Bay Area Japanese Americans Draw on WWII Trauma to Resist Deportation Threats
February 19 is the Day of Remembrance, the anniversary of when President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which led to the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. Some survivors of those prison camps are feeling like the rhetoric about immigrants and mass deportations today is hitting too close to home. President Trump has promised to enact the largest deportation operation in U.S. history. He wants to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, the same law that was used to justify incarcerating Japanese Americans. In response, some survivors are mobilizing to protect vulnerable immigrants. Reporter Cecilia Lei spoke to a group of them in the Bay Area about how they’re fighting to keep history from repeating itself.
‘The Poet and the Silk Girl’: A Japanese American Story of Love, Imprisonment and Protest
Nine months into Satsuki Ina’s parents’ marriage, Pearl Harbor was bombed. Their life was totally upended when, along with 125,000 other Japanese Americans, they were sent to incarceration camps. After unsuccessfully fighting for their civil rights to be restored, her parents renounced their American citizenship. That meant the US government branded them as “enemy aliens.” Ina was born in a prison camp at Tule Lake, but didn’t know much about that difficult chapter in her parents’ life. Then she discovered a trove of letters that they sent to each other while they were separated in different camps. She’s written a memoir about how her parents’ relationship survived prison camps, resistance and separation. “The Poet and the Silk Girl” is a rare first-person account of a generation-altering period in Japanese American history. Sasha Khokha sat down with Satsuki Ina to learn more about her parents’ story and how it shaped the course of her own life.