'The Poet and the Silk Girl': A Japanese American Story of Love, Imprisonment and Protest

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 memoir is based on letters Ina discovered after her father passed away in 1977 and spans the early days of her parents’ love story at the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition, all the way to their eventual release from the prison camps in 1946.

“My mother and I were cleaning out his desk,” Ina tells The California Report Magazine. “In the back of the bottom drawer was a bundle of letters that were wrapped in string. [My mother] was shocked, and she says, ‘I didn’t know that daddy saved my letters.’”

A few days later, her mother gave Ina the letters she had received from Ina’s father while they were imprisoned in separate camps. She never spoke about it again.

“When I found them,” Ina says, “I realized that this was a very important communication.” Equipped with the letters and a diary her mother kept throughout her incarceration, Ina was able to fully understand her parents’ story for the first time.

A Golden Gate Love Story

Ina’s parents were both Kibei Nisei, meaning they were born in the United States and raised in Japan. Her father, Itaru, came back to San Francisco as a teenager, where he graduated from high school. He was a bookkeeper by trade, but his first love was haiku poetry, and he became one of the first Japanese American poets to be published in a Japanese national haiku journal. Shizuko, Ina’s mother, came back to the United States to attend high school then went back to Japan. Then, in 1939, in her early 20s, she was selected to represent Japan’s silk industry at a massive international fair in San Francisco called the Golden Gate International Exhibition. The “Silk Girls,” as they were called, became local celebrities in the Bay Area Japanese American community, and their presence at social events was highly sought after. One day, Shizuko’s watch broke, and the watchmaker, who had fixed it for her, invited her to dinner. At that dinner, she met Itaru.

“I don’t know if they would say it was love at first sight,” Ina says, “But shortly after that, they were engaged, and my mother went back to Japan to finish up her job, say goodbye to her grandmother, and then came back to San Francisco, Japantown to marry my father.”

‘Enemy Aliens’

Only nine months into their marriage, Pearl Harbor was bombed, and they were ordered to register at Kinmon Hall in San Francisco’s Japantown. There, they received a family number, 14911, by which they would be identified for the rest of their incarceration.

Years later, Ina discovered a photo of her mother waiting in line to be registered. “In 1988, her picture was in a calendar that was being published by the National Japanese American Historical Society. They sent me the calendar, and there was the photograph of my mother standing in line waiting to get her number. It turned out that the photograph was taken by Dorothea Lange.”

The couple was first sent to Tanforan racetrack in San Bruno, where the smell of the horses that had just been removed still lingered. For Shizuko, who was newly pregnant with Ina’s brother and suffered from morning sickness, it was shocking.

“This was a memory that she never forgot. She didn’t talk about the camp experience very much, but she did talk to us kids about how…they were going to be treated as less than human.”

People incarcerated at Tanforan could peer through a fence and see people enjoying their weekends. Sometimes, non-incarcerated friends would drop by and throw fruits and vegetables over the barrier. One day, a woman passing by noticed Shizuko, and she could see that she was expecting. She beckoned for Shizuko to come close to the fence and threw a hand-quilted blanket to her.

“She said to my mother, ‘I hope this helps.’” Ina says. “She always remembered that.”

Ina says that when her mother was ill and dying, she still kept the blanket on her bed to remember “that someone outside cared.’”

Fighting Back

Over the next several months, the family was sent to multiple prison camps. While they were at Topaz prison camp in Utah, they, along with other incarcerated people, were given a form to fill out. It became known as the loyalty questionnaire. The government devised the mandatory questionnaire as a way to start releasing prisoners as the incarceration program was becoming costly and the U.S. Army was in need of more soldiers. But before the government considered releasing people, Ina says, they required prisoners to fill out a questionnaire determining their loyalty. The questionnaire hinged on two yes or no questions. The first asked if Japanese prisoners would forswear their loyalty to the emperor of Japan, and the second asked if they would bear arms on behalf of the United States.

“My parents never had loyalty to the Emperor, so they answered no,” Ina says. “Would they bear arms? They answered no. Because my father’s belief was, if you give me my constitutional rights back, I will do whatever you ask me. But until that time, the answer is no.”

Ina’s parents were branded as “no-nos” and sent to Tule Lake, the largest of the prison camps, which was specially designated as a camp for the disloyal. They were critical of both the Japanese and American governments, but Ina says that didn’t make them ‘disloyal’ to the United States.

“When Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, my parents were helping at the Red Cross and were dismayed that the enemy had bombed their country. So this whole issue of loyalty was an artificially constructed message to minimize any resistance to the incarceration.”

Itaru and Shizuko were hopeful that they would eventually be found to have just cause for resistance and be freed. But as time went on, that proved not to be the case. Their options became more limited, and they found themselves facing either indefinite incarceration or repatriation to Japan. Like many other Japanese Americans who answered no to the loyalty questions, they were presented with the option to give up their citizenship and be sent to Japan permanently.

“They had tried everything to try to maintain their innocence,” Ina says. “So they came to a place where they would renounce their American citizenship, hoping that by going back to Japan…their children would have more opportunity and more possibility of living without harm.”

“They were asking me to not let their story die”

Her parents would eventually be separated, with her mother, brother and baby Satsuki staying in Tule Lake and her father sent to another prison camp in Bismark, North Dakota. The letters that Ina found after her father’s passing were from this time of separation. All their letters were read by Japanese censors who worked for the U.S. government. The censors redacted portions of the letters they didn’t want to communicate, but her parents found ingenious ways to get around the censors by stitching letters into their clothes.

“My mother said that my father would shred the bed sheets, and then he would write on these cloth letters and then stitch them inside some part of his clothing. And then he would write her a letter, and [if there was] any reference to repairing his pants, she knew there would be a letter somewhere in there,” Ina says.

Many of the letters between Ina’s parents were in Japanese, and she had to work with a translator to interpret them. When Ina was a professor at California State University, Sacramento, she found a bilingual Japanese graduate student, and they embarked on the translation journey together. “It was more co-translating because she didn’t have much knowledge about the Japanese American incarceration experience,” Ina remembered.

“[The translator] would say, ‘People gathered for dinner in the dining room.’ I would have to say, ‘These were military-style mess halls. These were not bathrooms. These were latrines.’”

Together, they translated over 180 diary entries and letters from 1941–46.

Ina’s family history has informed her work as a psychotherapist, where she specializes in community trauma, as well as her work as an activist. She’s the co-organizer of the Japanese American social advocacy group Tsuru for Solidarity, where she’s led protests against inhumane policies at the border. In 2019, she and a group of Japanese Americans, including her older brother Kiyoshi, went to the border town Laredo, Texas, to speak with mothers just released from immigration detention centers, where they had been separated from their children. While Kiyoshi was sharing his story of living in an incarceration camp for the earliest years of his life, one of the mothers was moved to tears.

“Here’s someone who’s just suffered this horrible separation and loss, and she’s shedding tears for us,” Ina recalls. “To have someone cry for us, it was so healing.”

In 2005, Ina produced a documentary with PBS about her parents’ story, but the idea for a book lingered until finally, at 79 years old, her book will be released later this month.

“I don’t feel like I had a choice about writing this book,” Ina says. “The way my parents saved their letters and their diaries and their poems, they were asking me to not let their story die.”

This story was originally published on March 15, 2024.