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BY: You talked a little bit about intergenerational trauma when you were talking about Tsuru for Solidarity. And so this idea that a kind of trauma that is experienced by one generation can be passed down to successive generations who have not even actually experienced that thing, in this case, something like incarceration, that's the idea. So how do you think it is affected, has it affected anybody that you know? Either in your family or friends, or what makes you think that there's evidence that that is a real thing?

SS: Well, I think the suppression of Japanese American culture that occurred after the war, and even the self-imposed suppression of culture, like none of myself and none of my cousins who were born after the war learned any Japanese. All my cousins who were born before the war knew enough Japanese they could converse with my grandparents, but none of us after the war could. I attribute that largely to a conscious suppression of the language by our parents because they felt, they probably felt like that's one of the reasons we got targeted is because we were speaking Japanese. So if you speak only English, you'll seem more American, and it'll be safer in a racist society if you fit in better that way. And I think a lot of what happened within the Japanese American community, there was a weird dynamic of, on the one hand, they do want you to be, learn about your heritage and cultural norms and participate in Bon or Oshogatsu. But on the other hand, they don't want you to stand out or seem different or be singled out unless it was for good grades or good behavior at school or at work. And I think that led to a lot of my contemporaries and even some of the people younger than me having questions about their identity. More than just questions, having a degree of self-hatred. Like, "If only I were white, then I could be this or I could do that." And, "It's because I'm Japanese that I can't, that that's what's holding me back." So it was this kind of self-doubt or even self-hatred that emerges, whether it's conscious or not. And that's really destructive and leads to a lot of unhappiness. It also can lead to a lot of self-destructive behavior, like a number of kids I went to high school with, Japanese American kids, got into drugs and petty crime. And some of it was, I think, because they really weren't comfortable with who they were or who the society thought they would or should be, and so they were kind of reacting to that. Or they weren't just comfortable with themselves, and so they were trying to find a different reality in different ways.

BY: So do you think that the incarceration exacerbated that for Japanese Americans as opposed to, say, other Asian Americans?

SS: Yeah.

BY: And how so?

SS: Well, because it became a crime to be Japanese in America. The fact, like what Jimi Yamaichi said was, "my crime was my face," that just the fact that you were Japanese meant that you were undesirable, that you were no good, that you were suspect. And that had an effect on people where you either react by saying, "Well, so I have to prove myself and I have to be two hundred percent American." And to show that, one way to show that is to reject anything that was Japanese. Another way to show it is to do and die on the battlefield. Another reaction is to say, "To hell with this. If you're not going to treat me as an equal, then I'm not going to stay." And so some people renunciated, renounced their citizenship, because they felt the country had renounced them. And the varied responses led to real distrust and animosity within the community, which in my view is caused by the government's actions, but plays out in individual lives where people blame each other or say that you made the wrong decision and that's why your life is miserable, or that's why your family lost everything, rather than blame the government. At Tule Lake pilgrimage we'd do these things called intergenerational discussion groups where it's like a healing circle. It's a safe space where you can talk about specifically the camp experience and what it meant to you and your family.

So I was paired with, I was facilitating one year, and I was paired with this Nisei guy who was a farmer from the Central Valley in California. And he was, generally he was very jovial, joking around and saying, "Oh, not that bad." "There were some good things that came out of it, I met my wife," da-da-da. And basically saying that it wasn't such a bad experience that we survived it and so what? One of the younger people -- but he also was a farmer, and then he said something that kind of disparaging of Mexican farmworkers. And so one of the young people kind of called him out on it and said that, "I think that's unfair and maybe even a little racist." And so then he got really angry and said that they want to, the farmworkers union wants to take everything and they don't care. And so then his final eruption was, "And they're not going to take our farms again." And so in the moment, I was just trying to calm things down, because he was getting really heated. But afterwards, what I realized was that he was still having trauma from his family losing their farm during the war, and now he's blaming the Mexican farmworkers or the UFW for doing the same thing. But he's not blaming the government who was the one who actually took his farm away. So there's all this displaced anger that is pent up. And when you have that kind of rage inside of you that doesn't have any place to go, sometimes it comes out in odd places, like in a group that's supposed to be a healing group, and with the wrong targets, the Mexican farm laborers rather than the U.S. government. So I think... and that can happen within families. A lot of people, we don't like to talk about it, but a lot of Nisei, men in particular, ended up drinking a lot after the war. I believe there was an increase in suicides after the war. And a lot of that is related to the camps experience.

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