Anita Creamer’s article in the Sacramento Bee on Executive Order 9066 and the effect of internment on Japanese Americans.
Today Japanese American educators and researchers say that the community’s third generation – the Sansei, most of them born after the war to parents who had been imprisoned – has inherited a complicated generational legacy that has played out in the Japanese American culture ever since the days of camp.
“A lot of what people experience in adulthood can be traced back to the trauma their parents passed on intergenerationally,” said Satsuki Ina, 67, a psychotherapist and retired Sacramento State professor who was born to Nisei (or second) generation parents at the Tule Lake camp in Northern California.
Through her research, which culminated in an Emmy-winning PBS documentary, “Children of the Camps,” she discovered that post-traumatic stress scarred the lives of Nisei and their Sansei children in the years after they were released from camp.
In her own case, she said: “I think of what it was to be a baby carried in the arms of a mother who wrote in her diary, ‘Is today the day they’re going to shoot us?’ “
The Edge of the American West 
5 comments
February 27, 2012 at 5:51 pm
Vance Maverick
A good piece for the anniversary. For me the saddest line was
“I don’t know my culture,” said Nakashima, 50.
That the culture you know should not seem to be “yours”, and the one you don’t know should, is a painful thought.
“Look at it this way,” said Rauchway.
Done!
One of the pieces I’d been meaning to write for this joint would be on Ruth Asawa. Her basketlike wire sculptures are really worth seeing.
February 27, 2012 at 5:58 pm
eric
I keep thinking that one year, I’ll go on the Manzanar Pilgrimage. But it’s always around my birthday, and it’s not exactly what you’d call festive.
February 27, 2012 at 7:33 pm
Laura @ Texas in Africa
There’s some really interesting research along these lines going on in the DRC, where epidemiologists are studying cortisol (stress hormone) levels in the placentas of children born as a result of rape. Basically, they are trying to figure out what happens to babies who are exposed to such high stress levels in utero from conception on through delivery. Not surprisingly, it apparently has very negative health effects on the children, even before they experience nurturing by a mother who has no choice but to care for them.
February 27, 2012 at 11:06 pm
rja
I first heard of the Japanese internment not in school (I don’t think that happened until college), but when my father recalled his disbelief at how his Boyle Heights neighbors and high school classmates disappeared virtually overnight. Though they had been a part of the neighborhood all through his childhood, over the next months, he recalled that their homes were broken into and vandalized.
February 28, 2012 at 12:14 pm
Margarita
> “Is today the day they’re going to shoot us?”
It’s easy to forget that we only know the answer to this question in hindsight. Not only did that mother not know at the time, but the guards who were equipped with guns for that precise purpose did not know either.