ABSTRACT
Kai Erikson's concern is not with natural disasters but ones caused by human beings. Victims of such disasters commonly testify to feeling fear, self-doubt, helplessness, numbness, estrangement, vulnerability, and the erosion of a sense of security, resulting in a form of trauma. While shared trauma can function as a source both for creating and impairing community, Erikson stresses its damaging capacity. As for communalized traumas engendered by human disasters involving toxic contamination, Erikson maintains that they represent 'a new species of trouble' wherein those so victimized are unnerved to the point where they feel that 'something dark and baneful has worked its way into the grain of everyday social life' and that this condition is likely to obtain forever. Perhaps to avoid exacerbating the inherited trauma of their Sansei interviewer, however, the Issei narrators muffled both the traumatizing impact on them and their community of any single event and the historic skein of racist measures directed at Nikkei.
