Still from Satsuki Ina's documentary film, “Children of the Camps,” about the WWII Japanese American incarceration.
Satsuki Ina was born behind the barbed wire of California’s Tule Lake Segregation Center, a maximum-security concentration camp for Japanese Americans during World War II. Her family’s house and property in San Francisco was seized in 1942, as they were rounded up with thousands of other confused and terrified Japanese Americans.
“My mother was pregnant with me at the time,” Ina recalls. “My parents were held in the stables of a horse track in South San Francisco and then transferred a couple months later to the Topaz internment camp in Utah, where my older brother was born.” From there, they were segregated to Tule Lake in 1944, where Ina was born.
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More than 24,000 Japanese Americans who protested or resisted World War II detention were segregated and imprisoned at Tule Lake, California.
Ina specializes in the treatment of community trauma. She has produced two award-winning documentary films about the WWII Japanese American incarceration: Children of the Camps and From A Silk Cocoon.
I spoke with her about the Trump Administration’s plans to use Fort Sill, Oklahoma—which was previously used to detain Japanese-Americans during WWII—to house hundreds of Central Americans and others from south of the border fleeing extreme violence and poverty.
Dennis Bernstein: Tell us about your history and your family being taken into detention during WWII.
Russel Lee / LOC
“Inmates” transplanting celery at Tule Lake.
Satsuki Ina: Seventy-five years ago, I was born in an American concentration camp. 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry were incarcerated without due process of law. Two thirds were American citizens and more than one third were children. Without substance of fact, we were deemed a danger to national security, a threat to America’s economic future, and an unassimilable race of people with questionable loyalty. There was no protest, no outrage, no demonstrations, or protest. Japanese Americans used to say “Never Again!” but today we realize that “Never Again is NOW!”
Q: So you were serving time while you were still in your mother's womb. What are your thoughts about what is going on with the families coming across the border from Mexico into the United States?
Ina: Members of the Japanese-American community across the country are outraged by this repetition of history. Innocent children and women are being treated as criminals without any due process. We suffered family separation seventy-five years ago, violation of due process, and indefinite detention. We lost all of our material goods and our future prospects. Of course, many decades later it was determined that there was no basis for targeting us as a risk to national security.
I am a licensed psychotherapist specializing in trauma. I have visited women and children in one detention facility and evaluated the trauma that the children are experiencing. I walked away from there with rage and heartache for these children who live in fear and anxiety every day. We want to use our voices, as children who were incarcerated unjustly, to bring attention to the fact that what is being done is inhumane and a true violation of human rights.
Q: What kind of impact does this kind of treatment have on young children?
Ina: We determine our view of the world often through the arms of our mothers or fathers. Japanese-Americans who were children in the camps grew up with a constant sense of danger. I saw that look in these children’s faces when I visited this detention facility. They were clinging to their mothers, who were distraught and feeling powerless. They told me stories that were bone-chilling, about the courage that it took to cross the country and through Mexico, coming to the border hoping for refuge. They were told by the coyotes that as soon as they saw “the man with the hat,” they should outstretch their arms and say “asylum” and they would be taken care of.
What in fact happened was they were handcuffed and put into what they called “refrigerators,” which were cement slab buildings with no blankets. And these children cling to their mothers in fear, mothers who were terrified themselves about the future.
Those of us who were in the prison camps in World War II are now in our seventies, eighties and nineties. We are outraged to see the same brutal treatment today.
Q: Tell us about your recent protest.
Ina: On June 22, we went to the detention facility in Dilley, Texas, and staged s protest, bringing 25,000 folded paper cranes from Japanese-Americans across the country to bring hope to the children. We told them that we are going to keep protesting until they shut these detention facilities down and stop criminalizing innocent people.
We were calling on all our allies to show up at the site where 700 Japanese-American men were incarcerated during World War II. We did a ceremony with folks from the Cherokee Nation, who joined us in paying homage to those who lived through that ordeal and to those who died there. We want to use our moral authority as former innocent child prisoners to say that what this administration is doing today is inhumane. We will continue to stand with the mothers and children who are seeking refuge in our country.
Q: Why cranes?
Ina: The crane is a cultural symbol of peace and compassion. There is a story about a young woman who was dying of radiation exposure after the nuclear bombing of Japan and the belief was that her life would be saved if a thousand origami cranes were folded in her name and thousands of children across Japan began making these cranes. We feel that this is a national disaster, this abuse of children and families. We want the victims to know we are standing with them and are not going to be silent.
When we were incarcerated, when we disappeared from our homes and our schools and our jobs, Americans turned their backs on us. Nobody marched or signed petitions.
When we were incarcerated, when we disappeared from our homes and our schools and our jobs, Americans turned their backs on us. Nobody marched or signed petitions. We don’t want that to happen to this community of people.
Q: Do you think your parents or relatives ever fully recovered from this kind of brutality?
Ina: No. I think we have compensated, but we know now that trauma gets transmitted across generations. When we went to Laredo and met with women and children who had been released from these detention facilities, when we shared our stories, those women cried for us. One woman told me that she was released after nine months of being separated from her son, and to think that I was incarcerated for four years and separated from my father was an unbearable thought.