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that too. Richard doesn’t seem to know what’s going on, but okay, I’ll go with the program. I’m beginning to get a little pissed regarding my early childhood, meaning that period from  to  when my family was intact, my community was intact, and I was growing up a happy little child, with the nickname of Chatterbox and doting grandparents. Then about a week after we left the camps, my mother’s father died of a heart attack. He’s the one who took me to the canteen and bought me little treats. I guess it all came down on him and he died.28 THE UNGRIEVED TRAUMA OF INTERNMENT The Hurts of History “My country abandoned me” and “I want to know why I was thrown away,” relayed one man, who had entered camp at age two. The stirring documentary Children of the Camps explores the anguish expressed by this man and other former child internees. Countering conventional notions that there was little adverse impact on the children, psychologist Satsuka Ina views incarceration as a psychological trauma and scholar Donna Nagata studies how the injury of incarceration had lasting effects, even into the next generation.29 It was these multiple traumas and abandonments, mostly ungrieved , that bubbled up in the pent-up rage Richard Aoki felt, to his dying day, about the forced removal and detention of “my people” during World War II. Aoki frequently expressed outrage about the politics of incarceration— the racism, the bypassing of constitutional protections, and the monumental economic losses.30 The trauma was also very personal—injuries that struck at the very core of his personhood. There were financial losses resulting from the forced relinquishing of his paternal grandfather’s successful noodle factory .31 There was the deprivation of good health for several family members . His maternal grandmother developed tuberculosis and remained in a sanatorium throughout the war. His maternal grandfather died of “coronary arteriosclerosis” one week after returning to Berkeley in July . An aunt on his father’s side “became very ill”—from “dehydration, worry, fatigue, and cold,” the doctors said—shortly after her arrival at Topaz.32 An Aoki cousin, a high school senior at the time, suffered third-degree burns on his calf, inflicted while working in Topaz. He endured infection, a skin graft, and ten months confined to his bed. His mother said, “I blamed everything on this  “Protecting the Japanese” accursed evacuation then, thinking if only it had not taken place, my son would not have received his burns.”33 It is unclear what Richard, then aged four, knew about his family’s health problems. But he was aware of a pervasive sense of danger and a lack of physical safety inside the camp, as relayed in his narrative filled with fights, violence, and fear. Significant as the material deprivation was, other kinds of abandonments inflicted deeper psychological and political injuries on Richard. At a tender age, his faith in his parents’ ability to protect him was shaken. He would have become aware of the unfairness in the world, of being different, and of being a member of a targeted people. Like the man in Children of the Camps, Richard lost faith in America and in the U.S. government’s professed commitments to justice and equality. In short, he was deprived of even the illusion of the innocence of childhood. Compounding these more existential injuries, Aoki suffered tremendous personal and social trauma. The most painful was the loss of his nuclear family. His parents separated inside Topaz. On the one hand, marital discord in the stressful environment of the concentration camps was virtually inescapable. The crowded living conditions, the rudimentary facilities, and the omnipresent sense of injustice and powerlessness compounded the stress, and the lack of privacy made it difficult to resolve problems.34 There was almost no place to go to get away to think and to discuss intimate issues. In some ways, it is surprising there were so few marital separations. Then too, the strong taboo against divorce in the Japanese American community and the fishbowl atmosphere of the camps would have created additional incentives to stay together.35 One report on the atmosphere in Topaz noted that “center life is boring,” with “nothing doing” and “plenty of gossip.”36 Richard’s parents would have given the camp grapevine plenty of fuel, not only because they split up but also because Richard’s mother...

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