The government called it a “segregation center,” but Satsuki Ina calls it a prison camp.
Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941. The following February, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order authorizing the incarceration of anyone on the West coast who was deemed a threat, including everyone with Japanese ancestry. Government officials arrested Ina’s parents and took them to a horse track outside San Francisco that doubled as a temporary holding area. Ina’s family ultimately was sent to the Tule Lake Segregation Center near the California-Oregon border. Ina’s mother was pregnant at the time.
Tule Lake was a maximum-security prison camp that, at its peak, locked up over 18,000 people. Some 1,200 guards watched over the inmates from 28 watch towers. Some of the guards had machine guns. they were backed up by eight tanks.
“And that’s where I was born,” Ina told me.
Her father delivered a speech at Tule Lake at one point, declaring that it was his constitutional right to be free like other Americans. Ina says the U.S. charged him with sedition and punished him by separating the family and sending him to a prison camp in Bismarck, North Dakota.
By the time World War II ended, her family had been reunited at a prison camp in Crystal City, Texas. Ina was two and a half years old when she and her family were released. She says that time in detention has stayed with her, manifesting in longterm stress and negative physical consequences.
Today she’s a psychotherapist who has spent time visiting family detention centers, including the South Texas Family Residential Center, which sits just 44 miles away from her childhood prison in Crystal Lake.
Ina’s experience is eerily similar to what many young immigrants are experiencing today. I spoke to Ina about her life, work, and the longterm effects of detaining children in prison camps.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
You were born inside a prison camp here in the U.S. The U.S. government apologized for locking up Japanese-American families. What goes through your mind now when you hear the is U.S. detaining about 11,000 children in “shelters” across the country?
It’s alarming. It’s so resonant with what my family and my whole community had to experience. America made a horrible mistake back then.
When Pearl Harbor was attacked, there was so much collective anxiety in our country that finding a scapegoat was a natural outcome. The U.S. government just completely bypassed constitutional rights and human rights. And that’s that’s what I feel like is happening today with the inhumanity of separating children from their parents as a form of punishment.
I interviewed mothers in a family detention facility and I asked them why they would take such a huge risk and cross the continent to to get to the U.S. border. And it’s because they did not want to be separated from their children.
They worried that their daughter could be kidnapped and become part of sex trafficking or that their boy would be captured and become part of a gang. The women told me that they felt like they had to gather their children and escape so that they could keep their children from being separated from them.
What are some of the longterm effects that these children in detention may have to live with?
I am a psychotherapist, so I work with children who have been traumatized and what they are experiencing is definitely trauma. One of the worst traumas for children is to be separated from their caregivers and then placed in what they calling “temporary detention facilities.” But it’s indefinite detention—they have no idea how long they’re going to be held. They have no idea if they’ll ever see their parents again.
That level of anxiety causes tremendous emotional stress, and we know from the research in neuroscience that constant release of these stress hormones can affect a child’s ability to learn, a child’s ability to self-manage, to regulate themselves.
The longterm impact that I’ve seen in my own Japanese American community is this hyper-vigilance, this need to constantly prove themselves, and always being on edge. Japanese Americans are viewed often as the model minority but I see the behavior of needing to strive and not offend and belong and maybe give up their own personal aspirations to fit in has come at a great sacrifice and is a reaction to having been incarcerated unjustly.
You left the prison camp when you were two and half years old. How did those years affect you?
This kind of treatment has consequences for a lifetime for a child. The trauma effect is pretty severe when there’s been captivity trauma. We were unjustly incarcerated when we weren’t guilty of anything.
Today I live with anxiety about the possibility of random accusations or being blamed for something. That’s constantly present. So we are always working hard to please people and not cause trouble. There’s a constant need to be perfect. We don’t show up in the criminal justice system but we end up with a lot of psychosomatic disorders and symptoms resulting from over-achievement. We question our integrity and worthiness. I’m over-educated, for example. I have a Bachelors, Masters, PhD, I’m a licensed therapist, a certified gerontologist, the list goes on.
That high level of anxiety has given me high blood pressure. A lot of us who were incarcerated as children have high blood pressure. A study by Dr. Gwendolyn Jensen found that Japanese men who were detained had a 2.1 greater risk of cardiovascular disease, cardiovascular mortality, and premature death than Japanese men in Hawaii who were not imprisoned. [The study found the youngest detainees reported more post-traumatic stress symptoms and unexpected and disturbing flashback experiences.]
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