This year marks the 80th Anniversary of the end of World War Two and the end of the internment for Japanese Canadians and Americans.
It’s a time to reflect on the passing of time that I note by the fact there are so few internment survivors in the Japanese Canadian community still with us. I’m lucky to have three aunts: Tomi, 93, Lorna, 86, and my amazing 102-year-old Aunt Jean Nakasuji who just moved into an old age home after spending many years in the Momiji Retirement Home in Toronto. I marvel at my family members who’ve seen it all.
My Nisei parents, Sumiko, survivor of Bayfarm, Slocan City, and Kaslo and Norman Takeshi, who lived and worked on a Manitoba sugar beet farm, have passed on. Wherever they are, I’m sure that they’re happy with how our lives have turned out. While their memories now fade into the family landscape as we, their kids, age, now more preoccupied with our own mortality than perhaps to remember what was. We, Hayashida cousins, have gotten together now for the past two summers. This in itself is a small miracle: getting together to celebrate our family connection, resilience, and determination. We’ve made it this far…
Like my Aunt Tomi Sutherland (nee Hayashida), pictured above, we have prevailed. Each one of us has our own unique success story. Despite every ill intention in the past, we’ve made it to 2025. Standing together. We are the ones who peacefully obeyed the Canadian government’s order to go east of the Rockies after World War Two. We even politely refused the government’s offer of free passage to Japan after the war. Instead, we are the ones who decided that staying here in Canada was better than wartorn Japan.
Japanese Canadians persevered through racist times when newspapers still got away with running headlines that unabashedly screamed “Japs Go Home!,” editorial cartoons portraying us with hateful caricatures, not renting or selling homes to us, preventing us from entering university programs, the professions, and even barring us from returning to Canada’s west coast until 1949. It really is amazing that we survived.
We don’t often talk about the family rifts that happened because of the internment. They certainly tore away at parts of the Hayashida family. However, here we are: 2025. We’re still here! I wish the real monsters: Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King (1874-1950); BC Member of Parliament (MP) Howard Charles Green (1895-1989), Minister of Public Works; Vancouver Centre MP, Ian MacAlister Mckenzie (1890-1949), Minister of National Defence (October 23, 1935 - September 18, 1939), and Minister of Pensions and National Health (September 19, 1939 - October 17, 1944), government leaders, who were among the most racist, could see us now. I wonder if they would feel any remorse?
As historian and lawyer Ann Gomer Sunahara points out in The Politics of Racism (1981), Ian Mackenzie was the impetus behind the Liberal party’s anti-Asian campaigns in British Columbia. He had no qualms about associating himself with hate literature that employed every lie and innuendo in the arsenal of the White Canada Association, literature with slogans like: “A Vote for ANY C.C.F. Candidate is a VOTE TO GIVE the CHINAMAN and JAPANESE the same Voting Right that you have!”
These days, world media reports are filled with news of the latest progress of war raging on in the Ukranian, the Middle East, Sudan, Syrian, et al, to the point where we’re numb to the horrors that visit the world’s most vulnerable on a daily basis. The music lover in me wonders about where are the protest songs for this generation when we need them now more than ever.
Yobun Shima, Asahi Baseball historian, Tokyo, Japan
In January 1914, my father, Fred Yoshio Shima, was born in Vancouver. He returned to Japan at the end of 1933 and helped his older brother, who had already returned to Japan, with his work.
When the war began, he was drafted and sent to Iriomote Island in Okinawa but was discharged before the American forces arrived. From June 1944 until the end of the war, he served as an interpreter for 300 British prisoners of war at the POW camp at Iruka village copper mine, Mie Prefecture. About half a century later, the British prisoners of war visited Iruka to pay their respects at the graves of 16 prisoners who had died.
At that time, my father went to Iruka and had a very friendly and excited reunion, which story was covered by the news media nationwide. Unbelievably, even though it was a POW camp, it was a friendly place.
Since then, my father and Iruka boys back home started numerous exchanges of letters which are kept in my father's old file. Keiko Holms, a native of Iruka who lives in London and who waved the flag for the reconciliation tour to Japan, was recognized for her contributions and received an honorary OBE from Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth in 1998.
Bryce Kanbara, artist and You Me Gallery owner, Hamilton, Ontario
In front of Hiroshima train station, you can buy an inexpensive (200 yen) ticket to catch frequently arriving buses that loop around the city core, stopping at major cultural sites such as the museums, and the castle. This past May, I went to the A-bomb dome and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. Even though you may know what you will see, these are not your typical tourist attractions, and they are right there in the middle of a modern city that carries on living, along with memories of instant and lingering death.
David Iwaasa, Retired Federal Government Economist, Vancouver, BC
This year, being the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, has given me pause for thought. Eighty years ago this month, my father was in Germany serving as a member of the Royal Canadian Engineers after having landed in Normandy and having gone through nearly five years of vicious fighting against the German army through France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. He was just one of some thirty Japanese Canadians who had been able to enlist in the Canadian Army prior to Pearl Harbour and had served faithfully despite knowing about the injustices being imposed on members of their community back in Canada.
My mother and her family were working in Raymond, Alberta, having been uprooted and forcibly transported from their home in Langley, B.C. just four years earlier. They would have only recently learned that their home and strawberry farm had been sold without their permission and much of the proceeds used to pay for their own forced removal and exile to Alberta. I know that they went through many hardships and that they shed tears over the seeming unfairness of what they had to endure. Yet, I marvel at their patience, diligence, and dogged perseverance in the face of the injustices and difficulties that they had to face.
I personally benefitted from their sacrifices and was privileged to grow up in a country that had become more welcoming of racial and cultural diversity. Moreover, having learned of the pain and suffering caused by bigotry and falsehoods spread by those who should have known better and aided by those who chose to stand idly by, I have become all the more determined to ensure that the stories and experiences of my forebearers are recorded and shared with my own family members and as many others who are willing to listen and learn. If historical injustices are allowed to repeat themselves, we have only ourselves to blame.
Thoughts of an Internment Survivor…
Howard Shimokura, Tashme Historical Project (THP) committee chair
I was 8 years old when internment ended, the Tashme Camp was closed and my family was forcibly dispersed to Alberta, most certainly against my parents’ desire to return to Vancouver. Although Japan surrendered in 1945 and the war was over, we could not return, unlike Japanese Americans who began their return to homes on the West Coast In 1945. I can never fully accept the 1988 apology for the injustice and violation of civil rights perpetrated by the Government of Canada until 1949.
But the world has changed enormously since 1945. Anti-Japanese racism for the moment is a thing of the past. Over the past 30 years, there has been a huge resurgence of public and Nikkei interest in our collective history when for years after 1945 such interest was suppressed by the Nikkei community. History of internment is blossoming.
Today, persons of Japanese descent are integrated as full members of Canadian society. In fact, we Canadians of Japanese ancestry live in a paradise.
Howard lived with his family in Tashme from 1942 to 1946, is a volunteer with the Nikkei National Museum in Burnaby, British Columbia.
Nisei Yoshimi Susan Maikawa, Retired Early Childhood Education teacher (Collingwood, Ontario)
Me, the little girl they called Ochapei, “chatterbox,” had not only figured out how to survive, but turned hardships into strengths. I felt very fortunate to have contributed and enhanced the quality of life of Canadians by sharing my Japanese ancestral heritage background as Canada progresses positively towards multi-culturalism. It is my sincere hope that I will still be able to serve faithfully as a devoted caretaker to enrich and provide a base to reflect upon, a path to peace and harmony in the present Canadian society and for future generations.
“Sitting on Top of the Fence”—There is a saying “The grass looks greener on the other side.” Sometimes, I felt that I was sitting on top of the fence. When I fell on this side or that side there was always a deep connection between Japanese or Western cultures. Whatever the situation was, whether I stumbled and struggled or not, I always gathered my inner strength to face reality in good faith and dealt with it.
—From “Bachan’s Story”
Artist Haruko Okano, Vancouver, B.C.
I hear that during that time of anti-Japanese there were those who resisted and went underground. Some were taken into indigenous communities, others hid to such an extent that it took the RCMP, police, and military two years to find and incarcerate them.
We don’t talk about veterans who enlisted in the Canadian armed forces to prove our loyalty only to find coming home there was nothing left for them except the ongoing racism.
There were fisher folks who rather than give up their boats chose to sink them as a form of protest. We do not know much if anything about those Japanese Canadian families who lived outside of BC who weren’t interned. How was the experience for them without the support of a large community or those who chose to move whole families away to Alberta (or Manitoba) in order to keep the family together.
We are resilient. We faced a breaking of trust from governments, society, and religious institutions and yet here we are.
© 2025 Norm Ibuki
