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 "the Other" through Empathy – Interview with Dr. Satsuki Ina

Posted by Jean Downey on June 10, 2006

My hope is that by sharing our experience it will serve to increase people's awareness of the traumatic consequences of ethnic prejudice and discrimination.

Stories serve to humanize what could be seen as "just another historical event." The names, faces, emotions of fellow human beings, especially children, can convey a message that no history book can. It is through this humanizing process that empathy occurs and therein hope for our humanity.

–Satsuki Ina

Trauma psychologist and award-winning filmmaker Dr. Satsuki Ina has devoted her life to combating ethnic discrimination and to healing trauma created by discrimination.

(Ina family photo)

Ina's passionate activism against cultural and institutional discrimination and for healing springs from her early childhood experience. She was born and spent her early childhood in Tule Lake Segregation Center, a maximum-security prison for Japanese-Americans.


More than half of the 120,000 Japanese-Americans incarcerated by the American government during the Second World War were children. Infants were taken orphanages and also imprisoned because of the belief that there was no difference between Japanese-Americans (even children) and Japanese Imperial soldiers. Densho, the Japanese-American Legacy Project, explains:

In the end, the U.S. media would often make no distinction between Japanese Americans and Japanese Imperial soldiers. One Los Angeles Times editorial noted:

" A viper is nonetheless a viper wherever the egg is hatched.... So, a Japanese American born of Japanese parents, nurtured upon Japanese traditions, living in a transplanted Japanese atmosphere and thoroughly inoculated with Japanese ...ideals, notwithstanding his nominal brand of accidental citizenship almost inevitably and with the rarest exceptions grows up to be a Japanese, and not an American..."

Ina's films, Children of the Camps, and “From a Silk Cocoon,” focus on the incarceration experience of Japanese-Americans. However she is not only concerned about healing the past suffering of Japanese-Americans but about all people who have suffered or are suffering because of discriminatory ethnic stereotypes. Her films hold broadly relevant lessons about why dominant groups are compelled to scapegoat other entire groups of people and the lasting psychological effects of cultural and institutional racism.

Psychologist Nathaniel Branden said, “It would be hard to name a more certain sign of poor self-esteem than the need to perceive some other group as inferior. " It would seem that poor self-esteem is epidemic worldwide, including at the highest political offices.

Dr. Derald Sue, a multicultural psychologist, tells us that racist extremists do not do as much damage to a society as "ordinary" people who are unaware of their sense of cultural supremacy. He emphasizes that those who were responsible for the incarceration of Japanese-Americans were not members of white supremacist organizations, but were, instead ordinary people --political leaders, journalists, and citizens -- convinced that their cartoonish, unconscious stereotypes mirrored the "reality" of the human beings they were pushing around and abusing.

Moral philosopher Emmanuel Levinas asserted that every individual is unique, and ought not be reduced to the supposed characteristics to any group to which that person might belong. Sadly, the dominant view of multiculturalism is a collective kitsch view which equates individuals with static and reductionist cultural stereotypes. Such perception leaves no room for any kind of nuanced thought, such as diversity within cultures. Levinas said that we have an ethical responsibility to keep our minds open to the reality of people as individuals and to realize that we can never know the depths of any person. Levinas also said the prophetic voice must speak for the voiceless, to express their suffering, without excuses.

Satsuki Ina is this kind of prophetic voice. Concerned that desensitization and dehumanization might create a replay of the extreme racial profiling that she and other Japanese-Americans endured, Ina, is compelled to bring what she has learned to the largest audiences possible, hoping to warn and alert people about the insidiousness and profoundly damaging consequences of racism.
Ina and other Japanese-American activists are particularly concerned about the current situation of people of Arab, Muslim, and South-Asian heritage because they see a repeat of social psychological dynamics happening.

"So much of what happened to Japanese Americans stemmed from something similar to what we're looking at today, with anxiety about terrorism and looking for a scapegoat," Ina explained. "So there's a parallel that's happening. It sounds like almost the same language that was used right after Pearl Harbor was bombed. We want to prevent a violation of human rights from happening again."
Also, by helping to support those who are persecuted solely on the basis of race, Japanese-Americans are "doing for others what they could not do for themselves," and contributing to their own healing, Ina added.

Although mostly below the threshold of awareness, our entire world is still on its knees from immense historical traumas inflicted by racist-instigated violence over centuries, especially in the last century. Both individuals and cultures engage in psychological avoidance, including minimization and denial, as mainstays of coping. Others turn to repetition compulsion -- those who were bullied or abused seek out a repetition of similar abuse or invert roles and become bullies and abusers. Intellectualization and rationalization allow people to dismiss the traumatic emotions experienced by others or repress their own similar emotions.

On the margins, however, we can hear the voices of people calling for the painful awareness we need to break these cycles of violent global trauma. Most saliently, increasing numbers of psychologists are part of a multidisciplinary movement toward historical healing that has become a global zeitgeist and a counterforce to a parallel rise in ordinary and overt racism.

In recent years, there has been an explosion of literature about collective post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and its intergenerational effects. Therapists who work with survivors of different forms of collective trauma have begun to recognize similarities in patterns of injury and healing.

And, increasingly, therapists working across different client bases are dialoguing – including European Holocaust, Armenian Holocaust, Cambodian genocide, Aboriginal, Native American, South African apartheid, African American, Irish Potato Famine, Nanjing Massacre, comfort women, atomic bombing, Chinese Cultural Revolution, Soviet Gulag, September 11, and wartime survivors, among so many others, in our repeatedly traumatized and broken world. Their research shows similar patterns of wounding, generational inheritance of trauma, and also of healing and prevention.

Not only therapists, but activists, especially survivors of racist violence and their descendants, are also crossing boundaries of their own experience to be with and support the oppressed "Other" in our time. European Holocaust survivors, such as Elie Wiesel, who are coming to the aid of genocide victims in Dafur and Japanese-North Americans, such as Satsuki Ina, who speaks out for Arab and South Asian North Americans, powerfully show us how knowledge of our history can affirmatively change our present and future course.

Ina emphasizes the power of dialogue in helping to heal past collective trauma. She says there's immense power in the "compassionate witness," in listening to each other's stories, with openness.
In a recent interview, she elaborates:

There's something about the postwar Japanese diasporan experience in North America that reminds me of people who hid their identity because of persecution, including the Crypto Jews in the Americas and Hidden Christians in Japan.

I have wondered why Japanese-Americans assimilated so readily to the dominant Anglo-American culture. I always thought that people of Japanese heritage just were not attached to their heritage until I saw your film. I am now wondering if Japanese-North Americans still fear being Japanese?

There is no doubt that the Japanese American WW II imprisonment experience has contributed to an accelerated level of assimilation of Japanese Americans. We have the highest outmarriage rate of any ethnic group in America at a rate of 60% and increasing.

I wouldn't say it is a result of the fear of being Japanese, but more the fear of being ostracized, excluded and disempowered.

However, today, even as our racial identity is slowly being diluted in the US, there is a sense of pride in our ethnic identity as Japanese Americans.

A small but growing group of young political and social activists who are "happa" or mixed race are expressing the need to identify with their different ethnic identities rather than just blend into the mainstream.

People throughout the world seem to be starting a process of acknowledging and rectifying "race trauma," while new forms of race trauma continue even now. African-American historian John Hope Franklin says that "unacknowledged race trauma" is festering in the United States. I think this is true for the entire world.

I felt that you made this film as a "lesson" to the rest of the world about the tragic consequences of the collective demonization of groups of people.

As a psychologist, do you have any view about why, after what happened to Japanese-Americans, Jews during the Holocaust, Native Americans forced removals, African-American oppression during slavery and Jim Crow, and Korean forced laborers in Japan, that so many in the world haven't learned from history?

Yes, both of the documentaries I have made, "Children of the Camps" and "From A Silk Cocoon" were motivated by the hope that the experience of the Japanese Americans will serve as a lesson to be learned about the human consequences of race hatred, war, and the failure of political leadership.

From a social psychology perspective, when there is an ever-increasing level of societal anxiety as a result of war, economic threat, diminishing resources, etc., the way to bind that anxiety is often to find a scapegoat to direct all the fear and anger.

This process often requires that the scapegoated group be dehumanized so that inhumane treatment can be justified.

Pearl Harbor was not the beginning of anti-Japanese hostility, there is clear historic evidence that anti-Asian sentiment in America was very strong many years leading up to the war. Well, there are lots more and I could go on, but I'll just stop here.

How can we help to change history and to further healing? Will learning that there are no "races," and that we are all related, with common African ancestors, finally make a difference?

There is of course no simple answer to this question, but my belief is that rather than minimizing our differences, we must create a world community that values the richness in our differences.
So many of the political blunders that our American leaders have committed is a result of their lack of understanding of the cultural, religious, and social values of the different countries we are dealing with.

This ethnocentric point of view can be changed through early education, person to person contact, and inspired leadership. One step for me is to bring the story of the Japanese American experience to the Japanese community so that we may exchange our views and experiences and have a better understanding of one another.

Has making this film helped to heal you?

As a former prisoner myself, telling this story of my family and my community has been a powerful healing experience.

As a psychotherapist I often see my work as helping individuals who have suffered trauma to develop a coherent autobiographical narrative as an important part of their healing process. This applies to the individual as well as to the community.

What is the reaction among Japanese you have met regarding the experience of Japanese-American concentration camp victims? Could sharing this experience be a means to counter historical forms of ethnic prejudice and discrimination in Japan?

Most Japanese people that I have met did not know about the experience of the Japanese Americans. They often expressed shock and sympathy.

My hope is that by sharing our experience it will serve to increase people's awareness of the traumatic consequences of ethnic prejudice and discrimination.

Stories serve to humanize what could be seen as "just another historical event." The names, faces, emotions of fellow human beings, especially children can convey a message that no history book can. It is through this humanizing process that empathy occurs and therein hope for our humanity.

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