2025 Afterword
by Audrey Kobayashi
In 1976, I began graduate studies at the University of British Columbia. Soon thereafter, Ken Adachi’s The Enemy that Never Was was published. I read it cover to cover. It was this book that set me on a career path dedicated to uncovering the story of my own community.
In the summer of 1977, an incipient redress movement combined with the celebration of a century since immigration from Japan began. Hundreds attended the first annual Powell Street Festival, whence occurred a burgeoning of the arts that accompanied the next decade of community organizing and eventual hard bargaining with the government until Redress was achieved. Many of us were reading or had read this book, to find the knowledge it gave us inspiring and empowering.
In 1988, I was privileged to be part of the negotiations leading to the Redress Settlement with the Canadian Government. This book informed that process at every step. My dog-eared copy was chock full of yellow post-its that could be called up quickly to verify the facts and figures of the uprooting and dispossession of Japanese Canadians during the 1940s. It was consulted by government officials and advocacy groups as a singularly authoritative source on the history of Japanese Canadians. But the book gave us more than facts. It provided the concepts of fairness and justice that Redress depended upon. It introduced terms such as “exile” to emphasize that the Canadian citizens sent to Japan in 1946 were not “enemy alien” deportees. In nearly every chapter, it emphasizes human rights as the foundation of citizenship. And it depicts with unflinching and powerful prose what happens when governments abuse the rights of their citizens.
Ken Adachi’s gift to his community remains as priceless as it was in 1976. It is not only the first chronicle of Japanese Canadian experiences after their arrival as sojourning labourers in the 1880s; it remains the most comprehensive text. Many books and articles have been written since, but when I am asked what to read about Japanese Canadians, I tell people that they should begin with this book. It’s a good read, combining scholarship and journalistic flair with a strong sense of justice that has infused our community ever since.
A few aspects of Ken’s scholarship are of special note. The facts and figures give added credence to a story that is already compelling, compiled through careful mining of the archival sources that had been virtually ignored for three decades. The story of the uprooting and dispossession of Japanese Canadians held little interest among the public, the media, or scholars during the 1950s and ’60s, but by the 1970s, as a younger generation began to push for information, this book was to be their first and most authoritative source.
His recognition of the importance of prefectural origin in the organization of emigration, and in the subsequent development of cultural identities and practices, represents one of the most important factscapes in our history. Scholars have since built upon his initial work to develop themes of land tenure, religion, regional affiliation, and family structure as essential aspects of understanding Japanese Canadian communities, and the destinies of individuals and families during the uprooting. The stories we were told—or not told—as children make sense when cast in the light of Ken’s contextual writings.
This book is also the starting point for understanding the changes that have occurred among Japanese Canadians since the 1940s. Nearly 27,000 people (including those born during the 1940s) were cast adrift; over 4,000 exiled to Japan, a few thousand left in British Columbia, and the rest scattered across the country bereft of homes, businesses, farms, and employment in the primary industries of fishing, mining, and lumber. Community institutions were shattered. The once thriving newspapers, schools, churches, and social networks were never destroyed totally, but they were largely surpassed as people set about finding new jobs, raising a new generation, and trying hard to forget the ordeals they had faced. Many saw higher education as a means of overcoming adversity. Intermarriage became common among the younger Nisei, and the norm among the Sansei and subsequent generations. After three decades, we had the highest rate of intermarriage of any ethnocultural group in Canada. This book places contemporary Japanese Canadians on the verge of achieving the Redress settlement with the adamant claim we were owed justice, that notwithstanding what many would view as community successes, the uprooting was no “blessing in disguise.”
These facts do not determine, but they do provide a context for understanding some of the ways in which people emerge from trauma. I will not offer any platitudes about resilience, or forgiveness, or getting on with it, although I have heard such platitudes many times used to justify the period of recovery that our parents and grandparents went through. The recent flourishing of scholarship and artistic enterprises among Japanese Canadians is deeply rooted in both trauma and recovery, a past that we continue to try to reckon with and in some senses justify. The stories that are now told, however, should resonate with those of untold millions of others who experience violence, injustice, and displacement in today’s world.
Perhaps the most important contribution of this book lies beyond the community where I believe it has helped and will continue to help to re-think the concept of "enemy.” In a world riven by violence and xenophobia, where enemies are identified at every turn based on political affiliation, ethnocultural or gender identity, and nationalistic claims that have more basis in hatred than in truth, we are once again seeing threats, especially but not only in the United States, of denial of citizenship rights, incarceration, and deportation. Ken’s careful exposition reminds us of how the imagination of enemy leads to injustice and violations of citizenship. The precious status of citizenship remains in peril in many parts of the world where old and new enemies that never were are identified and persecuted for who they are. Many more people should read this book and re-think whom they call enemy.
The re-publication of The Enemy that Never Was in digital format that will now be widely available to all is a gift of which I believe Ken would be justifiably proud. It will continue to be a beacon to justice at a time when the world still needs it.
Audrey Kobayashi is a Sansei, Distinguished Professor Emerita of Geography at Queen’s University in Kingston Ontario. Her research over the past 50 years has spanned the impact of emigration in Meiji and Taisho Japan, the development of pre-1940s communities in Canada, and recent sociocultural changes. Although officially retired, she continues her research and publication, and is currently Co-Director, with Jordan Stanger-Ross, of the international Past Wrongs Future Choices project.