With his detailed recollections of his various experiences of uprooting, racial bigotry, exile to Japan, and repatriation to Canada, Roy often reflects on the significance of those experiences both for himself and for society at large.
Experiences of Racism
Roy’s mindset is still strongly affected by his own experiences of the racial persecution he experienced, especially as an elementary school child in Vancouver. He frequently comments that hearing the pejorative term “Jap,” first used against him by his classmates as a small child and again after his return to Vancouver as a young man, still “stings” him to this day.
He believes the little kids in his elementary school who tormented him verbally and “showered him” with stones him on his way home from school during the early days of the war did so largely because they had been influenced by the racist rhetoric of their parents. He warns adults that talking negatively about other races will result in their children quickly absorbing their racism:
I want them to realize that the adults have a very heavy responsibility to never talk bad or belittle other races because that will automatically make their children become racial bigots …The kids who discriminated against me—they were too young to be discriminatory. They should have been “colorblind” but because the adults talked [negatively] about us they automatically inhaled that and became racial bigots. I'm sure that's how it was when I was attending grade school (Okaeri video 67:00~).
Roy also ponders the irrationality of the racial discrimination against Japanese Canadians generally by the government of a supposedly democratic country such as Canada:
Later on, when I became more mature, I got to thinking...how could a democratic country like Canada have treated us like that? It's almost like, you know, a country like Hitler's Germany or even Japan's militarism or even Stalin's Soviet Union. They're not democratic, they're totalitarian, they're, you know, they're harsher regimes. So, you might expect that kind of thing to happen.
But in a country where they open up the country with one hand on the Bible and one hand on the shovel...that kind of country would do that? I couldn't make sense of it. But, at least in 1988, the Mulroney government finally recognized it. So, ...I came to believe that Canada's still a good country (Rebeca Salas interview)
He further notes the extreme irony of Canada accepting the Lithuanian Jewish refugees (whom he had met as a small child on the ship back to Canada) before the war although it would later be deporting its own Japanese Canadian citizens at the end of the war.
When the Japanese Canadians began the redress movement in the 1980s in an effort to get Canada to recognize and redress the grave wrong that it meted out to its own citizens from 1942 to 1949, I awoke to the saving of the Jewish people. It was mighty commendable for Canada to have helped these people in far Europe, but I noticed the BIG double standard here.
What they did [for the Lithuanian Jewish refugees] was very, very nice, but on the other hand, they confiscated and sold off for a pittance all the properties of Japanese Canadians who were their own people, and forced the main portion of them to move out of BC. For those who didn’t or couldn’t do so, they forced them to volunteer to go to Japan while forfeiting their Canadian citizenship regardless of birth or naturalization.
Gratitude for Loyalty of White Friends
Yet, while deploring the racism perpetrated by white Canadians against Japanese Canadians, Roy also reflects with gratitude about some white Canadians who remained steadfast friends of his family at a time when it was very unpopular to even associate with the Japanese Canadians:
When things go bad, you find who your real friends are. And we did find some, a couple of Canadian people, and I think by them befriending us they were put in a pretty uncomfortable position themselves. But… they stuck it out with us. They were friends and they proved themselves.
True friends, those people…One man, he had a small cartage company called Columbia Cartage and he kept associating with us until the last minute. I remember him shaking hands with my father before we shipped off to Slocan (internment camp) …. He was a true friend until the last minute.
There was another veteran from the First World War and he kept corresponding with us in Slocan. When we were being shipped to Japan, he came to see us off at the CPR rail yard. Yeah. That was very hard…he was a friend until the last….They were loyal to us, even through the war time.
My second brother had a friend in Celtic, a white person. We used to call him, in Japanese, “Shush” or something….He even joined my brother's Japanese class. And so, you know, he would participate in the Japanese Christmas concert. It was very comical. In the war time, he even came to visit my brother in Slocan. He was in the army….
Yeah, these kinds of people...so broad-minded, so friendly, and so warm. In those days ...these people were great, great people (Rebeca Salas interview).
On Being Bicultural and Bilingual
Like many of the Japanese Canadian exiles, Roy has a very ambiguous sense of his cultural identity.
In a 1991 interview with Tatsuo Kage, he joked that, although being a second generation Japanese Canadian, he probably seems to be more like a first-generation Japanese immigrant (Issei). He expressed this blurred sense of cultural identity in more detail in an interview with Rebeca Salas:
Although I'm biculturally a complete mixture, strictly speaking I'm more Japanese-y type. Has nothing to do with which is better or which is worse. I'm just saying, speaking objectively. My wife would say that too, and other people would.
I'm bilingual, so if I'm with Japanese from Japan I speak like them. And if I'm speaking with Canadians, I speak like them…The Japanese [on the ship back to Canada] thought I was a pure Japanese-born, Japanese-bred individual. So, when they saw me talking English with some other white passenger, they said “How come? How come you're speaking English?” They thought it just didn't fit me. I said, “I'm Canadian born.” People thought I was a real Japanese.
And my wife tells me that I'm a real Japanese-type individual…Sometimes, [I feel] both, but I've lived in Canada much longer than Japan. So, I think I'm more Canadian… Some people don't know how to judge me. “Is he Canadian or is he Japanese?” People don't know….
In the same interview, he elaborated on what he considers some positive and enriching results of his life experiences that made him bicultural and bilingual:
Right now, I'm glad that I came through some hard times and I could appreciate things more…Changing from Canada to Japan and Japan to Canada—It's disruptive…the culture's so different and it's disruptive. Especially as a child, it's kind of hard. But, I'm glad I went through that because I can appreciate things Canadian more, I can appreciate things Japanese more…It's a worthwhile process to go through. It enriches my life a lot more…
It's sometimes been awkward…(but) I think in both languages and I get better appreciation. I'm Christian, so I use [both the English and Japanese] Bible and I get a better view, a better appreciation of things, you know? In that respect, I'm glad.
In a way, I'm glad I went through a lot of uncomfortable times in the past. In Japanese, there's a saying that roughly translates, “One should go and initiatively grab situations and undergo hardship,” and you would come out a better person... I'm not that brave to go forward and grab such situations, but circumstances… made me go through those things (Rebeca Salas interview)
Regarding the big differences between the Japanese and English languages he explains:
Japanese and English are so different, you know? Enunciation is different, grammar is so different, the sentence structure is different. Simply speaking, English and our language are reverse. In English you say, “I go to school.” In Japanese you say, “I to school go.” That's how the Japanese sentence structure is made. So, when you translate or interpret [a Japanese sentence], you have to listen to the very last verb to see if “he went” or if “he didn't go” (Rebeca Salas interview)
Roy further describes how he coped with this difference in language structure, tone, and level of directness when working as a court interpreter:
When I used to go to the trial courts to interpret, I had to wait until the last word [of the sentence] to see if “he went there or did not go”…. Traditionally, Japanese culture is that we don't come out straightforwardly. We go in a roundabout way to say something to soften the blow.
So, to a Japanese [person in court the lawyer] would ask, “Did you go there that morning?” And this person would answer, “Well, that day was very cloudy and sunny, and I didn't feel too great and I was wondering if I should take an umbrella or something,” and all blah, blah, blah. So, the court interpreter has to interpret just as is.
And the [lawyer] questioning says, “I don't care how you thought...did you go or did you not go?!” The questioner wants to know if he or she went or did not go. But, the Japanese has to go all over all kinds of things and go in a roundabout way. That's our culture. So, an interpreter must be a cultural interpreter, too. We were taught that. Not just language, be a cultural interpreter. (Rebeca Salas interview)
© 2025 Stan Kirk
