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BY: One other question, kind of leaping ahead, is, so one aspect of the camps seems to be that Japanese Americans lost self-confidence and became docile, because they were threatened forever with disloyalty. And as somebody in Bob's book says, men were almost "castrated" by the experience. After all you've learned from hundreds of oral histories, how would you describe the impact on the people who were imprisoned?

TI: That's a good question. I think I would liken it to a form of posttraumatic stress. You have this layer of really... we talk a lot about what the government did to Japanese Americans. They had this policy, they targeted them, they removed them from their homes, put them in camps. Something that also has come up in interviews that I find really interesting is that their friends, like their white friends or other organizations like the ACLU, didn't come to their support either. And so it's more than this governmental force did this policy that was unfair and happened to us, it was also that there's a sense of almost abandonment by their communities, too. And, sure, there were people that said, "Oh, this is so bad it happened, but how can we help you do this?" or whatever. And I get that the times are very different from the '40s, but I do have this sense that that's part of this feeling, I mean, this feeling of shame and guilt that we see over and over again of people who have gone through this incarceration. Even though they did nothing wrong, it's like, okay, the government did this to us. The people that are in our communities, they didn't come to support us, we did something wrong, or something's wrong with us. And when we came back, it was never talked about, and there was always this suspicion. So it's kind of living with that, and in that kind of environment, it makes sense to me that you're not going to talk about it, you're going to keep it sort of stuffed. It's all there, there hasn't been this clearing or space for people to really share this. I think it shifted during the redress when the government started having hearings and people came out. I think the apology by Reagan and the Congress was really important because it at least clarified that what happened to Japanese Americans was wrong, and there was an acknowledgement of that, and the payment, the restitution payment. And so it's helped people open up more, and I think Densho came along at the time it did after redress, because people were more willing to talk about it. So I wouldn't go so far as what Bob Shimabukuro says, people may be castrated and stuff like that, I think it's this posttraumatic stress that people had to deal with. And for some, I've seen, especially if they've done an in-depth oral history and shared it with their family, friends and others, I actually see people healing from this. So it is something that, again, reminds me of people who go through posttraumatic stress. That as you share this and start feeling those things, you can actually sort of advance through some of this.

BY: That's interesting, because one thing that's so awful about shame is that it's kind of a self-imposed prison, if you will. But, in a sense, the fact it's self-imposed allows one to be released from it, if you can get to that kind of catharsis that you felt, too.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2020 Densho. All Rights Reserved.