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TI: And when were you born?

SI: I was born May 25, 1944. So my father's a poet, and that's what "Satsuki" means, it means "fifth moon."

TI: And your father was separated and went to a Department of Justice camp.

SI: Yeah.

TI: But for that to have happened, U.S. citizens were not supposed to go to Department of Justice camps, because these were technically internment camps for what were then termed "enemy aliens," so how did that happen? How did he go from a U.S. citizen going to an internment camp?

SI: So I think growing despair on the part of my parents, and now having two children, both of us born in a prison camp. I think they got to a place where they felt like there was no hope for a good life for their children, and they had family in Japan, my father had a sister there, and my mother had her grandmother. So they decided to renounce their American citizenship, and that was the... it's not like there was ever specific instructions, "If you take these steps, this is what the outcome will be," it was all word of mouth, rumors, half truths from the government, the camp newspapers, they're living in this constant state of uncertainty. So they decided that they would renounce their citizenship with hopes of returning to Japan together. And my mother...

TI: Just as I'm listening to you, how is it for you to talk about this? And the reason I say this is because in the Japanese American community, it has been historically an issue that is controversial, the issue of renunciants, and it's something that many families have tried to keep quiet or not talk about if it comes up. For you to be so open about it, to even do a movie that really makes this a core feature of it, how was it for you? And maybe now it's a little different, but when you first had to start talking about it, how was it for you?

SI: Well, I think the way I found out was the start of the position that I still feel. So I was a student at UC Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement, this was in the 1960s, and my parents would phone me every night, kind of in a panic, saying, "We're watching the newspaper, we do not want to see your name in the newspaper, we do not want to see your face in the newspaper. Do not protest. We have worked hard, and your purpose at being in school is to go to class. So you must go to class." And I was shocked when they first made that call, but then I was getting calls almost every night as the news was spreading that they were hauling students off to jail and things like that. And I remember the day that there was going to be a big speech on campus, and I'm walking towards class, and all the other students are walking in the other direction towards where the speech is going to be. And so it was a social work class, and so I went in and I sat down, and there were maybe five other students in there. And we're wondering what was gonna happen, and all of a sudden the professor came from the entrance and ran down the, through the classroom, jumped on top of the desk, and said, "Goddamnit, if you show up for class, I'm going to flunk every single one of you." I was like, okay, this is like a double bind. My parents want me to go to class, my teacher's telling me the better person doesn't come to class." So I went home to talk to my parents, because up until then, my parents have always been very supportive. I wasn't an outspoken protester on any issue ever until... at that moment I wasn't even, I was just kind of an observer. And interestingly, the growing concern was more about freedom of speech, and then as the Human Rights Movement started to take shape, more concern about discrimination against African Americans, and at that time had no concept that, as a Japanese American, I too had been discriminated against. This, I don't know, was educational brainwashing or whatever it was, it had kind of erased and taken my position away from there.

So I went home and, typical, my Kibei father sat in the other room, but I could tell that they had had this conversation. My mother said, "I need to talk to you." And she said, "We never told you this before, but we want you to know that during the war, we renounced our American citizenship." And I was, like, shocked, said, "What do you mean?" She said, "It's complicated, but we suffered consequences of opposing the government. And so we don't want you to get in trouble," and she had tears. And I'm sitting there, think about it this way, is that I'm sitting there with long hair, I've got braids across my forehead, flowers stuck in my hair, got a tie-dyed shirt on, I'm sure, and I'm hearing this from my mother, and I'm thinking, "That is so fantastic. You made a decision because you'd been treated so badly." And I said, "Why didn't you tell us this before?" Then she really started crying, and she said, "We were afraid you'd be ashamed of us." And I started crying because it would never have occurred to me to be ashamed of them. And then we went on to have more of the conversation, but when I reflect back on that, I realized that how they spent their life being so careful to not make a mistake, to not be cast in any kind of negative light, because they had suffered so much from that little speech from that two-letter word, "no," that they had to decide how they were going to raise their children, and one way was to not tell them about their dissidence. And because we were living in Japantown in San Francisco, the community survival strategy was, "Look what great Americans we are. We sent our sons, our brothers, our fathers off to war," they were told by the government that their efforts had reduced the war effort by so many years, and so the story of the dissidents, the renunciants, was submerged.

TI: It was submerged, and yet, and so you didn't know growing up, but yet, there were people in the community who knew, right? I mean, they knew the stance that your parents took, and probably some of them knew that they had renounced their citizenship. So was there an undercurrent in the community? Did the people who know, say, treat your parents differently because of that? Did you have any sense of that?

SI: You know, I don't know that. I wasn't observant of that as a kid, but there were, when I think back, there were interesting things. My father pretty much lived in the JA community, the Japanese American community. But he never went back to the Buddhist church, and he was surprised when I decided to join the Buddhist church. But he had been a devoted member of the San Francisco Buddhist church as a young man, but he never went back to the Buddhist church. But he was involved in the Japanese American Scouting, Boy Scouts. I had two brothers, my younger brother was born after camp. And he devoted his life to Scouting. And I always think about that as kind of this paramilitary, very patriotic component of American society, and also he managed to avoid interacting very much with the outside world. I mean, he had a business, a job, but it was my mother's job to answer the phone, to set up appointments, and so she was the one that would even answer the door when a salesperson came. So it was in that way that he withdrew from really engaging with the outside world. So I'm sure there were people that, when I look back on the letters my parents exchanged, and my mother's diaries, that there were family friends who we grew up with who were also "no-nos" and renunciants. But they never, I don't think they ever spoke about it openly to each other once the war was over and they were back in San Francisco, and the feeling I had was that people, not everybody knew. Certainly Kibeis were suspect, because the government kind of bunched them together, if you were Kibei or Issei, and especially if you were in an internment camp.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.