Healing Through Activism: Transformative Solidarity in a Japanese American Anti-Racism Movement

Abstract

In the eight decades since World War II, Japanese Americans have come to understand what Black, Brown, and Indigenous groups in the United States have long understood: that the harm inflicted by exclusion, imprisonment, and family separation is not temporary. Trauma still lingers in survivors of American concentration camps as well as in their descendants. Moreover, the fractures created within and between identity groups by exploitative power structures have inhibited allyship across divisions of race, ethnicity, faith, nationality, and more. This article introduces Tsuru for Solidarity, a grassroots organization at the helm of the anti-racist movement that has caught fire among Japanese Americans nationally. Bearing the scars of past racial oppression, Tsuru for Solidarity combines nonviolent direct action, cross-community organizing, and Healing Circles for Change to advocate for currently targeted immigrant, asylum-seeking, Black, and Indigenous groups. Transformative Solidarity is a concept presented through the lens of Mohanty’s Feminist Solidarity framework (2003), in reference to the healing that Tsuru for Solidarity members have experienced by way of cross-community coalition building. Tsuru for Solidarity’s healing-through-activism approach is a promising model for transformative change in the current contexts of both amplified racial hostility and unprecedented cross-racial mobilization.

Keywords:

• Feminist solidarity
• activism
• healing circles
• Japanese American incarceration
• multigenerational trauma

Author Note

With special thanks to Tsuru for Solidarity’s Satsuki Ina, Lisa Nakamura, and Mike Ishii, and in loving memory of our Tsuru sisters, Holly Yasui and Martha Nakagawa.

Disclosure statement

We have no conflict of interest to disclose.

Notes

1 I use “concentration camp,” “incarceration,” and “imprisonment,” rather than the euphemistic/inaccurate terms of “relocation center” and “internment.” See Daniels (2005) for in-depth analysis.

2 People of German and Italian ancestry were also held at Crystal City.