Ten Thousand Things
Multicultural Webfinds, by Jean Miyake Downey

"Ten Thousand Things" is a Buddhist expression representing the dynamic interconnection and simultaneous unity and diversity of everything in the universe.

Universal Writer & Human Rights Activist Joy Kogawa’s House Saved in Vancouver

"What this country did to us, it did to itself."

“But the earth still stirs with dormant blooms. Love flows through the roots of the trees by our graves.”

–Joy Kogawa, Obasan, 1981

The real-life drama to save the Joy Kogawa House in Vancouver reached its climax at on April 28, 2006, with The Land Conservancy of British Columbia deciding to take a mortgage to buy the house after not yet raising the necessary funds for purchase and restoration.

The Land Conservancy is preserving the house as a memorial of the Canadian treatment of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War. Kogawa, the daughter of an Anglican priest, was six-years-old when she and her family, including her brother, Timothy, who is now also a priest, were forced from their home during the relocation and incarceration of Japanese Canadians. The TLC also wants to offer the house to writers-in-residence who have survived human rights abuses.

Joy Kogawa responded:

What the house means to me -- these days it's a sense of miracle that surrounds me.

The fact of The Land Conservancy coming along and taking this on, the fact that it just happened to be that Naomi's Road was made into an opera at this time, that Vancouver Public Library chose Obasan as the One Book for Vancouver – these were miracles enough, without it all happening at this particular time…

When we look at the uncaring in our planet, here is evidence that relationships can be rehabilitated, the formerly despised can be embraced. The dream that writers who are presently among the despised of the world, can come and write their stories here, fills me with even more hope.

Racism is a present tragedy in the world, as it has been in the past. Here is one small way that we can say in Canada, that racism can be overcome.

Joy Kogawa is the internationally renowned second-generation Japanese Canadian author of a series of novels that provide insight into the experience of Japanese Canadians during the war and the aftermath. Her first novel, Obasan, is an allegorical narrative about the Japanese Canadian experience, centered upon a young girl, Naomi, who survives sexual assault by a white neighbor, loses her mother, is forced to leave her home during the relocation, and is separated from her father when he is sent to labor camp.

Cared for by her aunt, Obasan, and her uncle, both who stoically suffer in silence, and by her Aunt Emily who speaks out fearlessly and engages in political activism, Naomi not only survives, she undertakes a journey of healing, informed by both her aunts’ responses to trauma. She transforms from a child further oppressed by emotional repression into an adult who struggles with haunting, amniotic memories before being reborn as an advocate for truth and justice. Arriving to this powerful psychological place required facing harsh realizations, including the discovery that her mother, who had returned to Japan prior to the relocation, had died in the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki, and facing the details of Japanese Canadian internment history.

Emily Kato, her second novel, reflects how seeking justice as a political activist aided in personal as well as collective healing, and recounts the story of seeking and acquiring reparations for Japanese Canadians.

These narratives parallel the real life of Joy Kogawa, who emerged from her interrupted childhood in Vancouver and the Canadian wilderness and young adulthood trying to create meaning from what happened to her, onto the world stage as a profoundly moving prophetic literary and public moral voice.

Obasan, a powerful and poetic novel, published in 1981, was the first by a Japanese Canadian to explore the wartime relocation experience.

Both Canadians and Americans have adopted it as the classic literary representation of the North American relocation and incarceration experience, requiring it for both university and even high school reading. Translated into Japanese, it is a poignant narrative of their North American diasporan experience. Kogawa adapted the story for Naomi’s Road, a children’s version. And, last year, the Vancouver Opera created an operatic interpretation.

Kogawa’s rich synthesis of Buddhist and Christian imagery brings to mind the Japanese Christian novelist Shusako Endo’s greatest work, Deep River. Both authors treat the theme of divine abandonment. They both draw on water symbolism as a means of communion, from Japanese family bathing in Obasan to losing one’s ego-centered self in the Ganges in Deep River. And both fuse parallel Buddhist and Christian motifs into an all-embracing vision of humanity, using the language of transcendence to speak to all people, not words of partisanship meant for one group.

The motherless heroine, Naomi, presents a poignant and challenging counterpoint to the world’s best-known Canadian literary figure, Anne of Green Gables, another orphan, who is especially beloved in Japan.

I had been following the movement to save the Kogawa house, a landmark of not just Canadian history, but Japanese diasporan, and global human rights history, at the website of Vancouver resident Todd Wong. Wong’s witty and eloquent advocacy of inter-culturalism (which overlaps with my broad definition of multiculturalism) inspires me and makes me smile. Through his words, I came to view Vancouver as a city of people struggling to come to terms with their racist history and issues, while simultaneously creating and embracing an authentically vibrant pluralistic community.

In April, a final drive to save the Joy Kogawa house received attention in Canada and in Japanese American circles, including the Nichi Bei Times, the oldest Japanese American newspaper. The Land Conservancy’s last-minute appeals, including to the Canadian government, did not result in any immediate promise of assistance so it was uncertain whether the house would be saved or not.

When I saw the first news that the TLC decided to take out a mortgage, I was elated for Joy Kogawa and her supporters. I saw this as another chapter of moving into deeper healing for all Japanese North American survivors, their descendants, and supporters.

I also saw this as a move towards strengthening collective awareness about human rights and the fragility of human rights. People living in democratic nations tend to take their civil liberties for granted and assume that human rights is a problem “out there,” oblivious to the historical human rights skeletons and spectres of contemporary civil rights abuses rattling loudly in their own backyards, now more than ever.

While at least the contours of the wartime imprisonment of 120,000 Japanese-Americans are well known (although the worst details remain obscured – my high school and university textbooks made it seem more like a summer camp experience), few outside of Canada know that Japanese Canadians, most of them naturalized or Canadian-born citizens, were also incarcerated.

The reason that the Canadian government gave for the wartime forced relocation of 22,000 Japanese Canadians on the Pacific Coast was “national defense.”

Looking at photographs of the Nakayama family – Reverend Nakayama, with kind eyes, wearing an Anglican priest's collar; Mrs. Nakayama, demurely smiling; and two small and sweet children, Tim and Joy – I concluded this family had to have been top candidates for the least-likely-in-the world to aid wartime Japan’s grotesquely anti-Christian militarist government that had created its own state religion to serve ultra-nationalist values.

The reason commonly given for what happened was “wartime hysteria,” which brings to mind images of widespread panic. This was not the case. Instead, a small group of virulently racist British Columbia politicians, who had long been looking for an excuse to expel Japanese immigrants from the west coast, seized their chance when war broke out, cynically and shrilly claiming a threat of Japanese invasion. Senior military officers and civil servants countered, arguing against the relocations on the grounds that Japanese Canadians did not pose a threat. However, racist politics won out against reason.

What happened to Japanese Canadians in Canada happened in stages -- beginning with curfews, interrogations, the closure of Japanese language newspapers before the relocations began. These started with male non-citizens, followed by male citizens, and finally women and children, who did not know what had happened to their sons, husbands, and fathers who had disappeared.

As Kogawa recounts in Obasan:

None of us escaped the naming. We were defined and identified by the way we were seen. A newspaper in B.C. headlined, "they are a stench in the nostrils of the people of Canada." We were therefore relegated to the cesspools.

“Excremental assault” was indeed what happened to the women and children. They were sent to Hastings Park Manning Pool, a dirty, maggoty livestock pen smelling of urine and manure, converted into a holding pen for human beings. Open troughs became toilets. Cattle stalls became living quarters. Some of the later “internment” housing included former chicken coops. Forcing innocent women and children into animal pens could only have had one motive: degradation, humiliation and demoralization.

Men were separated from their wives and children “to prevent further propagation of the species,” and sent to road camps to work on roads and railroads.

These practices were so inhumane and abusive that they can only be construed as intentional psychological and physical violations, motivated by racism. This was a hate crime carried out at the governmental level, with long racist anti-Asian roots.

The Canadian government also confiscated their property, selling it at rock-bottom prices. Joy Kogawa’s brother, Reverend Timothy Nakayama describes the selling of their father’s church:

It must have been decided that our removal from along the Western Coastal 100-mile zone would be permanent, because while we were in "camp", all our property was sold by the government's "Custodian of Enemy Alien Property".

The Anglican Church, Diocese of New Westminster, must have come to the same conclusion, because the new Church of the Ascension, kindergarten building and property were sold to a pharmaceutical firm. All the buildings including the new Church were razed, to be no more. A place for the cure of souls became the location of a medicine factory.

The final plan was to deport all Japanese Canadians, including Canadian-born and naturalized citizens, to defeated and starving postwar Japan.

However, public support for Japanese Canadians had been building in the East throughout the wartime period. A few political leaders joined by Christian organizations, created even more momentum by their publicizing what had happened. Widespread protests erupted against wholesale deportation calls.

However, West Coast residents were not allowed to return home until four years after the war ended, in 1949. This was aimed to prevent Japanese Canadian growth and concentration in one community. Relocations, loss of property and income, four years and dispersals throughout Canada did succeed in destroying the original West Coast Japanese Canadian communities. Most Japanese Canadians now live in eastern Canada.

What happened to Japanese Canadians might still be viewed as a wartime anomaly of democratic Canadian history, instead of a chapter consistent with a racist past, if not for Joy Kogawa, Roy Miki, and other Japanese Canadian poets, writers, visual artists, performing artists, political activists, scholars, and ordinary people telling their life stories to their children. Some have joined with other people of minority heritage in Canada who are also sharing their historical truths in order to create an affirmative and empowered present and future. For example, the National Association of Japanese Canadians dedicated a portion of the 1988 redress to establish the Canadian Race Relations Foundation, identifying the situation of Aboriginal Peoples a high priority, because Japanese-Canadians understand the links between racism and loss of land in the Canadian context.

As Kogawa tells us in Obasan, "Don't deny the past. Remember everything.... Denial is gangrene.”

We are living in a time in world history when increasingly people are starting to hear and voice our broken shared interrelated pasts demanding attention and crying out for healing. This past is not “out there,” but inside of us, in our lives now, and a legacy that we pass down to our children.

European Holocaust survivors and descendants who are coming to the aid of genocide victims in Dafur and Japanese-North Americans who speak out for Muslim-North Americans powerfully show us where the past and future can affirmatively intersect with our present.

Obasan won numerous awards and was celebrated in literary circles. The power of the “freeing words” of this book was in large part responsible for the move towards reparations in Canada. Kogawa led a campaign for an apology from the Canadian government for the human rights atrocities. Parts of Obasan were read aloud in the Canadian House of Commons when the 1988 restitution to Japanese Canadian survivors was announced, after Prime Minister Mulroney formally apologized.

Japanese Canadians (and others) were told that racism was their fault because they failed to assimilate into the Anglo-Canadian culture. Only if they totally assimilated could they be given equal opportunity in Canadian society.

In a 2002 interview, Kogawa explained how some Japanese Canadians abandoned their ethnic heritage because of their “camp” experience while others became more activist, joining with Native Canadians:

“Japanese-Canadians who went through the political process of attempting to publicize their story and gain redress would have developed political wings, a new form of consciousness. After the redress movement, many joined in alliance with native peoples and created an identification and moved on in a kind of solidarity. There are others who continued to move away from their origins, to dissociate themselves from everything poor and downtrodden in an attempt to become as rich as possible. These are psychological realities common to many immigrants. When the mainstream identifies any group as less than desirable, then you have that gap, and have to overcome that gap one way or another.”

The Canadian government officially adopted a multicultural policy in 1971.

However, unacknowledged racist history and contemporary issues remain a part of the Canadian landscape. Doudou Diene, the U.N. inspector who last year criticized Japan, did the same with Canada in 2003, recommending government reparations to Chinese Canadians and to African Canadian former residents of a Nova Scotia community, Africville. Diene’s report also called for a national commission to fight ongoing discrimination.

Prodded by the grassroots and outside criticism, the Canadian government is making efforts to conform to its multicultural persona. In April of this year, the government has responded to the call for redress to Chinese Canadians, initiating information gathering from citizens.

The Land Conservancy chose the Joy Kogawa House to be their first Vancouver site project, joined by the Vancouver Heritage Foundation. Toronto lawyer and writer Chris Kurata’s tribute website to Joy Kogawa includes moving letters of support from across Canada. Last year, Vancouver Public Library chose Obasan as the book all people in Vancouver should read.

Todd Wong describes a reading:

When asked what was happening with the Kogawa homestead in Vancouver's Marpole neighborhood, Joy replied: "When we rediscovered it was still there, Tim and I tried to buy it but we didn't have enough money, so I let the idea go. When Roy Miki organized the reading at the house, it was very special. I was very excited to see the cherry tree again."

Then Joy held up a little plastic bag and said "Seeds from the cherry tree," as she smiled broadly.

Todd Wong says, “The Kogawa House at 1450 West 64th Avenue has become symbol of hope, and has also become a pilgrimage site for many readers of Obasan and Naomi's Road - not only for elementary, highschool, college and university students, but for people from around the world. It has been compared to Anne of Green Gables House in Prince Edward Island, and Anne Frank House in Amsterdam.”

Joy Kogawa, forced out of her house at age six, who grew up pushing through and transcending unjust suffering and all the emotional challenges that come with injustice, transforming what she experienced into beautiful and “freeing words” for all the world, has come home.

Bill Turner, TLC’s executive director says “We are calling on everyone who has been moved by Joy Kogawa’s writing to contribute to saving the house. Your contribution will not only recognize and honour Joy’s accomplishments but will also provide the opportunity for a writers-in-residence program that will enable a new generation of writers to be inspired by her work.”

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