The Resilient Japanese Canadian
A powerful new book traces how war, fear and racism nearly devastated a deep-rooted BC fishing community.
Masako Fukawa, Stanley Fukawa and the Nikkei Fishermen's History Book Committee
- Spirit of the Nikkei Fleet: BC's Japanese Canadian Fishermen
- Harbour Publishing (2009)
The 1942 expulsion of Japanese Canadians from British Columbia is modern Canada's most extreme experiment in ethnic cleansing, mercifully conducted without genocide, but otherwise complete with brutal family separations, expropriation of all personal property and mass transfers to concentration camps.
Vancouver's Japantown, a bustling commercial and residential centre of many thousands, with its own churches, unions, department stores, daily papers and baseball teams, was rendered a ghost town between Pearl Harbour, on Dec. 7, 1941, and the end of the expulsions in September 1942. More than 500 farms were seized and sold, countless businesses destroyed and thousands of homes looted as the Japanese Canadians were herded first to the stalls of the Pacific National Exhibition, with nothing more than they could carry, and then deported to camps across Western Canada.
But it was the destruction of the Japanese-Canadian fishing fleet, its boats anchored by the hundreds in Steveston within weeks of Pearl Harbour, that provided both the organizational focus and the ideological rationale for the expulsion.
An excuse to steal
The claim that Japanese-Canadian fishermen posed a security threat provided a perfect cover for their elimination from the fishery, a long-time objective of their enemies in the industry and elected office. Yet as early as 1944, Canadian authorities acknowledged there had never been a single instance or even allegation of treachery by Japanese Canadians before or after Pearl Harbour.
Masako Fukawa's Spirit of the Nikkei Fleet: BC's Japanese Canadian Fishermen is an extraordinary new account of that terrible period in Canada's history, profusely illustrated, and drawing for the first time on Japanese language sources. The result is a deeply-textured history of the rise of the Japanese-Canadian fishing community that illuminates the contradictions between Canada's declarations on human rights and its adherence to them in practice.
By 1900, several thousand Japanese-Canadian fishermen were working in the Fraser River salmon fishery, pooling their resources to create a hospital, a school and Gyosha Dantai, the Steveston Japanese Fishermen's Association that became a central institution of Japanese Canadian life.
A special hatred
Punjabi Sikh and Chinese immigrants bore the brunt of much institutional racism in B.C., but special hatred was reserved for the Japanese Canadians. Why? Fukawa surmises that innate racism in the Caucasian community was fanned by Japan's resounding military victory in 1903 over Russia, a European power, at a time when colonialism and imperialism were in full flower.
B.C.'s young Japanese-Canadian community had also achieved a social and political cohesion the Sikh and Chinese communities had not. Dantai had proved capable of negotiating both with salmon canners and the emerging unions of white and native fishers. In 1907, when anti-Oriental mobs sacked Vancouver's Chinatown and then advanced on Japantown, they were confronted by fishermen who rushed from Steveston, armed themselves with axe handles, and saved most of the community from attack.
By the 1920s, despite the conspicuous valour of Japanese-Canadian volunteers at Vimy Ridge, Japanese-Canadian fishers found themselves facing annual reductions in their fishing licences, driven by a federal fisheries department bent on preserving the industry for whites. The 1942 seizures were the logical culmination of this long war of attrition, conducted against Canadian citizens solely because of their race.
A community rebuilt
Despite their dispersal across Canada, the Japanese Canadians were anxious to return. Although thousands took Canada's offer of "repatriation" to Japan, a country most had never seen, thousands more longed to return to the place of their birth.
The story of how the Japanese-Canadian community was rebuilt -- and the fleet returned to sea -- is told here for the first time with an appropriate focus on the remarkable role of Tatsuro "Buck" Suzuki, who in 1938, at the age of 22, had already become an acknowledged leader of the Japanese Canadian fishermen. Unlike veteran community leaders like Rintaro Hayashi, who had learned by bitter experience that Canadian citizenship meant nothing if the citizen was of Japanese descent, Suzuki was seeking to unite Japanese-Canadian and white fishermen when Pearl Harbour destroyed everything.
Suzuki was deported to Kaslo, then moved to Brandon, Ont., and was working in a garage when the RCMP contacted him on behalf of the British Army. Would he volunteer for intelligence work in Southeast Asia? Suzuki, ineligible to serve in the Canadian Armed Forces, signed up. For a Japanese Canadian to serve the Allies against Japan, when his own country had treated him with such contempt, caused turmoil in his own community, but was indicative of Suzuki’s vision and determination to assert his full equality.
Engaging with communists
After service in India and Singapore, where he helped investigate war crimes, Suzuki returned to Canada. By 1947, he had slipped back to B.C. to sound out the prospects for return with Homer Stevens, the secretary-treasurer of the United Fishermen and Allied Workers Union. The two forged a partnership with an astonishing trade-off: the union would support the return of the Japanese-Canadian fishermen provided they joined the union on the basis of full equality.
But before he could conclude the deal with Stevens, Suzuki had to confront Hayashi, who was outraged at the thought that his right to fish was linked to membership in a communist-led union, many of whose members had demanded expulsion of the Japanese Canadians for decades. Suzuki countered that the Nikkei had only one option if they wished to resume fishing: join the union and "assert their rights from inside it."
The two met in an all-night confrontation in Hayashi's home that ended only at dawn. Suzuki, believing the meeting had been in vain, stood to leave, bowed deeply, and said "Rintaro-san, you know, I want you to believe me. I am not a communist."
Hayashi, overwhelmed, "excused myself, and scrambled to the washroom. There I wept, crying soundless cries. I realized that, even if he were a communist, that I should trust him on the basis of his character alone."
From Issei to Nissei
Hayashi's support for Suzuki's plan marked a new era, as Fukawa points out, between the "'old samurai' and the young upstart soldier, from the Issei to the Nissei generation, and from racial strife to co-operation in the fishing industry."
But Suzuki was also riding deeper currents. Since 1945, non-Japanese Canadians had organized to oppose the repatriation policy, which bore a disturbing resemblance to the policies of the Nazi forces Canadian troops had just defeated in Europe. The deportation policy finally collapsed in 1947 as Canadian diplomats pushed for ratification of a United Nations Declaration on Human Rights that stood in stark contrast to Canada’s treatment of its own citizens. Japanese Canadians did not get the vote until 1949, when they were also allowed to return to B.C.
Today only two descendants of the Japanese Canadian fishermen remain active in an industry that has been all but destroyed by a host of global factors. This book remains. It is a testament to a community's vitality, resistance and resilience in the face of intolerance.
![[Tyee]](http://thetyee.cachefly.net/ui/img/ico_fishie.png){kind=small}
1voice
19-05-2009
Uncle Buck
Thanks for the great book review Geoff.
One other point I'd like to add is my Uncle Buck was an environmentalist years before most of us even knew what was happening to our environment.
He was deeply concerned about our water and what was happening to our fish. I'm sure if he was still alive he would have quite a lot to say and would be very disturbed at the current threat to our wild salmon.
As for human rights, well we still have a lot of work to do. I fear some have not learned or refuse to learn from the mistakes of the past.
PatrickMcEvoyHalston
20-05-2009
If we care, less "refuse to learn," and more psychology.
The assumption in this article is that revealing that the Japanese in Canada posed no threat does some kind of good. It may not, you know. For when people in psychological panic are in the mood to set some poor lot of people up for mistreatment, sacrifice, these people are probably doomed. Why? Because the discriminators are going crazy, experiencing an overwhelming need to project all their unwanted characteristics onto someone else, so that they themselves can feel absent of internal conflict, all nice and pure (think how useful "bad" countries are in making many Americans [not me] feel like they live in the land of the free and the brave). It MIGHT do something to push reality in front of their face as often as can be managed, but their ability to push away any inconvenient fact, twist it into some other form, make it nevertheless serve their interest, cannot be underestimated. Stop setting them up as selfish, or obstinate, or some such--which is an awful lot about making the informed feel good about themselves. What they are, is damaged--the driven unfortunate who will see evil in others, because they must, lest they themselves go even crazier.
(Often, in fact, as was the case with Jews in Germany, the picked on group is actually overall psychologically more advanced, more truly virtuous, than the psychologically regressing mass.)
But no Tyee reader is going to count amongst those who think the Japanese in Canada were up to something sneaky in WW2. I don't mean to disparage your article, but if you want to challenge the Tyee reader in what I believe to be a way more useful way, why not tackle the implications of the tendency amongst many Tyee contributers to set up the Greens this election period, as the nefarious, sneaky group (ring any WW2 bells?), that need to be kept under watch, for the good of one and all?
Make Tyee readers see, what is hard for THEM to see.
G West
20-05-2009
Patrick...I think this statement of yours
...needs some explication.
The generally held view about prewar German culture is that it was very advanced, sophisticated and psychologically mature.
In fact, the circumstances surrounding the failure of a country with such a highly educated and specialized population (not to mention its managerial class) to be awake to the (seemingly obvious) political manipulation of a small group of fascists is, it seems to me, a far more interesting line of inquiry than your suggestion that the Jews (530,000 of them) somehow held within their midst, the clue to why 'they' ended up as the ‘other’.
I'd suggest that the problem - both here and there - may be more fruitfully sought in an analysis of the failures of the democratic capitalistic form and its tendency to become the tool of other forms of professional and political manipulation.
That isn't to say that the 'greens' couldn't become objects of prejudice here or elsewhere. However, I'd say that in this province that possibility is much more likely to be directed toward another group.
The election campaign just concluded should provide enough ready examples of the kind of thing I mean.
PatrickMcEvoyHalston
20-05-2009
Advanced, but pscyhologically fragile: that was the problem.
Interesting challenge, G West. What happened was that the middle class started experiencing huge anxieties, terrors, *owing to* their sudden prosperity, their real growth, "advancement," as you say--they started feeling like they would be punished for all the good things they were coming to enjoy. So they set up the Jews as the *really* greedy, sneaky, folk; and in playing a large part in wiping them out, they got to feel all pure again.
No one from a warm family would participate in anything this awful, though. No one--doesn't matter what books/pamphlets people pass on to you, others' aims, schemes, to manipulate: you're way beyond their reach--can't be anyone else's tool (Manipulators don't use the "susceptible," though--what actually happens is that those we prefer to imagine as susceptible make aggressive use of manipulators' "deceptions" to legitimize, engage, and excercise their own need to hurt those they've projected their own "badness" onto--that's what actually happens in Milgram's study, btw). Germans historically have had amongst the worst childhoods in all Europe, though. You might be sick of the deMause stuff, but his exploration of German authoritarian childrearing and the beginning of WW2, agrees with how you present German preWW2, and is one to read. (If you take a look, scroll down about half way to you reach "Causes of WW2 and the Holocaust.")
Link: http://www.psychohistory.com/htm/eln06_war.html
Also, I agree that kids, women, the unemployed, the poor, the "foreign," will be set up as "the problem." But for most Tyee readers, this will not be something to be pointed out--most of us will recognize and abhore when this is done. In the Tyee' forums--that is, amongst those in B.C. who most readily can "be reached"--during the election, the Greens were the ones most vilified. I just moved here, and I need to get a better sense of who the Greens are in this province, but it is possible to me right now that the Greens could be set up--by some middle class NDPers, even--akin to the way the educated German middle class set up literate, artistic, Jews for target, before and during WW2.
Frank
20-05-2009
Patrick
Comparing the Jews in Germany to the Greens in BC is way over the top.
G West
20-05-2009
Patrick
We've been through this before - I simply don't accept your one size fits all analysis that all society's problems stem from a poor upbringing and insufficiency of parental love.
The evils of Anti-Semitism are far more pervasive in the history of western Christian literature, business and thought – not to mention ‘religion’ to be dismissed that easily.
Once again, I’d say that democratic socialists are much more likely to be singled out for disapprobation than the greens…a quick look at events of the last 50 years in both Canada and the United States might be germane to that analysis. It’s great to have loving parents but stretching the claim that the lack thereof is the cause of society’s evils is just too attenuated to hold - the rubber just won’t stretch that far.
PatrickMcEvoyHalston
20-05-2009
Frank
Hi Frank.
Right now it is. And if the Greens really aren't all that progressive, it won't happen at all (I've had some people suggest Green is actually very conservative--I'll explore and see). But it will be the Paul Krugmans (i.e., the most pleasant, colourful, playful--evolved) that will EVENTUALLY be targeted hard by Obama and the left that follows/agrees with him, in the U.S., though. The happiest, the still advancing, will draw the ire of the suppressed rest--that's the way it goes.
Yammer
20-05-2009
The Community's vitality, resistance, and resilience
Wanna know why the Japanese-Canadians did so well after their ethnic cleansing?
This well-written review identifies the key trait: intergration.
"The two forged a partnership with an astonishing trade-off: the union would support the return of the Japanese-Canadian fishermen provided they joined the union on the basis of full equality."
That right there is an example of compromise, the basis upon which reconciliation and progress is possible.
There are practically no "full-blooded" Japanese-Canadians. However, as a people, their descendents are doing very well, because of this willingness to join a larger group, to subsume a specific independent identity into the successful whole.
Integrate and thrive.
Ghettoize and suffer.
G West
20-05-2009
Paul Krugman an object of attack?
That's just silly, almost as silly as the comparison between the Jews and the Greens.
Furthermore, being attacked won't be any surprise for the Princeton economist anyway, he's been the target of ad hominem slings and arrows (and worse) from the knuckle-draggers at Fox News and neo-con right wingers for years. Same old, same old.
On another point, I think the use of the word 'concentration camp' to describe the destination of the Japanese Canadians who were shipped out of coastal BC after Pearl Harbour is also 'over-the-top'.
I've always disagreed with the pusillanimous actions of the Canadian government of the time but using such a fraught word is not called for, in my opinion.
As a friend of mine has written, satirically:
'Yep we lined 'em up, shot 'em in rows to fill mass graves, moved them into packed ghettos so we could round them up later, work them to death and then send them to gas chambers and ovens. The Nazis didn't deport, they KILLED (and tortured).
'This kind of rank hyperbole, self-righteousness and politically-correct revisionism is more religious than logical and it certainly doesn't 'fit' the facts.'
'It's curious of course that the comparison wasn't to the way foreigners were rounded up in Japan, and in Japanese-conquered territory, during the war. Pointing at the Germans when it's Japan that's at question is also an old game....'
The problem is that these 'Canadians' were not treated fairly (in fact, they weren't even citizens) - but to make the comparison - by using that word - with either of two fascist governments (with whom this country was at war) is just plain nonsense.
Frank
20-05-2009
Patrick
By Greens you mean the Green party supporters? It just won't happen. (unless someone like "Gidget" is elected PM)
And if there are internment camps in BC's future it certainly won't be the Left building them. After all, it wasn't the Left that built them in the 40's.
PatrickMcEvoyHalston
20-05-2009
Forgot to mention, G West,
Forgot to mention, G West, that the part that's hard to shake off about deMause's articulation of the causes of the Holocaust, is where he points out how all the various things that were said to and acted upon by the Nazis upon the Jews (and homeless, weak, etc.), were things the Nazis and their supporters had to endure, when they were children. DeMause goes into the details, about what exactly German children had to endure, and how they exactly replicated what they experienced in their abuse of the Jews (but this time with them as perpetrators rather than victims). It's really powerful, and I wish you'd take a look at it.
Regarding your complaint against the use of the term "concentration camp," in regards to what happened to the Japanese in Canada during WW2: if the motives were the same--that is to stigmatize, humiliate, punish--and I think they were, then even if the sadism was less, if the abuse, less harsh--which it evidently was--than what happened to the Jews, I don't think I'm too off-put by the use of the term. Born of the same source, it's hyperbole, but not misdirection. Using the term is a tactic used to make it more difficult for those who really would want to "manage" that part of our history, so that our own arising desire to prejudice others feels more buttressed, substantiated--less guilt arousing. Of course, there's another reason--a really regretable one, and I'll get to it.
I don't think it's just that "they weren't treated fairly," which, you'll admit, sounds sort of oh hum, hum drum, near inconsequent. My sense is that it was about setting up a group of people as proper subjects of suspicion, hatred, and abuse--something vastly more horrifying than being inadequately attended to by whatever Cdn adminstration.
That the Japanese were up to something more awful in Japan, is something I would readily be prepared to believe (though, again, not out of evilness, villainy, or blameworthy anything, but of what happens to a populace that is going crazy sadistic, owing to the fact that the particular nature of their own childhoods has made it so that they cannot handle it when good things--like ANY kind of personal growth--happen in their lives). And it is extremely annoying that current criticism of widescale abuse seems way too largely motivated to set up conservatives as misanthropes, something that be better effected by making sure that all victims are best understood as saints (a practice we've seen in a number of book reviews here at the Tyee), by making sure that all abuse once or still supported by "everyday," six-pack, Cdns, is set up to seem as close to Holocaust scale as possible. This is self-inflating (for the left-leaning writer/thinker) and mean spirited (of the same source? You know, though the left is always better, it actually is.)
Please remember this discussion about Paul Krugman. I would like to bring it up again, a year or two from now.
excuse me
20-05-2009
Yammer - wtf are you taking about?
I was tempted to tag Yammer's comment as "Suggest as offensive" because the sheer stupidity of his statement is offensive.
Practically no full-blooded Japanese-Canadians?!?! Are you kidding or just ignorant? What about the hundreds I know personally? This is just a blatantly ignorant and idiotic comment.
Yes, there was a greater integration into the rest of Canadian society than some other immigrant groups and this has resulted in plenty of "mixed-blood" Japanese-Canadians, but there are still Japanese-Canadians of all ages who are "full-blooded", whatever that means.
G West
20-05-2009
umm
Sorry Patrick I don't think so.
There is a difference - and it's not a trivial or minor one - between the examples as I pointed out. Furthermore, there's a 'timing' difference that makes the action much less suspect in North America (reactive) than it was in either Germany or Japan (proactive).
Social structures are evolutionary; inclusive and popular democracy (and the concept of citizenship) were hardly extant anywhere in 1914...certainly there's lots to criticize in our past...Tommy Douglas himself was once a supporter of some forms of eugenics, as were most people with more than a high school education of his era.
In fact, psychological theory and practice was full of that bullshit at the time.
I agree that the use of the words 'concentration camp' were probably chosen with purpose - and that's exactly why I chose to object to them.
However, I'd say the tendency to play fast and loose with the truth is hardly a 'leftist' phenomenon.
I still think you're incredibly off base relative to Paul Krugman and what he's likely to expect if he continues to provide a counterpoint to Obama's efforts.
Whatever opprobrium may be heaped upon him, it will likely come nowhere near what an intellectual like Susan Sontag endured post 9/11.
;D
SharingIsGood
20-05-2009
my Japanese-Canadian experience
A good Vancouver Canucks hockey-lovin' friend of mine is a Japanese-Canadian. He and his folks were sent off to sugar beet farms (I believe it was in Alberta) during WW-II. For 3 generations, they had been successful land-owning farmers down in the Lower Mainland. His family lost everything they had except for what they could carry on their backs. Still, my friend told me that he understood exactly why internment had to happen; and he felt no malice toward Canadians and the Canadian government. After the war, my friend went on to complete high school and found a union job which he stayed with until his last working day. He said he couldn't have done any better for his family had they remained farmers. This wonderful Canadian citizen told me that, except during the war, he has always felt accepted by the Canadian people around him. Since the war, he has been treated fine.
My friend has not one complaint; and he is happy to be a Canadian, though he wonders how we could have chosen leaders like Mulroney, Cretien, Martin, Harper, Klien and Campbell who give away our sovereignty in this bountiful land.
Yammer
20-05-2009
Excuse you
Feel free to nominate me for any prudish censoriousness you like.
In the meantime, I will add statistics to my follow up comment, which is that my generation (1960s) is pretty much it for made-in-Canada JCs.
The NAJC website says:
Mixed marriages 70%
Intermarriage rate 95%
"The percentages of mixed marriages and intermarriage are the highest of all the ethnic groups. These figures reveal the dramatic shift that is taking place in the Japanese Canadian community. The number of Japanese immigrants has remained constant but the number of people with mixed Japanese ancestry has nearly doubled in 10 years. The possibility for two Japanese Canadians to marry is limited because of the small population. The scattered distribution of the community has resulted in the high intermarriage rate. Japanese Canadians are the most integrated and assimilated group of all the ethnic communities."
Get it? The MOST INTEGRATED AND ASSIMILATED.
Now, let me talk about the hundreds of Japanese Canadians I know personally.
Percent convicted of crime - none
Percent employed - all
Percent with university degrees - all
Yammer
20-05-2009
however
I do apologize for any offense given. I sometimes cave in to an urge to say things with "humourous" hyperbole. Such things have no place in an Internet discussion board.
G West
21-05-2009
Personally Yammer
The terminology I had a problem with was ‘ethnic cleansing'... but then I've read enough of your stuff to assume it was meant tongue in cheek.
The thing that amazes me is that you claim to know 'hundreds' of people (of any kind) personally.
On that point, you're clearly into fantasy.
- Oh and the idea that a university education is the sine qua none for anything is a bit of a stretch too.
After all, we have a former Prime Minister 'Himself' testifying that he's never done anything 'wrong' in his whole life.
Wise to take all that sort of thing with a healthy dose of salts.
Cheers dude!
I think I may have some more thoughts about the whole Japanese Canadian experience to post a little later
G West
21-05-2009
On the subject of the internment camps
Revisionism is a strong tendency in Canada these days and it's important not to forget that understanding history requires an appreciation of a time, and a manner of thinking and behaving, that was different from today's.
I object to the use of the term 'concentration camp' and the application of the words 'ethnic cleansing' to the removal of the Japanese from the coast; that doesn't mean I approve of the action of the Canadian Government (which was, as I've noted in other contexts, distinctly prejudiced in many respects).
But I do think it's important to try and understand those actions in the context of the times when the actions were taken.
The reason was security. Security and fear - and also, given the fact the country was already at war in Europe, retaining public order in face of the probability of civilian atrocities against Japanese communities, whether at Steveston, Japantown or in places like Mission or Saltspring.
This doesn't imply that the military were 'removing' the Japanese to protect THEM, but to avoid civic disturbances. Few whites could understand Japanese, or read anything in the local Japanese papers, much of which content was likely pro-Imperial Japan.
It's in that kind of a war fueled atmosphere of fear and suspicion that one might legitimately suspect that things
said in "that other language" had the potential to be dangerous.
Ditto with the fishing fleet and radio signals in Japanese....Viewed throught the lens of 1941, how was ANYBODY supposed to accept that those MIGHT not have been suspicious? Especially when the government 'said' they might be.
Even Dr. Miyazaki (a companion of the Order of Canada) opined on this in his autobiographical notes "My Sixty Years in Canada" whe he said 'that he couldn't comment on what Mr. so-and-so interned at Minto and his relationship to a
Japanese nationalist organization really meant. Such things are atmospheric, they grow out of times and they cannot be simply dismissed as racism from the perspective of today.
There were work camps. Without them the Hope Princeton, the Yellowhead and various other routes wouldn't have been built at that time.
Yes, there were relocations away from the Coast, where the threat of a
Japanese attack could NOT be ruled out. Given the experiences in Asia with Imperial Japan and in Europe with Germany the possibility of a fifth column could not be discounted. Pretending otherwise, and asserting that all white people were interested in running 'concentration camps' or indulging in 'ethnic cleansing' is noxious newspeak.
That doesn't mean one has to be blind to the fact that Japanese Canadians did lose property and suffer economically as a result of the relocations - but to pretend that this was a racist country is absurd.
(Thanks to a former Tyee contributor whose knowledge of BC history is far superior to mine for the substance of this post)
Yammer
21-05-2009
The internment was not militarily necessary
I see the point that "ethnic cleansing" and "concentration camp" could be considered to be an abuse of those terms if you compare them to Bosnia in the first instance or the Boer War/Nazi Germany in the second, but as for the security argument, it doesn't wash at all. If mass evacuation was necessary for good order, why didn't the army and RCMP recommend it?
The decision to cleanse -- er, intern -- the JCs was undertaken by the Liberal government for reasons of political expediency. Otherwise, Canadians of Italian and German descent would have faced the same strictures. The difference, of course, is that the JCs could not vote.
I'm not sure how it matters that the Hope-Princeton got built, unless you are actually advancing the argument that it was awesome to have slave labour.
Now, I do believe that the racism ultimately benefitted the JCs by making them pursue an informal but widely followed voluntary program of de-racialization, interbreeding, and assimilation, which other racial groups would be wise to follow, I don't see how it wasn't racism.
Yammer
21-05-2009
On the other hand, congratulations
It is cool that you are, bizarrely, defending the internment -- it is so not politically correct and boring.
G West
21-05-2009
yammer
Nope, you're smarter than that. I'm not defending it at all - I made that perfectly clear...I'm simply saying that you can't judge it in today's politically correct terms.
I thought that was obvious. Just as the treatment of the Chinese by Imperial Japan must be judged in the context of the time, so too the actions of a nation under attack, Canada, must be judged in the context of the threat Japan posed to the whole Pacific region...
In fact, a Japanese submarine did shell the Estevan Point Light House - fortunately all 25 shells missed!
VivianLea Doubt
21-05-2009
G West
"Revisionism is a strong tendency in Canada these days" : am I misunderstanding you here? (Aren't Dippers revisionists?)
How else will we judge history, if not in today's terms, politically correct or not?
Granatstein wrote in 1998: "No one seemed to care that most of Canada's history had been made by men, however unfair that might have been, and that any overt attempt to write more women into history might distort the past." Golly gee, who was birthing all those prime ministers and all the other men who make up his "grand narrative" of the country? The point being that it does not require a re-writing of history to see it from a different perspective...and that is not revisionist.
Help me understand your point, would you?
Oh, perhaps I had better add a smiley emoticon to soften that up a little... :)
G West
22-05-2009
Qualifying terms
I had a longer response in mind - and maybe I'll get to it later.
For the moment I think it's important to tell the truth - but not to demonize by over broad application of words which mean something very different in contexts apart from their original application.
Canada and Canadians have made huge mistakes - but we don't need to demonize our fathers and grandfathers for more than that. Accusing our forefathers in the middle of the last century of operating 'concentration camps' and participating in 'ethnic cleansing' is a kind of demonizing in absentia and it tends to make bad history in the first instance and create an unjustified smugness in ourselves (as somehow superior, more cosmopolitan and worldly) by contrast.
I hope that if I'd been around at the time that I'd have protested what happened to Japanese Canadians in 1942. But I'm not naive enough to pretend that this is anything more than wishful thinking.
We are all products of our time. I have Muslim friends whose wives wear hijab - I know many of those Canadian women were spat on in shopping centre parking lots here in Vancouver after 2001.
We should neither condemn nor glorify either the past or our own inclination toward similar behaviors.
I think Paul Fussell's book of essays - 'Thank God for the Atomic Bomb' is probably the best work on the subject...
SharingIsGood
22-05-2009
Indeed, GWest
"For the moment I think it's important to tell the truth - but not to demonize by over broad application of words which mean something very different in contexts apart from their original application."
I wonder what our grandfathers would think of us for letting the NAFTA an TILMA deals go down. I wonder what they would have thought of us:
for practically giving away a perfectly good railway,
for allowing our salmon to be killed off,
for selling our gas company,
for giving up our rights to our rivers and the power they generate,
for allowing so many hungry and homeless people to live on our streets while the wealthiest among us get richer faster than ever before,
for buying ferries from abroad while our own skilled workers sit idle,
for privatizing so many things that take money out of the country that our grandfathers provided for us.
Yeah, I'd say history will not be kind to us for short-sightedly, foolishly, placing burdens our grandchildren - whatever, race, creed or religion they may be.
The most educated citizenry in the world, and we've been duped, hoodwinked.
Yammer
22-05-2009
Please, no longer response
"Accusing our forefathers in the middle of the last century of operating 'concentration camps' and participating in 'ethnic cleansing' is a kind of demonizing in absentia"
So, you cannot assess the past by today's principles? We should cease to condemn slavery -- after all it was normative behaviour in its context.
"it tends to make bad history in the first instance"
How? Not that I disagree that there is such a thing as bad history.
"and create an unjustified smugness in ourselves (as somehow superior, more cosmopolitan and worldly) by contrast"
How is it unjustified smugness? Citizens today ARE quantifiably and qualitatively superior, more cosmopolitan, and more worldly. Consider the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and some governments are actually mostly following them in practice. I agree we should not succumb to hubris or cease to expand liberty, fairness, and transparency, but to say that we are not doing better than previous generations is absurd.
"We are all products of our time. I have Muslim friends whose wives wear hijab - I know many of those Canadian women were spat on in shopping centre parking lots here in Vancouver after 2001."
I think the spitters just missed, they were probably trying to hit the husbands.
"We should neither condemn nor glorify either the past or our own inclination toward similar behaviors."
Pfft.
We should *always* condemn that which should be condemned AND glorify that which should be glorified.
Sure we're imperfect humans today, but why would that make you abdicate your powers of discernment and judgement? This really ticks me off. I say we are OBLIGED to judge the past, and the present. Others as well as ourselves.
Refuse to apply your judgement? Why, who's judgement do you prefer? Oh that's right, you are too principled to have your own principles -- everyone else is right, just not contemporary Westerners.
VivianLea Doubt
22-05-2009
G West
You used the words 'fathers', 'grandfathers', and 'forefathers'...should I point out that mothers, grandmothers, foremothers ought to be included, or would that be too, too PC? Or would you use Granatstein's argument? (No smileys for Granastein) Of course, I write as a second-wave feminist- geez, who the hell am I to judge history? But I surely expect that we will learn from it...
Now, speaking personally, I would welcome a longer reply, but I insist that it include smileys...
G West
22-05-2009
Hardly yammer...that's not what I said
Baloney!
One can disagree with what was done but also understand how it happened in a different context. And appreciate, as I pointed out how easily the same thing could happen today....
The internment camps were NOT concentration camps and they were NOT an attempt at ethnic cleansing. PERIOD
That's what I wrote. I was clearly critical and you know it. To suggest otherwise is sophistry.
Glorifying and condemning are generally exercises performed by people who are little more than passive observers. and they're generally done to draw attention to the critic - not for any useful purpose:Understanding requires a bit more sophistication and a lot more empathy.
And no, I don't believe citizens today are superior to our mothers and grandmothers. In fact, in many cases quite the contrary - the universal declaration of human rights is pretty much 'universal' only in the sense that it's largely ignored.
Take away a few of our technical advances, cut off the flow of oil and clear the supermarket shelves and we'd be no more civilized than the Victorians (perhaps a damn sight less) - scratch a certain number of American males and you'll find a Nazi.
And no, they weren't aiming at the men - those low lifes were much too cowardly to spit on a woman who was accompanied by her husband.
VivianLea you're correct - that was sloppy.
8-)
wayfarer
23-05-2009
Sometimes a book review is just a book review
Geoff,
An excellent review of a book I had no idea existed. Thanks for raising this to my attention. We (especially those of us under age 50) forget just how vibrant the Japanese-Canadian community was pre-WW2; the Asahi baseball team alone was somewhat legendary back in the day.
A related note: I was happy to see the very first Japanese-Canadian BCer elected to our legislature in this past election (Naomi Yamamoto).
Otherwise, to all the commentators who want to use Geoff's review as an odious allegory reflecting the current evils of the Green party, TILMA, the Campbell government - chill out. As Freud said, sometimes a book review is just a book review. :)