I remember how indignant she was on our behalf, how I’d become used to this. Henry and Kay responded politely, if not fully. Yes, their names had once been Hiroshi and Keiko. No, they hadn’t bothered to change them back. Yes, it did create confusion each time they applied for a passport. The same agencies that had taken their names away now demanded that the originals be pulled out of storage. “It’s laughable,” Henry told Lena, but there was an edge to his laughter. When he suddenly referred to the part of the coast from which we’d been removed as “the Jap-free zone,” his outburst took all of us by surprise.
Henry and Kay did not offer information that wasn’t asked for. They did not, for instance, tell Lena that my first name was changed to Benjamin by an Anglican missionary who taught some of our classes in school during the camp years—on the pretext that Japanese names were too difficult to spell and remember.
But perhaps I, too, am guilty of not offering information. I did not tell my brother and sister that it was Lena who requested, persisted, and finally demanded to see long-forbidden documents kept secret for more than half a century. That when the embargo on information about the internment was quietly lifted a decade ago, it was Lena who stood at the desk of the National Archives with written request in hand. As a Caucasian, she was required to present my signature as proof that she was a member of my family—hence, permitted access to the files. I had to accompany her during that first visit, but I never went back.
Locating the files wasn’t easy, but Lena was not a person to give up. After weeks of following blind alleys to their frustrating ends, after tracking references and cross-references, after sitting in darkened rooms feeding slivers of microfiche into machines, after reading pages on blurry screens—whole paragraphs having been censored and blacked out—she paid for and obtained copies of everything she could turn up. When she was not permitted to see originals, she demanded copies. Of transcripts of tapes she was not permitted to view in their entirety; of auction papers concerning the fate of homes that had once belonged to my parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins. Details of fishing boats, insurance policies, beds, tables, chairs, carpets, trunks stuffed with dishes and linens, crates packed with fishing nets and tools.
Lena read excerpts to me from some of the letters, which were couched in politely firm but always condescending language, written during and immediately after the war by representatives whose job it was to explain to 21,000 people why there was nothing left.
Yes, Lena found explanations. About the disappearance and disposal of household goods that we were forced to leave behind in our family home during the early winter months of 1942. The eventual sum, which represented total value before expenses, was assessed at $24.75. After being charged an “auctioneer’s fee” of $2.48 and a “moving fee” of $3.42, our father was paid $18.85 in 1946, after the end of the war.
Eighteen dollars and eighty-five cents. A figure not easy to forget. A cheque was sent to Father, in that amount.
For an entire house. A house full of goods.
Who knows, after all this time, what really went on behind the scenes and what happened to the parts of our lives that we had to leave behind?
Strangely enough, Lena knew. Or partly knew. Lena the historian, born in December 1946, the year of the dog, one year after the end of the war, and unaware of these events until shortly before we married. She was the one who tracked my personal history.
I did not take part in the unearthing of Lena’s discoveries. Having lived through the internment once, I had no desire to read through files and live through it again. Especially after hearing her rant after each day’s research.
Leave the past alone, I wanted to tell her.
“How can you not want to know your own history?” she asked, genuinely perplexed. “We have a son. He’ll want to read these papers someday. It’s his history, too. There are relatives he hasn’t met west of the Rockies, cousins he doesn’t know. But most of all, the history is yours—to claim, or reclaim. Whatever!”
Did she forget that she had also told me how she’d wept over the documents while sitting at a long table inside the high-ceilinged room of the archives? A comment that made me even more determined not to know. I had no desire to weep. No desire for more anger. I had, I thought, distanced myself from the past in whatever ways I could.
Despite my determination, I admit that I listened when Lena read out details of the auction and the way the ownership of our family home on Vancouver Island was transferred to strangers who later denied that our father and Uncle Kenji had built it, board by board.
But I could not make myself open the manila folder she ultimately carried home at the completion of her single-minded search. I could not make a move to lift it. I could not riffle the pages to see if they contained a single paragraph of meaningful information.
Lena, having finished what she set out to do, eventually stopped mentioning the folder and stowed it in my rolltop desk, where it has remained ever since. Until I crammed it into my pack this morning. Now it’s in the car, travelling beside me.
Perhaps I did not want Lena’s version of my history because I knew it would differ from the one I had brought to a standstill in my own memory. If I were to call it up, my version would be active. People would be on the move, changing direction, criss-crossing in my head. For decades after leaving the camps, everyone I knew was involved in the same struggle. Relocating. Trying to fit in. Moving. Moving again. Trying to find work. Dropping out of sight—sometimes for years. Maintaining an awareness of others, but silently. Sending word back, but never telling the entire truth.
Also, in my version, while some stories are unfinished, others have reached their end. Okuma-san’s, for instance. His story reached its end in 1967. It was the year I left Montreal for England, on a scholarship to continue my studies in art. I was in my late twenties. I was eager; I wanted change; I wanted to learn everything I could. I wanted to stand before the great masters in the grand museums of Europe. I wanted to meet other art students. I wanted to explore the streets of London.
But first, I went to say goodbye to Okuma-san. He had retired two years earlier and was living in a small house near the river in the west end of Ottawa. I was with him the week before he died. If he knew that those days would be his last, he did not impart the foreknowledge to me.
I hear Basil stirring, and take this to mean I should stop the car and let him out for a break, a leg stretch for both of us.
The landscape is tense and still in the frozen light. We are backtracking into winter because the highway runs north before it angles west. Birch trees have stretched their bandaged limbs, begging for alms. When I pull over to the edge of the road and turn off the engine, Basil sends a sympathetic noise in my direction, a noise that sounds like a humpback whale, searching for a soulmate under water.
CHAPTER 5
Although no one could have predicted exactly how or when the removal would take place, I learned later that there had been forebodings for weeks. Terrifying rumours, letters intercepted, newspapers stifled, community centres boarded up, schools closed, radios, cameras, binoculars taken away. Because we were isolated in our island community—the supply boat arrived only every ten days at the wharf near the village store—it wasn’t easy to obtain information. Even so, the rumours were unstoppable. It was as if they’d
