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BY: All right, finally, let's talk about Tsuru for Solidarity. When did you get involved with that?

SS: Okay. So Tsuru for Solidarity is a relatively new organization. It officially formed in August of 2019, but it really has its start at the Tule Lake Pilgrimage in 2018. So in 2018, that spring was when two big things happened. One is the Trump administration started the Zero Tolerance Policy, where they were intentionally separating children from their families at the border and dividing them, so the children were locked up in one place and the parents were locked up in another. And they didn't keep records, so after the program was ended, they couldn't find most of the parents to reunite the families. So we were outraged by that. I think that was announced in April of 2018. And then the second thing was the Supreme Court was listening to the Muslim, looking at the Muslim ban version number three, and they had just approved it. So the Muslim ban we felt was, like, very racially discriminatory, religiously discriminatory, targeting people because of their religion or their ethnic background. And all of that was, carried these echoes from World War II and how the Japanese were looked at. Like there was no individual assessment of danger of guilt. It was like, you're Japanese, you're guilty, you have to be taken away and locked up in a concentration camp. Similar view of Muslims at that point. And the whole thing of locking up kids and separating families was reminiscent of what happened to so many Japanese American families. Or usually it's the father got taken away, no one knew where they were going or how long they would be gone, some people didn't hear from them for years. And little kids being locked up, even kids in the orphanage were taken away to Manzanar and they had an orphanage, barracks where they locked orphans up if they had any Japanese ancestry. My brother was four years old when he got sent to camp, and Uncle Heek said, "Yeah, we thought he was going to die there." Because he wasn't the healthiest kid to begin with, but sanitation was bad, the food was bad, the medical care was virtually nonexistent at Poston. So he had dysentery and we thought he would, or we didn't think he would make it. Fortunately, he did, but that whole idea, and then folks like Satsuki Ina was born in camp, Hiroshi Shimizu was two or three years old when he got taken away to camp. So at the Tule Lake Pilgrimage, we're feeling like, people were just feeling outraged and saying, we say "never again," but it's happening, so we've got to do something.

So we held a demonstration outside the jail, and we made it optional. It was after the usual ceremony we do to remember all those who had been at Tule Lake. And said, "After this part is done, we're going to hold a rally in support of immigrants and against the Muslim ban and against family separation. And if anyone wants to join us, you're welcome to do that." And probably about eighty or ninety percent of the people did, and the ones who didn't were mainly the older folks who had to go use the bathroom and wanted to get back on the bus because it was kind of hot outside. But there are a number of Nisei, eighty-year-olds, who were out there chanting with us. And then a number of people, the Minidoka pilgrimage was the following weekend, and a number of people who were on the Tule Lake pilgrimage went to the Minidoka pilgrimage, and they said, "Hey, we should do the same thing." So they had a march and rally at the Minidoka pilgrimage, and I think a couple other pilgrimages that were happening later that summer said, "Yeah, we should do that, too." And then we heard about other people in, like, L.A. and Chicago and New York organizing around similar issues. So in February of 2019, there was basically, it wasn't exactly a pilgrimage, it was a pre-pilgrimage scouting party of about twenty or thirty people who were going to Crystal City to prepare for the actual pilgrimage in November. So they went there and then someone told them that, well, you know, there's a child incarceration facility at Dilley, which is like thirty miles down the road from Crystal City. So Satsuki and others said, "Well, we got to stop there, and we should bring tsuru to hang on the fence, so hopefully the kids can see it and know that someone's thinking of them." So they put out a call for ten thousand tsuru. Everyone thought, well, that's a lot. [Laughs] I hope we can make it. But we organized it, and Seattle itself alone sent, I think, eleven thousand folded cranes, and they ended up with something like twenty-five thousand total. And so tsuru became kind of the symbol of this whole movement of supporting children who had been separated from their families, supporting the families, opposing family separation, opposing child incarceration at all levels for any reason. And opposing racism like the Muslim ban. And so by August, people started communicating and they said, "Well, we should just form a new organization to do something about this."

Oh, and in June of that year, we had heard that they were going to start a new camp to hold children at Fort Sill in Oklahoma, so we sent a team out there, Japanese Americans, and then contacted local folks in the Black community and the Native American community and the Latino community. And it want really well. It was not that large. But then the people that, local folks that we had called together and said, "Well, we want to do something bigger because they're still talking about putting the incarceration facility at Fort Sill." They said, "And we want you to come back and help lead it." So of course, we said, "Yes," and we got like four hundred fifty people to go to that second one. And people were feeling like there's a need for more leadership within the Japanese American community to support immigrant rights. Because we have a story to tell that is relevant, and because of the camps experience, we also, in a way, have a moral authority to make statements about the damage and the trauma of family separation, child imprisonment, racism, ethnic stigmatizing, religious stigmatizing. And if you have the moral authority, then you also have the moral responsibility to use it, to do something. So that's how Tsuru for Solidarity got started.

BY: And what is your role in the organization?

SS: So now I am on... we don't call it a board, we call it a leadership council. So I'm on the leadership council of Tsuru for Solidarity, and I am co-chair of what we call the Direct Action/Arts Action Committee.

BY: And what does that mean?

SS: So "direct action" refers to when we do something like hold a rally at the state capitol in Sacramento to support Lam Le, a Vietnamese immigrant, came here a twelve-year old, got involved with gangs, committed a crime, went to prison, changed his life, turned around, spent thirty-three years, I think, in prison, came out at the age of fifty. But if he doesn't get a pardon, he could be deported by ICE. And so we held a rally outside the state capitol to support him. We went to El Paso because there is a, one of the two existing child detention facilities that the federal government has. One of them is at Fort Bliss in El Paso, so we went there during Covid to hold a rally with United We Dream and Detention Watch Network and the few other local groups to protest the imprisonment of children. So the Direct Action Committee is responsible for planning out those kinds of things. Arts Action is one of the things we feel we can contribute to the movement overall is a cultural element that is different and sometimes missing from other actions. So in particular, taiko, tsuru folding as well as hanging, lately we've also added jizo, the kami, the god that protects children, to our repertoire. So, because we feel that oftentimes it's as important, sometimes more important than the words we say is the feelings and the emotions that we tap into, and that art is a much better way to reach people on that level than a speech. So the arts part is always important with any Tsuru action.

The other thing we feel is that our community experienced severe trauma because of World War II incarceration and forced removal. And that we're still dealing with it, that it's intergenerational, even if, like me, even if you weren't born in the camps or lived through the camps. Because your family did, you still feel it, and it still effects your life. And we know that that's happening to especially the kids who come across the border, but the families were separated, and anyone who was incarcerated, because like the folks in Tacoma in the Northwest Detention Center, they don't know how long they'll be locked up there. They're still under the similar conditions, lousy food and poor sanitation and inadequate health care and great uncertainty, separation from their families, from their community. So you feel that healing, a healing process needs to be started and be ongoing. And so whenever we do an action, we try to have what we call a healing circle where people, it's a safe space where people could talk about how they're feeling what they're feeling. And just being able to express that is a step towards healing.

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