Our Panelists 

Lorraine K. Bannai is Professor Emerita at Seattle University School of Law, where she served as Director of the Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality. After earning her J.D. from the University of San Francisco School of Law, Professor Bannai joined what is now the San Francisco firm of Minami Tamaki. While there, she served on the legal team that successfully challenged Fred Korematsu’s World War II conviction for refusing to comply with the forced removal of Japanese Americans from the West Coast.

Professor Bannai has written and spoken widely on the wartime Japanese American incarceration and its present-day relevance, including the need to uphold the rule of law, the danger of race prejudice, and the importance of allyship. Her books include the co-authored Race, Rights, and National Security: Law and the Japanese American Incarceration, and her biography of Fred Korematsu, Enduring Conviction: Fred Korematsu and His Quest for Justice.

Kathryn Bannai served as lead counsel in Gordon Hirabayashi's coram nobis case from 1982 to early 1985. Among other critical work, she successfully defeated the government’s effort to dismiss Hirabayashi’s case and persuaded the court to grant an evidentiary hearing. That hearing provided the basis for overturning Hirabayashi’s convictions for resisting the curfew and exclusion orders promulgated under E.O. 9066.

In addition to practicing law, she adjudicated cases for the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal and Seattle’s Public Safety Civil Service Commission; served as president of the Seattle and New York Chapters of the JACL; and was a member of the Board of Trustees of Eastern Washington University, the Board of Directors of Little Tokyo Community Council (Los Angeles), and the Advisory Council of Kizuna (Los Angeles). She also co-chaired the committee that sought posthumous recognition for Mitsuye Endo Tsutsumi, who was awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal in 2025.

Kathryn is presently a member of the Board of Trustees of the Japanese American National Museum and chairs its East Coast Task Force.

Peggy Nagae’s work has included being a litigator on civil and criminal matters, Assistant Dean at the University of Oregon Law School; COO, White Men as Full Diversity Partners; and owner of her own consulting firm.  Nagae served on the JACL National Redress Committee; the Civil Liberties Public Education Fund for Japanese American redress;  and the third president and first woman president, National Asian Pacific American Bar Association. As lead attorney for Minoru Yasui, she and a team of lawyers reopened his WWII Supreme Court case and had his conviction vacated in 1986. In 2014, Peggy spearheaded Yasui’s successful nomination for a Presidential Medal of Freedom, which President Obama awarded him, posthumously, in 2015.  In 2024 Nagae served as co-chair with Kathryn Bannai of Mitsuye Endo Tsutsumi’s nomination for a Presidential Medal of Freedom for her WWII Supreme Court case.  In January of 2025, President Biden posthumously awarded her a Presidential Citizens Medal.

Nagae Is a member of the JACL Social Justice Committee; Co-Chair, Tsuru for Solidarity Black Reparations and Solidarity Campaign; Co-Chair, Oregon Tsuru Black Reparations and Solidarity Campaign; Vassar College Alumnae/I Association; and the University of Oregon President’s Diversity Advisory Community Council.  As an activist, consultant, author, and speaker Peggy’s work is collaborative, values-based and heart-driven. She has dedicated her life to justice and equity and to building a multiracial, inclusive democracy.

Satsuki Ina is a psychotherapist, now specializing as a consultant in community trauma. She helps victims of oppression to claim not only their voice but also their power to transform the systems that have oppressed them. Her activism has included co-founding Tsuru for Solidarity, a nonviolent, direct-action project of Japanese American social justice advocates working to end detention sites. Ina has produced two Emmy-award winning documentaries about the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans, Children of the Camps and From a Silk Cocoon. She has been featured in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, TIME, Democracy Now! and the documentary And Then They Came for Us. Her recent memoir, newly released in paperback, The Poet and the Silk Girl: A Memoir of Love, Imprisonment, and Protest, has been expanded to include a study and discussion guide. A professor emeritus at California State University, Sacramento, she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Website: https://www.satsukiina.com/

About the Book

In her memoir, The Poet and the Silk Girl, Satsuki recovers the story of how her parents survived and resisted their incarceration in U.S. concentration camps during WWII. Drawing from diary entries, heart-wrenching haiku, censored letters, government documents, and clandestine messages, Ina shares the eyewitness dispatches of her newlywed parents Shizuko and Itaru Ina. Their words, interwoven with the upheaval of war and Ina’s own retrospective reflection, present an intimate view into the experiences of those whose lives were upended, by reason of race alone, by Executive Order 9066—a presidential edict that dispossessed an entire generation of Japanese people, including U.S. citizens, of their homes and livelihoods.

And the memoir also takes us to the current moment, where Satsuki, a psychotherapist and activist, connects her family’s WWII ordeal to the race and immigration stories unfolding today—from rising anti-Asian hate to the militarization of immigration enforcement. At 81, Satsuki continues to be at the forefront of Asian American activism. She's a co-founder of Tsuru for Solidarity, a nonviolent, direct-action project of Japanese American social justice advocates, and last year gave the keynote address at the 56th Annual Manzanar Pilgrimage (watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qL4Ea578Qj0). She was also instrumental in the effort to establish the Snow Country Prison Japanese American Memorial in Bismarck, ND, which had its official dedication ceremony in September 2025.