“Daruma of Resilience II” by Kristine Aono is a wall installation depicting Daruma, a Buddhist monk and symbol of resilience in the face of adversity. Visitors are encouraged to write out wishes on sticky notes to attach next to the piece. It’s part of the exhibit “Resilience — A Sansei Sense of Legacy” at the Illinois Holocaust Museum in Skokie through June. Pat Nabong/Sun-Times
By Erica Thompson, Chicago Sun*Times, December 28, 2024
Forty years after World War II, the U.S. government commissioned a study to examine the impact of the internment of Japanese Americans.
Public hearings included testimony from those who had been imprisoned, many of whom had never before spoken about their experiences.
“They’d been in those camps for three and a half years and kept quiet about it because they wanted to prove their loyalty to the U.S.,” said Kristine Aono, who grew up in the Chicago area. “Or, like my parents who were children during that incarceration, they just grew up believing they’d done something wrong and they had something to feel ashamed of, so they did not talk about it.”
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