<Begin Segment 19>

PS: I'm writing a column for the Rafu and one of the columns I did recently had to do with the Stockholm Syndrome, we talked about that earlier.

SY: That was fascinating, you were talking a little bit about that how you relate to...

PS: It's somewhat related to that incident on the metro line with the Japanese guy wound up stabbing this guy that was attacked -- did you read that article?

SY: No.

PS: The first incident they had in many years that they're running the metro line. Somehow this -- I think it was a white guy was waving something at this Japanese guy and the guy took out a knife and stabbed him. And so what happened was that they were trapped on the subway and so some of the people, they didn't know how to react, but a couple of the women told this guy, "Hey, take off that bloody shirt so you won't be recognized," and were helping him plot an escape. And they were helping him with his story, this guy says, you saw it all it was self-defense, this guy was attacking me. But that was interesting. It was kind of like the Stockholm Syndrome, these people may have realized that this guy killed somebody, this guy was lying in a pool of blood, so they should have done something about the guy who was doing it but this guy had a knife. If they said, "Hey, just a minute, what do you mean lashing out at a guy..." he could have turned on them. So it's interesting, so as soon as that thing stopped the guy jumped off and ran. But it's related in that here we were cooped up and as that article said on Google, what happens is that when the captors don't mistreat you, they don't harm you, you interpret that as kindness. In other words, I think what it is is self-defense, you are thinking well, it could have been worse. They could have starved us they could have beat us they could have... they didn't so that's being kind to us therefore we should cooperate, we shouldn't be too hard on them. And that carries over to redress. Therefore, hey look, they're our country, we look on the brighter side of things. We should always support our country, we should never say anything negative about the United States, so they drop an A-bomb, they kill off a hundred and forty thousand people in Hiroshima, we have friends who may have come from Hiroshima but we got to be loyal to this country. I think we need to face up to these kinds of things that we... and if we left it up to the older people, it would never happen. It's the younger generation that we need to look to and say, hey look, help us with this.

SY: Yeah, but it's amazing that you came up with that similarity between the Stockholm Syndrome...

PS: I'm amazed that no one has come up with it, no academic person because it's so obvious.

SY: Yeah, right.

PS: You know, Patty Hearst getting captured by these guys, taking their side, going, robbing a bank with them, I mean, and this woman who was kidnapped at age eleven, bearing children from this guy, having ample opportunity to run away, choosing to stay put with this guy. I mean, I think we need to look at it all.

SY: It's interesting because we generally think of it as a cultural... being put in camps, we think of it was maybe cultural that people didn't fight more but it could have something to do with feeling, with aligning ourselves with the government in that situation. I mean, the whole camp experience was the people who just cooperated, we all cooperated, right. So it might be a little bit more than just our cultural values.

PS: Sure, it's cultural mixed in with the other.

SY: Yeah, that's really fascinating.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.