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SI: So that was like the first striking thing, and then shortly after that, I had to go to a training. I'm remembering this sequence because I had been out of the country for a year and I had to renew my license as a therapist, so I had to go this training. And in this... it was a family therapy training in California style, so it's this mass of people. The exercise was for six people to form a simulated family group, and each person was to take turns in the center of the circle. And the instruction was, as you're doing that, close your eyes and imagine yourself laying in your baby crib looking up at your mother and father, and what do you see? And so I was the last person, and I anticipated that I would look up and I would see my mother and father's face looking very worried or scared. But the thing that was striking to me was that I wasn't in a crib, that I was in some kind of woven patterned thing surrounding me. And I was really struck by that, because the instructions were "crib." So you never know how much is constructed, the memory, how much is unconscious, would have been possibly preverbal memory, I wasn't sure. It was so intriguing to me that seeing my mother and father's faces wasn't disturbing to me, it felt almost familiar. But the crib thing really was unresolved. So I went from that training straight to my mother's place, and I asked her, "Where did you put me as a baby, as an infant?" And she said, these were her words, she said, "We didn't have a crib for you, so we put you in a kori, like that one over there," and she points to a woven basket, a willow basket, where she had packed her clothes in. And I looked and it was the exact pattern that I had visualized. And so, when I write about this, I say, "That could have been a pretty profound preverbal memory," or it could have been something she had told me and forgotten about, I don't know. But that was when I realized, how did that experience affect me? The fact that there wasn't a crib for me was really, it seems kind of trivial, but it was really disturbing to me that I didn't have a normal childhood. [Laughs] And it struck me that this wasn't just about my mother and father's story, but this was also about my brother and my story, too. So that was the moment that I thought, okay, now I need to start talking to people.

So I just started talking to my friends that I grew up with Japantown and said, "What do you know about the camps? What stories do you have?" And almost to a person, they said, "My parents never talked about it. I know this little piece and this little piece." So it felt like some door had opened, but it was empty space. And so I asked five or six of my friends, I said, "Do you want to get together for a weekend? And let's just talk about what we know as kids." So we got together Japanese American style, someone had a place to go, it was all cleaned up and food was in the kitchen, how this happens, you know. So we spent Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and the only thing I said is that I can't be the therapist for the group, I just want us as friends to just share whatever we knew. It was like this giant spiderweb, and we only had these strands of memory maybe but stories, and a lot of empty space in between. But somehow, being together as a group, it held together in this psychological way, there was this sense of what it meant to be a child in camp. So some people had physical memories of what the places looked like. But the interesting thing that happened was as one person talked, it kind of triggered a memory, a piece of a memory for someone else, and this is the group dynamics that is so powerful. And the thread that connected us all is we all cried for three days, tears just continued to well up. And many of us were very young in camp, so may not have even had language capacity, but we certainly had the emotional capacity. And as we heard bits and pieces, some complete stories, actually, that were so moving and sad, and some funny stories, there was this remarkable... I wouldn't say closure, but instead of feeling this fragmented disconnect, it felt like we're weaving together something that had substance, that had reality to it. We didn't have every word, we didn't have every memory, but we knew that we were... that the anxiety, the fear, the unknowing, that that was real, that was something that, someone said it was like a ghost that was kind of haunting us that we couldn't name or see. And that there was comfort in knowing that I wasn't the only one that sensed that. And that's actually what started my quest to learn more and to do more of these groups that culminated in making that film Children of the Camps. Because not with any intent, but by word of mouth, my friends started talking to other people, and then people would say, you know, "I have a few friends, we started talking about this, can you come and sit with us and help us just begin talking?" So in this ten-year period, redress was in '88, I started doing this in '89, and then made the film in '99, so it was like a nine- or ten- year period, that whenever anyone called, I would join them somewhere for a weekend, and we would do this process. Sometimes I joke about being the most healed of all the Sanseis that were children of the camps, because I'd been through so many groups and cried so much. But there isn't a single one where I wasn't weeping most of the time.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.