Be Strong. Don’t Cry.

My earliest childhood memory is a train ride. Standing in the aisle, barely able to reach the worn armrests on either side, I lift myself, swinging back and forth to the rhythm of the moving train. The air is hot and musty.  My brother Kiyoshi is curled asleep across my mother’s lap.  The man beside her is a stranger to me. I’m to call him Otō-chan, Daddy. When I cry, he says to me softly, “Shikkari shinasai. Nakanai de. Be strong. Don’t cry.”

I was born on May 25, 1944, in the Tule Lake Segregation Center, a maximum security prison camp in Northern California during WWII.  When I was a year old, my father was taken from us and held in a separate prison in North Dakota. Finally reunited after four-and-a-half years of prison life, we were leaving the Crystal City, Texas, Family Internment Camp by train on July 9, 1946. Our destination held an uncertain promise. I had only known life surrounded by guard towers and barbed wire fences.

It’s been more than seven decades since that defining moment of American history when 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry were unjustly forced from their homes and imprisoned in American-style concentration camps. The discovery of letters exchanged by my parents while held in separate prison camps during WWII has led me to embark on a life-changing journey to uncover, make meaning, and heal from a trauma that began before I was born.