|
The following two newspaper
articles on the Children of the Camps Project appeared
in the Sacramento Bee prior to the film's completion. They describe
more about the project's origin and purpose:
Children
of the Camps: Opening Eyes to Internment Trauma
Diversity:
Source of Regret or Pride?
CHILDREN OF THE CAMPS
Opening eyes to internment trauma
By Anita Creamer, The Sacramento
Bee
Seven years ago, Satsuki Ina started a series of workshops
encouraging her peers - Japanese American adults who had spent
part of their childhoods behind the barbed wire of internment
camps - to examine their lives.
Ina, a marriage, family and child counselor and an education
professor at California State University, Sacramento, has devoted
both her career and her heart to the healing power of education.
Now she's the producer of "Children of the Camps,"
a documentary based on the experiences of other Japanese Americans
who spent their early years interned during World War II.
"People ask me, 'Why are you digging all this up?'"
she says. "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 was born in 1943 at Tule Lake Relocation and Segregation
Center in the windy and desolate high desert just south of the
Oregon-California border. Her parents were both born in the United
States, as well.
No matter. Post-Pearl Harbor hysteria stripped them - and
120,000 other Americans of Japanese descent - of their legal
rights and sent them into imprisonment at 10 camps. Some 18,000
of them, including 8,000 Japanese Americans from the Sacramento
area, were interned at Tule Lake.
It's a shameful chapter of American history, a mistake that
the U.S. government acknowledged in 1988 with reparations and
an official apology.
And that, says Ina, began the healing.
"We know that childhood trauma has reverberative effects
on people's trust and self-esteem," she says. "This
is no different."
The emotional legacy of imprisonment has been passed to younger
generations, she says, and includes low-grade depression as well
as the drive to overachieve as a way to be accepted.
After Ina saw "The Color of Fear," a documentary
about the impact of racism, she contacted the filmmaker. He encouraged
her to capture her workshops on film.
In "Children of the Camps," executive producer Audrey
Kasho-Wells and a crew of Sacramento filmmakers document a special
three-day retreat in Bolinas, during which Ina leads a group
of six former internees through remembrance into the relief of
healing.
The oldest, a woman named Marion Kanemoto, was 14 when she
was imprisoned with her family. Born here, she spent most of
the war overseas, alone, after she was traded to Japan in a prisoner
of war swap.
Another participant says: "I felt so ashamed of being
Japanese. I felt somehow I'd caused World War II."
Says Ina: "Sometimes people say, 'It wasn't so bad. We
felt safe inside.' But there's a denial of degree they suffered.
My mother was writing letters to my father saying, 'I don't know
if we'll be lined up tomorrow and shot.'
"Our parents buffered us from the trauma they were suffering."
To finish the film, Ina is applying for a Corporation for
Public Broadcasting grant. On the evening of June 21, an art
auction at Sacramento's Excentrique Art Gallery will also beneft
the documentary.
After the war, Ina's family moved to Cincinnati and then returned
to San Francisco, where her parents ran a picture framing business.
"In Ohio, the teachers said I should Americanize my name,
so they called me Sandy," she says. "I reclaimed my
name when I was 35. My mother was distraught. She thought something
could happen to me. Now, she's the only person who calls me Sandy.
"So you see how deeply ingrained this wound is."
DIVERSITY:
Source of regret, or pride?
By Anita Creamer, The Sacramento
Bee, June 23, 1997
She took the time to write a long letter after she read a
recent column about "Children of the Camps," Sacramento
educator Satsuki Ina's documentary film about healing the lingering
pain of Japanese Americans who spent part of their childhoods
in World War II internment camps.
The woman who wrote was a child of World War II, as well.
She loved those years. She cherished them in her memory.
And so she wrote of patriotism and pride, of victory gardens
and gas rationing, of writing to American soldiers overseas and
waving at the servicemen packed on the troop trains passing through
her hometown depot.
No one can take those memories from here. And no one is trying
to.
Yet she also writes:
"The reason so many Americans consider the war years
to be happy ones is that it was a time, like no other before
or since, when all Americans were united as one.
"There were no hyphenated Americans then.. one spoke
of multiculturalism. Diversity was not a buzzword of the day.
Politically correct was an unknown expression, and racism was
not even a word in the dictionary.
"In those years, everybody celebrated the same holidays.
There wasn't a separate Christmas holiday for blacks and Jews.
There was no Cinco de Mayo. Courts didn't close down for
Jewish holidays. There was no Black History Month and no
Martin Luther King Day. America had one culture."
OK, maybe she got a little carried away.
There's no separate for Christmas for Jews now, for example,
and Jewish holy days have been around far longer than Christian
ones. Cinco de Mayo has been celebrated by Americans of
Mexican descent for many, many generations. It's not a
recent development, nor are African American celebrations such
as Juneteenth, which since the late 1860s has commemorated the
day that word of the Emancipation Proclamation arrived in Texas.
To some of us, that's the beauty of America - the idea that
one culture can be grand enough and generous enough to include
and celebrate so many others.
To some of us, diversity is not a buzzword but rather a source
of pride and strength.
And diversity - whether acknowledged or not - has always been
part of America.
The woman was writing to object to a column that presented
a picture of wartime America that differed from her own.
Satsuki Ina's childhood reality was not hers, and she really
didn't want to hear about it.
But how does making the effort to understand and heal the
experience of one diminish the experiences of the other?
Aren't we big enough to grasp that different people - in the
same country, even in the same family - have different experiences
of the same events, different memories and different lives?
History has many perspectives. Why should that realization
cause pain?
Yet it does. Several veterans got in touch to complain
that no one ever bothered to write about the men who fought and
died in World War II.
You'd have thought that 50 years of accolades for sacrifices
of their youth might have meant something. If that's not
a measure of our continuing admiration and gratitude, it's hard
to see what would be.
In a speech calling for a national dialogue on race, President
Clinton said: "We have torn down the barriers in our laws.
Now we must break down the barriers in our lives, our minds and
our hearts."
The woman wrote: "All the various races and ethnic groups
want to hang onto their own culture rather than be Americans."
In a more respectful world, tolerance wouldn't be such a threat.
And we wouldn't cherish the barriers of stereotype at the expense
of understanding how rich we are, as a people, in each other.
|
