In the Media
The Poet and the Silk Girl book launch event at J-Sei.
Renowned cartoonist, Adrian Tomine, son of the author, joined the event to be in conversation with his mother and together explored the intergenerational impact of the family’s wartime experience on identity and literary expression.
'The Poet and the Silk Girl': A Japanese-American Story of Love, Imprisonment and Protest
The California Report
Satsuki Ina’s parents always urged her to follow rules. They were even more adamant when she was a college student at Berkeley in the 1960s.
“Bad things will happen,” Ina remembers them telling her in an effort to deter her from joining the student protests that rocked the campus at the time.
There was a residual fear behind Ina’s parents’ concern. They were both incarcerated by the United States government during World War II, along with over 125,000 other Japanese-Americans. They were part of a group that resisted their imprisonment and ultimately decided to renounce their U.S. Citizenship. They told Ina about their resistance for the first time when she was in college. They were afraid that if she protested, she might lose her freedom as they did.
Now, almost 60 years later, Ina has written a new memoir about her parents’ time in the prison camps called The Poet and the Silk Girl. It uncovers a chapter in their life that, for most of Ina’s life, was shrouded in mystery.
Ina gave The California Report Magazine’s host Sasha Khokha a personal and detailed account of her family’s story.
The Safe Place That Became Unsafe
San Francisco’s Cameron House began providing refuge in 1874, protecting those vulnerable to sexual abuse. That changed with the arrival of pastor Grandpa Dick in the 1940s.
ALTA By JULIA FLYNN SILER
JAN 7, 2021
In late March 2007, Satsuki Ina, a Bay Area therapist specializing in the treatment of community trauma, headed to Medford, Oregon, on a mission.
Her destination was the Rogue Valley Manor, a hilltop retirement community founded by three Protestant churches. Accompanied by a San Francisco church official named Craig N. Palmer, she arrived on a rain-swept Monday afternoon, a few weeks before Easter.
A long drive led up to a 10-story apartment building. They stepped into a light-filled reception area brimming with lilies—a traditional Christian symbol of purity. Ina was struck by the contrast between their dark undertaking and the ethereal setting. Turning to Palmer, she said, “This looks like we’re in heaven.”
At the reception desk, Ina and Palmer asked for a resident named Dick Wichman. The receptionist asked if they meant Franz. In a nod to his German heritage, Wichman had dropped the nickname Dick and let the Rogue Valley Manor staff know that he preferred to be called by his baptismal name.
Toy Tank of Tule Lake
A Father’s Gift
50 Objects Stories by Nancy Ukai, video by David Izu
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.
Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does. […]
Shizuko’s Quaker Quilt - The Kindness of Others
50 Objects Stories by Nancy Ukai, video by Emiko Omori
During her captivity there, south of San Francisco, women from the American Friends Service Committee would come to the fence and throw fruits and vegetables over the barrier to the prisoners.
One day, possibly noticing that my mother was pregnant, a woman heaved a quilted blanket over the barbed wire fence and called out to her, “I hope this helps.”
The handmade quilt from the Quaker woman, a stranger, traveled with Shizuko for years afterward, through several prison camps and during a period of separation from Itaru, when he was detained by the Justice Department for dissent. After the war, it was always a part of her bedding in San Francisco. But we didn’t think to ask about it. It was just a blanket underneath the chenille bedspread.
And Then They Came for Us
Seventy-eight years ago, Executive Order 9066 paved the way to the profound violation of constitutional rights that resulted in the forced incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans. Featuring George Takei and many others who were incarcerated, as well as newly rediscovered photographs of Dorothea Lange, And Then They Came for Us brings history into the present, retelling this difficult story and following Japanese American activists as they speak out against the Muslim registry and travel ban. Knowing our history is the first step to ensuring we do not repeat it. And Then They Came for Us is a cautionary and inspiring tale for these dark times. Please partner with us to share this critical story.
LA Times: ‘What happened in World War II is happening again’.
By MOLLY HENNESSY-FISKE and CINDY CARCAMO
APR 11, 2016
The metal fence was what she noticed first, miles of tall barrier topped by barbed wire strung across the south Texas pastures — just like the internment camp nearby where she had been held as an infant.
And on the other side of the fence, again, 71-year-old Satsuki Ina saw mothers and children: this time, Central Americans.
“It was like fractured pieces trying to converge — their experience today, my history — being in this place where I had been as a child,” Ina said.
Ina returned to Texas to see firsthand the system the U.S. government has created to handle a surge of immigrant families and children across the southern border, many driven here by violence in Central America.
California Magazine: Children of Topaz Return to the Prison They Once Called Home
By Martin Snapp
On April 22, 2017, six tour busses left Berkeley for a trip—the passengers called it a pilgrimage—to the place where 15 of them grew up more than 70 years ago.
But it wasn’t a sentimental journey. They place they visited was a dusty, heat-baked, windswept prison camp called Topaz in the middle of nowhere in central Utah. They were some of the 120,000 Japanese-Americans on the West Coast who were arrested after the attack on Pearl Harbor. They were sent to euphemistically named “relocation camps” further inland, where they were imprisoned behind barbed wire and watched over by armed guards in towers like those of high-security prisons.
Around 65 percent were American citizens, having been born in this country. The other 35 percent had been forbidden by law to apply for citizenship.
KOTI-TV NBC2: Tulelake Pilgrimage 2018
Over 400 people began arriving Friday at Oregon Tech for the 2018 Tulelake Pilgrimage.
“Many people have come several times.” Notes Tulelake Committee Board Member Satsuki Ina. “Because they have found that this is a place to feel a sense of community, and shared history about our incarceration during World War II.”
After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, over 110,000 Japanese Americans were detained at 10 ‘internment camps’ across the U.S.
Many of those felt to pose the greatest risk were held at Tulelake.
Satsuki Ina was born at the Tulelake Camp, she believes the incarceration represents human rights violations that are still evident today. “What we want to do is stand up for those people that are being targeted, in ways that nobody stood up for us.”
Many of those on the Pilgrimage toured the stockade at the grounds in Tulelake on Saturday.
Jimi Yamaichi was the foreman on construction of that jail, and was a major force behind pilgrimages over the past several decades.
Yamaichi died May 12th at the age of 95.
“This is the first pilgrimage that I’ve been to where Jimi was absent,” notes Ina. “So we’re missing him – feeling that there’s a big vacuum.”
But there’s a strong effort to preserve the grounds in Tulelake, and to hold future Pilgrimages.
“We need to pass the story on to the next generation.” Says Ina. “We have to keep this story alive so America knows this isn’t just Japanese American history, this is American history.”
The Ross Ragland Theater will host a cultural program open to the public Sunday evening at 7:30.
Migrant Detainment Centers Look Familiar to Survivors of Japanese Internment
Fatherly By Lizzy Francis
Updated Jun 14 2019, 1:17 PM
As an expert in trauma, Ina is convinced that the trauma of her early life — not just in the camps, but in immigrant communities obsessed with modeling perfect behavior to an audience of Caucasian judges — affected the choices she made throughout her life.
Satsuki Ina was not yet born when the Emperor Hirohito ordered a bombing raid on Pearl Harbor and, in response, the U.S. government rounded up residents of Japanese extraction on the West Coast, bussing them to internment camps. She was born in one of those camps, a maximum security facility built at Tanforan Race Track, where her mother and father were living in a horse stable. Ina, now a 74-year-old psychotherapist and respected expert in child trauma, knows that the way she came into the world — under guard, under arrest, under lock and key — changed her life. Ina is convinced that the trauma of her early life — not just in the camps, but in immigrant communities obsessed with modeling perfect behavior to an audience of Caucasian judges — affected who she became by informing how she made choices.
This is why she recently snuck into a Texas detention center for Latin American migrants and why she is so concerned, not only about the Trump Administration’s former policy of separating families, but also about their current policy of detaining families together. Prison is prison. Armed guards are armed guards. Call the policy what you will, but internment is internment and imprisonment is imprisonment. Both as an expert and as a human being, Ina has been witness to this hard fact.
Ina spoke to Fatherly about the beginning of her life, the legacy of trauma for Japanese-Americans, and what she’s seen at detainment centers, some of which she’s been to several times.
Japanese Americans lead family detention protest at Dilley, TX facility
March 30, 2019
Japanese Americans placed thousands of hand-made paper cranes on the fence of the South Texas Family Residential Center, in solidarity with the mothers and children confined inside. Their #TsuruForSolidarity campaign had asked people across the country to make 10,000 paper cranes (tsuru)...over 25,000 arrived for the March 30 protest. About fifty Japanese Americans traveled to Texas for the demonstration, most of them former child detainees and their descendants. That morning, the group made a pilgrimage to the former site of the Crystal City Family Internment Camp, just forty miles away from the South Texas family detention facility. At Crystal City, more than 4,000 innocent people of Japanese ancestry were held for indefinite detention during World War II. At the Dilley detention center, the group joined with Grassroots Leadership, the Laredo Immigrant Alliance, and other local activists to call for an end to the criminalization and detention of families. In the following days, they traveled to Laredo and Austin for more actions in support of migrants and refugees.