<Begin Segment 6>

TI: And growing up, did you find yourself being very sensitive, I guess... how do I say this? I mean, it's almost like sensitivity in terms of people's moods and the things not said, maybe, and that you could sense these things?

SI: Right. And in talking to other people over the years, as I started to dial in more about my own family experience and what that meant, I wasn't conscious of it because it was just kind of natural, I always had this radar, like any time I entered a room, I always know how many white people are in the room and how many people of color. I'm always sensing the mood, I mean, still today, I'm aware of the undertone of the group of people that I'm with. And so it's like this constant measure of safety.

TI: Because it reminds me, like you, I read testimonies from Holocaust survivors, and something that struck me was one who talked about being kind of this victim of oppression, how he became so attuned by even the footsteps of the guard walking in, he would know the mood of that guard, and whether or not it was going to be hard, but just hyper sensitive to everything, and that's who he became. And it was mostly a place of fear, or just really building it up. And as you were talking, that's what came to mind.

SI: And I think you grow up with that kind of sensitivity from watching your parents, and messages you get from your parents. And I lived in San Francisco Japantown, and it was, Japantown was one component of a larger poor neighborhood, and we went to schools with kids from poor families. And so there was always this kind of subtext of danger. Most of the Japanese kids were kind of quiet, geeky, trying to kiss up to the teachers, and African American kids were more expressive and more running the show. Yeah, I was always alerted to that.

TI: But there must be, also, times when you're in situations where it's so clear to you what's happening, and you're frustrated that other people don't see that or sense that, and they're going down in a direction that says, "What are you doing? It's going to end up really bad if you keep doing that." So how do you respond to that? What's your mechanism when you see things? It's almost like you have this seeing that other people don't have.

SI: Well, of late, after years of interviewing, doing therapy with Japanese American clients and other people as well, and I think just doing the work, learning about my family, and learning more about the whole incarceration experience, is it's almost like I can't be quiet, I have to speak out. I have to say what I notice, whether it's a mixed group in a meeting or in a social situation or whatever, I feel like that sensitivity has value now, not just a self-protective value, but a value to my own sense of worth and educating. And sometimes it gets pretty awkward, but I'm not the good Japanese girl that will enryo and hold back in a certain circumstance anymore, I'm usually more likely to call it out.

TI: So when did that emerge? Was that always part of who you were even young, or did that emerge at some point?

SI: It was not a part of who I was, because I think while I was growing up, the message was to always be polite, to not notice, turn the other cheek. I used to get pushed around a lot by other kids in school because I was so skinny.

TI: And your earlier was to be so good, to almost protect your parents.

SI: Right.

TI: So what you're talking about now is different. So what was that transformation? That's what I'm trying to understand.

SI: Yeah, it's really hard to say. I think as I've learned to understand racism and the whole incarceration injustice, and I think over the last maybe thirty years, this kind of growing outrage about what happened to us that's culminating in my outrage about what America is doing today. So certainly it was, I'm not... well, I'm not the person my father knew. My father died pretty young. Like many of the men that were incarcerated, the studies show that there were significant premature death rates, so my father died in his sixties. But my mother lived until she was eighty-two, and so she got to witness more of my speaking out, of making my films, of educating people more, and I shifted from, in my career, from teaching basic skills in psychotherapy to more issues about trauma. And as a therapist, focus of trauma became my way of protesting what happened.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.