Amid reports of inhumane and degrading conditions at child immigration jails along the southern border, we speak with Satsuki Ina, a Japanese-American psychotherapist who was born in the Tule Lake Segregation Center, a maximum-security internment camp for Japanese Americans during WWII. “After decades of living our lives as compliant and quiet, and demonstrating and proving ourselves as good citizens, many of us have felt that it’s time for us to speak out, to protest, to resist, and to speak out in ways that we haven’t in the past, because we know what these children are experiencing,” Ina said. “We know what it’s like to have family separation, to suffer the long-term consequences of the trauma of being incarcerated—for some of us, more than four or five years.”
Satsuki Ina talking:
Japanese-American community has come to realize that what is happening to children in these detention facilities is so resonant of the trauma that we suffered during World War II. And after decades of living our lives as compliant and quiet, and demonstrating and proving ourselves as good citizens, many of us have felt that it’s time for us to speak out, to protest, to resist, and to speak out in ways that we haven’t in the past, because we know what these children are experiencing. We know what it’s like to have family separation, to suffer the long-term consequences of the trauma of being incarcerated—for some of us, more than four or five years. We feel like it’s really important to speak out.
my family was held for over four years, and I was born in a concentration camp. And the lifelong effects, I think, have led me to become a psychotherapist, to try and understand what happened to us, and recognize that these children today held in captivity, separated from loving care of adults, is very disturbing. You know, the reality that this is happening again is causing many of us to recognize that this is an injustice that is so discussed in the same way, presented in the same way, that we were a threat to national security, that we were an unassimilable race of people, that we were a threat to the economy of the United States. These are so much echoing what charges were made against us, that were unjust and without any basis. And these children are growing up in a time of tremendous chronic states of trauma. Captivity trauma is known to have lifelong effects on children growing up and resulting in depression and anxiety and post-traumatic stress.
Part 2:
My parents were newly married and living in San Francisco. They were forcefully removed from their homes as a result of the Executive Order 9066, that eventually led to 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry to be imprisoned, for some people up to five years. My parents were held for four-and-a-half years.
They answered a loyalty question that was imposed on them after they were incarcerated, a questionnaire that asked them to state their loyalty to the U.S. And my parents, by then, were very despairing of their—of the future, possibilities of a good life for their children in America. So they eventually renounced their American citizenship, thinking that if they went to Japan—although they were American citizens, born in San Francisco and Seattle, they had given up hope on America.
And so, there were 10 War Relocation Authority prison camps and multiple others, other prison camps, run by the Department of Justice. My father would eventually be separated from us and sent to Bismarck, North Dakota.
The conditions at Tule Lake segregation center were more dire than in the other prison camps. There was a quality of—the treatment of people considered disloyal was more severe. So my mother wrote in her diary that there wasn’t enough coal to heat the barracks that they lived in, that there wasn’t enough milk for the children. She was worried constantly and lived in a state of fear during her entire time of being incarcerated.
And I think mass incarceration of our community has led to mass mental health issues, that outwardly aren’t very apparent because, generally, our coping mechanism has been to be compliant and nonconfrontational, to, you know, defer and quietly stay under the radar. And in that way, we’ve been called the model minority, which is, in fact, I think, a reflection of the degree to which we have suffered the long-term consequences of trauma.
– U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez calling the migrant camps “concentration camps,” and others in an uproar that this somehow belittles the Holocaust in Europe by using that term, but when you’re dealing with places like Fort Sill, which not only interned Japanese Americans but was also used, before that, to intern the Apaches, Geronimo and other Apaches, who were herded into Fort Sill
So much euphemistic language was used to cover up and minimize the impact of what they were doing to us in 1942, so language like “relocation centers” and “evacuation,” instead of “arrest” and “imprisonment.” So, to call them “relocation centers,” when they were in fact concentration camps—the definition of “concentration camps” has to do with the imprisonment, mass incarceration of innocent people for political reasons. And so, the term “concentration camp” is a way of describing the reality of what was done to us, and not using the language that the government imposed, distorting the reality of what happened to us.
So, I can understand that people will want to make comparisons, but it’s not about comparing. It’s about speaking the truth. We were deprived of our freedom, and we suffered the consequences of being incarcerated without—under indefinite detention without any due process of law. And the term “concentration camp” is much more the reality of what happened to us.
my father was taken and put inside the jail within the jail that was built inside of Tule Lake, and then, from there, removed. And we didn’t know where he was for a period of time. And, you know, they were allowed to correspond, but there was extreme censorship. So the letters that I found that my parents had written to each other had these big cuts, razor cuts. And the confusion and the misunderstanding of what was happening was a result of that continued censorship. It was just an example of the kind of torturous life that they led, not knowing where he was, not knowing exactly what was happening.
And this was, you know, a form of trauma that continued to be experienced in my family even afterwards. My father, when we were reunited, was a complete stranger to me. And I was fearful of him, because I had been, from birth, from in utero, been with a mother who lived in fear every day of her life. And when he came back into our life, I had no idea who he was.
And I’ve continued that level of anxiety for most of my life, until I began this healing journey, which I think manifested in the need to stand up and defend and speak out for these children, particularly these children held under very similar circumstances. Fort Sill is a place where 700 men of Japanese ancestry were held under indefinite detention. And so, it’s not known that we suffered family separation, but it was one of the most traumatic elements of our experience.
current neuroscience shows that chronic states of trauma actually alters the physiology of the nervous system. And so, a child who is living in fear every day, and even in the arms of a mother who is fearful every day, sets the stage for the child to be anxious, depressed, and carry this throughout their childhood. And so, what we’re doing today to these children that are being confined in these terrible circumstances is creating mass mental health issues that are going to take a lifetime to heal. And as a person who has experienced that personally, as a professional who has seen that in patients who have suffered from the Japanese-American incarceration experience, I think it’s an atrocity, what is happening to these children today.
There were actually six of us former incarcerees—they called us “elders”—who had been children in prison during World War II. And we knew that there was a possibility that we would be arrested for resisting our removal. And I think we all decided, clearly, that we didn’t want to be removed again and that we would stand our ground and make sure that we completed what we intended to do, which was to tell our story to the press and to the American public.
And it was a powerful moment for us to be confronted once again by, you know, a military police officer, raising his voice, demanding that we leave immediately, asking if we understood English. And we took our deep breaths and calmly recognized that if that was what was going to happen, we were willing to do that, that taking a stand for these children today was something we had hoped for that would have happened for us when we were incarcerated. And so we were determined. And we were successful in resisting his demand that we leave until we finished what we had come for.
_________
Satsuki Ina
Japanese-American psychotherapist born in the Tule Lake Segregation Center, a maximum-security concentration camp for Japanese Americans during WWII.
— source democracynow.org | Jun 26, 2019