I didn’t continue digging into my Japanese Canadian family history for a while after finding their custodian file—for almost another half year, in fact. I became preoccupied with school and work and cancelled my Ancestry trial once it became clear I’d gone through every file with anything remotely similar to my family’s name.
Names like the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre (JCCC) and Nikkei National Museum were vague concepts far off on the horizon, places I’d heard of once or twice in passing. I didn’t investigate them or their archives further, not because I feared I’d find nothing, but because I feared finding something would send me down a rabbit hole I’d never find my way out of.
Instead, I turned towards cataloguing easier parts of my family tree. There were records and stories of my Black and European ancestors; oral histories and mythologies about how one person met another or how we eventually ended up in suburban South Ontario. I could ask my father and grandfather for these stories and piece them together with censuses or birth records.
Between chatter over dinner and the wealth of publicly available American records, I was able to track down the first woman in my Black family to be born free, all from the comfort of my Canadian home.
I should have been proud of myself, humbled, or felt more connected to my American side. But I somehow felt more lost, baffled at how I couldn’t find anything about my Japanese ancestors who’d lived in the same country—the same city—as me.
Maybe, I thought at that point, I’d found all there was. Maybe internment had wiped them off the map in B.C., and they’d intentionally wiped themselves off the historical record in Ontario. They seemed to hold their histories close to their chest, after all.
Maybe they didn’t want me to find them.
* * * * *
In the autumn of 2024, I’d just begun the third year of my writing degree. The semester was looking rough; I was expected to increase my written output by several times that of second year and do more critiques of my peers on top of it. I was looking for any way to lighten the load, and my feature writing class seemed like the perfect opportunity. All I had to do was pick something to write a feature-length piece about over the semester. It could be anything I wanted, and I wanted an easy A.
I mulled over what to write for a couple of weeks. Anything too vulnerable was off the table; I wasn’t looking to pour my heart out for a whole semester. My peers and I were advised to write a story only we could tell, and when I looked around at my class of non-Japanese classmates, I figured my family’s story qualified. Plus, I had all the information I could ever need in the custodian file and photo albums in the basement. I was set up for success.
When I floated the idea past Sadaf Ahsan, my professor (who seems to be a sniffer dog for good stories), she told it to me straight: she thought I had something big on my hands, a story that extended beyond a family history. I brushed it off because I didn’t want big. I wanted easy.
Sadaf gave me her blessing to write about my family, provided I could find a good journalistic angle. She encouraged me to get started with a word of warning: “don’t get lost in the weeds.” I laughed at that. What weeds were there to get lost in?
* * * * *
Although the assignment required me to interview three or four people, I started researching how I always do: burrowing under a blanket and reading as much as possible. I’d avoided diving too deep into my reading before, but now I had a reason.
And so I began. Justice in Our Time. Landscapes of Injustice. We Went to War. Obasan. I devoured them in a matter of weeks, making notes and effectively becoming a student in a subject foreign to me. When I was out of books, I pulled up the Archives of Ontario website and began sifting through declassified documents. During lectures, on the train home, before I fell asleep in bed—I scarfed down historical facts like I was starving. The more information I absorbed, the more I realized something stunning:
This was intentional. The internment wasn’t just a blip in history, carried out by a stressed, fearful government and its people. This—my family history never being passed down, why they never went back to B.C., why I knew so little about that historical period—was on purpose. A calculated, long-term attempt to erase Japanese people and history from Canadian records. Internment was just the apex.
This revelation gave me pause. I hadn’t learned anything about this in public school history classes (of which I took all). I hadn’t picked up on this anti-Japanese throughline in the textbooks I’d read cover-to-cover in the libraries. I’d been yapping off everyone’s ear in college about how I didn’t know anything about my Japanese Canadian family for almost two years at this point, and not once did anyone—peer or professor—mention anything past internment and classic old-timey racism.
No one around me, it seemed, knew anything about anything Japanese Canadian. But open on my desktop were books, studies, and letters between government officials detailing plans to solve British Columbia’s “Japanese Problem.”
Despite being raised to question everything and examine systems of power critically, I think this is what radicalized me. The loss of my family’s story wasn’t an accident. It was an intentional, systemic erasure by a racist government.
This infuriated me but also opened my eyes to something beyond my family. My pinhole focus on my ancestors immediately expanded to every other Yonsei and Gosei experiencing the same thing. The Big Bang had happened in my head, and in an instant, I was looking at countless other parts of the universe, connecting dots I’d only just learned existed. Once I quieted my rage (by talking my parents’ ears off), I sat back down at the computer.
I had an angle for my story. It was time to start setting up interviews.
* * * * *
While I emailed academics, amateur historians, and folks like Greg Nesteroff, who’d already helped me, I worked up the courage to ask the owners of the local Japanese grocer, Sandown Market, for an interview. Even though I was equally determined and excited to speak with scholars and people who had experienced internment firsthand, I needed a shin-ijusha perspective. The owners of Sandown Market, who’d been in business for fifty years and lived east of the prairies for their entire Canadian lives, seemed ideal candidates.
When I asked Reiko, the “mom” of the mom-and-pop operation, she was happy to answer questions, albeit through a friend’s translation. I quickly learned her story, how she ended up in Canada postwar—and, most importantly for my story, her experience with the Japanese-Canadian community In Etobicoke, Ontario.
I was shocked to hear that it was similar to mine. “Nothing,” she answered when I asked about the local JC community. “It’s just me and my husband.” The JCCC existed, of course, but it was a trek to get there. She and her husband had a store to run and, in their younger years, a family to care for. Visiting the building was an occasional privilege reserved for festivals. Without a cultural hub, they became the cultural hub, drawing in other Japanese Canadians by word of mouth.
I didn’t know what to do with this information. I’d fully expected western Toronto to have something—anything—more than Mississauga, but the JCCC, two hours east of my home, remained the last bastion. It seemed like my other interviews would be remote.
* * * * *
As I absorbed and processed these mass amounts of information, I likely became the single most irritating student in my college program; each fact I absorbed, I spat right back out for someone else to learn. It was the only way I could reckon with the insane injustices I was reading about.
I’d pore over documents detailing how government officials planned on scattering the Japanese Canadian community in the evenings and tell my peers and professors the next day. I’m sure I isolated some folks, but the real surprise is that people listened. In fact, people didn’t just listen; they became invested in a history that didn’t pertain to them, one they hadn’t learned about in high school or on social media.
Suddenly, I had a small but dedicated group of individuals who were just as fascinated with Japanese Canadian history as me. People who were eager to have me connect the dots and relay the information to them, eager to know what was buried in mountains of jargon-filled government files and hundred-page-long books.
I had an audience. Not just for my frustrated information dumps but for whatever came out of my feature writing class. I hadn’t even begun putting pen to paper, but there were people invested. Enablers, really, but the good kind; with their push and encouragement from Sadaf, I was officially down the rabbit hole.
To be continued...
© 2025 Ava Sakura
