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TI: Maybe another question, then, is because you've done the research, you, in some ways, were able to see who your parents were through their letters and diary. And through that research, did it surprise you who they were when they were young adults, when they got married, and was something lost? Was something taken away from them in this process?

SI: Yeah, I think what was taken away from them was a feeling of security and this kind of freedom to be who they are. I think they lived this very cautious life and passed that on to us, the children, that there was danger lurking if you took a misstep, if you didn't do it properly. Not just the Japanese way, because they were teaching us things about Japanese values, but also implicit in that, was how important it was to... if someone called you a "Jap" or, you know, we went to ghetto schools, we were very poor afterwards, and so there was a lot of bullying, particularly that I suffered, because I was so skinny after we were released. I had health issues and my teeth were all black, and I had a lot of bullying. But my brother and I would initially tell my parents, and my parents would say, "Just ignore them, walk away, you're not to get in trouble. I don't want teachers to say you have said any bad words or gotten into fights or anything like that. So there was this, I don't know, what do you call it? Suppression, maybe more a kind of suppressed sense of being, that the safety was actually of living in Japantown. But once outside of Japantown, it was like I was on full alert, making sure that I carried my thesaurus around to make sure that I understood the words, that I didn't mispronounce a word. I felt the pressure of needing to, in some ways, protect my parents. I didn't realize it at the time, but that if I was super good, I could protect my parents from whatever it was they were afraid of. And I don't know that I could have figured that out any earlier than I did, which is in the last ten or fifteen years.

TI: Well, as your parents got older, and as you became more aware of what happened to them and how maybe it impacted them, and you, because of your training, did you ever have discussions about that with them, to talk about it?

SI: You know, I'm absolutely positive I became a therapist because of my family's history. But it was this very unspoken message, especially from my father: "Don't ask us." I think they decided only what was necessary to tell us, like about the renunciation, because they didn't have their citizenship from the time they renounced in 1943, late 1943 or '44, until 1959. And that whole time that I was growing up, I had no idea.

TI: So let me make sure I understand. So it took them that long to get their citizenship back?

SI: Right.

TI: And so they had to go through it with Wayne Collins?

SI: Yes, Wayne Collins helped them, and they got the official letter, and I saw the letter. But no, I think we never sat around and talked about it. I never inquired, because I didn't really understand why I became a psychologist, why I was so interested. But my interest started in junior high school where I couldn't stop reading about the Holocaust. I would actually, after school, go on the city bus to the main library and bring home enough books that I could carry on my lap like this on the bus. Because I wasn't like a scholar, but there was something that was going on for me trying to understand, and I was trying to understand the perpetrator. I wanted to know about the people who were making the decisions about the dehumanizing things they were doing. And my parents thought that was pretty weird. [Laughs] Everybody else was playing volleyball or basketball, I was going to the library trying to figure out something that I didn't really understand.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.