CANADA SETTLES AN OLD DEBT
Knickerbocker, Nancy
Canada Settles an Old Debt BY NANCY KNICKERBOCKER My husband was born in Vancouver Island and he always loved Canada like a mother and believed in the Canadian government," says Haruko Kobayakawa,...
...We never believed it could happen in Canada, especially not to the Canadian-born," says Arai...
...I told my father I didn't want to go," she says...
...Those who stayed in Canada were prohibited from returning to British Columbia until April 1, 1949...
...All these events unfolded against the advice of senior officials of the military and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who strongly—and correctly—believed that Japanese-Canadians posed no security risk whatever...
...I wanted to stay at home and finish my education—I only had grade eight—but we had no choice...
...Their political, educational, and legal work sparked debate on one of the more fundamental questions facing any nation: Just what are the rights of citizens...
...Then last August, President Ronald Reagan signed a U.S...
...The family sailed on the last repatriation boat in December 1946...
...How, they would ask, given the precedent set in Washington, could Mulroney justify not redressing even graver abuses by Ottawa...
...A generation later, the wounds had begun to heal...
...Demoralized by four years of internment, Mary Seki's father decided that sending his children into exile in Japan was preferable to keeping them separated from their mother...
...The government's own wartime documents, now declassified, reveal that a small but powerful group of bigoted politicians and businessmen simply used the war as an excuse to expel the Japanese-Canadians from British Columbia...
...For Miki and other leaders of the National Association of Japanese-Canadians, it was the culmination of a long and vigorous campaign...
...With her father, sister, and three brothers, Seki was shipped out to do forced labor on a sugar-beet farm in Alberta...
...If Mulroney reneged, he would have to answer to this formidable coalition which, for the first time, was organized and united...
...But we lost everything my dad worked for for forty years, everything...
...It is September 22, 1988, and it has finally happened...
...Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney this morning arose in the House of Commons to offer Japanese-Canadians "the formal and sincere apology of this Parliament for those past injustices against them, against their families, and against their heritage...
...Through years of politicking and posturing by a succession of cabinet ministers, they persisted in asserting the moral imperative of redress...
...The Canadian government was following a continental policy, but few people realize how much more severe the abuses were here...
...They therefore refused to carry out the evacuation orders, compelling Ottawa to establish a civilian body for that purpose...
...Many were weeping, overwhelmed...
...I'm very happy...
...Canada Settles an Old Debt BY NANCY KNICKERBOCKER My husband was born in Vancouver Island and he always loved Canada like a mother and believed in the Canadian government," says Haruko Kobayakawa, eighty-six, recalling the hardships her husband and other Japanese-Canadians suffered during World War II...
...By their example, Japanese-Canadians showed the way to a new, more engaged model of citizenship...
...It was the end of her childhood...
...I was trying to knit scarves for the boys overseas...
...It was the language of our own movement that the government was affirming...
...One was in downtown Vancouver, another in the heart of a growing neighborhood...
...She often asked herself, "Why are we forced to go...
...Many Issei [the immigrant generation born in Japan] said we would never see this day...
...It broke his spirit...
...But things got worse, not better, for Japanese-Canadians...
...Both forces asserted that the activities of white racists presented a more serious threat to public peace...
...Mary Seki was twelve years old when the evacuation began...
...Yoshio Arai's family, for example, were paid $1,900 for everything they owned: all their household goods, a new car, their home, and two successful dry-cleaning businesses...
...redress bill granting reparations to Japanese-Americans...
...No one will ever say so, but it will have a total impact here," said Roy Miki the day the U.S...
...What's more, Japanese-Canadians with their meager profits were made to pay for their own incarceration...
...The Queen was my Queen...
...The photographs on the following pages are from the archives of the Japanese-Canadian Centennial Project, collected by Vancouver photographer Tamio Wakayama...
...This is my home...
...And he made a "solemn commitment and undertaking to Canadians of every origin that such violations will never again in this country be countenanced or repeated...
...Our national self-image demanded that the government of Canada resolve the issue at least as generously as did the United States...
...We clung to that commitment," says Miki, "and we used it...
...The words sounded familiar, talking about healing the burden of the past...
...What could he have said to Canadians, most of whom—rightly or wrongly—like to think of themselves as a more tolerant people than Americans...
...Like their American cousins, more than 21,000 Japanese-Canadians were uprooted from their homes on the Pacific coast, dispossessed, and interned in the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor...
...Myself, I still can't believe it...
...Roy Miki, a Vancouver English professor and veteran advocate for governNancy Knickerbocker is a free-lance writer in Vancouver, British Columbia...
...bill passed...
...ment redress, was in the Parliamentary visitors' gallery when Mulroney spoke...
...That left Prime Minister Mulroney with only one option: to live up to his promise before he called an election...
...When he was interned, he felt as though they'd cut his legs and arms off and thrown him out into the snow...
...Such direct seizures and forced sales of assets did not take place in the United States...
...Their homes and businesses in the thriving "Little Tokyo" area of Vancouver, their farms in the lush valley outside the city, their boats that worked the great salmon runs of the Fraser River—all were sold off below market value by the government's Custodian of Enemy Alien Property...
...He passed away in 1979 without seeing any sign of redress, although he was always talking about it...
...In 1984, as Mulroney was heading toward the biggest electoral landslide in Canadian history, he had said, "If there were a Conservative government...
...I was born here...
...Then the family got twenty-four hours' notice to abandon their hotel business and get out of town...
...Today, federal government offices occupy that site...
...She shrugs, recalling her naivete...
...In the process, their stories captured the imagination of Canadians of all complexions...
...I can assure you we would be compensating Japanese-Canadians...
...The work was back-breaking, the living conditions primitive, the winters harsh...
...Their cause touched hearts in every ethnic community in a country that has enshrined bilingualism and multicultur-alism in law...
...In 1945, Ottawa issued a "repatriation order" that deported 4,000 to post-Hiroshima Japan, where they were also treated like aliens...
...I thought I was a real Canadian...
...Families were split up, some for years...
...She had already lost her mother, who had gone to Japan on vacation and wasn't allowed back to Canada after the Pacific war broke out...
...At the end of the war, Japanese-Americans were allowed to go home and begin to pick up the pieces of their lives...
...Survivor Charlie Kadota says the cultural values inherited from the Issei kept the community working together—especially the quality of gamen, or patience and perseverance...
...Mulroney also announced immediate payment of almost $3 million (Canadian) to the 14,000 surviving internees-$21,000 apiece ($17,220 U.S...
...and a further $27 million for Japanese-Canadian community programs and a national human-rights foundation...
...He also pledged pardons for those convicted under the internment laws and the restoration of citizenship to people deported to Japan, with an offer of citizenship to their children...
...The Association was ready, bolstered by the support of a remarkable coalition embracing every national ethno-cultural organization, members of every political party from the Conservatives to the Communists, key labor movement figures and Native Indian leaders, all the major churches, and the nation's preeminent intellectuals, jurists, artists, and journalists...
...It was how I'd always imagined it would be," Miki says...
...By then, they had nothing to come home to...
...I've asked hundreds of times today—can it really be true...
...A 1986 study calculated the Japanese community's economic losses at about half a billion dollars...
...Japanese-Canadians began to speak out...
Vol. 52 • November 1988 • No. 11
