Despite major differences between Canada and the United States at the moment, historically there are many commonalities between the two countries. For example, both governments decided to cave to anti-Japanese racism in 1942 and incarcerate their Nikkei communities regardless of citizenship status. In both cases, the story of Japanese American/Japanese Canadian incarceration is seen in terms of failures by each government to respect the rights of a community – failures that arose from anti-Japanese bigotry. And, in both cases, governments coerced Nikkei populations to sign questionnaires that, if answered in a manner deemed negative, could lead to their deportation.
However, the story of Japanese Canadian incarceration has some distinct differences. In September 1942, the Canadian government, betraying a promise it had explicitly made to protect the assets of Japanese Canadians, auctioned off Nikkei-owned property partly to defray the costs of inland exile and party to prevent the owners or their families from returning to British Columbia. They did so while also catering to parliamentarians from British Columbia to keep Japanese Canadians out of the province until April 1949 – nearly four years after the war’s end.
The Japanese Canadian experience is one that should be known by both Americans and Canadians alike. In 1988, the Canadian redress movement won a victory when Prime Minister Brian Mulroney signed legislation awarding surviving Japanese Canadians compensation and an apology.
As had been the case for the U.S. redress movement, Nikkei women activists played a crucial role in the Canadian redress movement. Activists like Maryka Omatsu, the first woman of East Asian descent to be appointed a judge in Canada, worked with groups like the National Association Japanese Canadians to lobby the Canadian parliament for redress. For some, such as Mary Kitagawa, engagement with the national redress movement led to further such efforts—in Kitagawa’s case, leading the campaign to grant former Japanese Canadian students of the University of British Columbia with retroactive diplomas and, with her husband Tosh, working to shore up the Powell Street Festival at a critical juncture.
Kitagawa is the subject of Karen Inouye’s latest book Mary Kitagawa: A Nikkei Canadian Life. The author of The Long Afterlife of Nikkei Wartime Incarceration, Inouye is an expert on memory politics and commemorations of the Japanese American incarceration. Recently, I interviewed Inouye to learn about her journey on writing Kitagawa’s biography and the relationship of Kitagawa’s story to Japanese Canadian history.
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Jonathan van Harmelen (JVH): Thank you for agreeing to this interview with Discover Nikkei! I want to start by asking you how you became interested in Kitagawa’s story?
Karen Inouye (KI): In spring of 2012 I was finishing my first book, The Long Afterlife of Nikkei Wartime Incarceration, when I ran into a friend and colleague, Chris Lee, at a conference. Chris works at the University of British Columbia (UBC), and he suggested I come out to see their retroactive diploma ceremony for Japanese Canadians who had been unjustly expelled after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Chris deserves special thanks because that generous invitation wound up transforming my research.
I attended the ceremony, and during my visit Chris helped make it possible for me to interview several of the surviving students. I was amazed by the fact that many of the attendees had come not only to experience the righting of an historical wrong, but also to ensure contemporary graduates would witness the continued reverberation of the past in the present.
Needless to say, I wanted to learn about this woman Mary that everyone was talking about. She had spearheaded the effort – indeed, was the very reason it occurred at all – despite having been a small child in winter of 1941-1942. I wanted to know how and why she had decided to pursue such an important event in the face of significant cultural and administrative resistance.
Probably because he knew this would happen, Chris introduced me to Mary, who, along with her husband Tosh, spent years convincing the university to hold the ceremony and then helping the institution carry it out. That conversation convinced me to include the UBC ceremony in The Long Afterlife.
I stayed in touch with Mary, whose sharp wit and iron-clad memory for dates, places, and names made communication a genuine pleasure. No less important, there was clearly potential for a longer narrative about how and when her political activism took shape.
COVID sealed my fate when it put an end to research travel for another project I had been working on. With airports and libraries closed, and with grim statistics mounting, I asked Mary if she might be willing to sit for an interview. (I won’t lie: a big part of my thinking was simply that I wanted to hear her voice and talk about persistence in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.) She kindly agreed, and that marked the beginning of a series of conversations that ultimately gave form to A Nikkei Canadian Life.
JVH: I am a big fan of biographical writing, and I particularly appreciate the way you tell Kitagawa’s life story. What are some particular events that stood out to you about Kitagawa's story?
KI: I appreciated the way she talked about how her political activism took shape. I had gone into the project thinking she came to that project late in life, but the truth is that her politics were always at work; she just hadn’t had the opportunity to express them in a focused, programmatic way.
That’s where her clear grasp of history, both large- and small-scale, took on such importance. Particular places or events or people turned out to be inflection points: prewar life as a child on Salt Spring Island; the abduction of her father by an officer in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police; the combination of resourcefulness and kindness and pragmatism her mother, Kimiko, displayed; the increasing interdependence of Mary and her siblings during their inland exile; her first friendship with another Nikkei Canadian during her studies at the University of Toronto; the way Tosh won her over at a time when most Canadians of Japanese ancestry seemed to be marrying white spouses.
The more we talked, the more readily I could see how each moment, each challenge, each relationship had enabled Mary develop a sense of what it could mean to live as a Nikkei Canadian, rather than someone who was Nikkei in Canada.
In some ways, I find myself drawn to the family’s postwar years in southern Alberta, which so clearly demonstrate the importance of placing wartime incarceration in a much larger historical frame. Impoverished by their expulsion from BC, Mary’s parents decided to join one of Kimiko’s brothers in Cardston, where he ran a cafe. The next few years were incredibly hard, and I can only imagine how strange and trying an experience it must have been. On the one hand, Mary recalls her family as the only Asian Canadians in town at the time; the only other racialized group in the region was the Kanai Nation, members of which would visit the family’s restaurant.
On the other hand, Mary also recalled delightful moments of engagement with the community, such as when she and her younger sister played sports in high school: “Rose and I were on the basketball team, so you can tell how small people on the basketball team were.” And at the end of those strange and trying years, the family was finally in a position to return to Salt Spring Island, pay cash for a new parcel of land, and boldly settle into a population that included more than a few people who felt their expulsion had been justified. I flash on these postwar moments especially often because there’s been relatively little scholarship about them, especially with respect to Nikkei Canadians.
JVH: I appreciate that not only does your telling of Kitagawa’s story emphasize the role that Japanese Canadian women played in redress, but that you connect it with other human rights movements such as the First Nations and the Doukhobors (members of a Spiritual Christian group from Russia who settled in Canada and were persecuted there). Did you find any parallels between Kitagawa and other activists?
KI: Both Mary and Tosh have stressed the importance of how First Nations people shared their political strategies with Nikkei who were trying to organize redress efforts, and Art Miki has been working on a study of that vital information sharing. But for me, one of the most striking things I discovered in the course of researching this book was how many opportunities Mary simply did not have. Her Toronto years are a case in point. She was approached by other Nikkei at least a couple of times, but the impression she got was that they were interested primarily in socializing. Living on a shoestring budget and ever mindful of the sacrifices her parents were making to support her education, she felt she could not in good conscience pursue those invitations.
As for other groups on campus, particularly those dedicated to labor and antiracist activism, Mary seems not to have had the chance to learn about them. To support herself, she worked as a nanny, and the family that employed her lived far from campus. Consequently, whenever she wasn’t caring for the family’s young son, the bulk of her time was spent studying, attending classes, or commuting.
So, for me, perhaps the most pressing connection has to do with people who do not have the chance to act on their experiences, who do not have the opportunities to engage politically. The problem only seems likely to grow worse as social media become ever more closely aligned with money and political authority.
JVH: Were there any challenges in the writing process?
KI: The writing process is always difficult for me, slow and painful with seemingly endless revisions. I’m much more interested in human connection. That’s a big part of why I really enjoyed my conversations with Mary. She gave me opportunities not only to offset the alienation we all endured as a result of COVID, but also to see and feel how important human interaction is – socially, culturally, politically. Those conversations propelled me through the writing process.
JVH: I want to finish by asking about what readers should take away from Kitagawa’s story.
KI: Well, for one thing, it merits repetition that the history of Nikkei Canadians is very different than that of Nikkei Americans. In some ways it was even more difficult. For instance, people of Japanese ancestry in Canada were officially barred from British Columbia until 1949, whereas Nikkei Americans could move back to the West Coast in 1945. Furthermore, the Canadian government engaged in a kind of ethnic cleansing: discouraging Nikkei from congregating in neighborhoods and encouraging Nikkei to marry non-Nikkei; even some supporters of Nikkei advocated such measures.
For another thing, Mary’s life story reveals that activism can take shape long after an original assault. Looking at the longer history of marginalized peoples can help us see the origins and trajectory of activism, allowing us to understand it as something much more varied and complex than many might think. In addition, that life story can also help us see how political engagement is a social phenomenon that takes shape in conversation. It lives and dies by the opportunities we provide one another.
JVH: Lastly, are there any future projects on the horizon?
KI: Yes. I’m working with a co-author on play-spaces in wartime prison camps. We’re particularly interested in the relationship between formal and improvised sites, which tell us a lot about mid-century Nikkei American childhood. I’m also working on a longer-term project about indigenous interactions with Nikkei during World War Two on a global level.
© 2025 Jonathan van Harmelen
