I grew up beside rivers: first the Moira River in Ontario, and then the Ottawa River in Quebec. My earliest memories are water-soaked. I have lived close to rivers in many countries. I love the metaphorical use of rivers in literature. As readers of
After giving a public reading from
I have been thanked many times by non-Japanese and Japanese Canadians, all of whom want the stories told. And I believe that the stories should be told. They should not die off with each generation. Sometimes, older Caucasian readers approach me at public events and tell me that they lived through the news of the period but had no idea what the interned families actually experienced. They did not know about the stripping down of dignity, the shame, the total humiliation.
Finally, I loved receiving a phone call from a person unknown to me who had just finished reading
About the book
The Writing of
As early as the 1970s, I began to write about the Second World War removal, detention and imprisonment of North American citizens of Japanese ethnic origin. After Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, longstanding racism came to a head, especially up and down the West Coast. It was almost as if two governments were acting in concert, so aligned were the dates of the forced removal of citizens from their homes and businesses, from their farms and fishing villages, their schools and universities, and from their professions.
In Canada, under the War Measures Act, more than 20,000 people were moved to inland camps. In the United States, more than 114,000 were interned in ten camps stretching throughout six states from California to Arkansas. This was imprisonment based on ancestry. It was highly organized racism. No person of Japanese descent was ever charged with any act of sabotage or disloyalty in either country.
I recall trying to describe, during a class with W.O. Mitchell in the seventies, a visit to the site of a former camp beside the Fraser River in British Columbia, where my husband had been interned as a child for almost seven years—five years in the camp and two subsequent years of restricted movement, going from place to place while his father tried to find work.
The trip to the Fraser Valley was revelatory. When we reached the site of the camp, before my eyes my husband turned into someone I did not know. We were standing at the side of a mountain in the midst of a bulldozed, abandoned field where there was no proof of human habitation. No road, no path, no graves, no building fragments. And yet, he began to pace off the territory of his childhood. He was suddenly on his knees, digging in the earth. Although he had been only eight years old when he left the camp, he was able to recognize patterns in the grass, patterns of earth cellars below now-invisible shacks—sixty-three of them, the contours of which he held only in memory.
He continued to dig. I went to the woods and returned with branches, and the two of us scraped away at the location he insisted had been his own. Moments later, we began to find dishes. Splendid blue and white rice bowls, broken into large fragments that we were able to piece together. After that, we drove to the Okanagan Valley to visit his parents. We excitedly showed my mother-in-law our discovery. With dignity, she walked to her kitchen cupboard and opened a door. She pulled out a bowl that was identical to those we had found in the dirt, hundreds of miles away. A glued-together rice bowl, missing one triangular piece of rim, is now on a special shelf in our own dining room.
When our children were young, I wrote this experience into a poem called “The Camp Revisited—1976.” At the University of Alberta, I took a sociology course taught by Professor Gordon Hirabayashi, a former resident of Seattle who had been a student at the University of Washington when Japanese Americans were rounded up and detained in 1942.
I continued to write about this always-interesting betrayal of democracy: a book of poems, short stories, essays. I advertised in various papers asking to meet Canadian citizens of Japanese origin who wished to be interviewed. I was impressed with the dignity and resilience of those who came forward. I collected documents, hard-to-find histories and memoirs. I visited Neys Provincial Park in Ontario, a former POW and internment camp— barbed-wire enclosed—where my husband’s uncle was detained and required to wear a target depicting a large red sun on his back. I listened to documentaries and attended relevant film screenings. My extensive library on the subject includes both Canadian and American novels, poetry and photographic accounts, one of which is the beautiful book
I returned again to the site of the camp where my husband had lived during his childhood. As recently as 2009, I stayed in the town on the opposite side of the Fraser River, a town that Japanese Canadians had not been permitted to enter during most of the war years. I visited a museum and purchased copies of available documentation. I was told by the Caucasian attendant that two or three families from the camp had moved into town after the war. “That’s how good we were to them,” she said.
In fact, the camp detainees had few places to go. Having no vote in Canada, their own country, until 1949, they were not permitted to return to the West Coast until that time. Unbelievably, almost 4,000 were expelled and exiled to Japan in early 1946. An attempt at further expulsions—which in some circumstances could now be considered a crime against humanity—was stopped because of appeals to the newly formed United Nations. Most of the remaining camp occupants were dispersed to eastern parts of the country. The story was similar in the United States, although Japanese Americans left the camps earlier and were permitted an earlier return to the West Coast. Despite this, having lost everything they owned, they mainly dispersed to other parts of America.
I suppose it was inevitable that I would write a novel about this period. These events happened on a continent celebrated for its democratic ideals. Could it all happen again?
Book Club Questions
