History for the Reckoning
A podcast that dives deep into uncomfortable history; the kinds of stories we need to learn so they’re never repeated.
Each season we'll dig into a history that we've misremembered, tried not to think hard about, or even tried to erase. Through interviews with historians, scholars, artists, and people who lived the history firsthand, we'll learn with the depth each topic deserves.
Season 1: “American Concentration Camps: The Story of WWII Japanese Incarceration”, launches February 19th.
Sponsored by the JACL Mt Olympus Chapter, the Takahashi Family Foundation, and the JA Community Foundation.
History for the Reckoning
Ep10 - Intergenerational Trauma with Debra Kawahara - 'The trauma is passed on to the children'
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Psychologist and American Psychological Association President Debra Kawahara comes on to explain the concept of intergenerational trauma, particularly as it relates to Japanese WWII Incarceration. What can that kind of thing do to a person, a family, a community, even generations after the events?
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This is History for the Reckoning, a podcast that dives deep into the history that's hard to hear but critical to understand. Season one, American Concentration Camps, the story of World War II Japanese Incarceration. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm your host, Spencer Ford. Over the last two episodes, we've learned about the redress and reparations movements as well as the Corom Nobis cases related to Japanese incarceration. Both can be described as important steps toward healing for the JA community. But what exactly is the Japanese American community healing? That is, what exactly does something like the incarceration do to an entire group of people, psychologically and otherwise? And what would healing even mean? To help us explore that, I'm honored to be talking to today's guest, Dr. Deborah Kawahara. Deborah Kawahara is a psychologist, scholar, and advocate for justice and healing. As the 2025 president of the American Psychological Association and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs at Alliance International University, she is shaping psychology's future through cultural humility, intersectional insight, and systemic care. Her work as a researcher has included studying intergenerational trauma, including that experienced specifically by the JA community. Dr. Kawahara, thank you for joining me today.
SPEAKER_02Thank you for having me, Spencer. I'm really happy to be here.
SPEAKER_00Oh man, thank you. So we talked before the title you gave yourself was a multicultural and social justice psychologist. Can you tell us what that means and why those that arrangement of words is important to you?
SPEAKER_02You know, I think um when I was looking for graduate programs in terms of specializing, um, one of the things that I thought was really important is that I needed to be trained to be a culturally responsive psychologist. And so um at the time when I was going to graduate school, it was important for me to find a program that was not only like I was gonna look at it academically or learn academically, but I actually found a program where the professors were actually practicing out in the communities. So I had someone that was practicing at uh King Drew Medical Center and working with African American uh communities, and I had someone, another professor that was working in East LA at a health center that was really focused on uh Hispanics or Latinx populations, had another person working at the Asian Pacific Family Center in Monterey Park. And so I really uh it was really important to me to be able to learn from people that were actually integrating cultural factors into their practice. Um and so, and also not only in terms of therapy, and we traditionally think about, you know, individual or group therapy, it was also doing the community outreach and looking systemically in terms of what do you need to have in the context in order for people to not have the barriers or obstacles that we know a lot of minoritized communities face. So that's part of that multicultural and social justice is that uh working from a culturally responsive lens, but also the social justice part is I am going to try to break down barriers and obstacles within our social context so that people are able to live, you know, and have the opportunities to thrive and reach their potential.
SPEAKER_00Amazing. So you mentioned within there the broader system. So that speaks to, I think what's gonna transition well into what we're talking about today, that we're all part of much more than ourselves, that everyone we interact with, all of the social and psychological systems were part of. Could you describe what you mean by the broader system, very high level?
SPEAKER_02Okay. Um, so I'm gonna sound very academic, but I think for me, that's the way I can explain this. So there was a theorist, Ruffrinbrenner, who talked about as you think about the context, and I talk about context is environment, basically. We're talking about the environment that you live in, right? And if you think about that, yes, internally you have your own world and you know, thoughts and feelings and things, but you also probably live, you know, you have family or a close set of people that are part of your world. And then from there, there's probably a community that you live in. And whether you're very engaged or not that engaged, that community's gonna influence you, right? In terms of, you know, what's available in that community? Who are the people that are in that community? What are the anyways? So then that's the community. Then if you go farther out than that, we'll kind of say state that you live in, and then kind of our our country, and then you kind of start kind of going out to globally, and how is all those positioned in different ways um in those different levels?
SPEAKER_00Okay, like every level affects you.
SPEAKER_02It's yeah, and they're um they're they're bi-directional, so each one operates as its own, but then they also influence each other. So that's where we when you think kind of like an ecosystem, right? Okay, it's like it's gonna be the whole system that you're thinking about, and that system is is influenced by many factors and many influences, right? That then are gonna impact, let's say, the individual animals or the plants, right?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so today we're talking about the influence on an entire community of something that happened at the state level. Uh, I almost feel like when people talk about intergenerational trauma, they talk about the group that was affected as though it was an organism. I guess how would you describe the group as all of Japanese and Japanese Americans that experience this trauma? How do we, how can we uh I don't know, conceptualize that?
SPEAKER_02You know, I think I I think that's an interesting question because I think, you know, oftentimes what when it's written about or talked about, we kind of just lump everyone together. And we know that there were people who weren't incarcerated. Um, you know, like my my parents were in Japan, but they still had certain things that were happening. They were 11 years old, you know. Um, you know, they had a curfew. They had to, you know, from my parents, they had to have paper on their windows. Um, I actually went to Hana Uli last year, which was a camp in Hawaii, which is not talked about very much, but they had, you know, thousand people that were actually incarcerated. Um, so you have a group that wasn't incarcerated, but still wasn't impacted by what was going on during the time, right? You also had people that decided either to go back to Japan or decided to move to other places so that they wouldn't be incarcerated. Of course, that up, you know, up just picking up and and moving is impacting you, right? But there's also the the concept, so and then you have the interne, you know, the incarcerees who actually live through incarceration or pr imprisonment, right? So when you talk about this group, I think it has affected the community, even if you yours you that person was not actually incarcerated. Because if if we I mean, I think there's the thought that you know, when we saw different things happening, whether it was Asian hate or George Floyd murder, or you know, targeting uh at in Texas where they targeted at Walmart Hispanic or Latino, as a person of color, it raises your awareness that okay, am I safe? Is this gonna be kind of directed towards me in some way? Right, and so I think you know, we talk we talk like it's just like this directed thing, but oftentimes the reverberations of it are far reaching. And because we're used to it, we oftentimes may not even register that, oh my gosh, I'm I'm anxious or scared or stressed or you know, um any of those feelings when these things happen.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So maybe that takes us pretty smoothly into what is intergenerational trauma, generational trauma, perhaps trauma in general. So when we're we're talking about it, you and I, help me understand what we're talking about.
SPEAKER_02Okay. So let's start with trauma because then we can move on to intergenerational trauma. So trauma just, you know, the basic thing that most people think about when you're talking about trauma is a response to a deeply distressing or disturbing event that has lasting adverse impact on a person's functioning, and that it can include social, emotional, mental, spiritual, any of those things on your well-being would be what we would consider trauma. And we know that many people, you know, experience trauma, um, that it now is considered pretty common as a therapist to think a lot of things are traumatic for people, right? So from a trauma kind of experience, then, and we will say the World War II incarceration is considered a race-based trauma event, right? And from that, the people that then were incarcerated, what the belief is, and you know, we talked about the transmission of trauma, and and what's believed is that the trauma then is passed on to the children because if you think about how how that trauma then impacts that person is gonna then change they it could possibly change their worldview, it could change the way they're coping, it could change the way that they think I need to raise my child in order for them to be able to live in this context where I was you know put in this situation uh that was deeply disturbing, deeply distressing. And uh, you know, we talked about for a lot of the uh incarcerees that they couldn't make sense of it. How could this have happened? You know, right, that it challenged so many of their beliefs about the United States, you know, of freedom, of free will, of human rights, right, of due process, you know, all those things that we think we have rights as citizens of the United States, they were all taken away. They were not even followed, right? And so how do you make sense of that when you believed in it so much? And they I think a lot of them still believed in it, even when they were imprisoned.
SPEAKER_00Right. You have the images of the Boy Scouts still raising the flag and them still doing the Pledge of Allegiance in school and things like that. I wonder if you can tell us in intergenerational trauma, if we're like diagnosing it, what are the symptoms? How would I know if, oh, this is what I'm experiencing is intergenerational trauma, not just anxiety or any other host of things.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and so that is the more difficult thing, right? Because, you know, one is a trauma-informed therapist or, you know, um trauma-based therapist would need to have awareness that that is in your history to be able to then, because I don't think it's a siloed kind of thing or a singular kind of thing, because you may have anxiety because of other factors that are going on in your life, but that the anxiety may also be combined, like we talk about multiple things that may be causing the anxiety, not just the one thing that it is, that part of those things may be also the intergenerational trauma that you have been experiencing, but maybe not aware of. And and as a therapist, you know, working with someone, my expectation is that person that I'm working with is not gonna necessarily be able to say, well, it's intergenerational trauma, it's this and this and this. As a therapist, you help your client come to, well, you know, it you would be assessing it. So as a therapist, I may need to be exploring with you kind of your background and your parents and your childhood, you know, because some of the things may be, oh, well, my parents were pretty protective of me, you know, and and um they influenced me to, you know, not speak Japanese, you know. A lot of kids say said they they they their parents wanted them to be this super American, you know, and um, you know, part of trauma may be overcompensating by perfectionism, like we are gonna be better than what, you know, or you know, other research has shown that maybe your parents are so suspicious that it then builds anxiety. Um the other is knowing like you represent your parents and you are given all the opportunities your parents have it. So there may be guilt. But it's like the hard part about it is each one is gonna be unique. So you can't just say, oh, it's this and this and this, because depending upon how your parents responded to it, it may then manifest in you in a certain way, if that makes sense.
SPEAKER_00That makes me think of there's a common uh story in movies and things where it's like my grandfather was a depression baby, and therefore we were never wasting food, and we were never uh trusting banks and all kinds of things. Is that kind of what we're talking about?
SPEAKER_02Absolutely. I mean, I think that's where it's like looking at the parenting to then figure out okay, from what they experienced and then how they coped, and then how they then saw the world, how did that then influence how they created their family environment, right? And how they parented their children. Because oftentimes parents will parent from what they think they need their children to be able to do in order to be successful in life. And so that's where you're gonna see that transmission possibly then manifesting in the outcome of what their the kids kind of do.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, interesting. One thing you point out in the middle there was we have to be high performers, high achievers, perhaps as a response. So I'm wondering, specific to the JA community that we're talking about today, if you feel like the benevolent racism of all other groups toward Japanese Americans is incredibly high achievers, good at math, perhaps. Uh, if maybe some embracing and characterizing ourselves as these stereotypes is related to a generational response. This is what the alarm bells went off for me when you said that.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and then what it made me think about is the model minority stereotype of Asians just in general, but that fitting into that stereotype, right? And some some of the research, what it shows is so I'm trying to connect everything. What this what the research shows about stereotypes is when you are the only one, oftentimes stereotypes are imposed on you. And when you don't fit those stereotypes, you then get a backlash of why aren't you fitting in what you know, or you know, um that that you're seen as what you know, this anomaly, like why aren't you like this? And oftentimes those stereotypes are used because they don't the other person doesn't have actual information or doesn't just see you as the person that you are as of so they're filling in their gaps with the stereotypes, um you know, and so you know, I I think it's it's that model minority puts you know, Asians and Japanese Americans in particular in kind of this bind. Because one um oftentimes people will talk about that pitting us against other minoritized communities because it's used as well, why can't you just be like them? They're successful even if they had these adversities, right? But at the same time, we know within our community there's a diversity, right? And so there are people who are struggling or aren't that a student, or you know, don't fit in the conventional box, and oftentimes they're excluded, or you know what I mean? Uh and it's like we can't forget about and we have to be inclusive. And our community is more complex and diverse than that stereotype.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, we've mentioned uh particularly family passing down their traumas. Like my father experienced this kind of thing, so he taught me to do a certain thing, et cetera, et cetera. At what other levels might a trauma be passed on? So I'm wondering if at the community organization level, at the state level, all kinds of things.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So I think at the community level, I think, you know, and I'll I'll use the Japanese American community, I think it it it was the community also needing to figure out how do they represent themselves within the larger society, right? And we know when we look at history, what's what um is known is that even within the community, there was tension between those who said, you know, let's work with the government and kind of try to, you know, do what they're asking. And then there were others that were saying, why are you doing that? This is so wrong.
SPEAKER_00We talked a lot on previous episodes about the no-nos and the yes-yeses from the loyalty questionnaire. Yeah, absolutely.
SPEAKER_02Exactly. And so I think even within the community, it was like needing to heal both what they experienced from the imprisonment, but also the conflict that within the community, I think, you know, um was really uh strong, the conflict that was going on. I mean, I even know for my father in law, he he actually still it's like you know, looks at the you know the JCL and and that it was like they were for us being imprisoned and he didn't think that that was right and so you know these can get carried for lifetimes you know and so as a community it's like healing from that right um and I think we know that that history gets played you know to uh to like even our not played out but that we know that that exists and um needing to as a community deal with it you know because I even know that there have been people that have had to talk about because they've been leaders of you know organizations and saying we need to talk about this this is not something that we could just let lie because it really happened in our community. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00That makes me wonder if the things that are transmitted from a community level have to be addressed at a community level. I don't know if there's any research related to this but that's just if the leadership was the cause quote unquote if the leadership has to be part of the solution that kind of thing.
SPEAKER_02Yeah that's an interesting question. I I you know I think part of it is process. So it's not gonna be that community's gonna have to in their own way figure out how do we walk together in order to uh work through I guess is the best way that I could say to a resolution of this. And it may be it may be that it's not like you end up getting to an end goal that it'll be something that you're you will have to continuously do you know as a cultural yeah.
SPEAKER_00I wonder if as someone who has a like a Venn diagram of cultural background where you had a Japanese family that moved to America and then this Japanese American family uh what things have you noticed from your semi-outsider perspective coming into this family culture that said to you intergenerational pro trauma is probably at play? You know one of the things I think growing up so I grew up in a pretty um a more heavily populated area of Japanese Americans so I grew up in Gardena California if people are familiar with that it's in the Los Angeles city area and there's a large Japanese American population but there was an observation like the kids that had parents who were incarcerated and the kids that didn't um and this was oper uh observational so I it wasn't like a study but some of the things that were talked about is the ones that had parents they seem to be quieter like not bring attention to them uh that they kind of followed you know that they were pretty pretty uh law abiding stand-up citizens you know they they were good student you know they just didn't cause a lot of problems not that the non but I think the other ones were probably more talkative more like it was okay to do you know um so it was interesting because even then you kind of started seeing differences like those that were from what we call the mainland and those that you know weren't kind of of that um and just noticing the differences you know so even as kids right yeah oh and kids are so perceptive it's just yeah that's so interesting yeah let's get into the actual research in your field uh perhaps as a history lesson when did your your field this field being intergenerational trauma the whole study of it when did that emerge in my mind I'm drawn to thoughts of just post-World War II with the Holocaust particularly but I wonder if you can tell us a little bit more yeah so you know when I was in graduate school so this was in the early 90s I came across a newspaper clipping and then I actually looked more into it about uh research that was being done by Dr.
SPEAKER_02Natana Nagata um and you know it was called the Sansei Legacy Project and what she was doing was she was looking at the children of incarcerees and trying to see what impact did the incarceration have on these children. And so when I saw that it's like wow I hadn't heard about this and so I started pursuing it as my graduate study research project. Yeah but she really was the one that kind of I see as the pioneer in this area and kind of the foremost researcher in this area at least psychologically and so what she did is she really just surveyed these children of incarceries to see what their experiences were. And some of the things that she came up with was the silence around the incarcerations that parents didn't talk about it. And if they did it was only a reference point like oh I knew him in camp or we ate that in camp. So those kind of things but never about the experience um you know she talked about avoidant communication where they just wouldn't talk about it even if they were being asked you know um the parents or even the children the parents the parents and I think part of what they knew is their parents went through something pretty horrific or pretty significant uh but they knew that their parents didn't want to talk about it and so they didn't cross that line but what it did then is it caused identity confusion for them because they couldn't they that was one piece of you know their parents that they they couldn't learn about right and so it's kind of like okay I don't know what this is but I know that my parents don't want to talk about it.
SPEAKER_00You know um you know one of the things that just if you look at more kind of statistics it has been known that there's there's a larger outmarriage rate among Japanese Americans as opposed to our Asian counterparts and people have some money what does outmarriage mean outmarriage means that you don't marry someone Japanese the same ethnicity so um and and typically it was white that they outmarried but they could outmarry to any other race I guess you know and so the outmarriage rates are a lot higher in the Japanese um ethnic group as compared to other Asian ethnic groups um and many think that that had to do with the impact of incarceration you know where people thought you know what um we need to be pro you know we need to be super American we need to be pro-American and that meaning white right so that we don't have this happen to us again right um so you know it's interesting because it's like yeah perhaps that is a part of the intergenerational transmission of this race-based cultural event right it's very interesting because as you say and I've encountered this as I've talked to survivors from camp is so many will say I never told my children or their children will say my parents never told me and yet those trends at a demographic level will still play out that's crazy.
SPEAKER_02Yeah yeah so you can see how this process permeates even without us being aware or conscious of it.
SPEAKER_00Right right but just the little micro things the way that parents behave the way that our community leaders talked and oh it's fascinating horrific but also fascinating yes absolutely so you learned of her work and you were inspired by this studies that she had done so what was it that you did with it so from that I wanted to know were there differences in terms of psychological indices um so what I did in my study is and for those research geeks out there um I did a quasi experimental experimental correlational design study.
SPEAKER_02Okay break down those pieces for me yeah so I'll break it down what quasi-experimental means that I could not randomly assign people to groups because I was basing it on what I did is I had three different groups I had one group that both of their parents were interned or incarcerated I had one group where one of the parents was incarcerated and then I had a group that neither one of the parents were incarcerated. Okay and then all from a Japanese American community they were all Japanese American yes and that what I ended up doing is I matched them on certain demographics like gender and social economic status educational certain things that I didn't want to contaminate kind of the different groups if I found differences. This is really giddy minutia for people that but but so then and then what I wanted to do is based on that I wanted to see could we see psychological outcomes based on the differences between the groups now unfortunately what I found is that there weren't any differences I looked at depression I looked at self-esteem I looked at anxiety I looked at I you know so I looked across a lot of different psychological outcome and nothing they all seemed like they were functioning you know where I didn't have differences based on incarceration however when I went back to it what I did find which was really fascinating to me is if a child came from a parent that was incarcerated and they had a traumatic event happen to them that they then showed outcomes of substance abuse of behavioral issues of so you know um and other like uh depression anxiety so then it was almost though as though and I kind of equated it to okay they were fine as long as they themselves did not incur a trauma you know and that could have been a trauma like violence or sexual you know assault or something like that or a disaster so some kind of trauma um if they didn't experience they were fine but if they experienced it that's where you saw those those outcomes become more severe and so it was like that that the um and you're saying more severe than the average population or who are you comparing it to uh more than the other participants oh interesting okay yeah yeah so they significantly were were different than the ones that didn't experience a trauma. Oh that's it's almost as though like there's this buffer uh uh which we all need to cross in order to hit this big trauma and they were just closer to it from the jump or from their own so yeah I kind of see it as what the generational trauma is that it for lack of a better analogy it's like shock absorbers and they didn't have as much absorption you know or padding so that when they had a trauma they could they you know the the impact of it was a lot more interesting yeah and so for me that was a fascinating because it's almost as though yeah you're not gonna see it unless they have a trauma and then their response to it's gonna be as though it's gonna be more severe than somebody that doesn't have that in their history.
SPEAKER_00Wow yeah yeah it's also just an apt metaphor for the effects of this community damage exactly exactly as your career progressed this study was your dissertation yes yes amazing I hope you got your PhD I did I did thankfully thankfully awesome so as your career progressed any more research that you either personally did or became aware of where has the field of intergenerational trauma and not necessarily exclusive to the Japanese American community what have we learned from the entire field?
SPEAKER_02Yeah so you know so you know Donna the God is continuing to do her research and you can follow her because she's now going into so she did the Sanseis she's now looking at the Yonsei so the fourth generation to see yeah can you continue to see the effects of incarceration on now we would say two generations right um so I would continue to look at her I know that there have been other people who have taken the work and also have studied it and I think in the in my field psychology people and other men other social sciences they are this is becoming pretty big of an area that people are interested in. So you know with um African Americans or black Americans slavery and what is the impact psychologically on them and the communities um you know uh American Indians uh or indigenous people are also looking at it and and you know um so there's the soul wound or uh historical trauma that's talked about um you know so and and you know we can't forget the Holocaust because really for me that was a basis of supporting my research you know in terms of when you're looking at research previous research that has been done and really the one area that the Holocaust they're looking at epigenetics which means that within your body um they're starting to find genetics that are changed because of race-based cultural trauma.
SPEAKER_00Whoa literally your DNA exactly exactly so that really shows that no this is not you know it's not a made up phenomenon or you know that physiologically they are now show starting to to be able to show the impact of it so I hope that our our listeners will do their own research as well because this is an emerging field of study and there are many things that'll be coming out in coming years. I wonder if speaking to the JA experience again if there are other you mentioned this correlate of out marriage is an interesting just demographic phenomenon within the community are you aware of any other things that are kind of novel about the JA community in relation to maybe other Asian groups or the American populace at large?
SPEAKER_02I'm trying to think if there is anything I mean you know I think what's interesting is uh we are reducing in number you know we're like what you know well I mean you know in terms of our you know we used to be pretty populating the United States right I think now we're like the seventh in terms of ethnic groups within the United States interesting you know yeah and I I don't know if that is a function of like a literary birth rate might be lower.
SPEAKER_00Exactly or I don't know you know because a lot uh uh percentage is immigration and we know in Japan the population in Japan is reducing as well and so I don't know if it is but it is interesting because other groups are you know we're supposed to be like the largest racial group that's growing and we seem like we're contracting um so I don't know interesting yeah yeah I don't know I mean I don't have any data or any to but it's it's an interesting phenomena uh demographic that we are uh becoming smaller I guess yeah can't wait for that dissertation uh perhaps the final point on related to the research in this field is now that we're aware of intergenerational trauma there's the effects of the traumatic events on entire communities what are borne out in research or just your thoughts and recommendations on healing from this kind of thing moving forward and counteracting those effects yeah you know so there are because this area is becoming more prolific people are more interested I think the healing piece is also becoming more known you know what needs to happen um and like we started at the beginning of the podcast we talked about you know the whole the levels in which we live in right what our environment entails um and I think the healing piece what they have found for these kind of cultural traumas is that it it's it has to be at the different levels.
SPEAKER_02So at the individual level it may be being able to process it creating safe spaces where when you say process what do you mean in that therapeutic context? So I I mean it can be in different ways because I think we all kind of work through things differently so process is how do you then um resolve any of the distress or the disturbance that the trauma has caused you you know and the adverse effects and you know processing can be talking about it processing can be you know a lot has been done now with somatic you know okay what does that mean with your body um that oftentimes people will talk about the trauma being kind of caught in your body and that needing to work the trauma out and so it may not necessarily be through verbal that you may do it through more physical movement. I know people have talked about the arts as a wonderful way of working it through you know and so at the individual level it could be you know and I'm gonna talk about the community level but you just engaging in community work could be very very healing and helping you process it. You know so figuring out for you how do you kind of address that trauma for yourself. And then At the community level, I think we have seen it in different ways. One being very powerful was the redress movement. When you know, going through that, being able to eventually get the government to pay reparations and apologize to the people, I think was very important for the community to heal. I also think, you know, and we met at Heart Mountain, so I think the pilgrimage pilgrimages and um making these sites historical sites um so that the history gets taught um I think is really important as well in terms of the um the projects in terms of getting oral histories you know so that the collection of the experiences of these is also.
SPEAKER_00Don't take this as pushback, but why would that be healing? Because one argument is we're just stirring up the mud again, no reason to leave it in the dirt. Why would that help?
SPEAKER_02I you know, I think I think it it's because it gives people voice. It gives it empowers people that yes, this was important and it's important to to actually uh be known. And I know we talked, and when you found out about this, it's like everybody should know about this so that we prevent it from happening again. And so, yes, I I mean I think the conversation about yeah, our history, there are there are things that we should feel uncomfortable about. And we're uncomfortable because they shouldn't have happened and we need to learn from it so that it doesn't happen again. You know, I think the saying never again, that is part of that community side because it's like I think a lot of the incarcerees thought if we sacrifice and get incarcerated, that we hope that then future generations do not have to bear this ever again. You know, and so I think that's where okay, yeah, uh people may not want this to be known as part of the history, but we know that history needs to be known so that we hopefully prevent that from happening again.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so I wonder if you have any more takeaways because you've kind of been doing an amazing job giving us this great button for the end of the episode. But as people learn about your research, Dr. Nagata's research, any other pieces around generate intergenerational trauma, what do you hope that they take away from it? How do you hope it changes them?
SPEAKER_02Um, you know, I I think when we think about intergenerational trauma, I think it's important that we also talk about resilience. So it doesn't sound just all negative or deficit. I think, you know, there that to, you know, and I talked about my in-laws to have heard what they went through and the the resilience and the strength that they had to have. And people were courageous and they were really strong. And I think I would say I would want that as a take takeaway too.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Well, thank you so much for your time, Dr. Kawaha. Your expertise is invaluable, so thank you for sharing it. And thank you so much for having done that work so that we could even be shared today.
SPEAKER_02Thank you for having me.
SPEAKER_00Season one of History for the Reckoning is made possible by support from the JACL Mount Olympus chapter, as well as generous financial support from the Takahashi Family Foundation and the JA Community Foundation. The music was produced by Patrick Coffin. If you want to support the show, follow us on Instagram at History for the Reckoning. Sign up for our newsletter at History for the Reckoning on Substack, where you'll also find the show notes for each episode, or support us financially through Patreon at patreon.comslash history for the reckoning.
