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TI: Well, that's why I want to ask about the healing process, and maybe you answered it by saying you're the most healed because you've gone to so many... I mean, what is the healing process? Is it just sharing it and sharing in the group?

SI: So I think what happens, in order to understand the healing, you have to understand the trauma. And the trauma kind of fractured our connection to our parents, because our parents didn't talk about something that was so painful for them, so disturbing. And some parents sugar-coated it or minimized it for many reasons. I've interviewed parents and asked their motivation, lots of different reasons, so there was... and I think Donna Nagata tapped into this in her initial research, that there was this feeling of disconnect between the Sanseis and their Nisei parents. And then the disconnection... because we didn't have this, what they call a coherent autobiographical narrative in psychology, we didn't have this coherent story about how we were as children, most of us didn't have photographs of ourselves as babies and children, and there wasn't this birthday party and things like that, so there was this fragmentation of our sense of self and this kind of, the wind behind our back, always pushing towards having to constantly prove ourselves. Looking back and there'd be no one there, but you could feel it, you could feel it in the community, you could feel it in the family. And no connective tissue, like stories or, "Here's what happened when you were three months," and then, "Here's what happened when you were one."

So the healing that comes out of being in a group of people with shared experience is, one, the bonding with each other, because we understand the not known. It's a kind of different trauma, where another trauma that people could say, "Yeah, we were all in this earthquake together, and we remember these elements of it." But for us, it's like when someone says, "Well, when do you think your trauma started?" It's like, "I don't know, I was in utero," or, "I couldn't talk, so how would I know?" And then I think the Japanese believed, our Nisei and Issei parents believed that if you were a baby, you had no idea what was going on, so you couldn't have been affected. But as a therapist, I know now that if you're held in the arms of an anxious mother, you're going to internalize that the world isn't very safe. So the healing is in the talking with each other, and the safety that is built into the trust that we're all struggling to try and piece this together. And really, in sharing not just the unspoken, but the secrets, that my father was a renunciant would emerge over time. And other people said, "Oh, I think my grandfather left his family," or these family secrets that would emerge. One story that I always remember was so powerful is the man who said, "My mother told me that she was having, not feeling well, so she went to the white doctor in the camp, and the doctor said, 'You need to have a hysterectomy.'" She didn't want to hear that, and found out after a few months that she was actually pregnant, and the thought that she may have done what the doctor had recommended. So he was telling me that story, and then someone said, "Were you that baby?" and he burst into tears, because he hadn't made that connection. He knew that story, but, see, that's that kind of fragmented split experience. And then when he realized that that must have been him, and if whatever that doctor's motivation was, there were other stories... I heard similar stories about doctors recommending hysterectomies for women in the camps.

So when a person has this coherent narrative about their life and can allow themselves to have the emotional connection to it, so we cried a lot. We laughed, but we cried a lot, because there was so much unresolved grief. Lost time, lost jobs, lost money, lost futures, lost possibilities, that no one has named. We just look back and we see our parents working so hard, night and day. Why? We hadn't made any connection to. What that meant for us? We were latchkey kids, we had to fend for ourselves. There was so much strain on our parents, but we didn't want us to be the cause of it, so all these things that a child's mind tries to put into place without information.

TI: So I'm curious, if you go to Hawaii or Honolulu and you are with a group of Japanese Americans about the same age as what you've done with these seminar groups, do you see a difference?

SI: Yes. [Laughs]

TI: Talk about that. Because the Japanese Americans in Hawaii, generally, their parents didn't go through this process.

SI: It's a great question because I remember reflecting back on it, the first time I went to Hawaii, I must have been early twenties or something. And how shocked I was that these Japanese Hawaiian men would whistle and flirt on the sidewalk, and walk up to me and just introduce themselves and make jokes and whatever it was like, it was so uncomfortable for me. And then I thought at the time, no one in San Francisco, no Sansei boy in San Francisco would ever be that forward or open. So that was early on, noticing something shocking. But subsequently, to me there's a significant difference in their comfort level in some ways. They're more outspoken, less inhibited, more happy in some ways. They'd talk a lot about things -- the people that I've met and spent time with -- talk a lot about things they want to do that would be fun to do, to enjoy. And in contrast, I have seen -- and it's changing, I think, with the Yonsei generation to some extent -- but there's more seriousness, more avoiding being the one who has failed. Like somehow if you failed to be this ideal Japanese American, how devastating that is if your parents are disappointed. I also always grieve the reality that many in my generation could have been more creative artists, musicians, actors, poets, but we all were urged, either overtly or not, to track ourselves into positions where we could protect our parents with this level of security.

TI: Interesting. So you think that it was a parental thing to take care or protect them later? That was sort of... I didn't think about that. I always thought it was like they did that because they just wanted their children to be self-sufficient.

SI: Yeah, I'm sure that's part of it, to be self-sufficient, but I think there's this under layer that is, this is what we've been entrusted to do. Most of us have way more degrees than we need, we're all teachers, doctors, educators, dentists. I haven't seen any exact statistics, but to become professional, or if you aren't professional, to be really good at whatever you do, whatever the job is, and to be on time, to be responsible.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.