man whom everyone knew as Tak. Tak was in his twenties, and had been living with his parents in our camp for the past six months. He had been sent to a work camp in 1942, to build roads near the Alberta border, but after a year he was permitted to join his parents because his father had become ill. Few young single men were ever allowed to remain in the inland camps; they were either sent to Ontario prisoner-of-war camps, to work camps to build roads under supervision, or—if they could find jobs—they were permitted to move east to work. Even the young male teachers in the other internment camps in the interior were eventually sent east, after being told by the Security Commission that they could no longer keep their teaching jobs.
Tak remained in our camp until his father was well again, and by then, he and Miss Mori had decided to marry. They planned to move to Ontario after their wedding. They had been promised work in Hamilton, and had received permission to travel by train across the country. Tak’s parents would leave with them, and that would mean the first empty shack in our community.
I was sorry to lose Miss Mori partway through the school year. She had always given me extra challenges. It wasn’t difficult for me to learn work from the third grade because I could hear the lessons around me from the next row of desks. I was doing both grade two and grade three work at the same time. Miss Mori also taught songs to the four grades on our side of the room. There was no instrument to accompany our voices, but that didn’t stop her from teaching us to sing. There was one special song we planned to sing at her wedding, but that was to be a surprise.
Miss Mori was replaced by Mr. Blackwell, a Caucasian missionary from the Anglican Church, a man who had once taught English and Bible studies. He was living in Vancouver when Miss Mori announced her departure. When the school committee found out about him from church contacts, he was invited to teach at our camp. He agreed to take over grades one to four for the rest of the year, and he found a room in a boarding house across the river. He had an old black car. Every day, he drove it across the bridge, right up to the school door.
Everyone stopped work for the wedding, which took place outside on a sunny fall Saturday afternoon. A canopy had been created and decorated, and Miss Mori and Tak stood under it and were married by a minister from across the river. The minister left immediately after the ceremony. With the temperature cooling down, we all moved inside the schoolhouse to celebrate in the community room. Many of the women had baked, and Mother had made a special cake in the oven of her stove. Other families had donated butter and sugar to help with the cake.
At a signal from one of the older girls, Miss Mori’s pupils, including me, gathered quickly in one corner of the room. We stood, tall and proud, and sang to the new couple “Don’t Fence Me In,” a song Miss Mori had taught us the year before. Miss Mori wiped at tears while we sang, but at the end of the song, she joined everyone in the room as they clapped and cheered.
I had made a special card for my departing teacher, using a precious sheet of thick paper from one of Okuma-san’s books. I folded it across the middle and drew a mountain and a schoolhouse. I tried to make these look like our mountain and our schoolhouse. Across the bottom, in indigo ink, I drew the river. I wanted Miss Mori to remember me and I wanted her to know that I was going to miss her. Okuma-san stayed at my side much of the afternoon, and he presented the new couple with a book of Japanese legends from the two of us.
School carried on, and as always, we started the morning by reciting the Lord’s Prayer and singing “God Save the King.” Mr. Blackwell had brought a large rolled map with him from Vancouver, and this was hung on the dividing wall between classrooms. He used a pointer, and pointed to all of the pink areas and said, “This is the Empire, and we are proud to belong to it.” There was a round globe on a stand on the other side of the classroom, and Keiko sometimes pointed out the names of countries as we spun the globe during our breaks for lunch or recess.
Mr. Blackwell was a kind teacher but he insisted that we work hard. He also decided, that year, to give us new names. He told us it was difficult for “white” people to pronounce Japanese names, so he gave us English names. I was called Benjamin Okuma the rest of the time I was at that school. Sometimes, he called me Ben. The following year, Mr. Blackwell stayed on and taught the upper grades. That is when he changed Hiroshi and Keiko’s names to Henry and Kay. Okuma-san and the other children continued to call me Bin. I did not like being called Benjamin at school, and sometimes I forgot to look up when Mr. Blackwell called out the English name he had given me.
All our lessons were in English now, even though Miss Mori had sometimes spoken the Japanese language when she was teaching. Mr. Blackwell, however, insisted: English in the classroom and English in the schoolyard. Some children did not speak Japanese at all; others began to learn English only when they first started school.
There were evening classes now, too—these provided extra help for high school students—as well as community classes for adults. Classes were offered in drama, dance, sewing, carpentry, singing and calligraphy. Uncle Aki had persuaded Auntie Aya to take one of the classes, and she said she would try calligraphy. She had done this before, when she’d lived in Washington, and she would try again. But only if Uncle Aki accompanied her to the classes.
At Okuma-san’s, once my homework was done in the evenings, I was permitted to do as I wished until bedtime. There were books on his shelves, perhaps even more books than there were in my classroom. The textbooks and readers at school had to be shared because there weren’t enough to go around. These were the same texts that every other child in British Columbia was using, and they had been ordered through the Security Commission’s purchasing office. But in Okuma-san’s shack, the books were different in every way.
I began to take them down, one at a time, to examine them closely. There was one about animals I especially liked, and Okuma-san read the accompanying stories to me. When I was alone, I turned the pages slowly and made up my own stories to go with the pictures. These were not animals such as the ones that lived in the woods and mountains around the camp. These were not wild horses that galloped between the rows of shacks on spring and summer mornings, or chipmunks that darted among tree trunks, or black bears that ambled up on the Bench. These were not loping coyotes silhouetted on the ridges of surrounding hills. This book was populated by monkeys and badgers and hares and crabs and foxes, and sparrows that danced on their tails and held fans tucked to their wings. Some animals wore kimono-like robes and
Okuma-san told me what he knew about these creatures. He also told stories that were not in his books, but that he had heard as a boy. Sometimes he talked about people he had met long ago while travelling in the big world I had never seen. When he spoke about his travels, I pictured the spinning globe in the schoolhouse and imagined Okuma-san in a small boat, paddling over its round surface, crossing seas with ease, pulling up on the shore of one foreign land after another.
OKUMA-SAN HAD BEEN an only child, born in Victoria just before the turn of the century. His parents were importers of silk and tea, and they had owned a store that did very good business. The school he attended in Victoria had divided classrooms: Japanese and Chinese children on one side, Caucasian children—
After supper, in the evenings, Okuma-san’s father liked to sit on a chair by the front door outside the small bungalow where they lived in Victoria, smoking a cigarette and watching the goings-on of the street. The cigarettes he smoked were hand-rolled and inserted into the end of a yellow-stained ivory holder. The father smoked one cigarette per night, always after supper. He puffed slowly and did not allow anyone to disturb him while he smoked. If it was raining, he stood in the doorway to stay dry.
When Okuma-san was nine years old, his father decided to travel to Japan to visit the companies he dealt with in his business, and he took Okuma-san along to learn something about the country of his ancestors. They sailed on a freighter, and Okuma-san described that stormy voyage with huge waves crashing over the ship’s bow. He was told to stay below in his bunk, and was not permitted to climb the steps to the outer deck because the wind was so strong he might be lifted off his feet and blown over the side. When he became seasick, one of the crew members gave his father a chunk of ginger root and told him to have Okuma-san drink warm tea made from the grated root. After he drank this, the seasickness went away.
When he and his father arrived in Japan after the difficult journey, they visited the village where his late
