[00:05:02] Host: Were there other moments before the development of Displacement that this story or this experience came back into your education or into just your life?

[00:05:17] Kiku: Yes. I do remember trying to pick projects for Washington State or local history assignments that had to do with camp. In ninth grade, I also chose Japanese-American incarceration as one of my ninth-grade project themes. It was something that I think I had always been wanting more information on, even though I didn't necessarily consciously think about why.

Then that all took more of a shape when I was in college. One of my best friends in college, we were talking about family stuff and she mentioned that she was in high school or middle school before she learned that she was actually Jewish and that her grandparents had fled Europe and converted to Christianity once they got to the United States because antisemitism was still so rampant in the United States as well. She didn't even realize that she was Jewish until she was already a teenager.

We were talking about how these sorts of decisions that our grandparents made to abandon parts of their cultural heritage for the safety of assimilation in the United States, how complicated it is for us later to unravel these threads and figure out where these moments of connection are and whether our grandparents would be happy or sad to see how little we know about where they came from. That was a point where I started thinking more about the afterlife of camp and what it means to be a descendant.

[00:07:03] Host: Then when was the moment where you're like, "I'm going to take everything I've learned and fallen in love with as far as my skills and talent and take these stories, which I've only heard whispers of and I'm curious about like this life in the camp and this horrific experience and combine it into a first book"?

[00:07:28] Kiku: That was actually really solidified for me as a plan in 2016. I went to an event that was co-hosted by Densho, which is the online archive of Japanese-American incarceration. Plus they have a great encyclopedia, digital media resources, all that. They were hosting it with the Seattle Public Library and it was called the-- Oh, I don't remember what it was called, but it was about basically a discussion panel between scholars about the aftermath of incarceration and how we can, as Japanese-Americans, understand the current political climate in 2016 through the framework of what happened to our ancestors.

It really got me thinking about the ways that we are still feeling the effects of camp. The authors there were very good at highlighting those connections and talking about the subtle ways that camp transformed the landscape and transformed what it meant to be Japanese-American. At that time, too, I was getting into comics as well. I had not really thought of comics as a medium with any kind of seriousness until I was just graduating college.

I discovered WebComics, which I always like to shout out because the barrier to entry to get your story out there for WebComics is so much lower than having to deal with a publication. There are stories in WebComics that were incredibly moving, incredibly beautiful. A lot of marginalized authors and artists that are otherwise underrepresented in the publishing scene were able to get their stuff with a lot of eyes on it and get a lot of attention to their work online. That was happening at the same time in 2016. I was thinking about the election, I was thinking about the rhetoric that was happening in the Trump campaign, and all those things just coalesced that year. [chuckles]

[00:09:35] Host: All of that exists in your book, which I love because it's connected to this modern era. You mentioned in your acknowledgments Octavia Butler and as I'm reading I was like, "Oh, this feels a lot like Kindred." It reminded me of taking that person from modern times from this current experience or that experience of 2016, or just really any time since the Trump presidency.

Taking this person in that modern experience to a historically traumatic time to live through that historically traumatic time, but with that modern perspective. I think it's a great technique to not just personalize a story, but also to create accessibility for even some younger readers who may shy away from historical stories. As you were putting this together, did you know right away that you weren't just going to tell a story of a certain time, but tell it in this magical realism way?

[00:10:48] Kiku: I didn't know that it was going to be the time memory travel at first, but what I did know from the very beginning was that there was going to have to be some sort of device that allowed me to account for all the things that I didn't know. That was mainly things specifically about my grandmother's life because she died before I was born. She didn't talk about her life very much to her kids and there were things that I knew I would just never know about her experience.

I'd never be able to access her thoughts and her emotions in that time, or know the darker details or the more difficult to discuss details of what her life was like. I knew I had to have a separation-- I couldn't just tell her life story, basically, because that was entirely inaccessible to me. I also knew that I wouldn't be able to tell an entirely accurate story of camp because so many of the records are limited in certain ways. There's a lot of inaccessibility when it comes to these sorts of historical stories, especially when there's so much generational silence around them.

I wanted to account for that and to make sure that I wasn't portraying it as an experience that couldn't have happened, I guess, as if it were a nonfiction straightforward telling. What the time travel, memory travel aspect allowed me to do is already prime the reader to expect that this isn't a nonfiction book. It's not something that you can take as a academic resource. It's an exploration of the lasting impacts and of the-- really, the emotional impacts that a community has after an event like this.

As much as I did a lot of research and wanted to be as accurate as possible, I also appreciated the opportunity that the time memory travel has to remove the emphasis on historical accuracy and place it on the emotional truth.

[00:12:53] Host: What did you do for research? Take us a little bit through your research process and those challenges of, like you said, of finding more of those day in the life stories from the camps as opposed to just facts and dates and numbers, and especially since the closest resource you had, which would've been your grandmother wasn't present.

[00:13:18] Kiku: I was very lucky to be writing the book in 2016 with the internet and especially with Densho again. Could not have done it without Densho. They have an incredible archive of interviews with survivors, interviews with firsthand accounts, as well as letters, photographs, all sorts of really useful encyclopedia entries written by experts and people who've done a lot more research a lot more thoroughly than I could.

Densho was a huge part of that research. I was also very interested in the newspapers at the time. Both Tanforan and Topaz had camp newspapers. That, of course, were heavily censored by the WRA, but nonetheless, gave a good glimpse about the day-to-day and what people-- more importantly, what people were told through official channels, which was interesting.

For the on the ground and personal experiences, Miné Okubo's Citizen 13660, which is, if not the first, at least one of the first books published by a Japanese-American about their experience in camp. It was published in 1946. Basically, immediately after camp. She was an artist who was in her early 20s at the time. She was living in San Francisco-- well, she was living in Europe when the war broke out and he went to the United States because Europe was in the middle of the war.

Then, of course, Pearl Harbor happened and she was taken from San Francisco to Tanforan and Topaz. Already an incredible resource for me because those were the same camps that my grandmother went to. Because she was a young, single woman, it was a really important resource too because that's a perspective… sometimes, it's hard to get when you're reading about history, the perspective of women.

She also was an illustrator. She was an artist. Her method of telling her story of her experience was creating an illustrated diary, and she would document her day-to-day, again, heavily edited. What she would do is she would take up most of the page with the scene that she had drawn and then have a little caption at the bottom that described it. This was so recent after the camps closed that it was still necessary for her to have the book approved by the WRA before publication.

It was very useful for day-to-day life and major events and things like that. It was a diary, so it had major events including things like the murder of James Wakasa, but she also, I think, was able to tell the story with this increased-- what am I trying to say? She was able to tell the story in a way with her art that she wasn't able to tell with the written words. Because of the censorship, because of the need to get it approved by the WRA before publication, a lot of her language-- and I'm assuming it's because of the censorship, I don't actually know this, but this is my assumption or theory, a lot of the language that she uses is very neutral. It's not inflammatory in any way. It doesn't express a lot of extreme emotions, I guess, about what's happening to her.

In her drawings, she's able to demonstrate those emotions more honestly. She draws these big crowd scenes where people are packed together and you see the wide range of emotions. She has this drawing of the bathrooms in Tanforan, a woman in one of the stalls crying into her eyes or into her hands. She's able to put a lot more in the drawings than she's into the text.

That was not only super helpful as a resource, but also, I don't know, it meant a lot to me to see the way that we've told this story since one of the earliest beginnings is as a comic in a way. That was a really good resource. Another one, sorry, this is a long answer, but--

[00:17:29] Host: Please. No, no, no. I love it.

[00:17:31] Kiku: Another one that I was really interested in was a book called Children of Topaz, and it was also a visual diary, actually, but it was made by a kindergarten class in Topaz. They had a classroom diary that they kept, and the kids would draw a picture and tell the teacher what happened to them that week. The teacher would interpret it in their kindergartner. She's writing it all.

It would be things like, "This week, Toshi found a lizard outside and we all looked at it." Then there would be other times when it would be something like, "A man was killed," or I don't think they said a man was killed. I think they said, "A man died." This very neutral language again, because the teacher is very careful to make things not-- she's very careful with her language so the students were protected, we can assume.

There are moments where you know that the kids are aware of some of the more dramatic happenings at camp or some of the more terrifying things that happened. Seeing that interpretation from a kindergarten classroom is really interesting too.

[00:18:39] Host: You did something, and this is going back to your choice of inserting that magical realism or time travel element. You have the main character, the version of you who gets displaced to these camps. While she's talking about her displacement in time, she's experiencing the same displacement that all 120,000 Japanese-Americans are experiencing and she's alone.

I imagine that that would be way more traumatic than being with your family or being with people you know. It's interesting that you used that example of the single woman. I was like, "Oh, I've figured it out." I know it was done with a purpose, but it was so poignant for me as a reader to experience the, not knowing what's happening in the science of time travel as these people are not knowing what's happening in their daily life.

[00:19:55] Kiku: Yes. That was one of the things that Kindred of Octavia Butler was really instrumental in how I structured this book. I read that for college and it was just eye-opening the way that she used time travel as something that happens to you, not something that you can control. That as a metaphor for generational trauma just blew my mind because you see time travel tropes most often in movies and things as these scientists who are able to take the helm and control where they are in time and space but time travel, or in this case, memory travel as something that is done to you in almost an act of violence, is really interesting to me.

[00:20:44] Host: You created with your visuals in your storytelling, it's like a dream element, with relationship to your grandmother and your great grandparents, that they are there, but they're always so far away that you couldn't touch them. They spoke Japanese and your character didn't. It always had that just out of reach, just on the other side of the wall. I really loved that aspect as well. Was it traumatic for you at all putting this all together and inserting yourself into this experience while knowing that this was what your grandmother had to go through as a teenager, along with the other 120,000 people as well?

[00:21:31] Kiku: I wouldn't say it was traumatic. It was definitely-- more so I think it was healing in a certain way.

[00:21:41] Host: True, cathartic.

[00:21:42] Kiku: Cathartic. That's a good word for it because again, it was processing a lot of things that I had in the back of my mind throughout my life. These questions of, why don't we speak Japanese? These questions of, where do we fit in in this community? Especially being mixed race, there was always a feeling I had of not quite feeling like I could claim any ownership over being Japanese-American.

Going through the history and going through specifically the timeline of my grandmother's life and how it was affected by camp, it made me understand better where I come from and where my identity comes from, I guess, because so many of these questions that I had about why I don't feel this connection to Japanese-American community or to culture, it all comes down to camp and to the successful scattering of Japanese-American communities.

One of the things that I don't know is talked about as much about what camp achieved, in terms of the government's goals, was to break up these historic Japan towns, because so many people who went to camp, you were able to leave a little bit earlier if you went to the East Coast or you went to West places that historically, Japan towns were not. There were not a large concentration of Japanese-American communities. What it essentially did was break up these cultural centers and scatter people and dissolve these fabric of their community. That is where I come from. That's why so many of Yonsei, my generation, feel this lack of connection.

[00:23:33] Host: This is the crux of this podcast series. While this book is historical fiction, it is history. It's researched and it's shared through the human lens, through the emotional lens of fear, of unknowing, being lost, being alone, distrust, faith, and resilience. It fills in the gap where our history books fail.

It fills in the gap where there may be some shame or guilt or lack of sharing these stories from the people that actually experienced it. I'd love for you to talk about how important it is to have not just this book, but like Kindred and stories that may not just be a historic telling, but create that empathy, whether through art or literature or music or theater.

[00:24:32] Kiku: Well, thank you, first of all. I think one of the things that really solidified for me when I was doing a lot of the research for Displacement was the way that historical fact is unreliable in a certain sense. What I mean by that is you have your primary source documents from camp, you have newspapers, you have government reports, you have even diary entries. All of those things our primary source materials are of the time, are heavily biased, heavily censored, heavily edited, and have an agenda.

The truth of the matter is that the way that we view history through artifacts of the time is if you don't have the context of what people were trying to achieve by creating this document, by creating this article, then you really don't have a historical artifact. You have these newspaper articles, again, for example, the murder of James Wakasa, that talk about, Jap killed trying to escape fence, things like that. Those are primary source documents, but they are also inaccurate and they have an agenda.

I think it's important to have works that filter through the, I guess, primary source artifacts of history and understand and contextualize them from a distance, I guess, because I think if you rely solely on the artifacts that we keep from historical record, there's just so many ways that that gets removed from the context of their era if that makes sense. It's hard to get an accurate idea of what was going on if you don't understand why certain documents were written in the way they were. I feel like I'm getting off-topic.

[00:26:46] Host: No, it's great. In addition to that, though, just giving the human experience with the group of friends sitting and talking and the two different choices the boys were making on question 27 and 28. The moment where Kiku felt ashamed because she was afraid and didn't know how to answer those questions. You're capturing this emotion that we don't really get from those newspaper articles.

Definitely not from those artifacts, but even in a lot of the diary entries, you're not getting-- there's that almost pride element of just writing about what happened or talking about what happened, but without going into that emotional space, that human experience.

[00:27:39] Kiku: I think one thing that I also observed reading Miné Okubo's work was how difficult it can be to have, or to even understand your own emotions when you're going through something like that. I think that was why, in a certain way, some of her writing is a little bit neutral, because how do you process an emotion like that as it's happening? I think a lot of it has to be unpacked later. A lot of the process of telling the story for decades afterwards.

My character in the book, similar to my own self, had grown up hearing about the No-No Boys and the derogatory way that my grandmother had apparently talked about the No-No Boys. That added another layer to this struggle of how to answer these questions but I think that reflected a real community shame. We are trying not to seem disloyal, and these people are causing waves and things like that. That lasted through generations of these troublemakers. [chuckles]

[00:28:54] Host: I want to finish with, like we've talked about before, this book starts in this modern era, and it finishes as well. How important was it for you to connect this story of the incarceration and Executive Order 9066 to the issues of today?

[00:29:13] Kiku: Yes, that was a huge part of it. I knew from the beginning that would have to be part of it. Not only because, obviously, of the parallels between the escalating orientalism and anti-Japanese fervor that happened prior to Pearl Harbor, which is why the first displacement that my character goes through is not actually during the war. It's about ten years earlier when there's still this sort of growing anti-Japanese sentiment because I really wanted to show that there's always a groundwork laid that leads to these moments of racist violence, that it doesn't just come out of nowhere.

Those parallels are important to draw, obviously, because one of the main infamous rallying cries, I don't know, one of the things that is very important to a lot of Japanese-American organizations now, is this sense of never again. It's the responsibility in the community to be speaking about camp and making that connection for people to the present day. Ronald Reagan, the Republican's darling boy, apologized for what the United States did to Japanese-Americans in the 1980s. It's become very important for a lot of Japanese-American organizations to point out, you can't apologize with one hand and then do the same thing to a different group of people with the other.

These things are incompatible and I really appreciate how many Japanese-American organizations both pivoted during the 2016 election and directed their energy towards making those connections for people. Also, formed new organizations that were more direct action. There's a group called Tsuru for Solidarity, their whole organization is about closing concentration camps in the United States, including immigrant detention centers and places where they're separating families at the border and at various ports throughout the country.

Those connections were being made already by a lot of different Japanese-American organizations. I've had people ask, do you think including Trump in the book dates it and to that, I have to say that I think the Trump campaign and the election and the subsequent years have become a part of Japanese-American history because of the reaction of the community and to our shame, these things had been happening more quietly prior to the Trump administration.

It's true that he just said the quiet part out loud, for all of us to understand more in depth. I'm very grateful that organizations like Tsuru and Densho were still fighting the Biden administration for their immigration policies. I think it's a new direction and a focused vision that Japanese-American activist groups have now.

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[00:32:22] Host: We'd like to thank Kiku Hughes for her time, her expertise, and her passion. Medium Historyis produced by Chapman University's Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, and Past Forward. For more socially conscious content, visit pastforward.org or follow us at Apple, Spotify, or wherever you podcast.

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