Appendix XVI
Internment scars run deep
by Ken Adachi, Toronto Star, Sept. 24, 1988.
Forty-six years ago on a day in February, Prime Minister Mackenzie King, following the precedent set by Franklin Roosevelt in the United States, issued a series of orders-in-council setting into motion the mechanics of forced evacuation from the west coast of Canada and detention of nearly 21,000 Japanese Canadians.
The draconian measure, we were told, was “necessary for the security and defence of Canada.”
I was then 13 years old. One of my two brothers almost immediately had been shipped to a road camp in northern Ontario. Within months, my parents, another brother and myself were herded upon a train and transported from Vancouver on a long and uncertain journey to an internment camp called Slocan in the Kootenay Valley.
The memory still rankles. Born in Canada, brought up on big-band jazz, Fred Astaire and the novels of Rider Haggard, I had perceived myself to be as Canadian as the beaver. I hated rice. I had committed no crime. I was never charged, tried or convicted of anything. Yet I was fingerprinted and interned.
In the language of the Canadian government, I was an enemy alien. The politicians branded me as the yellow peril, a phrase then in popular usage. My only offence was that my parents were born in Japan. Yet I was interned.
For some 3½ years, I walked the perimeters of the internment camp and, though there was no barbed wire, I felt comprehensively penned in.
I listened to politicians in full rant. The experience heightened my awareness of man’s inhumanity to man, of a supposed democracy swiftly and inexorably attempting to crush a tiny minority in a spiral of civil repression. But I was equally impressed by man’s capacity to endure and survive.
My father died last year in an old-age home in Toronto at the age of 97. He had come to Canada in 1907 and, like other immigrants, had struggled for a stake in Canada. He had built up a modest business in Vancouver, operating a small hotel and confectionery store. It wasn’t much, but it was his. He saw it stripped from him, sold without compensation.
My mother died in 1945, of a heart attack while languishing in a jerry-built hospital in Slocan. Her body was cremated on an open fire.
Meanwhile, one of my brothers, 19 at the time, managed – in the teeth of official government discouragement – to join the Canadian army and later was to serve in Burma on loan to the British forces.
In the spring of 1945, my father opted for deportation to Japan, under the so-called dispersal plan which stipulated that all Japanese Canadians in British Columbia must either move east of the Rockies, as proof of their “loyalty,” or agree to be exiled to Japan.
I signed to remain in Canada and subsequently moved east to Toronto, and though my father was allowed to rescind his decision of “voluntary” deportation to Japan, we were never to come together as a family unit.
He was a casualty of wartime hysteria, of a country’s reluctance to uphold the principles of democracy in a time of crisis. He was 58 when he came to Toronto, perhaps too old to forge a new life other than to engage in a series of menial jobs.
Thus, and for other reasons, I can only greet with mixed feelings Thursday’s announcement by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney of a $291 million compensation package for survivors of wartime internment. I am relieved – though undoubtedly there will be a backlash – to see a divisive issue finally laid to rest. But I am not a little perturbed to hear politicians settling comfortably into a collective armchair, for a wallow in self-congratulatory rhetoric.
… In The Book Of Laughter And Forgetting, the great Czech novelist Milan Kundera writes: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” Certainly, with Mulroney’s announcement, it would appear that we’ve come some distance in that struggle.
Of course I feel better today, as a Canadian, than I did last week. But it doesn’t assuage my anger. No, not quite. I cannot summon up tears. Our individual and collective experience lies too deep for a facile display of emotion and easy rhetoric.
It is too little and too late, for some of us.