Ten Thousand Things

"Ten Thousand Things" is a Buddhist expression representing the dynamic interconnection and simultaneous unity and diversity of everything in the universe.

Humanizing History – Satsuki Ina’s “From a Silk Cocoon”

Dr. Satsuki Ina, with members of her production team, including her niece, Kimberly Ina, accepted a Northern California Chapter 2006 Northern California Emmy for her acclaimed documentary film, From a Silk Cocoon at the San Francisco Palace of Fine Arts.

“WE WON!!!! Kim, Emery and I walked on stage to accept our statues and I stammered through the required thanks and acknowledgements...It was an amazing moment and a wonderful acknowledgement of the Japanese American experience,” Ina shared her feelings, proudly adding that her husband, Carey, looked dashing in his tuxedo.

Ina, a trauma psychologist and award-winning filmmaker, is in Japan to attend the Japanese debut screening of this film in Nagoya, at the annual conference of the Japanese Association of Migration Studies.

But hers is not an academic’s weekend trip, to simply report and facts and opinions about migrations to and from Japan.
Instead, this is a journey of the heart. This is a journey of personal, familial, and historical healing. This is a journey to share the story of her family’s North American diasporan experience, especially the devastating consequences of the four years they spent in at Tule Lake Segregation Center, a maximum-security prison for those who protested the removal and incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans from their homes to remote prison camps in the American West.

“People ask me, 'Why are you digging all this up?'"

Ina explains why she won’t let this story go. "It never really got buried. It hasn't died in us yet.

"In the Japanese culture, you don't express feelings, you don't complain, you don't say anything about family. So this was a pain people just held. In that way, the wound doesn't get healed.

"There's so much to be learned from this experience. I don't think this is just about Japanese Americans. It's about how profoundly damaging racism is," Ina emphasizes.

For Ina, life lessons about racism emerged out of the crucible of her infancy and early childhood in Tule Lake, located in a northern California desert, just south of Oregon, where she was born, and where most of the inmates were also children.

A land of ancient volcanic eruptions, Tule Lake, especially a luminous underground cavern, Fern Cave, held deep spiritual significance for its first people, the Modoc, who arrived there around 0 C.E. Tule Lake was also the scene of their earlier forced relocations. When European settlers came to California, they wanted even this desert land and the Modoc hid in the landscape’s black lava beds, and fought off the U.S. Calvary until they lost and were marched to Oklahoma during the Gold Rush years in the mid-1800’s.

In this place where the U.S. soldiers had previously cleared out a community with over millennia of Modoc history etched into the earth, Ina’s earliest, most primal memories were of her parents’ fear, anger, and heartbreak.

Her parents, Itaru and Shizuko, striking, even glamorous newlyweds, were first-generation American citizens who loved the United States. They also loved Japan, where family and friends remained behind -- they traveled back and forth – true cosmopolitan and bilingual Americans. Itaru was an accomplished calligrapher who wrote haiku. And Shizuko, before she married Itaru, represented Japan as a "Silk Girl" in the 1939-40 World's Fair. Their lives seemed to be charmed until everything broke apart in one day, when the world they lived in was shattered by the soldiers with guns who forced 120,000 Japanese-Americans from their homes, and “relocated” them.

According to Anupam Chander, a University of California, Davis law professor, these removals “grew out of rampant anti-Asian sentiment in the pre-war period…by those seeking racial cleansing of the Japanese Americans from the West Coast,” in “Legalized Racism: The Internment of Japanese Americans.”

Although some American military and government leaders, including FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, opposed this policy, government lawyers “concluded that the removal would be constitutional because, to white Western (Occidental) people, all Japanese look alike: ‘Since the Occidental eye cannot readily distinguish one Japanese resident from another, effective surveillance of the movements of particular Japanese residents suspected of disloyalty is extremely difficult if not practically impossible.’ " There was not one instance of sabotage by Japanese American citizens or residents of the U.S. before or during the war.

For Ina’s parents, numb disbelief shifted to queasy shock when they realized that the government had sent them to live in horse stables at a racetrack, along with the other Japanese-Americans:

"My mom sees it and tears start coming down her face," Richard "Babe" Karasawa said. "My mom says, 'We're not going in there...’”

At the stables, they were told to use manure-laced straw to fill body bags, which would be their “beds.” For the rest of her life, Shizuko could not completely shake physical memories of being sick to her stomach that would bring her back to that day.

Her mother’s intermittent nausea became part of Ina’s everyday reality as a toddler. Her life also included the extreme emotions of the adults and children around her suffering from traumatic stress and demoralization, a sense of loss of continuity between the past and the future, hopelessness, grief, and pining for relief from despair, – natural responses to four years of unjust betrayal of patriotic trust, imprisonment behind barbed wire fences, guards in turrets, dust storms, shifting extremes in daily temperature, inadequate food, overcrowded rooms, and beatings by guards with baseball bats.

Ina became a psychologist, seeking to heal the profound injuries that she, her brother, her parents, and others suffered. She began to realize that she and other former inmates suffered from a collective form of chronic post traumatic stress.

Also, through working for decades as a community therapist for Japanese-American survivors and their children, Ina discovered the tremendous healing power of creating coherent life narratives in helping traumatized people gain mastery over fragmented, intrusive, and repressed memories and the debilitating emotions that accompany the demoralization and dissociation of collective trauma.

In her role as a filmmaker, Ina has brought the power of the narrative to a broadly collective, even global level, enlarging the scope of her concern from directly healing Japanese-American survivors, to telling the world about the profoundly traumatic consequences of racism of every kind.
Ina's first film, "Children of the Camps," broadcasted on American public television from 1999 to 2003, put the face of children on this history. This film exposed the fact that over half of the 120,000 Japanese Americans who were incarcerated were children. Some were even motherless infants who were removed from orphanages.

Following the lives of six people who experienced the incarceration as children, Ina plunged into the ongoing emotional, familial and psychological consequences for these "children of the camps", and documented their personal journeys of healing from the wounds of institutionalized racism:

“Former internees report lifelong struggles with chronic depression, psychosomatic illnesses, low self-esteem and the stresses of over-achieving. Consonant with Japanese American values, these individuals have internalized their suffering in an effort to secure their acceptance in their own country.”

"From a Silk Cocoon," Ina’s second film, is even more personal, lyrically showing the brilliant creativity of her father and, through his poetry, unlocking memories of how this period of American history shattered her parents' lives, psyches, and hearts:

The discovery of a small metal box leads to the uncovering of a family story, shrouded in silence for more than 60 years. Woven through their censored letters, diary entries, and haiku poetry, is the story of a young Japanese American couple whose dreams are shattered when, months after their wedding, they find themselves held captive, first in race track horse stables and later, in tar paper barracks.

Many adult prisoners accepted what happened. Some held fatalistically low expectations of American "democracy," and just wanted stay low to survive. Others believed in the American Dream to the extent that were willing to give their lives as soldiers to prove their loyalty, even as their family members remained behind barbed wire.

But Ina’s parents protested, joining the American tradition of patriotic dissent – just as anti-slavery abolitionists did before them, and Civil Rights activists did after them. The Inas were determined to make American society conform to its professed democratic ideals. And the traditions of dissent on behalf of justice that they followed were not to be found simply in the United States, but also in Japan, and throughout the world. The quest for truth and justice is an ancient and universal one.

However, the U.S. government’s responded to their and other dissenters' protests by meting out harsher punishments. A mug shot of Itaru after he returned from the stockade reveals cuts and scratches on his face. Itaru and Shizuko felt so devastated by hypocrisy and betrayal that they renounced their American citizenship, as did thousands of other Japanese-Americans. They did so not just because of anger over injustice, but because they were afraid of their children’s future in the United States:

In her diary, Shizuko writes, "because our children have Japanese faces, I don't want them to be Americans."

Itaru went as far as to associate himself with the Hoshi Dan, a group of militants who shaved their heads, wore headbands, encouraged renunciation throughout the camps, and rebelled through non-cooperation.

Seeing the Hoshi Dan on screen deeply pained me, because with historical perspective, I knew that Japan was not the protective haven for them that they fantasized it would be in their heartbroken and furious desperation.

I empathized with their sense of feeling trapped, with no way out, in an unjust society. My own Japanese grandfather had been arrested in Japan, for speaking out against Japanese wartime aggression. He was a friend of Toyohiko Kagawa, a Christian labor organizer and pacifist, founder of the National Anti-War League in 1928, who was arrested in 1940, for apologizing to China for Japan's attack on that country. The story of war resisters in Japan is a largely untold story.

The story of Itaru and other protesters is another mostly hidden story. Resisters were sent to Tule Lake, which at its peak, held 18,789 inmates, mostly children. Adult prisoners held frequent demonstrations and strikes, demanding to be treated as equal citizens under the law. They refused to take a loyalty oath without reciprocal treatment, insisting that the U.S. government honor their constitutional rights. After years of frustration, some gave up on seeking justice in the United States and demanded repatriation. Itaru, incensed at the hypocritical and grossly unfair treatment, had been one of the former, and switched to the latter, when he realized that his family’s constitutional rights to equal treatment would not be forthcoming.

In “Remembering 'The Good War' The Atomic Bombing and the Internment of Japanese-Americans in U.S. History Textbooks,” historian Mark Selden points out the omission of these protesters in textbooks that have historically framed Japanese Americans as a loyal “model minority” who accepted this abuse of rights without question:

…not a single text mentions the fierce Japanese and Japanese-American resistance against the violation of their constitutional rights. In particular, there is no reference to the members of the "Fair Play Committee" who refused U.S. demands to register for the draft so long as Japanese and Japanese-Americans were deprived of their constitutional rights…

And not a single text hints at the existence of the fierce struggle waged by internees who demanded repatriation to Japan, refusing to declare allegiance to a nation that imprisoned them solely for having committed the crime of being born Japanese…by January 1, 1945, 20,067 Japanese and Japanese-Americans had filed applications for repatriation… And none discusses the U.S. government apology and reparations to Japanese-Americans four decades after the war in terms of the movement for justice by Japanese-Americans and others...

In eliminating the terrain of resistance and social conflict we are left with the image of a U.S. government that moved in mysterious ways to right a gross violation of the rights of one of its hyphenated minorities and to reify the image of Japanese-Americans as a model minority, one that rallied unanimously to the national cause and fought heroically for the United States against Japan in World War II, even as their parents, grandparents, brothers, and sisters passed the war in the camps.

It is an analysis that distorts fundamental elements of the Japanese-American experience and deprives substantial elements of the community of agency and history.

As a part of her work at an even deeper level of psychological redemption, for not only her parents and herself, other survivors, and the nation that allowed this to happen, Ina has directed her entire life towards correcting this historical distortion by telling the truth of what she experienced and witnessed.

Encountering Ina's level of honesty combined with compassion in “From a Silk Cocoon,” powerfully impacted me. Forgotten memories of racism I grew up with as “hapa,” a mixed Japanese and Anglo-American, came back to me.

I had wondered most of my life why my Japanese mother stopped speaking to me in Japanese when we moved to the United States. I sensed unease about the subject and never asked her about this until recently.

She admitted she felt fear for my infant sister and me, a toddler, when we came to the United States in the early 1960's. The American South was still an apartheid society where violence against African-Americans was a part of everyday life and racism was not restricted towards Blacks.

At the time, many states still had anti-miscegenation laws, outlawing marriages between whites and Mongolians (Asians), Native Americans and African-Americans. Until my mother told me, I never suspected the reason that my father never stopped at hotels or why we didn't eat in restaurants when we traveled across the country was because many hotels and restaurants wouldn't accept us. She said that some of these businesses in some Southern states, notably Texas or Tennessee, did serve Asians, but it was a roll of the dice knowing which were friendly and which were not.

I suddenly remembered my father's nervous chain-smoking while driving nonstop, his taking naps pulled over on the side of the road, and my parents loading a large cooler of food and bags of groceries into the car before the traveling. A descendant of Quakers who came to North America to escape religious intolerance in England in the 1600’s; abolitionists who fought slavery and the Confederacy in the 1800’s; and a Cherokee great-grandmother who avoided the “Trail of Tears” forced removal by hiding on an Anglo-American farmer’s huge expanse of property, my father had his own twentieth century personal historical battle of American bigotry to face because he fell in love with a Japanese woman and had mixed children.

The Supreme Court did overturn state anti-miscegenation laws in 1967 and the U.S. Census finally recognized children of mixed marriages in 2000. We’re just now seeing creative breakthroughs in a new movement acknowledging and even celebrating those of mixed backgrounds in North America, paralleling similar shifts throughout our globe.

I had no idea how close circular diasporan bonds were between Japanese immigrants to North America and their families in Japan until I saw “From a Silk Cocoon.” Many went back and forth, as Ina's parents did. However, these circles were broken because of the incarceration experience.

Satsuki Ina is now even more deeply restoring her own personal diasporan bonds in Japan before she attends the screening of her film in Nagoya.

She and her husband will be making a journey to visit the Komagane Silk Museum, a beautiful state-of-the-art museum, in Nagano-ken. She met the director and curator while she was shooting footage for the documentary at the Miyasaka Silk Reeling Mill in Okaya in 2004.

“I decided to donate the silk dresses that were hand-made for her when she represented Japan as a Silk Girl for the World's Fair in 1939-40. The museum is planning a special exhibit about the Japanese Silk Trade and the Second World War, through my mother's personal story,” Ina shared.

“The museum is not far from where my mother was raised, where she described falling asleep listening to the rain-sound of silkworms feeding on mulberry leaves.”

“The rest of the time, Carey and I will be hanging out at in Kyoto taking short trips and soaking up the sights or our favorite city,” Ina smiled.

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