Introduction for Mary Kitagawa

Introduction

The reader of this book is probably looking for at least one of two things: a biography of the Nikkei Canadian activist Keiko Mary Kitagawa and a history of Nikkei, or people of Japanese ancestry, in Canada. My aim is to provide both, to the extent that this is possible. The history of Nikkei in Canada is in fact many intertwined histories that demonstrate some commonalities as well as numerous differences, including where peoples’ ancestors came from in Japan, who recruited them to work abroad, where they settled, when they settled there, the job skills they brought with them, the work they found after arriving, and the social and economic networks available to them. Such differences grow starker once we account for the wartime expulsion of Nikkei from British Columbia in 1942, their exile in the interior of Canada, their government-dictated dispossession, the impoverishment most of them subsequently endured, and their postwar exclusion from British Columbia through 1949. The experience of wartime injustice was one of the few things most Nikkei Canadians have shared since 1942, but they have done so in different ways and to different extents. Indeed, wartime injustice was arguably not the defining feature of Nikkei Canadian history but rather a catastrophic inflection point within a larger sequence of crises, challenges, and at times successes that people of Japanese ancestry, along with their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, have experienced in Canada.

The reader might reasonably ask how one particular Japanese Canadian could bring some of those histories into focus as well as how those histories might help us understand her. The recipient of multiple accolades and honorary degrees, Kitagawa’s political work began with her vigorous public support for Japanese Canadian redress, but it has expanded far beyond that effort. Inspired by the example of American institutions, in 2012 she secured diplomas for Nikkei students wrongfully expelled from the University of British Columbia after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Not content to leave the matter at that, she also secured financial support from UBC that funded the establishment of the Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies Program (ACAM). She remained closely involved with both the program as well as the university, leading the effort to hold a 2017 Day of Learning to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of forced dispersal and its aftermaths. She also lobbied forcefully for a curriculum on Japanese Canadian history and, in 2018, co-taught the resulting course, ACAM 320A (The History and Legacy of Japanese Canadian Internment) with Dr. John Price. Mary also led the 2007 charge to rename a major British Columbia governmental building after Douglas Jung (1924-2002), the first Chinese Canadian member of Parliament, a change that took effect in 2008. (The building had originally been named in honor of Howard Charles Green, a politician who notoriously argued in 1945 that “the Japs must never be allowed to return to British Columbia.”¹)

Mary’s efforts have also involved a significant interpersonal component. For instance, she has served as an important member of the Human Rights Committee of the Greater Vancouver Japanese Canadian Citizens Association; a community council member of the Landscapes of Injustice Project, a scholarly effort to document the long afterlife of wartime injustice against Nikkei in Canada; and a member of the National Honorary Advisory Council of the National Association of Japanese Canadians. In addition, she and her husband, Tosh, have been longtime participants in the Powell Street Festival, an annual celebration of Nikkei culture in Canada. When the festival faltered in the early 2000s, the two of them helped place it on stable financial and administrative footing. Such efforts have both arisen from and resulted in a breathtaking array of friendships, from the many ACAM students who think of Mary and Tosh as surrogate family members to several descendants of Howard Charles Green. Results such as these are high-profile enough that some people might be surprised to learn that Mary began pursuing them only when she was in her early fifties. In truth, it is probably more remarkable that she began at all, given the relationships that governed much of her life outside the home.

Relational Identity

To understand the matter, it helps to think about identity as being relational.² Take a simple question—who are you?—and think through the ways you might respond. Imagine, for instance, that you decide on a common response: you say your name. Your name is not truly your own, though, even if you grew up in a stereotypical “nuclear” North American family whose members remain on good terms. In fact, it is not your own twice over. Your parents may have provided your given name, but your family name is another matter. In most cases, that family name arose and metamorphosed over time. Perhaps one of your male ancestors made shoes or was born to someone named “Anders.” Perhaps a grandparent or great-grandparent passed through an immigration center where Anglicization or even complete replacement was the order of the day. Perhaps one of your forebears changed their name out of necessity—for instance, while fleeing persecution. Or perhaps you are named in honor of an Indigenous ancestor, in which case your name likely takes at least two forms: one voiced in that ancestor’s language and the other an Anglicized version. Your name is not fully your own. It was chosen by history in consultation with people. Many of those people are long dead, but their decisions continue to shape your daily life in all sorts of ways.

You are yourself, of course, but who you are—that is to say, the identity you assign yourself in any given moment—is not entirely of your own making. It continually originates both in the past and in the circumstances you encounter and the relationships in which you participate. In the example cited above, something as fundamental as your name speaks to years or even decades, of conversations, many of which began with the utterance of that name. With each utterance, your sense of who you are underwent subtle consolidation. Again, this presumes a stereotypical family devoid of the many complexities that come with life, and it does so to illustrate that even in the simplest of circumstances, we exist by and through our relationships, which means our identities are necessarily born of those relationships.

Identity is also metamorphic, since the relationships available to us change over time, as do the circumstances governing those relationships. Furthermore, experience can enable us to pursue new relationships. These relationships might require that we sharpen our sense of self, which in turn enables us to pursue more new relationships. That is why you are not who you once were and why you will be different in the future. It is also why, although you will be different, you will not become someone else entirely. The identity with which you enter each new relationship derives partly from earlier relationships and extends some of its previous characteristics into those new circumstances. Nonetheless, you are a moving target, paradoxically consistent in the kinds of changes you might undergo.

And then there is the matter of opportunities, which govern the relationships and the potential identities available to you. A talent for writing will not develop fully if you lack access to a robust and affordable educational system or, more accurately, to the money and relationships that make such a system available. A knack for business or medicine can achieve little if you are regularly thwarted by legal and economic obstacles or, also more accurately, by competitors whose money and relationships enable them to throw legal, social, and economic obstacles in your path. And since the opportunities that do arise will necessarily dictate the number and characteristics of future relationships, those opportunities compound themselves over time. Hence the importance of recognizing structural factors when discussing economic mobility, intellectual development, cultural expression, or political engagement: the distribution of opportunity is unequal, which is why not all things are possible for all people at any given moment.

Now let us apply the idea of relational identity to Mary, in particular in the first two decades or so of her life. Imagine spending your earliest years living in a rural community on Salt Spring Island, which lies across the Strait of Georgia from Vancouver, British Columbia. Imagine that you are one of a handful of children who look like you and that your siblings make up the majority of this handful. A few children who look different in other ways live nearby, but most of the kids in your school and with whom you interact belong to a category that adults, including your parents, call “white.”³ Although she was born in Canada, your mother spent much of her youth in Japan, and your father was born and raised there. As a result, your family and your middle names, your language skills, your speech cadences in English, and many of your social habits differ from those of most children you know. Every relationship in your young life, whether at home or elsewhere on the island, involves at least a measure of translation.

Imagine, at the age of seven, being told that you, your family, and everyone who looks like you are somehow responsible for the recent bombing of a distant American place called Pearl Harbor. The teacher in your oldest sister’s class even says this outright, and the claim colors conversations with the people who live around you. Your classmates now hurl insults and assault your siblings; people now vandalize your family’s farm under cover of darkness. Imagine your father being abruptly hauled off by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, leaving you with no idea of whether—let alone when—you will see him again. Imagine being herded into filthy horse stalls, shipped eastward into a strange place called the Kootenays, and then sent with your family to work seemingly endless hours on a sugar beet farm and live in a shack that is somehow worse than those horse stalls. Imagine, in fact, that conditions in Alberta are so bad that your family is shipped back to the Kootenays, where you spend the next few years living in drafty makeshift structures that are more tents than houses.

Imagine being told your family’s farm has been sold to a white veteran (a supposedly true Canadian) at a substantial financial loss and that this has been done so that your family can pay for its own expulsion from the province followed by inland exile. Imagine being told after the war ends that you cannot return to British Columbia, including the island where you grew up, because of your ancestry. Imagine being told instead that you should go “back” to Japan, a place you have never even visited. Imagine being told that, if you want to remain in Canada, you must move east of the Rocky Mountains. You are also told that people who look like you, who share your names and language skills and social habits and speech cadences should not gather visibly because that might upset white people.

Imagine that, while the law barring people of Japanese ancestry from moving west eventually lapses, your family lacks the money to return. Impoverished, you all move to a small town in southern Alberta, where you are once again one of a handful of people who look like you. This time, with one or two brief exceptions, your family makes up the entirety of that handful. There are, once again, other people who look different in another way, but they are relegated to something called a “reserve.” One or two of them come to your school, but they are not allowed to mix with the white population. Religion also comes into play. Your family has long belonged to the Anglican church, but that church is active mainly on the reserve. In your town, it is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or the Mormons, who rule the roost. There are one or two other non-Mormon kids in your school, and not all of them are in your family. Nonetheless, you remain part of a tiny, highly visible minority that is a subset of another minority.

Imagine that when you graduate from high school, your family has managed to save just enough money to return to the Gulf Islands and buy a new property while also paying for part of your university education. Your oldest sister was not so lucky. Her college years came when the family’s finances were at their most precarious, so she had no choice but to work. You, by contrast, have the opportunity to make a move of your own choosing. Like many people of Japanese ancestry your age, you choose Toronto—east of the Rockies, home to a relatively large number of Nikkei Canadians, and supposedly marked by less virulent anti-Japanese sentiment. But money is so tight that you have to work long hours as a nanny, which also involves living far from campus. As a result, you have relatively few opportunities to form relationships with people your age—Nikkei, yes, but also white people and non-white people from other backgrounds.

Every relationship you have had outside your family has been unstable because of all those forced moves. Every relationship you have had outside your family has also been governed by the question of who you are, a question that necessarily creeps back into the home, for that is where the supposed problem lies. Are you Japanese? You were born in Canada, but the Canadian government has told you that you and your family members and other people who share aspects of your background are at best threatening and at worst criminals. They have told you that the land your family owned was not in fact theirs, that you are not to be trusted, that you are a threat to the (white) social and economic fabric, that you cannot gather in noticeable groups, that you are not free to move where you wish in the dominion—that you are, in sum, not Canadian, despite the fact that by law as well as self-identification you are. And even when you succeed by white Canadian standards, some people continue to say it is because you compete unfairly, work too hard, charge too little for your labor, or just generally seek unfair advantage.

Above all, imagine that these conversations, including those involving people who consider themselves your allies, drown out the most important one. That conversation, the one almost nobody outside your family seems to allow, begins with you recognizing that you had not been a criminal at age seven, that you are not a criminal now, and that you had not been a criminal during the intervening years. You know this about yourself, but outside the home there is virtually no one with whom you can have that conversation. And even in the home, your conversations are limited in scope, for all the while your family is still struggling to re-establish itself financially and minimize further persecution.

Many readers might imagine that, as teenagers, they would have become very angry at this string of injustices. They might even imagine themselves becoming activists at an early age. But such a development requires opportunities, most notably in the form of relationships that create a space for what we recognize as activism. Imagine, however, that the conversations listed above are the only ones you had had and been able to have throughout your formative years. You might have been angry at the injustices you and your family had suffered, and you might even have had opportunities to voice that anger—at the dinner table. Those opportunities were formative and governed by the expectation of considered, articulate expression modeled by not only your parents but also your siblings, especially your oldest sister. During the family’s time in the Kootenays, she was lucky enough to have studied with a high school social studies teacher whose investment in equity and social justice imparted to your sister some of the vocabulary and intellectual framework necessary to put words to the family’s situation.

But remember: every relationship you have, whether at home or elsewhere, involves at least a measure of translation. And one of the things you must translate on a daily basis is the slow poison of white nationalism. Identity is relational, and virtually every relationship you have outside the home has been governed by the presumption of your guilt and by the expectation that people who share your background should be eliminated, whether by deportation or by an informal program of ethnic cleansing. Even non-Nikkei who recognize that you were not and are not a criminal compound the problem. They tend not to speak about wartime injustice at all, or if they do, they frame it as a regrettable “military necessity.” And when you finally land in Toronto, a place where people are having conversations that run counter to that slow poison, your financial precarity and necessary emotional reserve keep you at a literal and metaphorical distance from those people, those conversations, and those political frameworks. Bearing such relationships in mind, the question we should ask is not why Mary took so long to become the activist she was, but how she managed to do so at all.

The topic is far from abstract for me. My parents were born around the same time as Mary, and they too were persecuted for being of Japanese ancestry. They were imprisoned by the U.S. government and, as a result, endured different sorts of injustice. Nonetheless, Mary’s and my parents’ respective injustices shared roots in white nationalism and racial capitalism. Furthermore, Canadian wartime policies were frequently modeled on American precedent, albeit revised to fit the structure of a parliamentary democracy—as, for that matter, were efforts to mitigate and in some cases prevent the resulting injustices.⁴ Consequently, even among the important historical differences, I could see similarities. And yet, my parents engaged in little overt activism. They favored redress but were not involved in the political fight. Like Mary, they knew they had never been criminals, despite having been criminalized. Unlike my parents, though, Mary reshaped the experience of injustice into an engine for overt, forceful political engagement. I wanted to know how and why.

That reshaping was necessarily a personal experience, so biography was clearly in order, but biography of a particular sort. Mindful of the separation wrought by our partially shared history, I would never try to provide a comprehensive account of who Mary is and has been. My aim has been only to understand her political formation. That is why this book focuses on relationality: not to delineate the myriad details of a private existence but to track the unfolding of a sensibility and the actions it has animated. Even in her most isolated and isolating moments, Mary has stood in relation to family members, to other Nikkei, to First Nations peoples, to people of Chinese ancestry, to white antagonists, to friends and allies, and of course to various institutions—provincial and federal governments, the Anglican Church, and so forth. Any attempt to understand Mary’s political formation should therefore be a study of what E. P. Thompson once called “nodal points of conflict,” the intersections where her mind has met and meets the world.⁵ Accordingly, this book dwells on what I consider the most important point of intersection, memory—especially the memory of transformative relationships—which has been the driving force behind Mary’s activism.⁶

This book takes that point of intersection as a place to begin thinking outward from my own historical frame of reference. Having recognized that a partially shared history separates me from Mary, I now seek to relate that history as well as its attendant gravitational separation to you. Mary herself is something of a crossroads where multiple groups and multiple traditions entangle. Disentangling those groups and traditions has entailed continually thinking in terms of the sharing that divides us. In the text that follows, I have tried to differentiate my voice from Mary’s as clearly as possible, but there may be places where the distinction becomes blurred. I can only say that this is because the relationship I have been fortunate to form with Mary has itself been transformative. I have pursued a moving target while myself being in motion.

In the course of studying the development of Mary’s political sensibilities, this book also engages with the larger history of Nikkei in Canada. It does so for two reasons. First, although rich, the literature on people of Japanese ancestry in Canada tends to be specialized in emphasis. Interested readers can find excellent work on early immigrant communities, their origins, and their social and economic structure. There is important literature on the forced dispersion, dispossession, deportation, and ethnic cleansing of Nikkei in Canada after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Valuable work has also been done on the postwar reverberations of such profound injustice, especially concerning the pursuit, acquisition, and continuing impact of redress. In addition, there is a rich body of first-person reminiscences by survivors of wartime injustice, but these necessarily tend to be localized, often accounting for life in a particular place at a particular moment.⁷ Bringing together these sources with Mary’s own recollections will perhaps enable readers to see some of the histories of Nikkei in Canada, histories that determined the conditions of Mary’s life and, consequently, that she has lived.

Tracing the histories of Nikkei in Canada as well as Mary’s experiences will perhaps also shed light on how Mary’s sense of her political self developed over time. Seeing that broader picture is necessary if we want understand Mary’s trajectory as an activist. Riyo (Kimura) Okano, Mary’s maternal grandmother, was a hard person to get along with, but she loomed large in Mary’s childhood and teenage years. For one thing, she raised one of the most important people in Mary’s entire life, Mary’s mother, Kimiko. But Riyo’s impact on Mary was also both more direct and fraught. An early female migrant from Japan, Riyo and her husband, Kumanosuke, lived just up the road from Mary’s family before forced dispersal, then at varying distances from them during inland exile, and then with Mary’s family in a shared house for several years in Cardston, Alberta. During this time, Kumanosuke died, and Riyo became dependent on her daughter and son-in-law; she eventually spent her remaining years living with Mary’s parents back on Salt Spring Island, where Mary spent her summers. If you want to understand Mary Kitagawa, you will need to understand something about her grandmother. And to understand her grandmother, you also will need to understand something about her grandfather, which means you also need to understand something about the earliest Nikkei migrants in British Columbia.

To account for that reciprocal transformation, this book redirects our attention away from wartime injustice as a discrete event and the actions of white nationalists as a primary topic, focusing instead on the continuous labor Nikkei Canadians have performed throughout their history. In that respect, this book attempts to recount what being Japanese Canadian has meant to a specific individual over time, in different places, in different circumstances, at different ages. The institutional, civic, personal, and familial insults and injuries visited upon Nikkei after the bombing of Pearl Harbor are central to that attempt. They could hardly be thought of otherwise, so profound was the damage done. But, as readers will see, the fever dream of a white Canada had raged against First Nations peoples, then expanded to antagonize Black, Chinese, and Japanese immigrants, among others. The bombing of Pearl Harbor merely provided a stable, recognizable, easily caricatured target—an excuse masquerading as a cause. Once we bear this in mind, a host of other phenomena come into focus: the accretion and modification of anti-immigrant legislation in British Columbia during the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the seizure of Nikkei-owned properties and their unjust sale to white Canadians during World War II; postwar laws designed to obliterate Nikkei and Nikkei Canadian subcultures; and institutional as well as interpersonal racism that have lingered since the end of the war. Placed against the backdrop of all those phenomena, we can begin to see Japanese Canadianness not as a stable entity that triumphed over a single adversity but as a continual process of identity formation in relation to obstacles and opportunities, suffering and joy, isolation and connection.⁸

To convey the richness of that process, this book tells the story of a particular Nikkei Canadian life, one that has been in many ways exemplary. That life has been exemplary in that it was made possible by the early history of Japanese immigrants to Canada, was shaped by the injustices visited upon Nikkei in British Columbia and Alberta during the Second World War and the 1950s, and has since contributed to painstaking efforts by people of Japanese ancestry to claim their rightful place not only in present-day Canada but also in the nation’s history. Recounting those efforts in the context of one Nikkei family will provide us with a ground-level view of one history of Asian immigrants in Canada and of racist efforts to alternately exploit or eliminate those immigrants. Important though legislation and policy have been, these things happen at so large a scale that it is easy to lose sight of their daily consequences.

Mary’s life and the broader sweep of history to which it belongs are worthy of study in their own right, but something else is also at stake. For Mary and her siblings, the memories of racialization, dispossession, loss, and suffering—and, importantly, of encouragement to speak their minds thoughtfully—produced an instructive response. They watched their parents move back to Salt Spring Island; struggle to set down new roots in a postwar climate marked by both continuing racism and a keen sense of the humiliation it had visited upon the family; restore the island’s Nikkei cemetery, which white locals had repeatedly vandalized; rebuild a family business obliterated by government-sanctioned bigotry and economic opportunism; and then sustain that business in the face of continued postwar racist antagonism.⁹ In sum, they watched their family not only acknowledge the limits of their agency but also persist in exercising that agency. Then, as adults, Mary and her siblings followed that example in various ways. As Mary’s sister Rose has written, “Our parents were a powerful team. They were our role models. They taught us never to quietly accept the cruel onslaught of racial hatred, never to act as victims, and always to show a proud face to the world—never a face of defeat. They showed us how to be generous and compassionate towards others.”¹⁰

What is perhaps most striking about Mary and her siblings is the role of memory in their postwar lives, especially the way it contributed to their growing political engagement. Think, for instance, of Mary’s success in persuading the University of British Columbia (UBC) to award diplomas to surviving Nikkei whom the university had expelled after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Mary had been but a small child at the time of this injustice, and she did not know any of those students or their families. But, having witnessed her family’s eviction from Salt Spring Island, having watched her mother struggle to keep the children going while their father was being held in an undisclosed location under unknown circumstances, having grown up in the beet fields of Alberta, having watched her older sister Alice endure the torment at which teenagers excel, and having come of age in postwar Cardston, she had a keen sensitivity both to what those UBC students deserved and, more to the point, what they might have felt in the wake of expulsion. Memory was much more than a private cache of experiences. It was a means to generate new relationships, bringing people together across time and space in pursuit of justice.

Memory also was a teaching tool. Since the diploma ceremony was built into the university’s regular week-long commencement festivities, Mary rightly believed that the class of 2012 would learn about wartime injustice not only from speeches and official narratives provided by UBC administrators and staff but also from witnessing the actual victims of injustice finally get their due. It is impossible to capture in words the emotional weight of such witnessing, but that was the point. Providing diplomas would not lay wartime injustice to rest. It would bring it back to life, relating the human cost of that injustice to a new generation even as it enabled members of the earlier generation to relate once again to their former classmates, both living and dead.¹¹ The memory of her own experience allowed Mary to relate to others who had endured similar experiences. That process of relating compelled her to act, and her actions were designed both to address the injustice other Nikkei had suffered and to instill in others a sense of the human toll such injustice exacts not only in the moment but long afterward. Having been forcibly transformed by a generation older than she, Mary sought to transform a generation of Canadians now just coming into its own, to ensure the continued possibility of conversations that had taken decades to initiate.

To capture the full sweep of that metamorphosis, this book unfolds in five chapters. Chapter 1 tells the story of Mary’s roots in Canada: the immigration of her maternal grandfather and grandmother, the birth of her mother, the immigration of her father, and her family’s earliest years on Salt Spring Island. Chapter 2 recounts the family’s growing success on the island, success cut short by the seizure of their property, the separation of the family, and their forced relocation eastward; it also recounts the earliest struggles they had in Alberta and their subsequent time in the Kootenays. Chapter 3 tells of the postwar years in Cardston, where the family began rebuilding its finances and where Mary graduated high school. Chapter 4 tells the story of the family’s decision to return to Salt Spring Island, of Mary’s university experience, of her marriage to Tosh Kitagawa, and of the family she and Tosh built. Chapter 5 maps Mary’s political trajectory from the later 1970s onward, with particular attention to the relationships that transformed her efforts from intuitive, small-scale forms of resistance into large-scale, programmatic projects. The afterword discusses the importance of relationality for understanding how political consciousness both manifests and metamorphoses over time.

The accent in this book lies on lived experience. That experience is, as readers will see, a critical factor in how Mary has, in addition to surviving, come to flourish as a political activist. Because of this emphasis, this book pays less attention to the legislative and juridical processes by which Nikkei injustice and its aftermath have unfolded. Readers will find references to key Orders-in-Council and legal cases, but they should still track down the foundational work of Ken Adachi and Ann Gomer Sunahara, among others.¹²

Some readers will already have noticed that my terminology departs from that of government documents, many newspaper accounts, and even some academic sources, which often refer to wartime injustice in terms of an “evacuation” of Nikkei from western British Columbia or their “internment” after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. I recognize that some contemporary scholars of the topic continue to use the latter term, in part due to its legibility among the broader public. However, as Roger Daniels and Roy Miki have demonstrated, such terms are inaccurate, using euphemism to elide or avoid the truth.¹³ And because that truth continues to reverberate in the present, those euphemisms warp the conversations we might have about history and distort the relationships we might seek to pursue. The forced removal of 22,000 innocent people of Japanese ancestry from their homes was not an evacuation, even for those who had the money to move before they were picked up by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police; neither was it an internment. It was a programmatic effort to expel those people from western British Columbia that entailed systematically placing them in interior “ghost towns,” labor camps, farming communities, and small towns, as well as cities in Quebec, Manitoba, and Ottawa, where they were subject to restrictions on what they could own and where they could move.

At the same time, though, it also was not incarceration, at least not of the sort Nikkei in the United States endured. Rather, Nikkei who had lived in the western part of British Columbia experienced almost dizzyingly variable mistreatment: a small number were incarcerated, in the strictest sense of that term; some were assigned to labor camps; some were shipped to Alberta, where they toiled in the sugar beet fields for egregiously low wages; others spent the remainder of their lives in former “ghost towns” near the border between Alberta and British Columbia; a lucky few paid their own way to Montreal, Toronto, or other points east. So varied are these experiences that I do not feel I can refer to them as “incarceration,” involuntary though the movement of these people was, and confined though Nikkei were due to “exclusion” from the western part of Canada. (I should note, however, that some Nikkei Canadians, including Mary, do at times refer to their experience as incarceration.)

In order to allow for the complexity and variability of Nikkei wartime experience, while also accounting for the involuntary character of it, I have therefore chosen to use “forced dispersal,” an umbrella term meant to cover more specific phenomena including outright incarceration, passage through staging areas such as Hastings Park, assignment to work camps, placement on private farms in Alberta or Saskatchewan, and postwar expatriation/deportation (but not “repatriation”). In some places, I also refer to the government’s program as one of expulsion from the province. As for post-expulsion conditions, I use the term “inland exile,” since forced dispersal combined with continued postwar exclusion from British Columbia alienated Nikkei from the opportunities and relationships they had once been able to pursue in Canada.

A final word about scale. Although exemplary in certain respects, the familial and personal history at stake in this book is also highly particular, in some ways even singular. Consequently, that history is but one of many. Every single Nikkei individual uprooted from the Pacific coast, forced eastward by white nationalism and economic opportunism, stripped of their property and savings in order to pay for their own forced dispersal, subjected to ethnic cleansing, and barred from British Columbia after World War II had officially ended had to marshal all the skills at their disposal and had to draw on all their emotional, intellectual, cultural, and social reserves. Every life impacted by wartime injustice merits consideration. And while many of the histories at stake have been lost to time, readers can still do one important thing. They can multiply the injuries and insults and losses in this book by the roughly 22,000 Nikkei whom the Canadian and British Columbia governments subjected to expulsion, dispossession, and ethnic cleansing. And, having done that, they can then extend their thoughts toward other marginalized groups with whom Nikkei Canadians came into contact: Black migrants who fled the United States to settle on the Gulf Islands in the later nineteenth century, the Doukhobors in eastern British Columbia, First Nations people in southern Alberta and elsewhere, and the Chinese immigrants whom racists and economic opportunists alternately grouped alongside and pitted against Nikkei.

Notes

1. On Green’s statement and the larger anti-Japanese context in which it circulated, see Patricia E. Roy, The Triumph of Citizenship: The Japanese and Chinese in Canada, 1941–1967 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2007), ch. 3, esp. 142–144.

2. I draw here on the model presented by Michael Omi and Howard Winant in Racial Formation in the United States: the 1960s to the 1980s, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2015). Of particular importance is their recognition that, while racial formation operates at every scale, it is “always and necessarily a social and historical process” (110). Accordingly, racialization is determined by historical factors, but it continually reconstitutes and reshapes itself through interactions among individuals, groups, and institutions. Hence the importance of attending to non-Nikkei groups at key points in this book. To do otherwise would be to omit crucial factors governing both how Mary’s mind met the world and how the world, or at least one part of it, met that mind. See also Natalia Molina, Daniel Martinez HoSang, and Ramón Guttiérrez, eds., Relational Formations of Race: Theory, Method, and Practice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019), especially Daniel Martinez HoSang and Natalia Molina, “Introduction: Toward a Relational Consciousness of Race” (1–18), and George Lipsitz, George J. Sánchez, and Kelly Lytle Hernández, with Daniel Martinez HoSang and Natalia Molina, “Race as a Relational Theory: A Roundtable Discussion” (22–42).

3. This term was current in Mary’s family for as long as she can recall. Unlike some Nikkei, her parents never resorted to pejorative terms. Karen M. Inouye, interview with Mary Kitagawa, December 2, 2023.

Regarding Nikkei responses to, and engagement with, North American discourses of race, see Andrea Geiger, Subverting Exclusion: Transpacific Encounters with Race, Caste, and Borders, 1885–1928 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), ch, 1, esp. 78–83; Andrea Geiger-Adams, “Reframing Race and Place: Locating Japanese Immigrants in Relation to Indigenous Peoples in the North American West, 1880–1940,” Southern California Quarterly 96:3 (2014): 253–270; Janice Matsumura, “More or Less Intelligent: Nikkei IQ and Racial/Ethnic Hierarchies in British Columbia and Imperial Japan,” BC Studies 192 (Winter 2016–2017): 51–69.

4. See in particular Stephanie Bangarth, Voices Raised in Protest: Defending North American Citizens of Japanese Ancestry, 1942–1949 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2008).

5. E. P. Thompson, Witness against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (New York: New Press, 1993), xix.

6. On the importance of memory in Nikkei activism, see Alice Yang Murray, Historical Memories of the Japanese American Internment and the Struggle for Redress (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007); Todd Stewart and Karen J. Leong, with John Tateishi and Natasha Egan, Placing Memory: A Photographic Exploration of Japanese American Internment (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008); Karen M. Inouye, The Long Afterlife of Nikkei Wartime Incarceration (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016).

7. See, for instance, the first-person accounts published in Nikkei Images by, among others, Michiko Midge Ayukawa (“Lemon Creek Memories,” 17:1 (2012): 11–16), Tamiko Haraga (“My Experiences during the Second World War,” 7:3 (2002): 18–19), and Frances Kuniko Nakagawa (“Reminiscences of My Stay in the Livestock Building,” 18:2 (2013): 4–5), as well as indispensable book-length work by the survivors of wartime injustice, including William T. Hashizume, Japanese Community in Mission: A Brief History, 1904–1942 (Scarborough ON: self-published, 2002), and Yon Shimizu, The Exiles: An Archival History of the World War II Japanese Road Camps in British Columbia and Ontario (Wallaceburg, ON: self-published, 1993).

8. On this point, I follow the argument laid out with respect to Japanese Americans in Tetsuden Kashima, “Japanese American Internees Return, 1945 to 1955: Readjustment and Social Amnesia,” Phylon 41:2 (1980): 107–115.

9. Rose Murakami, Ganbaru: The Murakami Family of Salt Spring Island (Ganges, BC: Japanese Garden Society of Salt Spring Island, 2005), 31–37, provides a short summary of what the family has had to withstand.

10. Murakami, Ganbaru, 37.

11. Diploma recipients carried photographs of their deceased classmates as part of the ceremony.

12. Concerning the legislative and juridical aspects of wartime injustice in Canada, see Ken Adachi, The Enemy That Never Was: A History of the Japanese Canadians (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1976); Ann Gomer Sunahara, The Politics of Racism: The Uprooting of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War, rev. ed. (Burnaby, BC: Nikkei National Museum, 2020); and Mona Oikawa, “‘Driven to Scatter Far and Wide’: The Forced Resettlement of Japanese Canadians to Southern Ontario, 1944–1949,” (MA thesis, University of Toronto, 1986). See also Jordan Stanger-Ross, ed., Landscapes of Injustice: A New Perspective on the Internment and Dispossession of Japanese Canadians (Montréal–Kingston: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 2020); and, for the broader North American context, Greg Robinson, A Tragedy of Democracy: Japanese Confinement in North America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). See also Mona Oikawa, Cartographies of Violence: Japanese Canadian Women, Memory, and the Subjects of the Internment (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012); Jordan Stanger-Ross and Pamela Sugiman, eds., Witness to Loss: Race, Culpability, and Memory in the Dispossession of Japanese Canadians (Montréal–Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017). All include important bibliography.

13. Roger Daniels, “Words Do Matter: A Note in Inappropriate Terminology and the Incarceration of Japanese Americans,” in Louis Fiset and Gail M. Nomura, eds., Nikkei in the Pacific Northwest: Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians in the Twentieth Century (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005), 190–214; Roy Miki, Redress: Inside the Japanese Canadian Call for Justice (Vancouver: Raincoast Books, 2004), esp. 50–55.