Atrocity is familiar to Japanese Americans
Like you, I’ve seen this week’s horrifying pictures: the 2- year- old girl screaming, in vain, as a Border Patrol officer prepares to take her migrant mother away from her, and the slight, lethargic boys huddling beneath blankets in their cages.
The public outrage against President Trump’s reckless policy of separating thousands of migrant children from their parents at the border was so overwhelming that on Wednesday, June 20, it provoked a rare thing from this toxic and destructive White House — a partial policy U- turn. According to Trump’s executive order, the new plan is to incarcerate the entire family together.
To me, it sounded like a disastrous moral failure. But not a new one. Unfortunately, the U. S. has a long history of incarcerating people based on nothing beyond their ethnicity and place of origin.
Many of them, like the two Japanese Americans I spoke with this week, are still with us.
Both Satsuki Ina, a 74- year-
old who lives in Oakland, and Mas Hashimoto, an 82- year- old who lives in Watsonville, spent many of their childhood years in incarceration with their families.
This was thanks to President Roosevelt’s order to place Japanese Americans on the West Coast in camps for the course of World War II. Eventually, most Americans recognized this was a horrible mistake. In 1988, the federal government formally apologized and offered $ 20,000 in compensation to each survivor.
But Ina and Hashimoto both say the country’s going to have to learn that lesson all over again.
“The parallels are really striking,” Ina said. “I saw the numbers they’ve put on the ( migrant) children at the shelters, and I remembered how my family had to register. The way these kids are being treated like criminals just for existing, the fact that they’re not being told how long this will last — it’s a very, very similar and horrific situation.”
Ina was born in the Tule Lake Segregation Center ( Modoc and Siskiyou counties) in 1944. She also experienced family separation. After her father gave a speech in at the center about the constitutional rights of his fellow detainees, the government charged him with sedition and sent him to Fort Lincoln, a camp in North Dakota where many “disloyal” Japanese Americans were sent.
“After that, I was a crybaby,” Ina said. “I cried all the time, suffered all the time. When you don’t know what’s happening or why, your mind will fill in the blanks with the worst- case scenarios.”
Ina eventually became a child therapist. Her primary focus is on children suffering from trauma. She is also a documentary filmmaker whose film, “Children of the Camps,” is about the adult lives of her fellow child detainees.
Both roles have taught her a lot about the ways in which childhood incarceration can haunt someone for an entire lifetime.
“The children we’re seeing this week? We are definitely damaging them,” Ina said. “They will suffer from depression, anxiety, mistrust, a constant feeling of being insecure and unsafe. And because they’re so young, these experiences are literally altering the structure of their brains, so these will be long- term consequences.”
Hashimoto lived in Poston, in Arizona’s Yuma County, from age 6 through 10. Even at that age, he told me, he knew what was happening to him was wrong.
“I was the youngest person in my family,” Hashimoto said. “As a child, you listen to the elders. In our family discussions in the camp, it was clear that the best possible course of action was to go along with the policy, and to eventually persevere. What else were we going to do? They could have shot and killed us at any moment.”
But that didn’t mean he accepted what was happening.
“They took a lot from me,” Hashimoto said. “We didn’t have a qualified teacher in the camp, so I wasn’t able to finish first grade and I never went to second grade at all. My older brother — my favorite brother — died of tuberculosis in the camp.”
He was grateful to have had his family with him, Hashimoto added.
“Together, we had a mission: to survive and to prove, by our conduct, how wrong this was,” Hashimoto said. “I can’t imagine how hard this would have been if I’d been alone.”
As an adult, Hashimoto became a teacher — “in gratitude to the few teachers who eventually came to camp and taught us, and were called ‘ Jap lovers’ for their service,” he said.
Although he’s in his 80s, he still does guest lectures at schools around the country about his wartime experience. He estimates teaching 2,000 to 3,000 people annually.
“I stress the racism in this country that led to our incarceration,” Hashimoto said.
He’s not finished yet, either. Watching child detention camps spring up over the past few weeks has galvanized him.
“This should never happen to anybody,” Hashimoto said. “I’m so proud of our Japanese American community, and how we lived on after the incredible wrong that was done to us. But now it’s our job to help others.”