FINDING HOME AFTER INTERNMENT A SEVEN-SIDED STORY ART PRACTICE, MEMORY AND ENGAGED RESPONSE
KATHERINE TERESA YAMASHITA
A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
GRADUATE PROGRAM IN EDUCATION LANGUAGE, CULTURE AND TEACHING YORK UNIVERSITY TORONTO, ONTARIO
SEPTEMBER 2011
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By virtue of submitting this document electronically, the author certifies that this is a true electronic equivalent of the copy of the dissertation approved by York University for the award of the degree. No alteration of the content has occurred and if there are any minor variations in formatting, they are as a result of the conversion to Adobe Acrobat format (or similar software application).
Examination Committee members:
1. Lisa Farley (Chair) 2. Rishma Dunlop (Supervisor) 3. Aparna Mishra Tare (Program Member) 4. Yvonne Singer (Outside Member) 5. Mario DiPaolantonio (Dean's Representative) 6. Pamela Sugiman (External) ABSTRACT
This dissertation employs artistic practice to explore points of intersection and divergence among the life histories of seven sisters who were interned by the Canadian government during World War II. The study draws on the personal perspectives of the researcher and her family members to conduct an intergenerational exploration of historical trauma and its transference. Each story recounts the experience of internment, its aftermath, as well as the time and place that each storyteller found "home." A participatory art installation was produced that employs a variety of visual, written, and audio/visual texts. Functioning as a point of engagement, this immersive environment acted as a place of witness, a researcher's response, and as an open invitation for gallery visitors to make meaning. This supports the researcher's claim that through artistic practice, archives containing personal witness accounts can engage an audience direcdy, challenge or reframe historical pre conceptions, inspire meaning making, and invite creative response. In the written text, this work contributes to the field of memory studies through an interweaving of collected artifacts: historical photographs, autobiographical life writing, and life history interviews to support the claim that context, personal and collective significance, and the meaningful transference of personal histories can reframe, resignify, and supplement official accounts of history. Experiences of the Japanese Canadian Internment are reconstructed through personal and creative practices of memory to theorize the idea of post-memory and its significance to a member of a post-generation. Moving between lyric and more traditional text, journeys through memory and the photograph, history and postrnemory, home and identity, document a personal path through these theoretical territories. Finally, the stories of the sisters present the memories and experiences of specific lives told in relation to the injustices enacted against Japanese Canadians. They demonstrate the difference between living through and beyond events and the black- and-white facts of history. The stories show how the sisters—after alienation, incarceration, and displacement—managed to establish family, identity, and home.
IV Dedicated to
Jean Yaeko Fujimoto Lucielle Oikawa Kimie Watanabe June Minemoto Lily Westerlund Susan Olssen May Kumoi Naomi Kumoi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to first thank my daughter who interviewed and videotaped my mother for a high school assignment. Her interest in our family history inspired me in my work here.
My mother and my aunts have been central in my work and in helping me to better understand our female family heritage. I am so grateful for their gracious gifts of time, and most importandy, for their stories. I dedicate this work to them.
I would like to acknowledge the inspiration and support of Professor Rishma Dunlop. I found my voice in having to read my writing aloud in her class. Her support of my hybrid and often fragmented way of working has allowed me to develop as a researcher and as an artist.
My thanks to the other members of my committee, Professor Lisa Farly and Professor Aparna Mishra Tare for their support and guidance through many rewrites. I would also like to thank Professor Mary Leigh Morbey and Professor Ron Owston for early support.
Sincere thanks also to the members of my examination committee, Professor Yvonne Singer, Professor Mario DiPaolantonio and Professor Pamela Sugiman for their expertise and contributions to conversations about my research. I appreciate the whole committee's willingness to come to the gallery for the defence so they could experience the artistic component of this dissertation.
My gratitude and thanks to the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre for their support and the opportunity to show my work in their gallery and to the National Association of Japanese Canadians for their support.
My love and thanks to my family for all their support in my academic endeavours.
vi TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction 1
Chapter 1 The "Eye.I" In My Work 10 Art-Practice as Research 11 Postmemory and Research 18 Oral History and Shared Authority 21
Chapter 2 Previous Excavations 29 The Japanese in Canada Before and During the War 30 Women and the Internment Early Writings 32 Recent Views 34 Memory and Identity 37 Creative Response 43
Chapter 3 Photographic Memory 51 Thoughts Written For My Mother 52 Memory and the Photograph 61
Chapter 4 A Journey Into the Past 72 B.C. Journal: My Historical Research 73 Post-Memory 94
Chapter 5 Home Away From Home 102 Visiting Japan to Interview Aunt Kimie 103 Homes Away From Home 108
Chapter 6 Lived History 115 Seven Sisters' Life Stories 116
Chapter 7 Artistic Construction, Psychic Reconstruction 149
Bibliography 162
vii TABLE OF IMAGES
1. Self-Portrait, Mixed Media, K. Yamashita viii 2. A Day that Will Live in Infamy, K. Yamashita 1 3. Notice for the forced evacuation ofJapanese Canadians from the B.C. coast. Vancouver Sun and Vancouver Province newspapers in June 1942 © Vancouver Public Library / VPL Accession No. 12851 CD No. 159 ' 2 4. My Eye/Ego, K. Yamashita 10 5. My mother andfriends in Tashme, Collection of Jean Fujimoto 28 6. Photographic Memories, Photo Collage, Katherine Yamashita 51 7. My mother, aunt and son in Kyoto, K. Yamashita, 2005 52 8. Grandma's Ashes, K. Yamashita, 2005 54 9. Chemainus Picnic, Collection of Kenji Kumoi 56 10. Family Portrait, Chemainus, Collection of Kenji Kumoi 57 11. Mom, Uncle Kenchan, Aunt May, Aunt Kimie, Kenji and Me 58 12. Mining and Undermining, mixed media, Katherine Yamashita 72 13. Tashme Christian Girls in Training, September 4, 1945, Jo Seko 75 14. Mike and me at Bear Point, J ean Fujimoto, 1978 78 15. Mom at the Chemainus Cemetery, K. Yamashita, 1978 79 16. Sunshine Valley Real Estate Office, K. Yamashita 85 17. Tashme Internment Camp, Photo courtesy of the Hope Museum Hope Travel Information Centre, 919 Water Avenue, Hope, BC, Canada 86 18. Sunshine Valley, K. Yamashita, 2008 87 19. Mike on the Bridge, K. Yamashita, 2008 89 20. Group Photo, Tashme, Photo courtesy of the Hope Museum 91 21. The Oikawa Family 102 22. The home of Emi, Yoshihiro and Kotaro, K. Yamashita, 2009 104 23. Uncle Kenchan's Ashes, K. Yamashita, 2009 105 24. Family Barbeque at the Kawasakis', K. Yamashita, 2009 107 25. Leave-taking, K. Yamashita, 2009 108 26. Message to Aunt Lily, K. Yamashita 115 27. Chemainus Superior, Division 6, 1938, Collection of J ean Fujimoto 119 28. View From Home, K. Yamashita 149 29. Finding Home Exhibition, Katherine Yamashita 150 30. Finding Home Opening, Katherine Yamashita 153 31. Memoy Box Covers, Katherine Yamashita 154 32. Letters, Katherine Yamashita 155 33. Creative Response Station 156 34. Video Response Station 156 Image 1. Self-Portrait, K. Yamashita
Memory is water cupped in the palm of a hand. It slips through fingers, running free, and falls on me to be absorbed, leaving first a dark stain and then evaporating — into soul.
I remember...
I remember what you told me of your life before, but the story changes a litde every time you tell it. My memory of your telling is what I have constructed from what you may or may not remember. I have built the stories into elaborate constructions that have litde to do with your memories created day-by-day, emerging and receding; but have everything to do with the truth between you and me. K. Yamashita
ix INTRODUCTION
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Image 2. Day that Willi Jve in Infamy, Photo CoUage, Katherine Yamashita On December 7, 1941, Japan bombed Pearl Harbour, and life for a family in a small logging town on Vancouver Island changed forever. On February 24, 1942, the first in a series of Orders-in-Council passed under the War Measures Act, gave the
Canadian federal government the power to "completely regulate the lives of all persons of Japanese origin."1 The British Columbia Security Commission was formed and oversaw much of what happened to these people from that point onward.
NOTICE TO ALL JAPANESE PERSONS All PERSONS OF JAPANESE RACIAL ORIGIN TAKt NOTKt TFCART 0ntm MM. It. 1O, it ml Kb* MNfc SMaM* m, »M mmft wtn iiw ** j iRAwo ,UAM0 KMT MOOOT K>CO MSTMCT OF *** coqwuam MAIUAkOVfUt M|WW wrVTMlN}Tt« IIASIK MliU ANO »UlfN(« «A*« NOllCt fW» «•* mmf «# «W ***** »*»•*#** • Hi* ' C*^ew*w» Cw* #«*«• t*.vmm9*4 Ihrfk#Or^«) ffc«£t•» 1* f C. }£4>S Auiim e TAVtot. Ciwnrn**,
Image 3. Notice for the forced evacuation of Japanese Canadians from the B.C. coast. This notice appeared in the Vancouver Sun and Vancouver Province newspapers in June 1942. © Vancouver Public Library / VPL Accession No. 12851 / CD No. 159
My grandparents and their ten children were sent to Hastings Park, and later to Tashme Internment Camp, in the interior of British Columbia. After the war, my grandparents and their 11 children were dispersed throughout Japan and Eastern
2 Canada. The decade after the war found them in Japan, Eastern Canada, Western
Canada, and the United States. The family has never been reunited since Tashme.
As a child of peacetime born in the suburbs of Toronto, the experiences of this family seemed remote and almost unimaginable. Though these experiences are the roots of my history, I felt very much like an outsider looking in on them. The fragments I gathered from my mother about her experiences during these times were anecdotal and fragmentary at best; but I knew there was a story lying underneath the everyday surface of our lives and I wondered about its significance. Eva Hoffman, the child of Holocaust survivors, relates her feelings about this: "Until then it had not occurred to me that I was in fact a receptacle of a historical legacy or that its burden had a significance and weight that needed to be acknowledged."2
The stories my parents told me of their childhood did not have the word
"internment" in them. They told me of picnics on the beach, a favourite dog, first train rides, mountain streams, a racket club, concerts, and the good will of priests, sisters, and teachers. Occasionally, these happy childhood stories would be punctuated with tales of harder times, but they did not seem extraordinary. It was not until I became a teenager, and I heard of the Interment from other sources, that my parents' past took on a different significance. I felt a kind of pride of association, but
I was ignorant of my parents' real experiences during the war and the mark it left on their lives.
3 Although the Canadian Government made its official apology to Japanese
Canadians on September 22, 1988, thus officially ending the story that began in 1942, the black-and-white facts of these acts offered a single story, one that was difficult to empathize with, even for a child of those who lived through it. For this reason, I sought stories told from one adult to another, not the fairy tales told to me as a child, but the fragmented, half-remembered and complex stories that brought out the shades of grey between black and white.
When I conducted the interviews of these seven sisters, I did not know what stories these women had for me or how they would affect me. I intended the process to be a goal in itself. I wanted to inspire personal and situated learning. Being an artist, my research and analysis followed a creative rather than traditional, analytic process, one that was research- and artistic creation-based.3 My specific approach involved journal and letter writing in a lyric style, mixed media work, and video. It culminated in a multi-media gallery installation. This multi-text approach followed a sometimes wandering but determined path to find answers about my relationship with a personal, and also national, identity.
My art installation provided a series of individual lenses through which a period in history could be viewed. These stories were presented as open texts that challenged gallery visitors to construct a personal framework mapping how each story related to the Japanese Canadian experience during and after World War II. I did this to draw out connections between these stories and the visitors' own experiences. The
4 work challenged them to ask what Deborah Britzman calls "dangerous questions":
"What is it that structures my own stories and my own intelligibility? What do my moral imperatives cost?"4
The stories were presented to provide a point of entry, to promote an interaction between a text and its reader. There was no single authoritative voice presented in the installation. The texts and multi-texts were designed to create a narrative atmosphere that operated on many levels: video, still images, artifacts, and mixed media. These varied levels created the bits and pieces of a family history and encouraged the visitor to make a personal connection to the experience, to piece it together. The installation welcomed interpretations and derivations.
My multi-text way of working began at York University in a graduate education class called the Act of Writing. It grew out of weekly memoir writing assignments given to us by our instructor, Professor Rishma Dunlop. Writing these assignments awakened brilliant and detailed memories of my childhood, youth, and also memories of stories told to me by my mother about her childhood. As a photographer and artist, I found that words were not enough — I rooted out old photos that I had seen in my childhood. I surprised myself by creating, in only a few days, a series of mixed-media artworks containing my writing and historical family photographs. I became obsessed with the idea of exploring this history about which I knew very little and from which I felt very detached. This drive to know led me to read several versions of the official story, to seek out testimonies, read personal
5 accounts, read academic papers, visit museums, and also to visit the sites where each of my parents was interned. All these investigations and creations have been an attempt to solve a family mystery, and more importantly to unlock the puzzle of who
I am and how I have been formed by those who have come before.
The story of the Japanese Canadian Internment has been told several times in several ways. For me, a primary goal has been to resist an easy truth or interpretation.
There was no easy piecing together of historical facts or artificts as I had first hoped, especially since the sisters' ages range over 14 years. Many barely remember their place of birth and some have only vague memories of Tashme. I did not uncover all the family secrets or find the reason why people turn against one another in times of war. What I did create was the map of the personal journey taken through memories and told in the first person. I came to value the complex shades of grey and subtle textures that arose through working in this way. This personal approach brought broader understanding of how a people endure trauma. Most importandy, I learned that in the narrative of a life, even trauma is only one chapter and that other chapters can be as or more important, such as the chapters about enduring and overcoming traumatic events and injustices and how one progresses to live life afterwards.
The words of Muriel Kitagawa, a Japanese Canadian woman displaced during the war, offers several signposts:
I felt again the fears and confusion, the hysteria, the feeling of being caged in helplessness. And if, out of the welter of those days, we wrung from our battered resources, any cheerfulness, it was the cheerfulness in all people who rise above disaster. This is not particularly a Japanese trait.3
6 Muriel Kitagawa further observed the cheerfulness of Londoners during the blitz. The difference, however, was that Londoners were free citizens of their country being attacked by a declared enemy. In Muriel's case she was a Canadian declared the enemy of Canada, and was treated like one.
The use of the War Measures Act—the ethical ramifications of decisions made by the British Columbia Security Commission—may seem distant, but events as recent as the actions of police during the G8 Conference in Toronto in 2010 show how what seem to be a Canadian's inalienable rights can be ignored.
In her book The Politics of Racism: The Uprooting of Japanese Canadians During the
Second World War, Ann Gomer Sunahara states that fear is a powerful tool in enacting racist policies that contravene human rights6. She observes how anti-Asian politicians and group leaders "were successful because they appealed not to logic, but to fear: fear of economic competition, fear of social disruption and intermarriage, and fear for personal and national security. For seventy years the anti-Asian movement had exploited the fears of those in real or imagined competition with Asians."7 This kind of thinking still operates today. In July 2011, after a bombing and terrible shooting massacre of youth in Norway, experts featured in the British and other media were quick to assume Islamic terrorism when the real attacker was a Norwegian anti-
Muslim extremist. This tendency of the media to inflame popular prejudice was profiled by journalist Charlie Brooker in The Guardian UK on July 24 in his article
7 "The news coverage of the Norway mass-killings was fact-free conjecture." Media attitudes in Ann Sunahara's Politics of Racism are disturbingly similar.
At the outset, I wanted to construct a definitive family history out of the stories of these women and use it to add another dimension to the official story of internment. In the process of attempting this, I realized the parts of the story were greater than any whole that I could construct. The gaps in the story created spaces for me to seek other voices and other facts. Anecdotes and insights brought experiences of my own to my mind. They hinted at a female family heritage that seemed foreign, yet poignantly familiar. I wanted to know more, and more importantly, I wanted to express how I felt about what these women had shared with me. Interacting with these stories proved to be the realm where informed understanding and relationship building occurred.
The survivors of trauma and injustice are more than living textbooks with important facts to pass on before they are forgotten. Life story testimony is more significant when the life experience of the teller inspires the desire to understand the person, not just the events. Relationships that inspire active and creative response can work against prejudice and promote transformative understanding.
8 Notes
1 Ken Adachi, The Enemy that Never Was, (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Ltd., 1976), 216. 2 Eva Hoffman, After Such Knowledge: Memory, History and the legacy of the Holocaust. (New York: Perseus Books, 2004), x. 3 The field of Research and Artistic Creation is defined by Dr. Rishma Dunlop in her syllabus for a course of the same name offered at York University (course # EDUC5240, Fall, 2009). 4 Britzman, 32. 5 Muriel Kitagawa, This is My Own, lMters to Wes and Other Writings on Japanese Canadians, 1941-1948. Ed. Roy Miki (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1985), 187. 6 Ann Gomer Sunahara. The Politics of Racism: The Uprooting of Japanese Canadians During the Second World War, (Ottawa: Ann Gomer Sunahara, 2000). 7 Ibid.,7.
9 CHAPTER 1
THE "EYE/I" IN MY WORK NAVIGATING MEMORIES AND POSSESSING THEM
Image 4. My Eye/Ego, K.Yamashita
My universe consists of the 'ocula' or natural, physics-based imagery created on my retina and every social, psychological, literal or transverse glance that 1 have ever made. The 'balloon-cye' of Redon is my subconscious and dream-life and each gazes on the other. This unstable, shifting world is home forme. Journal entry January 2008 Art-Practice as Research
I want to encourage generations of researchers to speak to each other and to their communities with open hearts, to be eye/I witnesses to the world, to speak in our own voices, not the third person impersonal historically sanctioned as the proper voice of academic research.1
In the quote above, Rishma Dunlop challenges academics to present themselves as personal witnesses of their subjects of investigation. In this dissertation
I attempt to negotiate territory that traverses art practice, memory studies, and identity construction as an artist and researcher.
In his essay "Research Acts in Art Practice,"2 Graeme Sullivan observes that art practice is intimately tied to the practice and goals of academic research.3 He also claims that arts practice considers the complex relationship between artist, subject, and viewer or the researcher, the researched, and the reader in the case of academic research.
The researcher and the researched are both changed by the process because creative and critical inquiry is a reflexive process. Similarly, a viewer or reader is changed by an encounter with an art object or a research text as prior knowledge is troubled by new possibilities.4
Initially, this dissertation involved the collecting of stories from family members who have lived through the Japanese Canadian Internment. The intent was to bring their stories into conversation with the documented history of this time in
Canada; however, my research in preparation for the interviews involved reflection and response that became a journey of self-identity and art creation in the form of lyric journal writing and the creation of multi-media artworks. The collection of the
11 life stories turned the focus of my work from my own personal path of investigation to the lives of these seven sisters who were interned during the war, and more importantly how they found home after it. My analysis and reflection of the stories collected naturally led to the creation of an artistic expression of this research and to the proposal of a new way of engaging my reader in the experience of it.
Sullivan further outlines how postmodernity and a critical conceptual shift in the art-making process has drawn art practice and research practice closer. He identifies the shift away from art defined by media, technique, or style and the movement toward art defined as a concept or an expanded way of working and thinking:
What has expanded, however, is the range of conceptual tools, creative approaches, and communal contexts, within which artistic practice takes place. A characteristic of this practice shows that artists periodically "think in a medium," "think in a language," and "think in a context."5
This ideological move from stylistic expression to concept-driven exploration and provocation repositions art practice as a "theoretical act"6 that can be practiced within theoretical research. Given the personal and creative path of my initial research for this dissertation, I chose to present the interviews collected as an artistic embodiment of the women themselves to my reader in the form of an art exhibition.
In 'Toward Connectedness: Aesthetically Based Research," Liora Bresler suggests that aesthetics is at the heart of both artistic experience and qualitative research, and that artistic processes, in particular, the space surrounding art experiences, can illuminate significant aspects of qualitative research, including data collection, data analysis, and writing."7 Liora Bresler writes of the "I-Thou" relationship that exists between researchers and their subject and later, how the expectation that this interaction will be shared with an audience intensifies their relationship—what she calls tri directional* She further observes that the arts provide rich and powerful models for perception, conceptualization, and engagement for both makers and viewers. "I highlight their potential to cultivate habits of mind that are directly relevant to the processes and products of qualitative research."9 Bresler later refers to this kind of work as a dialogic process.
The tri directional relationship, and the search for both social and individual understanding, has been critical in the development of my methodology. Creating places for these three parties to engage in meaningful dialogue and the exchange of ideas has been the logical extension of this tri-directional relationship. As the artist/researcher, I wanted to create the "space to discuss these processes of spinning, discovering, and presenting oneself turned inside out to the public gaze." 10 The gallery installation allowed each storyteller to speak for herself. Presented in their original interview format, visitors to the installation heard the questions as well as the answers. The construction of the space, the placement of elements, the choice of content, and the timing of events within the gallery experience constructed an immersive environment that challenged gallery visitors to become active agents in a tri-directional relationship between the researcher, the storytellers, and themselves.
The relationship between art practice and research brings to light the
13 importance of the objective and subjective as more than polarities. Maxine Greene observes this disruption of the binary:
Once we do away with habitual separations of the subjective from the objective, the inside from the outside, we might be able to give imagination its proper importance and grasp what it means to place imagination at the core of understanding.11
In her chapter "Transformative Subjectivity in the Writings of Christa
Wolf,"12 Sandra Frieden writes how a similar kind of balance is found in the writing of Christa Wolf. Writing from a feminist standpoint, Sandra Frieden sees the work of
Wolf "direcdy addressing issues of identity formation and social change."13 Wolf accomplishes this through a Active form that explores and confuses ideas of self, subjectivity, fiction, and documentary. Her work, "The Quest for Christa T." is both
a fictional account based on real-life sources and an artist's self-projection into her
own character to create a montage of the two Christas. Wolf employs a non-
traditional form to accentuate this duality: "The first person narration carries no
quotation marks, ambiguously blends first-person account with direct discourse, and
confuses self-address with words spoken to and by others."14 In this way, Wolf
employs a non-traditional form to artistically present her own ideas and perspectives
through the vehicle of her protagonist. My own work does not go this far, but I feel
the presence of my own voice and experience colours this work in a similar way.
In her more traditionally autobiographical work, Patterns in Childhood, Wolf s
work and my own have more in common. This work recalls the first 16 years of the
author's life through the lens of a family trip back to her childhood home. This frame of the family trip allows Wolf to present her past through a subjective, adult, and present-day lens. In addition, the trip itself is presented as a diary not only of the physical journey, but also of the process of writing the book—her own artistic process. Frieden describes how "the individual and social histories are summoned through the childhood memories of the adult, act upon the adult retrieving them, and are commented upon by the reflecting writer, who (re)views their significance within an ever broadening spectrum of current events and moral values."15 Later in this chapter, Frieden describes in the work of Christa Wolf the kind of creative/factual and non-traditional, but deeply considered presentation of theory, research, and insight that I desired to present in my own work:
The model she presents for identification is not that of a unified self, but that of an insistently questioning subjectivity, a sense of self which, on the one hand, disregards the expected boundaries separating "self' and "other," and on the other hand, acknowledges the differences between them. Her multiple use of forms—the rendering of (auto) biographical information into varied formats—prevents a fixation on conventional narrative functions of identification or closure. Combining narrative forms with open-ended essays, letters, and journal structures, she uses form and content to reduce and resist the powerful influence of patriarchal canons.16
My own path through this work has been one of discovering voice as well as self. More challenging has been the task of navigating and formulating a coherent path between established historical facts, the oral histories of my mother and my aunts, and my own journey of self-discovery through this research. I found myself engaged in journaling and art making as often as reading and researching. I found both provided forums for reflection and analysis.
15 Alessandro Portelli observes how "oral sources are always the result of a relationship, a common project in which both the informant and the researcher are involved, together."17 My work acts as a case study to investigate a personal voyage through this complicated landscape in an attempt to map out the relations between personal and public history, individual and cultural memory, and the knowledge that can be learned from the interaction of each.
As a result of my own varied interests and my own particular habits of mind, this work touches on several separate but related fields of study: memory studies, oral history research, art practice as research, intertextuality, visual culture studies, identity construction, and the concept of home.
My journey charts this artist/researcher's difficulty in steering a straight and traditional course through these various areas of study and approaches. I find my own tendency for divergence is complicated by the multi-textual, transdiciplinary nature of knowledge and self-construction in the face of cultural shifts in the developed world that are being heralded by the omnipresence of the Internet. The relentless flow of information and the continuous opportunities for self-promotion and self-construction in collective knowledge bases and social networking are shaking up the foundations of educational theory as well as the academy. This shift in the balance of power with regards to the knowledge economy has in some ways challenged the academic world and expanded the artist's. Postmodern, feminist, and more often deconstructivist theories have offered signposts of meaning for me, but I
16 propose that the theoretical wandering I employ charts a method of investigation in itself.
My intent has been to document a process of investigation that involved the collection of foundational research, data collection, and the presentation of findings through both artistic and theoretical practice. The written part of this work reflects a kind of schizophrenic vacillation between academic and lyric text, explicit and open- ended ideas, sources in the first person, citation from authoritative texts, and interpretations that lack any distance at all. When this rather uncertain path through theory, research, and autobiography is combined with the art installation, I feel that a better balance is achieved. In the installation the women speak for themselves, and my process as an artist and researcher takes a back seat to the other artifacts in the room: my letters, the memory boxes with their photos and other documents, and most importantly, the postcard and video responses of gallery visitors.
Bresler stresses the importance of balance between aesthetic or academic distance and rationality in creating a critical framework for understanding. She states that one of the goals of qualitative research is empathic understanding:
To accomplish empathic understanding, the researcher must achieve a state of mind that is explicidy rational, and at the same time, highly affective. The experiences of art where caring propels a dialogical relationship with the artwork, a relationship that is both affective and cognitive, provides, I suggest, an important model for research. The unique juxtaposition of affect and cognition, caring and distance, that renders making and the viewing of art dialogic and transformative are mobilized towards empathic understanding.18
In documenting my process through historical texts, theoretical texts, and
17 institutional and personal artifacts, the fine line between research/artistic process and aesthetic/academic distance has been the most challenging for me. As an artist, researcher, and educator, the most engaging point of interest for me in interviewing, collaborating with, or guiding others, is the opportunity to observe how individuals narrate their stories, explain their beliefs, solve problems, and by degrees, share who they are with me. I also applied this approach to track my own development as an artist, researcher, and Japanese Canadian woman.
Postmemory and Research
Ethnographic research seeks to study and to define culture. In its methods, ethnographic research (and life history interviews in particular), can be seen as the telling of many stories. In her chapter, "The Question of Belief: Writing
Poststructural Ethnography," Britzrnan describes the allure of ethnographic research and its aim to present a culture that the reader can "step into" and "act like a
native."19 She then identifies the "belief and expectation that the ethnographer is
capable of producing truth from the experience of being there and that the reader is receptive to the truth of the text."20 I present my reader with both more and less. I
present seven eyewitness stories that constitute the varied and complex threads of my own family heritage and a personal perspective on an important series of events in
Canadian history. I present this work as rich material for investigation, but I also trace a personal journey in search of identity and understanding.
18 Britzman further observes how the landscape of ethnographic research has become a "contested and Active geography"21 in the advent of poststructuralist theories. In speaking of the complex interactions between the participant, the author, and the reader, she observes how all three "voices create a cacophony and dialogic display of contradictory desires, fears, and literary tropes that, if carefully 'read,' suggest just how slippery speaking, writing, reading and desiring subjectivity really are."22 This caution poses a challenge to both the researcher and the reader to look deeper and learn more. When considering the Japanese Canadian experience, Roy
Kikooya's work offers a unique perspective. His book Mothertalk: Life Stories of Mary
Kiyoshi Kiyooka2} transcribes recordings of his mother's life stories and weaves together an autobiography that is warm and personal. It creates the sense of an Issei woman, the daughter of samurai, who found herself on a sugar-beet farm in Alberta.
The story is told with the voice a mother uses with her son, and so the reader hears the stories from the son's point of view.
Reading Kiyooka's book put a face and a personality behind the facts and insights made by Ann Sunahara in The Politics of Racism.24 Both works had a strong impact on me as a Sansei. My experience in reading Mothertalk was mediated by Roy
Kiyooka himself, and by Daphne Marlatt, who extensively edited the work after
Kiyooka's death. Like Roy Kiyooka, I researched personal connections that are not just about identification, or even transference. As an artist I wanted to create a work that acted as a vehicle for the stories and as an archive that provoked meaning
19 making and response. My desire to interact with, to question, and to respond to each storyteller brought my own experience and understanding into conversation with the storytellers'; the gallery exhibition was the result. The aim of the exhibition was to inspire gallery visitors to question, interact with, and creatively respond.
Annette Kuhn, in her book Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination,25 writes about the ways in which individual stories expand in significance. They spread into an extended network of meanings that brings together the personal and the familial, the cultural, the economic, the social, and the historical. The field of memory studies makes it possible to explore connections between "public" historical events, family dramas, relations of class, national identity, gender, and personal memory. In these cases, outer and inner, social and personal, historical and psychical histories coalesce and the web of interconnections binding them becomes visible.26
The importance of interaction and response in creating broader understanding about historical trauma brought me to the memory and postmemory work conducted around the Holocaust. Marianne Hirsch defines postmemory as "the relationship of the second generation to powerful, often traumatic, experiences that preceded their births but that were nevertheless transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their own right."27 She also touches on the importance of adoptive witnesses28 in the transmission of memory and the significance of traumatic histories. In their article "Remembrance as Praxis and the Ethics of the Inter-
human,"29 Roger I. Simon, Mario DiPaolantonio, and Mark Clamen outline my own
goal in presenting life stories as multi-texts. They write of engaging the reader in
spaces "that advance, encourage and enable practices of ethical response and critical
learning through which one might explore the fundamental terms of relation with an
absent presence that—through testament—arrives asking, demanding something of
us."30 Simon et al employ historiographic poetics, which is a multi-textual form of
collage: "the citation and arraignment of a finite set of testamentary texts and images in juxtaposition."31 Here, a specific history in the form of stories, artifacts, and images is presented as fragments in order to astonish and present what Lisa Farely calls a
place of undecidability, where "conventional notions of living and learning from the
past might be rethought and transformed."32 Rather than creating a collage of
juxtapositions, my approach employs a collection of closely related artifacts that relate
to one family's experience during the war. It proposes a personal response not to
present group members or other readers, but a response directed to the storyteUers
themselves and to the artist.
Oral History and Shared Authority
The life histories I was told were richly revealing about the war and its impact, but they were also profoundly shaped by the men's post-war lives, by their role as storytellers, and by their relationships with me and with the legend of their lives.33
In the fields of history and memory studies, the place of the oral history is
complexly situated. My challenge has been not only to authentically track how the stories of these women present various ways of finding both a physical and a conscious home but has also been a journey for me to incorporate the family heritage of the Japanese Canadian Internment into an understanding of who I am.
Because, like my mother, I do not look as Asian as the rest of my family, and because my parents chose not to share their wartime experiences with me earlier on,I grew up with a rich connection to Japanese culture through involvement in the
J apanese Canadian community, but not to the specific experience or history of my family during the war. As I have grown older, I have had an uncomfortable and unsettled sense of identification with this culture and more specifically, this history.
This insecurity about my identity has inspired this work.I wanted the opportunity to find out more about this part of my family history.
After recording each woman's story, enjoying time with them as a family, and later, after listening to their stories many times, I began to see how complex the experiences of an individual are compared to the common understanding of the facts of an historical event. How does one's relation to one's subjects change the usual dynamic between researcher and subject? Perhaps intimacy with one's subject can bring knowledge. Or is objective looking and listening required too? The first requires relationship; the second requires reflection and intense observation. Are these diametrically opposed practices or complementary ones? I think they are both.
Portelli addresses the fact that oral sources are based on the relationship between the storyteller and the researcher.34 Given this fact, he states that "the first
22 requirement, therefore, is that the researcher 'accept' the informant and give priority
to what he or she wishes to tell, rather than what the researcher wishes to hear."35
This attitude on the part of the researcher requires a kind of openness, which for me resulted in an attempt to resist coercion, and also to resist formal conclusions.
Instead, after careful listening,I decided to respond thoughtfully and personally to
each storyteller. Formal analysis came later.
Unpacking one's attitudes and beliefs and shifting them is not an easy task for anyone; it has not been an easy task for me, either. This work seeks to navigate through the official histories and the personal histories of my family, to reconstruct understanding in a way that uncovers the complex nature of an individual's experience in the face of persecution that happens on a grand scale. From my perspective, as one who did not have these experiences, I seek to expose the shades of gray, the incompleteness, and the relative truths and half-truths that constitute our understanding of history. Portelli supports this: "The unfinishedness, the partiality of oral sources infects all other sources. Given that no research can be considered complete any longer unless it includes oral sources (where available of course), and
that oral sources are inexhaustible, oral history passes on its own partial, incomplete quality to all historical research."36
Portelli observes another interesting phenomenon that occurs between the researcher and the storyteller in oral history work. An interesting role reversal or dual role is established where "Informants are historians, after a fashion; and the historian
23 is, somehow, a part of the source."37 This reversal changes the nature of written history too: "Oral history changes the manner of writing history much the same way as the modern novel transformed literary fiction; and the major change is that the narrator, from the outside of the narration, is pulled inside and becomes part of it."38
My work is more than a vehicle for empathic understanding, although I think it is important. What I am trying to accomplish is autobiographical as well as biographical and speaks to my particular process of constructing understanding as much as what that understanding is.
Michael Frisch coined the term shared authority to describe the "altered relationship between historian and 'source,' between scholarship and public discourse, and between dominant cultural forms, assumptions and institutions and the alternatives that practitioners of these methods so hope to empower."39 He specifically refers to shared authority as a process, "the beginning of a necessarily complex, demanding process of social and self-discovery."40 He later observes how this process also requires a commitment to this kind of sharing, and how "at every stage of the process described, the exquisite contextual particularity places quite relentlessly different stresses on a generalized commitment to sharing and collaboration."41 Frisch is an oral historian who applies this particular collaborative process to his work. His projects often involve the collecting of oral histories to create public collections related to specific historical events and cultural communities.
My work shares the complexity Frisch describes and his focus on process. Although
24 my work does shed light on the experience of women during the Internment, it has also been a personal journey. My project was also designed to invite personal response, interpretation, and derivation on the part of those who read or experienced it.
Additionally, Portelli observes how "oral sources are not objective. This of course applies to every source, although the holiness of writing sometimes leads us to forget it. But the inherent non-objectivity of oral sources lies in specific intrinsic characteristics, the most important being that they are artificial, variable, partial."42I do not think that this fact belies the truth in oral histories. I think that this lack of the definitive can constructively destabilize known facts, and enrich with variation and contrast what is sometimes presented as black and white.
Helene Cixous observes that when we try to capture happenings in black and white—the declarative—they become less true. She uses poetic language to keep the truth alive, which is "the process of seething, of emitting, of transmitting itself."43 For me, this process of navigating both official and established theories and playing with them tracks the process of my self-construction as a member of the Japanese
Canadian community and as a member of my family. This way of working constitutes the heart of my creative process as an artist and as an academic,44 and I do believe that being an academic requires a creative process as well as an analytic one.
I found myself uniquely situated in this work as a family member in search of a specific identification related to the past, and as an researcher seeking to bring
25 personal histories into conversation with more official ones. My role as family member and as researcher situates me as a major character in this work. This is a position that artists often use as a point of departure or provocation, and I claim the dual role of artist and researcher in my work here.
26 Notes
1 Rishma Dunop, "In Search of Tawny Grammar: Poetics, Landscape, and Embodied Ways of Knowing" in Canadian Journal of Environmental Education, 7:2 (2002): 24. 2 Graeme Sullivan, "Research Acts in Art Practice" on Studies in Art Education 48:1 (2006):19-35 3 Ibid. 19. < Ibid. 28. 5 Ibid. 31. 6 Ibid. 7 Liora Breseler, "Toward Connectedness: Aesthetically Based Research" in Studies in Art Education 48:1 (2006): 52-69. »Ibid. 52 »Ibid. 10 Ibid. 56. n Maxine Green, "Texts and margins" in R.W Neperud (Ed.) in Context, content and community in art education, (New York: Teachers College Press), 1995,115-116. 12 Sandra Frieden, ""Transformative Subjectivity in the Writings of Christa Wolf' in Interpreting Women's IJves Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 1989, 172-188. "Ibid. 172. 14 Ibid. 173. '5 Ibid. 174. 16 Ibid. 185. 17 Alessandro Portelli. "Peculiarities of Oral Histroy" in History Workshop, (1981 12), : 103. 18 Bresler, 54. 19 Deborah Britzman, "The Question of Belief" Writing Poststructural Ethnography" in Working the Ruins, Feminist PoststructuralTheory and Methods in education, ed. Elizabeth A. St Pierre, Wanda S. Pillow, (New York: Roudedge, 2000): 27. 20 Ibid., 27-28. 21 Britzman, 27. 22 Britzman, 28. 23 Roy Kiyooka, Mothertalk: Ufe Stories of Mary Kiyoshi Kiyooka, (Edmonton: New West Press, 1997). 24 Ann Gomer Sunahara, The Politics of Racism: The Uprooting ofJapanese Canadians During the Second World War, (Ottawa: Ann Gomer Sunahara, 2000). 25 Annette Kuhn, Family Secrets Acts of Memory and Imagination, (London: Verso 1995), 5. 26 Ibid. 27 Marianne Hirsch. "The Generation of Postmemory" in Poetics Today, (2008 29): 102. 28 Ibid., 107. 29 Roger I. Simon, Mario DiPaolantonio and Mark Clamen, "Remembrance as Praxis and the Ethics of the Inter-human" in The Touch of the Past: Remembrance, learning, and Ethics, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 30 Ibid., 134. 3] Ibid., 149. 32 Lisa Farley, "The Problem of Historical Judgement: On the Possibilities of Collective Study as a Structure of Responsibility" in History in Words and Images. Proceedings of the Conference on
27 Historical Representation held at the University of Turku, Finland, 26—28 September 2002. Edited by Hannu Salmi. (Turku: University of Turku, Department of History, 2005), 261. 33 Alistair Thomson, Michael Frisch, Paula Hamilton, "The Memory and History Depates: Some International Perspectives" in Oral History,(1994 22:2): 33. 34 Alessandro Portelli, "The Peculiarities of Oral History" in History Workshop,(1981 12):103 35 Ibid. 36 Portelli, 104 37 Ibild. 105. 3» Ibid. 39 Michael Frisch, A Shared Authority, Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History, New York: SUNY Press, 1990. xviii-xiv. 40 Michael Frisch, "Commentary, A Shared Authority, Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History" in The Oral History Review, (30:1), 2003,112. 41 Ibid. 42 Portelli, 103. 43 Helene Cixous and Mireille Calle-Gruber. Kootprints Memory and I Jfe Writing. London: Roudedge. 1994, 4. 44 This idea is also supported by Graeme Sullivan, "A central thesis is that research is a transformative act that has an impact on the researcher and the researched. Further, if the purpose of research is the creation of new knowledge, then the outcome is not merely to help explain things in causal or relational terms, but to fully understand them in a way that helps us act on that knowledge. Consequendy, arts researchers at ail levels of educadon need not solely rely on the methodological conventions of the social sciences as a means of defining the research identity of the field. We have to be confident that by following different, yet complementary pathways, we can create important new knowledge. After all, this is what is at the heart of art, and it is what research strives to do." Graeme Sullivan, "Research Acts in Art Practice" on S'tudies in Art Education 48:1 (2006): 24.
28 CHAPTER 2
PREVIOUS EXCAVATIONS
Image 5. My mother andfriends in Tashme THE JAPANESE IN CANADA BEFORE AND DURING THE WAR
Several books have been written about the history of Japanese Canadians.
Critical first steps in documenting this history started in 1948 with Forrest E. La
Violet's The Canadian Japanese and World War ID. During the fight for redress, books such as Ken Adachi's Enemy That Never Was2 and Barry Broadfoot's Years of Sorrow,
Years of Shamwere important in presenting the historical facts then available in
Adachi's book, and the stories of the people at the time in Broadfoot's. All these texts
suffered from the fact that for thirty years, access to all government documents related to this time had been restricted.
Ann Gomer Sunahara's The Politics of Racism: The Uprooting of Japanese Canadians
During the Second World War4 is considered the definitive text documenting the
Japanese Canadian experience. She presents previously known facts about this time and overlays them with the contextual background of official government documents
"justifying" the actions taken against Japanese Canadians before, during, and after the
Second World War. She presents a balanced but not impartial analysis of the facts, as well as insightful observations on the fight for redress and the effect it had in preserving Japanese Canadian identity. She also analyses the inter-relations and attitudes between the successive generations: the Issei, Nisei, Sansei and Yonsei, (the
first, second, third and fourth generation Japanese Canadians) and the complicated reality of being a Canadian citi2en with this kind of heritage.
30 The poverty of the Issei, the social silence of the Nisei, and the cultural ignorance of the Sanseizte all legacies of the war. The Issei are poor because they were dispossessed. The Nisei are silent because they are good Canadians, and as such they want to believe that their government is benign, that it embodies the British fair play in which they were taught to believe in the public schools of their childhood. They would prefer to think that they were not betrayed, but that the federal government did what it did for good reasons.5
Sunahara writes of the then-policy of assimilation and how the Nisei, like rape victims, felt shame not only for their heritage, but even for their parents' passive acceptance of the indignities they endured.6 She sees the success of the Nisei, not as a fortunate by-product of an unfortunate past, but as the natural inheritance endowed by hard-working, honourable, and courageous Japanese immigrants who endured poverty and injustice and yet built a home for themselves and their children in
Canada. She identifies how all generations were scarred by the war experience but how the Niseis' ultimate success derived from the cultural values of the Issei:
"qualities of eniyo (reserve or restraint), gamen (patience and perseverance) and shikataga-nai (resignation) that allowed the Nisei to bend rather than break under the restrictions of the war."7 As a Sansei, I see Sunahara's conclusions as a starting point for my understanding of the immediate and long-term impact of trauma on a group of citizens, providing a base for my more specific research.
31 WOMEN AND THE INTERNMENT EARLY WRITINGS
The stories of individual women during the Japanese Canadian Internment have been recounted in books such as Mothertalk: Life Stories of Mary Kiyoshi Kiyooka by
Roy Kiyooka (edited by Daphne Marlatt8) and This is Mj Own: Letters to Wes and Other
Writings on Japanese Canadians, 1941-1948 by Muriel Kitagawa (edited by Roy Miki9).
Mothertalk is a mother's autobiography, translated and interpreted by her son who is a poet and a writer. This work is based on a recorded life story, but in its voice, order, and presentation has been crafted into a creative piece of writing that echoes not only the facts of Mary Kiyooka's life, but also her voice and her innermost feelings:
O I've known people who spent their whole lives looking for the place they could call home. Others like me have always known they carry it around in their hearts. Believe me Tosa is my heart's true country.10
The cadence of these words read aloud reminds me of my own grandmother. Tosa, the mother's birthplace, is described as "a landscape etched in their hearts which got sewn in a bamboo grove."11 Roy Kiyooka uses an invented dialect and poetic language to add dimension to the story of his mother's life. His writing fleshes out the narrative and gives it a lyric quality that makes this as much a creative work as a biographical one. Another significant fact is the presentation of a whole life story, of which the Interment is only a part. In this way we are presented with the person, not the event.
32 Kiyooka creates a rich Active and biographical blend of one woman's life. At
the request of his daughters, examples of his own poetry punctuate the text. As a
reader,I found this work complete in itself. It does not require response; it does not
astonish or prick, as Barthes12 would say — it is a rich and lyric life narrative.
The letters of Muriel Kitagawa, which were collected and edited by Roy Miki
after her death, are presented in the book This Is My Own: Letters to Wes <&° Other
Writings on Japanese Canadians, 1941-1948. In contrast to Kiyooka's book, this
collection of letters and manuscripts written by Kitagawa are personal letters and
other writings that are direcdy related to the events and time of the Internment.
Unlike Mary Kiyooka, who was an Issei immigrant who spoke little English, Muriel
was an educated Nisei woman who was married, a mother, a journalist, and was
politically active in the fight for Japanese nationals' rights prior to the war. Her
husband was a sports hero and held a position at the Bank of Montreal. At the core
of this book are letters that Muriel wrote to her brother Wes, who was a medical
student in Toronto at the outbreak of the war. These letters present a blow-by-blow
view of the trauma and panic that the acts of the Canadian government perpetrated.
As stated by Roy Miki in the introduction, these letters are "the living words [and] the
descriptions and statements were set down — sometimes frantically — in the heat of
turmoil."13 Although Muriel did not go to a camp and was not processed through
Hastings Park, she and her family experienced loss and turmoil as a result of
33 government policy. As an educated and politically active Nisei, she felt keenly the injustices to which she was subjected.
The work of Roy Kiyooka has a personal and creative approach. This Is My
Own presents a time capsule view of a life through personal and official correspondence collected and presented for a specific historical purpose. These writings were used by Roy Miki as a testament and a record of the effects of the injustices enacted by the 100-mile limit, which was the minimum distance from the coast that Japanese Canadians were relocated. This work and the subject, Muriel
Kitagawa, operate as one of the official narratives of Japanese Canadians during the
War. Although specific and related by and primarily about one woman, the work presents in many ways a private life in public. Muriel also recorded a CBC radio interview about her experiences on November 7, 1973 with Hide Shimizu.
RECENT VIEWS
The Japanese Canadian Internment and its intergenerational effect on women was explored in the work of Pamela H. Sugiman in her article "Memories of
Internment: Narrating Japanese Canadian Women's Life Stories."14 Sugiman also based her work on Japanese Canadian women who were interned during World War
II, so the focus of her research, initially, mirrors my own.
She sought to gain information about a history that, for political and cultural reasons, had been silenced. Sugiman investigates memory as a meaningful social concept. She refers to memory as a "fusion of personal biography with the history of
34 groups or communities."15 She identifies memories as being situated uniquely in the present in which they find themselves. She also observes how an audience shapes or
even re-makes memories.
In her doctoral dissertation "Cartographies of Violence, Women, Memory and
the Subject(s) of Internment,"16 Mona Oikawa sees the internment of Japanese
Canadians during World War II as an enduring act of violence. Her work explores the attitudes toward this time in history and the way a liberal humanist dominant culture can use various means to actively facilitate the "forgetting" of these acts of violence, which she stated is necessary to maintain Canada's reputation as a benevolent country.17 Her work is supported by the work of Tim Stanley and his work on the experiences of Chinese-Canadians.18 Although historical and contemporary attitudes
to the Internment were not the only focus of my work, the construction of a personal
framework for understanding these historical events was. I used specific and personal
stories to lead my readers to seek out versions of the "official" story and to come to
their own conclusions about the relationship between specific and official versions of
this time in history.
Oikawa's work also explores how the Japanese Canadians who were interned
were presented as a model minority who had been treated poorly in the past, but had
survived to become model and successful citizens. She observes how the "liberal
framework seeks closure by presenting the internment as a 'past' event."19 She also observed how this attitude produced the idea that Japanese Canadians, "in both the
35 historical literature and in popular discourse, are the silent, passive subject of internment, the post-internment silent survivor, and the Model Minority Subject."20
Oikawa counters a stereotypical portrayal of Japanese Canadian women by interviewing eleven women who where interned, as well as their daughters. Her work explores systems of domination and their effects on Japanese Canadian women with relation to white supremacy, male domination, class, heteronormativity, and physical/mental ability.21
Kirsten McAllister's "Photographs of a Japanese Canadian Interment Camp:
Mourning Loss and Invoking a Future"22 provides insight into the post-memorial significance of photographs for the Sansei, or "postgeneration,"23 as Marianne Hirsch labels the children and grandchildren of victims of events such as the Holocaust and the Japanese Canadian Internment. In her essay, McAllister uses historical photographs from the archives of the Japanese Canadian National Museum to reconstruct her idea of the internment camp as a "site of memory"24 for herself, her family, and the broader community. She approached them as both "visual texts" and
"visual acts." As texts they "invest whatever is in their field of vision with meaning,"25 but she later observes that the texts were also shaped by what was absent, and that past and present context as well as the perspectives of the viewer constructed their ultimate meaning.
As visual acts, photographs were used by their makers - the internees — as a way to document and depict, and perhaps in some ways, normalize, a completely
36 unnatural experience. McAllister sees in its most obvious function that the act of making these photographs was a way to document the reality of governmental
"spaces of erasure." She observes that the "act of photographing the camps offered the internees a way to visually re-configure the camps within their own terms."26
McAllister points out that the photographs from the camps, which often activated "postmemory"27 in the children of survivors of trauma, were different from other commemorative arts or historical archives that refer to the internment since they were created "at the moment" or in the time of this historical event. This gives photographs a different significance, a more authentic, yet ephemeral, one. They are the traces or markers with which we are left to deal, and therefore they have profound implications for the present.
McAllister reads into and overlays some of her ideas of her own mother's experience onto the faces of women seen in archive photographs.28 There is a degree of projection and speculation, and even a sense of detective work, in her way of interpreting the photographs. Her work, however, made me speculate what it was like to live in the camps and makes me wonder if there is a darker subtext to the images and stories McAllister presents.
MEMORY AND IDENTITY
Irit Rogoff writes of finding self before finding meaning in one's subject.29 I am the lens through which I view the complex social and cultural situations of others. I am a daughter, a wife, a teacher, a student, and a Canadian woman of Japanese descent whose
37 parents were interned in the interior of British Columbia:
The second generation after every calamity is the hinge generation, in which the meanings of the awful events can remain arrested and fixed at the point of trauma; or in which they can be transformed into new sets of relations with the world, and new understandings.30
Second- or post-generation theories and studies have been conducted with relation to the Holocaust. The term postmemory, was used by Marianne Hirsch to describe the kinds of memory inherited by the children of Holocaust survivors. She refers to postmemory as a generational structure of transmission31 for those, like me, who come after Tashme, after labels like "enemy alien," after repatriation to strange lands. I was born a Canadian citizen, confident in my own identity as a citizen of this country. I cannot identify with any of the labels I occupy myself with in this work: enemy, alien, internee, resident, undesirable. But something has been transmitted. Hirsch calls it a sense of living connection with the living survivors, the remnants of which are preserved even as they are being eroded.32 She calls both this sense and the desire to take on or understand the experiences of parents or relatives who experienced these events postmemory.
Hirsch asks a question about postmemory that resonates and challenges me to answer: "How can we best carry their stories forward without appropriating them, without unduly calling attention to ourselves, and without, in turn, having our own stories displaced by them?"33 According to her, the answer cannot be found in traditional archives or methods. She calls for an embodied knowledge,34 one mediated not by recall but by
"imaginative investment, projection and creation."35 It is as though this transmission of knowledge, postmemory, is a call for something new, something different that rings true,
38 to my mother and her sisters, to me, and to those whom Hirsch calls "adoptive witnesses."36
In her book After Such Knowledge: Memory, History and the Legacy of the Holocaust,37 Eva
Hoffman writes much about the experience of the children of Holocaust survivors. Her book chronicles seven developmental stages or modalities that the second- or post generation have experienced as the memory of this horrific event passes from living memory to postmemory. In early childhood, the fragments and anecdotes shared by survivors with their children take on the character of fairy tales, stories that have an aura of
fancy or unreal drama about them. In the next stage, she explores the psychological impact these stories can have on the survivors and their children, and especially the psychic gulf that separates them from their parents based on tragic knowledge, differences in experience, and the generation gap. The next stage addresses the impact of emigration and displacement. The forth stage addresses the polarized yet parallel and conflicted relationship between survivors and their torturers, and more specifically the relationship between the children of these two groups. The fifth stage explores memory construction, both personal and collective. The sixth documents a physical "return" to the geographic site of the trauma by children of survivors, and the seventh relates the past trauma to present historical sites of trauma, namely, September 11, 2001.
Hoffman presents a thought-provoking analysis of memory and identity issues as they relate to the postgeneration of the Holocaust. More importandy she has laid out a
frame from which the postgenerations of other traumatic events in history can find their
39 work:
I believe we need to transform our living link to the Shoah into a felt, but enlarged, comprehension of history. We need to locate our family stories in the broader context of events, to ponder not only the individual fates of those we know and love, but the larger developmental patterns that propelled those fates.38
Hoffman writes of broadening context, and of looking at the conditions and causes of events such as the Holocaust. She also suggests that it might be the postgeneration's responsibility to move beyond the experience of trauma to something else.39 She does not, however, speculate about what that something else might be.
In the introduction to the book Between Hope and Despair Roger I. Simon,
Sharon Rosenberg, and Claudia Eppert write of how studying traumatic historical events can move toward hope. They speak of "learning that enacts the possibilities of hope through a required meeting with traumatic traces of the past."40 Deborah
Britzman talks about this as learning /row past lives and events, not just about them.41
In her chapter "If the Story Never Ends," Britzman states more clearly how our study of trauma and loss can lead to hope.
The loss must be made into a memory, which in itself requires a distance called thought. And, in thinking the thought of loss and the loss of thought, we may also begin the interminable work of making more generous, more righteous, more just, the urge for affective community.42
Although some might think that a better "affective community" can be found in Canada, Tim Stanley's chapter "Whose Public, Whose Memory? Racisms, Grand
Narratives, and Canadian History"43 states that the myth that there is no racism in
40 Canada endures in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.44 He refers to systematic practices, institutional as well as cultural, that support racism in spite of the anti-racist reputation most believe Canada to have. Stanley identifies public memory, or what Benedict Anderson labels the "imagined community,"45 which creates an almost exclusively Eurocentric grand narrative of what is to be Canadian:
The problem with imagined community is that if some people are imagined as within the community, as belonging to the nation, others are imagined as being outside of it, inexorable aliens who are not and cannot be like one's self.46
Lisa Farley addresses the value of moving beyond the grand narrative, the accepted or rational explanation to historical questions. She observes how working with historical events such as the Internment can disrupt prior assertions and that the disillusionment of certainty can lead the way to learning and hope.47
Irit Rogoff writes of shifting the burden of responsibility "from the material to the reader,"48 or researcher and viewer in my case. She suggests extending the range of significance beyond descendants to others:
I hope that in the process some understanding of the degree to which "trauma" informs all of our originary myths, means that some patterns and symptoms are shared by the culture at large, even if its populations have radically different specific histories.49
Derrida's lack of centre50 is in operation here. Rogoff observes that understanding different and distinct histories can lead to shared understanding. Rogoff s ideas and even their apparent contradictions support my purpose. I employ personal narratives to provoke public understanding.
Psychologist Jerome Bruner observes that narrative is often how individuals
41 become cultural meaning-makers. He studied the way individuals construct stories and how they themselves are constructed by available cultural narratives.51
Similarly, Hannah Arendt talks of a place between past and future. She observes that to "man, who always lives in the interval between past and future, time is not a continuum, a flow of uninterrupted succession; it is broken in the middle."52 She speaks of how we stand in the present, a clashing point that is the terminus of the past and the future, a place where two dynamic and terrible forces move off in opposite directions to their infinite origins.
This point of impact is where I am, standing in this gap, picking up fragments of the past. They are intentional and unintended offerings.53 Arendt states that reality, i.e. history, is more than a catalogue of facts and events; it must tell a story. In this story particular facts lose their contingency and acquire human understanding.54
Understanding is the answer. Now I must think of the questions that will take me there. Some kind of transformation is required here. Arendt talks of this transformation of the "raw material of sheer happenings."55 For Arendt, the historian is like a novelist or poet who transfigures grief into lamentation, jubilation into praise.
An artist sets the high emotion, immediacy and trauma of an experience at a distance, so we can see through other eyes, and feel through other bodies, out of the moment.
Arendt states that this is the role of the storyteller, to present a catharsis, a cleansing or purging of all emotions that paralyze. The storyteller teaches us to accept things as they are.56 And so I will choose a narrative path in this endeavor.
42 CREATIVE RESPONSE
What is most true is poetic because it is not stopped -stoppable.
All that is stopped, grasped, all that is subjugated, easily transmitted, easily picked up, all that comes under the word concept, which is to say all that is taken, caged, is less true.
There is continuity in the living; whereas theory entails a discontinuity, a cut, which is altogether the opposite of life.57
My goal in this work has been to leave room for a reader to construct personal meaning through the story of others. This approach involved examining how ideas of deconstruction can be applied to this kind of research. Derrida warns that deconstruction is not a method, but rather an event that takes place, and my goal was to inspire an engagement and creative action that delves deeply, personally, and historically, "decomposing, and desedimenting ... to understand how an 'ensemble' was constituted and to reconstruct it to this end."58 My goal project was designed to provide a working model of how this theoretical concept can be applied to my family history, to the world, and to the events that have shaped it.I challenged the audience, not just myself as the researcher, to find the meaning in the data, or at least to "play" with it, to use Derrida's term.
Like the fragments, hints, and ideas that Freud speaks of using to construct memories,59 Eva Hoffman observes how she had to piece together fragments of her parents' traumatic past: "There was a kind of prohibition on the very quality of coherence. To make a sequential narrative of what happened would have been to make indecently rational what had been obscenely irrational."60 Working in fragments
43 seemed a natural way to work for me.
In her monograph The Fragment: Towards a History and Poetics of a Performative
Genre,61 Camelia Elias explores the concept of the fragment in literature as well as in critical and literary theory. She identifies two general classifications of fragments. The
first is characterized by the following words: incomplete, inconclusive, and inconsequential, such as fragments of ancient texts. The second classification of
fragments she identifies as unfinished, unstable, and uncountable, such as
"constructed ruins"62 like Coleridge's "Kubla Khan." My own writing has been characterized by fragmentary messiness for as long as I can recall. I have always attributed this to a lack of clarity in my understanding or a lack of focus. I have begun to realize that my resistance to working in a more formal, didactic, or persuasive way indicates my need to maintain the initial life of an idea or impression. The same resistance to precision is present in my painting and drawing. Elias writes of a kind of
"resolute" fragment that finds its roots in Romantics such as Schlegel for whom the
"totality of the fragment is its essential incompleteness."63 Expanding on the modernist idea of the fragment, Elias finds two ways that fragments are used. She refers to fragments whose juxtapositions create a sense of a whole. She then refers to combined fragments that are completely incompatible. In this use of fragments she observes how this very incompatibility "elicits an openness which grounds meaning, not in the text, but in the wide spaces where the search itself for meaning becomes meaningful."64 These wide spaces allow for ideas to retain their vivacity, a contextual
44 vibration, and these gaps allow for readers or an audience to find their way in the text, with room for their own thoughts and ideas to mingle, along with my own.
Lisa Mazzei's "Inhabited Silence in Qualitative Research: Putting Postructural
Theory to Work,"65 describes the cooperation of an interviewee as a gift, and their silences — the pauses, reticence, and stark silence that occurs during the interview — as the "gift within the gift."66 Not all silences in an exchange can be granted such significance, but there are meaningful silences, what Elias calls the "breach, the crevice," that help to destabilize impressions and to unearth layers that build other possibilities of meaning.67 She sees this as a deconstructive way of working. I feel that the layering of what is said and not said, what is seen and not seen, are essential parts of a truth or meaning that will never be complete. They have a momentary truth that begins to build meaning from the gaps as well as the facts in my work.
Mazzei talks of another quality one might find in qualitative data—what legal scholar Kenji Yoshino identifies as "The Pressure to Cover."68 Yoshino describes this pressure as a need for people to downplay their eccentricities in order to fit into the mainstream. The act of being selected as a research subject is an initial labeling.
The need to satisfy or to represent their "type," whatever that type is, can be a complicating factor in the interview process. In conversation during a visit to BC,
Kirsten McAllister spoke to me about the responsibility of representation when conducting research about historically sensitive events like the internment of Japanese
Canadians. I feared, at times, that my subjects felt this burden too. My interest was
45 not in validating the official story or countering it, but it would have been naive of me not to consider the weight of the attitudes and narratives that dominate this time in history. Conversely, there was a danger of reading too much into the withholding or covering up of information.
A multi-format approach was my way of reflecting the kind of convergence and
fragmentation typical of our lives and perhaps our culture in today's hyper-visual world. In defining visual culture Irit Rogoff writes:
Thus visual culture opens up an entire world of intertextuality in which images, sounds and special delineations are read on to and through one another, lending ever-accruing layers of meanings and of subjective responses to each encounter we might have.69
The research I have conducted has involved accessing many forms of media.
Individually they offered facts, impressions, and perspectives, which I brought to my experience of interviewing my mother and my aunts. As I recorded each story, layers of meaning began to form, some supporting and others conflicting with one another.
I was not naive enough to think that all these texts could be synthesized into one definitive text, but I thought that I might be a conduit through which a single story might be blended. Although I have charted my own path through their narratives, and my own analysis of these stories in relation to other research in this field, I also found the strength of each story told in the first person. In presenting both, the reader is challenged to navigate a difficult path between history, memory, interpretation, and the unedited source.
My work aims to enrich the body of research around the displacement of women during war — women whose stories deserve to be told for their contemporary and historical significance. This work constitutes a step towards not only challenging the grand narrative of Canadian identity, but also challenging the idea of any metanarrative, even the accepted one as it relates to the Japanese Canadian experience, as having any relevance, unless it leads to greater personal understanding of the complexity of human experience and what we can learn from it.
47 Notes
1 Forrest E. La Violette, The Canadian Japanese in World War II. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1948). 2 Ken Adachi, The Enemy that Never War. (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Ltd. 1976). 3 Barry Broadfoot, Years of Sorrow, Years of Shame: The Story ofJapanese Canadians in World War II, (Toronto: Doubleday, 1977). 4 Ann Gomer Sunahara, The Politics of Racism: The Uprooting of Japanese Canadians During the Second World War, (Ottawa: Ann Gomer Sunahara, 2000). 5 Sunahara,149. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Roy Kiyooka, Mothertalk: IJfe Stories of Maty Kiyoshi Kiyooka, edited by Daphne Matlatt, (Edmonton: New West Press, 1997). 9 Muriel Kitagawa, This is My Own: letters to Wes and other Writings on Japanese Canadians, 1941-1948, (Vancouver, Talonbooks, 1985). 10 Roy Kiyooka 14. 11 Ibid., 160. 12 Roland Barthes, Camera Ijuida, Reflections on Photography, ed. Richard Howard ( New York: Ferrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1981), 26. 13 Kitagawa, 33. 14 Pamela Sugiman, "Memories of Internment: Narrating Japanese Canadian Women's Life Stories" in Diaspora, Memory and Identity, ed. Agnew, Vijay, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 48 - 80. 15 Ibid., 64. 16 Mona Oikawa, "Cartographies of Violence, Women, Memory and the Subject(s) of Internment" (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 1999). 17 Ibid., 5. 18 Tim Stanley, "Whose Public? Whose Memory? Racisms, Grand Narratives, and Canadian History" in To the Past: History Education, Public Memory and Citizenship in Canada, ed. Sandwell, Ruth, W (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 32-49. 19 Oikawa, 31. 2(1 Ibid. 21 Ibid., ii. 22 Kirsten McAllister, "Photographs of a Japanese Canadian Interment Camp: Mourning Loss and Invoking a Future" in Visual Culture, Vol. 21, 2:133-156. 23 Marianne Hirsch, "The Generation of Postmemory" in Poetics Today, 2008 29: 103. 24 The term 'site of memory' refers to Pierre Nora's "lieu de memoire." "A lieu de memoire is any significant entity, whether material or non-material in nature, which by dint of human will or the work of time has become a symbolic element of the memorial heritage of any community", (Nora 1996: XVII). « McAllister, 138. 26 Ibid., 139.
48 27 The term 'postmemory' refers to Marianne Hirsch's concept. "Postmemory describes the relationship of the second generation to powerful, often traumatic, experiences that preceded their births but that were nevertheless transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their own right. "The Generation of Postmemory" in Poetics Today, 2008 29: 103. 28 Kristen Emiko McAllister, "A Story of Escape: Family Photographs from Japanese Canadian Internment Camps" in I Mating Memory Photographic Acts, ed. Annette Kuhn and Krrsten Emiko McAllister, New York: Berghahn Books, 2008, 100. 29 Irit Rogoff, "Studying Visual Culture" in The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Mirzoeff, Nicholas, (New York: Roudedge, 2002), 33. 30 Eva Hoffman, After Such Knowledge, (New York: Perseus Books, 2004), 103. 31 Hirsch, 114. 32 Ibid., 104. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid., 105. «Ibid., 107. »Ibid. 37 Eva Hoffman, After Such Knowledge, (New York: Perseus Books, 2004), 196. 38 Ibid., 196. 39 Ibid. 40 Roger I. Simon, Sharon Rosenberg, and Claudia Eppert, Between Hope and Dispair: Pedagogy and the Remembrance of Historical Trauma., (Lanham:Roman and Littlefield, 2000), 5. 41 Ibid., 6. 42 Ibid., 51. 43 Tim Stanley, "Whose Public? Whose Memory? Racisms, Grand Narratives, and Canadian History" in To the Past: History Education, Public Memory and Citizenship in Canada, ed. Ruth W. Sandwell (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006). 44 Ibid., 32. «Ibid., 33. 46 Ibid. 47 Lisa Farley, "Radical Hope: Or, the Problem of Uncertainty in History Education" in Curriculum Inquiry (Toronto: OISE, 2009), 39: 539. 48 Irit Rogoff, "Studying Visual Culture" in The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Mirzoeff, Nicholas, (New York: Routledge, 2002), 114. «Ibid., 35. 511Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1978), 278-294. 51 Jerome Bruner, Acts of Meaning (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1990), 29. 52 Hannah Arendt, between Past and Future. (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 10. 53 Ibid., 11. 54 Ibid., 257. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid. 258. 57 Helene Cixous and Mireille Calle-Gruber, Rootprints Memory and IJfe Writing. (London: Roudedge. 1994), 4. 58ed. Wood & Bernasconi, Derrida and Difference, (Warwick: Parousia Press 1985), 3.
49 59 Sigmund Freud, "Screen memories." The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume III (1893-1899): Early Psycho-Analytic Publications (London: The Hogarth Press, 1962), 301-322. 60 Eva Hoffman, After Such Knowledge (New York: Perseus Books, 2004), 15. 61 Camelia Elias, The Fragment Towards a History and Poetics of a Performative Genre (Bern: Peter Lang, 2004). w Ibid., 20. »Ibid., 27. 64 Ibid, 117. 55 Lisa Mazzei, Inhabited Silence in Qualitative Research Putting Postructural Theory to Work (New York: Peter Lang, 2007). Ibid., 27. «Ibid., 14. <>8 Ibid, 33. '•'> Rogoff, 24.
50 CHAPTER 3
PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY
Image 6. Photographic Memories, Photo ColJage, Katherine Yamashita THOUGHTS WRITTEN FOR MY MOTHER INSPIRED BY ROLAND BARTHES' CAMERA LUCIDA1
To the Issei, honour and dignity is expressed through silence, the twig bending with the wind...
The Sansei view silence as a dangerous kind of cooperation with the enemy.
Joy Kogawa, in an interview with Susan Yin/
Image 7. My mother, aunt, and son in Kyoto, K. Yamashita Mom,
When we went to Japan together with Mikey and Aunt May in 2005,1 found
myself to be several things at once: mother, niece, daughter, tourist and, although I
was unaware of it, miner of my own identity. I know that for you it was mosdy a
repeat journey visiting places you have been to before. Thank you for your patience.
It's amazing how our little foursome just "worked." In spite of the long flight,
exhaustion, and the challenges of traveling with a lethargic teenage boy and two
senior citizens, everything was so easy. We were three generations traveling to the
"homeland" where none of us were born — a true adventure.
Did you notice how an easy daily rhythm allowed us to creep between years of
knowing each other, from family gatherings and in the telling of stories, to learning
habits and sharing unconscious understandings? All this has weaved a stronger web
of family between us. What strikes me now is how neither you nor Aunt May
mentioned much about your time in Japan after the war. We visited Kumamoto
where you lived, and Kyoto too, but reminiscences were few. Aunt May talked about
a childhood filled with caring for the young ones, someone always on her back.
That's all I remember. Mikey and I glided through Japan as curious tourists, our eyes glazed with wonder. My only feeling of recognition was the novelty of seeing
Japanese treasures and scenes "in real life," which I had only read about in books. I
wonder now about your amnesia and my blindness.
Joy Kogawa writes about this in the opening passage of Obasatr.
53 There is a silence that cannot speak. There is a silence that will not speak. Beneath the grass the speaking dreams and beneath the dream is a sensate sea. The Speech that frees comes forth from the amniotic deep. To attend its voice, I can hear it say, is to embrace its absence. But I fail the task. The word is stone.3
I remember riding on the shinkansen to Kumamoto City. I felt excited and anxious about the shift from tourist to visiting family member. We took a trolley from the hotel for our first visit to Auntie Kimie and walked past the Sun Live grocery store to that rather run-down complex of low-rise buildings. Didn't you tell me later it was subsidized housing for repatriated Japanese? Grandma and cousin
Kenji lived there for over 40 years. Auntie Kimie has settled there after all the troubles in her life. We couldn't find the apartment at first, remember? And then when we did, Auntie Kimie was so excited she was speaking Japanese and English all in a jumble. She had us gather in the back guest room where there was a bit of open space and I was immediately drawn in by her warmth, her sense of familiarity (odd, since I had never met her before), and of course her humour. Auntie Kimie is a continuous one-woman stand-up comedy act, and she is instantly engaging. Running under this lively energy I felt undercurrents of emotion that even a small reunion of you and your sisters seems to revive. Tears were welling up in Auntie Kimie's eyes, and she was so excited that she forgot about Uncle Kenchan, who had fallen in the adjoining room and was calling out to her: more cause for humour at her own expense and more reason to chide and affectionately swear at her husband. She has
54 such a hard life looking after my uncle, whose body is paralyzed yet his mind is untouched. Uncle Kenchan's shaking shoulders and raspy breath show he is laughing
along with Aunt Kimie's wisecracks. I see that laughter is still a common sound in
this household.
Auntie Kimie's house felt like home in spite of its smallness and the sick room.
You and your sisters were so vibrantly present. The shadows of the past, distant or recent, were chased to the corners of our consciences by your talk of now, the train ride, catching up on children, recounting today's and yesterday's adventures, and plans for what we would do with our short time together.
Image 8. Grandma's Ashes, Katherine Yamashita
After settling down we did have to attend to the obligations of the past. It was
time for us to visit Grandma's shrine. Until this moment in the trip I had almost
55 forgotten our whole reason for being in Japan. Mikey, while fighting for his life in
The Hospital for Sick Children, expressed a wish to go to Japan to see Grandma — she was ninety-nine then, wasn't she? This was his reward for getting better. Sadly,
Grandma died less than two months before our arrival—bittersweet to say the least. I guess that is a good reason to say "Sho ga nai" (an expression of regret).
We filed out of Auntie's apartment, went across the road to Grandma and
Kenji's house, and entered another world.I am not sure if it was darker because
Grandma had lived there longer, but it was claustrophobic and there was no place to sit, remember? Even when we went to see Grandma's shrine, where her ashes are kept, although there were fresh flowers there (I am sure Auntie did that), the shrine was hemmed in by a DVD player on one side and nearly falling off the edge of the cabinet on the other. I did see that Auntie had put the sympathy letters in a napkin holder you made for Grandma, just like one that sits on my dinner table right now - touches from home. I said a prayer there, but I did not see or feel Grandma.
It was when we went into the back room, coated in dust and piled high with cookie tins and small boxes that I found Grandma. Stacked, piled, and overflowing in boxes were hundreds of photos, knick-knacks, letters, and drawings. Sifting through the boxes, I found all the pieces of my life: images of me as a newborn and as a toddler, faded hearts I had cut out to make her a Valentine, all the drawings and lettersI had sent her, pictures of my first communion, my graduation, my marriage. It wasn't only my life that was stored here; similar artifacts and images could be found
56 from all my aunts, uncles, and cousins. Each item was carefully labeled in my
Grandmother's gorgeous, flowing cursive handwriting with name, date, and occasion.
There were, of course, hundreds of photos of her children too, as well as my mother and her siblings. You, the keeper of our family history, jealously handled these treasures, but knew Kenji's loss was too fresh to broach the topic of taking some back to Canada even for a while. You asked me to photograph some of the photos with the little point and shoot camera I had. The results were horrible considering the low light and the fact that my eyes kept tearing up and I was embarrassed to let you know.
Image 9. Chemainns Picnic, Collection of Kenji Kumoi
One is of you when you were about five or six years old. I think I can see
Auntie Lucy (or is that Auntie Kimie?) gazing at the camera below you. It looks like you are having a picnic and Grandpa is just peeking up from the bottom of the picture. Is that Grandma beside the man drinking? It looks like she might almost be
57 smiling! She never smiles in pictures. There is a sense of ease in everyone's posture even though everyone is aware of the camera. The sister below you has the look of my cousin Wendy, don't you think? That kind of casual sizing up she used to do with her quiet stare.
Image 10. Family Portrait, Chemainus, Collection of Kenji Kumoi
The other photo was taken in Tashme. I can see Grandma's writing on the bottom. Everyone is lined up formally, although there is almost too big a crowd for the frame. It looks as though you are standing in front of a shack. Is that where the rest of the family lived? I know you stayed next door for some reason. Auntie Rose's big smile radiates as she crouches by the little ones, an unmistakable brilliant blur. She must have been visiting. Hey, doesn't the boy Auntie Lily has her arm around look like Kenji? Is that Uncle Kenny?
In this photo I can see that the relaxation and ease of the family in Chemainus
58 is gone. Although everyone is aware of the camera, there is a feeling of preoccupation. This photo is far more formal than the Chemainus one. There is also a feeling of claustrophobia in the way all the family members are packed into the frame. It makes me wonder how you were all crammed into the shack you were given to live in Tashme.
Mom, you stare out at me fifth from the right in the back row, so upright, so serious. I wonder who that girl was and what her life was like at that time. How different is she from the mother that I know?
Image 11. Mom, Uncle Kenchan, Aunt May, Aunt Kimie, me and Kenji, April, 2005
When I look at our family dinner photograph with Auntie Kimie and Uncle
Kenchan, and apply the same analytic eye, it seems we are somewhere between the ease of the Chemainus photo and the self-conscious preoccupation of the Tashme one. We are all aware of the camera; we look relaxed in each other's company, but
59 our ease is newfound, not habitual. Look at Auntie Kimie's expression — no smile.
Doesn't she look like Grandma here? I checked all the photos we took that day, and she has a serious expression in all of them. It seems uncharacteristic, given her lively nature. Was Grandma like that too? Or was she always serious?
Thinking back,I wonder if my time in Kumamoto with Auntie Kimie was the seed that has grown into a closer connection with all my aunts. I know for sure that
Grandma's back room still resonates deeply with some part of me. There is so much unsaid in her absence. There is so much I feel in what you and my aunts don't say about when you were young.
Although I am investigating your history, not mine,I feel an intimate connection to it through the photos I have seen and re-seen since I was a child, and from your occasional references to that time. It has led me to wonder about the amazing bond between you and your sisters, and to try to understand what family means as defined by the Kumoi women. After all, I am one of them.
Lovingly, your daughter, Kathy
60 MEMORY AND THE PHOTOGRAPH
My research is about my love for my mother, her strength, her heroism, her integrity, her strong family leadership, her goodness, her rightness, her love. For nearly fifty years now,I have heard parts of the stories, dangled at the end of conversations and explained as warnings and admonitions, but it's the boxes and
albums of black and white photographs that contain hidden clues for me.
Earliest childhood photos of my mother:
My mother stands or crouches unsmiling for the camera in family photos but offers a
shy smile in pictures posed with others. Her first memory is standing on an orange crate washing diapers.
Few photos remain of this period.
There is an explosion of photos from 1943. Internment: Tashme, Interior B.C.
Page after page of photos of my mother and her friends, but almost none of family.
Smiling faces:
"with love from Sets"
"with best wishes Miye"
"love May"
"love Kaz"
"love Shirl"
... my mother, a glowing smile and a far-off look in the Christian Girls in Training
61 group photo (September 4, 1943)
... Hollywood teen pretty in the March '44 photo of the Tashme Stars
... on stage with tap shoes
... on stage with hula skirts with a tap dancing Robert Ito (later to be a T.V. character on Quincy)
"lovingly Mitzuko"
"love Lily"
"Best wishes, Philip"
"With love Isako"
Seventeen pages in all, each filled with tiny photos lovingly addressed to my mother.
While the outside world may condemn the internment of Japanese Canadians in the 1940s, my mother recently told me that her time in Tashme was the happiest time in her childhood and youth, and is the source of some of her fondest life memories.
How strangely this sits with the established, documented view of this time when terms like prison camps and incarceration have been used to describe this experience.
The conjunction of memory and history collide jarringly, and I am at a loss to reconcile them.
In his work "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire," Pierre
Nora4 explores these two concepts. He observes how the "fundamental collapse of memory is but one familiar example of a movement toward democratization and mass culture on a global scale."5 By memory he is referring to oral histories,
62 traditions, and life wisdom that is handed down from generation to generation. He regrets the loss of "societies that had long assured the transmission and conservation of collectively remembered values, whether through churches or schools, the family or the state; the end too of ideologies that prepared a smooth passage from the past to the future or that had indicated what the future should keep from the past."6 Nora refers to history as the way in which "our hopeless forgetful modern societies, propelled by change, organize the past."7
I am not so sure that I can define the terms "memory" and "history" with such strong polarity. Nora refers to a process of interior decolonization that affects ethnic minorities who bring with them little or no "historical capital" in the imperial sense. As a descendent of an ethnic minority whose history in Canada has, until recently, been marginalized and then brought to light and politically recognized by an official apology and financial compensation, I feel I am indebted to those who collected, documented, exposed, and memorialized the historical facts that are now officially recognized in the "annals of history." Without this prior work, I could not embark on my current research. I am aware of the debt of responsibility I owe those who have come before; however, I also feel the impersonal distance created by these landmarked, official documents and the resonant echoes of the more personal ones found in my family photo album and stories told by family members.
Nora refers to places where history and memory meet as lieux de memoire, or sites of memory that employ an "art of implementation, practiced in the fragile
63 happiness derived from relating to rehabilitated objects and the involvement of the
historian with his or her subject,"8 a reanimation of historical facts. My own work will
seek to reanimate, to combine the personal with the factual, the critically analyzed
with the baldly stated, the text with the image, the object with the artifact, the spoken
word with silence.
I remember...
Bobby MacDonald chanting the taunt, "Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees, look at
these!" (pulling his shirt out at the nipples to imitate breasts) and being called a
"JAP" by him when I was in grade four.
I remember...
being about fourteen and finding an old Eaton's box of photos tucked away on
a shelf in the basement. I see my mother in a uniform type suit with an Andrews
Sister hairstyle in one. I find an old envelope containing a love letter from my
father, who was in the hospital at the time, addressed to my mother. I remember
feeling guilty at this invasion of my mother's privacy, but feeling something else
too that I can't quite name, a quiet insight or bit of secret knowledge that has
stayed with me.
For me, memories often resurface in brilliant clarity after being triggered by
somethingI have read (mosdy research these days), or seen (often photographs but
sometimes objects), artifacts, and even, at times, smells or the "feel" of a place. I
64 often wonder how many of my memories are real and how many are my own
constructions, fabricated from dim or imagined memories and my own present need
and nostalgia.
After a couple of exploratory interviews with my mother and one of my aunts, I
felt the need to explore my ideas about memory through the lens of other creators
and researchers to ground the work I plan to do. In her chapter "Diaspora and
Cultural Memory," Ahn Hua uses a string of incongruous terms that describe
memory: emotional, conceptual, contextual, constantly undergoing revision, selection,
interpretation, distortion, and reconstruction.9 In referring to memory in broader
social or cultural terms, she writes that sites of memory are "collective yet individual,
living yet dead, ours yet belonging to others. In the landslide of commemorative
memory, memory shimmers, becomes strange things."10 In my initial struggles to find
a form and a vehicle or set of vehicles to weave into my work,I hoped yet feared that
I would create a strange thing. A primary goal was to balance the thoughts of other
thinkers, and even the thoughts of my mother and aunts, with my own thoughts, to
allow the coexistence of free association and deeply contemplated conclusions. I
hoped also to keep in mind the slipperiness of memory and to maintain this
slipperiness, to allow for other points of view and interpretation. In her book
"Tangled Memories," Marita Sturken observes how personal memory, cultural
memory, and history cannot be clearly delineated, and how they often inform and/or
become one another. She writes about the role of memory objects and narratives and
65 of how they can shift in meaning. She refers to these objects as "technologies of memory."11 Sturken stresses that these images, objects, and representations are not passive vessels of memory "so much as objects through which memories are shared, produced and given meaning."12
In my case, photographs were my primary technology of memory, operating in many ways. Initially these photographs were identifiers from which I learned to recognize my relatives when they were younger from family photographs. When I later began to access historical images from "official" institutions,I began to recognize Tashme and its many views and seasons. Although some of the photos were personal, and others were accessed from public sources, they began to build a picture for me, of what life was like in that place and time. This newly built picture was not so much a source of nostalgia, or even a sense of history—for me, it became a sense of identification, a sense of place, captured in sepia tones of lives frozen in snap shots. Strangely, these individual images are primarily without narrative. They do not speak particular stories to me as some of my own childhood photographs do since I can remember the time photos of me were taken and they therefore connect with stories I remember. My mother's family photographs act as a backdrop to stories that I have heard from my mother and my aunts, but for me, the stories exist as heard, not seen.
My family history is connected to no other tangible objects, to my knowledge.
Upon reflection, perhaps my paternal grandmother might have had barber shears
66 from her time as a barber before the war, but other than that, I know of no other objects that have survived. Perhaps my grandmother in Japan had some, but I have never seen them.
In her paper "Memories of Internment: Narrating Japanese Canadian Women's
Life Stories," Pamela Sugiman refers to the importance of significant objects and mementos to a family or a family member. She refers to the term "memory households," coined by Iwona Irwin-Zarecka, which refers to objects that belonged to or evoke a deceased or absent loved one, or hold a particular family significance for other reasons. She observes that "most of the time, a memory household offers an anchor, the comfort of continuity and identity."13 Although her discussion refers to the loss of property during the time of the evacuation and internment, I feel collecting or reconstructing a memory household is also important.
In her article "Photographs of a Japanese Canadian Internment Camp:
Mourning Loss and Invoking a Future," Kirsten McAllister refers to photographs in particular as having multiple layers of meaning and significance:
Rather than reading these photographs as transparent records of reality, I approach the photographs both as visual texts and visual acts. As visual texts, the photographs order and invest whatever is in their field of vision with meaning. The meaning(s) are fundamentally shaped by what is absent, off- frame, what cannot be seen, what in time is forgotten, making it impossible to be fully certain of what is actually present. This introduces a level of indeterminacy, opening up the possibility of multiple readings by different viewers from the past and present.14
The vehicle for presenting visual texts, the environmental context in which they are stored and displayed, becomes a critical factor influencing these
67 multiple readings. Accessed in a museum, identified with coded numbers, a
photograph may have one meaning. When the same photograph is found in a
family album, it takes on a completely different significance.
In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes seeks to find whether photography has
"a 'genius' of its own."15 He sees himself as the mediator for all photography:
"Starting from a few personal impulses, I would try to formulate the fundamental
feature, the universal without which there would be no photography."16 For him,
the photograph is the object of three practices, emotions, or intentions: to do, to
undergo, or to look. He equates these with three roles: the operator or
photographer, the spectator or ourselves and the target or photographic subject.
Barthes refers to the target as a "litde simulacrum, an eidolon emitted by an
object."17 He assigns even more spiritual significance to these objects when he refers to "that rather terrible thing which is in every photograph: the return of the
dead."18 Almost more startling for me is the presentation of a version of a person known in the present, as something other: a mother depicted as a child, a wizened
woman depicted as a passionate and youthful teen. The haunting becomes more provocative when one is confronted with a past version of oneself or of a loved
one. Seeing pictures of one's parents as children seems incongruous. Our
egocentric point of view will not allow for our parents to be other than what they are in relation to us, possessing no past before our own natality. These photos are used for identification, but their memorial context is lost to the post generation.
68 Their significance is at once blatant and fugitive.
Derrida writes of a kind of "trans generational haunting," an irrepressible kind of knowing or being that exists beyond biological science, but perhaps not beyond psychoanalysis:
Without the irrepressible, that is to say, only suppressible and repressible, force and authority of this trans generational memory, the problems of which we speak would be dissolved and resolved in advance. There would no longer be any essential history of culture, there would no longer be any question of memory and of archive, of patriarchive or of matriarchive, and one would no longer even understand how an ancestor can speak within us, nor what sense there might be in us to speak to him or her, to speak in such an "unheimlich,"" uncanny" fashion, to his or her ghost.19
Allowing photographs or other artifacts to trigger response or memory for a post-generation or others, reinforces the importance of this kind of knowing, the importance of speaking to ghosts, and allowing that they speak within us.
Like Barthes, my making and reading of photographs is analytical, complex, and deeply personal. I am a photographic image-maker, and an obsessive possessor and reader of visual media. I believe art-making and meaning-making are creative acts, and I practiced both in my work here. As I examined Barthes' idea of haunting, the return of the dead, I saw one of his essential conflicts: the image reflected in silver black on paper white is a faithful record of what has been, but it cannot capture the essence of the subject depicted. To enlarge it is to discover only the specs of silver that create the dark areas;20 there is no physical way to penetrate the paper's depth.
Marianne Hirsch observes that photographs, "in their flat two-dimensionality, in the
69 frustrating limitation of their frames, they also signal its [the past's] insurmountable distance and unreality."21
That is the paradox in the photograph's undeniable record of what has been:
The photograph then becomes a bizarre medium, a new form of hallucination: false on the level of perception, true on the level of time: a temporal hallucination, so to speak, a modest, shared hallucination (on the one hand "it is not there," on the other "but it indeed has been"): a mad image, chafed by reality.22
The record of my preliminary research took the form of photographs and autobiographical journals that charted my physical, historical, philosophical, and spiritual journey to build a foundation and design a form for working with life histories and other artifacts and memory. For me, like Barthes, there are images23 that resonate—they signify more than the reflected image of a subject recorded on a light- sensitive surface. The images that punctuate my letter to my mother may illustrate my narrative, but since I know the subjects, they have a richer significance. They also hold true mysteries, ones that are hinted at in the faces in the photograph, but are unreadable, and unreachable, just under the surface.
70 Notes
1 Roland Barthes and Richard Howard Trans, Camera 1 Jidda, Reflections on Photography, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1980), 2 King Kok Cheung, Articulate Silences (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 127. 3Joy Kogawa, Obasan (Toronto, Penguin Canada, 2003), 5. 4 Pierre Nora, "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire" in Representations, No. 26 Special Issue: Memory and Counter Memory, (Spring 1989), 7-24. 5 Ibid., 8. 6 Ibid., 7. 7 Ibid., 8. 8 Ibid., 24. 9 Anh Hua, "Diaspora and Cultural Memory" in Diaspora, Memory and Identity, ed. Agnew, Vijay, (Toronto: University ofToronto Press, 2005), 198. 1(1 Ibid. 11 Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 9. 12 Ibid. 13 Pamela Sugiman, "Memories of Internment: Narrating Japanese Canadian Women's Life Stories" in Diaspora, Memory and Identity, ed. Agnew, Vijay, (Toronto: University ofToronto Press, 2005), 58. 14 Kirsten McAllister, "Photographs of a Japanese Canadian internment camp: Mourning loss and invoking a future" in Visual Studies, Vol. 21, No. 2, (October 2006), 138. 15 Roland Barthes and Richard Howard Trans, Camera 1 Jidda, Reflections on Photography, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1980), 3. "Ibid., 9. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Jacques Derrida, "Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression" in Diacritics, Vol. 25, No. 2 (John Hopkins University Press, 1995), 27. 20 Ibid., 100. 21 Marianne Hirsch, "Suriviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Post Memory" in Journal of Criticism, Volume 14, no. 1, (2001), 14. 22 Barthes, 115. 23 Ibid., 70.
71 CHAPTER 4
A JOURNEY INTO THE PAST
Image 12. Mining and Undermining, mixed media, Katherine Yamashita B.C. JOURNAL: THE JOURNEY OF MY HISTORICAL RESEARCH
In the last chapter I used personal memories and personal photographs to explore ideas of memory, cultural memory, and haunting. In this chapter I follow more official channels to find the authorized sites of history and memorialisation of the Japanese Canadian Internment. I then explore the significance of these sites to the inheritors of these histories.
Pierre Nora speaks of topographical sites of memory,1 ones that are sites of historical scholarship, repositories of official histories, and artifacts. My research began at one of these sites in Burnaby, B.C., at the Japanese Canadian National
Museum. I perused some of the thousands of photographs and clippings in the collection itemized in binders. Many of the images I saw in the collectionI had seen before, in digital archives online and in books. I found several aerial photos of
Tashme Interment Camp and photos of Japanese-Canadians being transported to and from Hastings Park in the Eastwood Collection. This is a fascinating collection of photos taken by Alec Eastwood, who worked for the B.C. Securities Commission in
1942. Prior to his death he gave his granddaughter a collection of reports, and some official and personal photographs of Hastings Park and a number of the camps, including Tashme. In the museum collection description, it states that "Mr. Eastwood himself felt that the 'evacuation' was unwarranted and distasteful,"2 and that the collection should be preserved in an appropriate archive or museum since he felt that
73 the descendants of the evacuees would want to know their history.
Flipping through the binders full of images from the collection — with only numbers and impersonal tides to identify them — seemed to reduce the images to nameless, if not altogether lifeless, images. They had been reduced to museum specimens, devoid of frame or context. I often wondered which ones were "official" and which were personal. It is impossible to distinguish, as the officials of the B.C.
Securities Commission were often instructed to document the lives of the occupants.
What I did notice were the rugged and beautiful mountains in the background.
Tashme was an enclosed valley featuring towering trees and a rushing mountain stream. There were no fences in Tashme to keep the occupants in. There was no need; the mountains hemmed them in. Another hallmark of these photographs is the
fact that everyone is Japanese. Although white missionaries from the Anglican and the United Church later came to Tashme to teach in the elementary school and to volunteer teaching high school-aged youth, most aspects of running the camp fell to its occupants. Under the supervision of officials from the B.C. Security Commission the occupants were responsible for every aspect of running the camp from the building of the tar-paper shacks, the building and operation of the sawmill, to the running of the soy bean factory and manning the government store. As stated in a history of the times written by the Hope and District Historical Society, "residents" were to subsist on their private assets — those not confiscated, that is — as this would preserve for them a feeling of independence and self-sufficiency.3
74 There is a strange feeling of familiarity and discord when I see images of the young people and their activities. I see page after page of images of musical concerts, girls in hula skirts, rows upon rows of girls in matching scarves who are proud members of the Christian Girls in Training, young people crowded around a camp
fire, and the May Queen proudly holding her bouquet of tulips surrounded by her attendants. The faces are culturally similar, Asian faces, but most of the activities portrayed are very Western, or at least Canadian. Tashme certainly was not a litde
Japan. The children and youth of Tashme appear Canadian by culture and upbringing according to most of the photographs I have seen.
Image 13. Tashme Christian Girls in Training, September 4, 1945, Jo Seko
Although I had seen it before, one image jumped out at me from the pages of one binder. It is a photo of the Christian Girls in Training from Tashme, 1943.1
75 know this photo because my mother is the girl fourth from the right in the dark coat.
This same photo is in one of my mother's photo albums. There is something both
satisfying and jarring about seeing a photo of a family member in a museum archive.
It is both rewarding and distancing. The image moves from the realm of the personal
photo to that of the museum artifact. It takes on a different meaning, oneI am not
sure how to categorize or interpret. I feel a similar confusion relating my academic
research to the stories my mother has told me about her past.
This has led me to consider the importance not only of the three "players" involved in the meaning of a photograph as identified by Roland Barthes, but also of
the context in which the photograph is placed or seen. I am referring to the
conceptual context as well as the physical one. The facts of a story can be recorded
and stored as a specimen, just as a physical photograph can be stored, but a kind of
acknowledgement and contextual understanding must be attached to a photograph
before it takes on meaning. Barthes uses two terms to explain the effect and meaning photographs can have on him: studium and punctum. Studium is a reaction of
"general enthusiastic commitment."4 These photographs are meaningful and provide
cultural and contextual information. Punctum, on the other hand, strikes to the heart.
As Barthes describes it: "A photograph's punctum is the accident that pricks me, (but
also bruises me, is poignant to me)."5 Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer expand this
concept by defining it as "points of intersection between past and present, memory
and postmemory, personal remembrance and cultural recall."6 They further observe
76 how the "term point is both spatial—such as a point on a map—and temporal—a moment in time; and it thus highlights the intersection of spatiality and temporality in the workings of personal and cultural memory."7
Most of the photographs that I have collected in my research so far would be considered by Barthes to be more studium than punctum. The more I observe a photo, however, layers of meaning seem to surface which are enriched as I gather more contextual information, or more of the photo's story. I wonder if punctum is the personal reaction and projection that I as a viewer put onto a photo, a personal and very specific one. He suggests as much when he observes that punctum,
"whether or not it is triggered, it is an addition: it is what I add to the photograph and what is none the less already there.Punctum describes what I have tried to capture in my research. I wanted to move beyond the usual, the expected, the impartial uncovering of the facts. I wanted to explore this historical territory personally.
I wanted to find or create my own "site of memory" (as Pierre Nora would put it) to create my own context for exploring the pieces of the past that are my mother's and my aunts' story.
In creating my own "site," I am aware of another of Barthes' admonitions about the photographic image:
Not only is the photograph never, in essence, a memory (whose grammatical expression would be the perfect tense, whereas the tense of the photograph would be the aorist), but it actually blocks memory, quickly becomes counter-memory. ... The photograph is violent: not because it shows violent things, but because on each occasion it fills the sight by force, and because in it nothing can be refused or transformed."9
77 I wonder at the terrible truth of these words as I undertake the reanimation of photographic images in my own words and art. Other artifacts and memories must contribute to the creative process to counter this.
I remember an earlier trip to B.C. with my mother and my boyfriend when I was 19. We accompanied my mother to Chemainus, her birthplace. It was important to her that I visit it. What blithe, youthful ignorance allowed me to comply with her wishes yet remember practically nothing! I cannot remember any details of the town itself, butI remember the point of land that we took Mom to: a small piece of shore jutting out into the water, the ground quilted with moss and lichen and small creeping wildflowers. My mother talked of coming to play here with her sisters and brothers.
Gentle waves lapped at the water's edge and I imagined young children playing in this magical spot.
Image 14. Mike and Me at Bear Point
78 The other memory I have of this trip is our visit to the cemetery. Twin brothers of my mother died as babies and are buried there. When we arrived we found nothing but unmarked grass in the Japanese part of the cemetery—no stones, no markers, nothing to indicate who, if anyone, was buried there. It was a very disquieting experience to see how even the dead can be erased from a place. This second memory is not preserved or memorialized with a photograph since there was nothing to record. My mother had to settle for a picture beside the cemetery entrance.
Image 15. Mom at the Chemainus Cemetery
Yet the image of the sun-scorched grass and the barren and bald part of the cemetery is precisely preserved in my memory, as if the heat of the day and my feeling of disquiet, unease and incredulity burned the image into my memory.
My most recent journey started at the Japanese Canadian National Museum, but ended in a planned trip to Tashme Interment Camp where my mother's family was interned, and Greenwood, where my father's was interned. Current family events and
79 circumstances resulted in seven family members making the journey from Fort
Langley, B.C. to Lethbridge, Alberta, the town where some of my husband's family
settled after labouring on sugar beet farms. Our motley group included two senior
citizens and a niece and nephew for whom the drive was rather taxing. As a result,
the planned route and activities were shortened. In her article, "Tender Research:
Field Notes from the Nikkei Internment Memorial Centre, New Denver," Monica
Kin Gagnon makes reference to planned trips or "pilgrimages" like the one I
undertook with my family:
Some visitors have pilgrimaged to this site to startlingly encounter their own repressed stories, hearing them for the first time as words unwittingly spill from their mouths. Perhaps such journeys to the NIMC hold the promise of clues to familial histories, secrets or revelations on the "evacuees" and their whereabouts following their disappearances.10
In my experience, life and research mix in unique and distracting ways. I might
have intended a research trip, but family obligations and "holiday mode" interfered
with the kind of focused attention that one would wish on such a journey. My dual
status of being both researcher and holidaying family member was challenging, but in
some ways more real. I might have wished for a solitary pilgrimage leaving lots of
time for study and thought, but that was not my reality. And I realized that it was
important for me to be in the here and now as well as the past, reconnecting with living relatives as well as searching for family stories from the past. My work is for me
and my family, and others whose lives will touch ours through this work. Otherwise
this work will be yet another collection of data, unappreciated and un-mined.
80 Our first stop was in Hope, twelve kilometers away from the silver fox farm that was converted into Tashme Internment Camp. Unlike other camps with more
scenic and descriptive names, Tashme, although it sounds Japanese, is actually created by combining the first two letters of the surnames of three members of the B.C.
Securities Department of Labour, Japanese Division. It celebrated the names of those who created and maintained the camps (TA - SH - ME).
My husband and I woke up at 7 a.m. to get an early start so as not to intrude on the day's travel plans and activities for the rest of our party. I was nervous, pardy because I was not sure where Sunshine Valley (the current name of the Tashme
Internment Camp) was located, and also because I was not sure how I would feel when I got there. Of course my husband had already confirmed its location and knew how to get there.
Image 16. Sunshine Valley Real Estate Office
85 There is nothing distinguishing about the site. A realtor's sign advertising
Sunshine Valley let us know we had arrived. The site is now a beautiful, treed valley
with chalet type houses nesded in the trees. It is a strange irony that what was once
an internment camp is now "Sunshine Valley." Recreational and chalet style buildings
are scattered around a large field of grass and a mountain stream. The mid-July sun
was already hot and bleached out the greens of the grass, brush and towering fir trees.
The mountain air was cool, but already tinged with the searing heat of the coming
day. The presentation centre was empty so we wandered past the buildings to an
open grassy area.
Tashme
Image 17. Tashme Internment Camp, Photo courtesy of the Hope Museum
My Tashme is not green; it is the sepia of old photographs: rugged, wild and harsh.
Trees are like erect spires and buildings are rough-hewn shacks. This aerial view from
86 the Hope Museum depicts my Tashme.
Image 18. Sunshine Valley, formerly Tashme Internment Camp, 2008
I walked between the presentation centre and a house and onto a large field
looking out onto brilliantly white barn structures with strident red-orange roofs.
Although freshly painted, the skeleton of an old silo is a tell-tale sign that these
buildings are as old as my Tashme. The nearer buildings have since burnt down, but in their day they were a residence for unmarried men and workers, a hospital and a
butcher shop. To the left, approximately 300 two-family shacks were arranged in 10
avenues. Now, in the place of the avenues, tall grasses and younger pines dot the
expanse, and, flanked by some mobile homes, a bed and breakfast can be seen nesded
into the trees across the bridge. Although mosdy treed, chalet and cottage type homes
are sprinkled across the landscape. They are hidden in the trees and perched on
outcroppings of rock halfway up mountain slopes. I am reminded of my own chalet
in Moonstone, Ontario, obscured by trees, halfway up a hill. I try to ignore the irony
of this.
The bridge to one side of the larger structures produces a shock of memory and
I rush through the bushes and weeds to stand approximately where Jo Seko took a
87 picture of a the Christian Girls in Training in 1943. It's not the same bridge, but the bridge location is the same. I am reminded of a scene from the 2004 film, "Un long
demarche defianfailles" or "A Very Long Engagement." The heroine is conducted to the battlefield where her fiance was lost. She is carried on the shoulders of an old veteran
through gorgeous fields of grain, sun umbrella in hand, shaggy white dog bounding
and bouncing at her side. All evidence of the bloody battlefield and trenches has been
erased, reduced to a pastoral idyll. The absurd distance between history and the present is eloquendy depicted here. Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet employs a very
monochromatic palette in depicting the historical scenes in his film, visually distinct
from the dreamy wheat and pastel tones of the rest of the film. For me it is striking
how art imitates life, or vice versa. I feel a kinship with the fictional character in this
film for she, too, is returning to a scene that she has never been to, trying to
understand and relive a history she did not witness or live. The poignancy and
hopelessness of the scene echoes how I felt in Sunshine Valley.
In finding the bridge and photographing my husband, I attempted to recapture
a true memory. And what was my truth based on? Not reality, but a sepia-toned
photograph found in a museum archive. Upon examining my reference later, I see Jo
Seko, the photographer of the original photograph of the Christian Girls in Training
in 1943, was on the other bank. My attempt at recapturing and connecting to the past
ended up being from the wrong point of view.
88 Image 19. Mike on the Bridge
Roland Barthes' terrible photographic truth rears its head once again.
Upon reflection, it was not the reality of Sunshine Valley that moved me in this place; it was the openness to vision and experience and the desire to understand that
made this visit important. After all, what is a pilgrimage but a journey, a progression
toward some understanding or truth? The act of going there and being in that place
affected me strongly. The fact that all traces of Tashme had been erased, and that
there was no acknowledgement that it had existed here, did not bother me. I did not need any physical evidence to know I had come to a place of family and cultural
significance, one that has been elemental in shaping who my mother is and what I
have received from her. History is only important when it has a bearing on present
understanding and vision. I felt the weight and substance of that kind of history here.
Hope
With the family safely packed into our Dodge minivan, we arrived at the Hope
89 Museum and Tourist Information Centre. The door to the Hope Museum was just beyond a large counter that served as a cash checkout and information counter in a room about the size of a gas station kiosk. The door opens out into a large room with aged walls and orderly displays, some sitting out and some in glass cases. On one wall a few photocopied images with typed notations at the bottom, complete with other display items. This is the section of the museum devoted to Tashme. I half-heartedly took a few photos of the photocopied images, and decided to ask the attendant if there was any other information before I left. She produced a black binder, but this one held more significance for me than the ones at the Japanese Canadian National
Museum. After the general information was listed, which were mosdy newspaper clippings from the local newspaper, I found a wonderfully preserved collection of photographs donated to the museum. Not only were there "official" aerial photographs, but also intimate personal scenes and group photos like the ones in my own mother's albums. Although some of the images were duplicates of images I had seen in the other museum, these images felt more personal, more related, and seemed to show glimpses of what everyday life might have been like in Tashme. They were completely without documentation or identification, images with stories waiting to be told, but with no one there to tell them.
With permission I photographed some in dim light without a flash, hoping that my photos would retain some of the connection I felt when I first saw them. Later that day, going over these photos, many of them out of focus, I found a fuzzy but
90 unmistakably familiar face, my mother's unsmiling face in the middle row of a group photo.
Image 20, Group Photo, Tashme, Photo courtesy of the Hope Museum
Another important document related to this collection of photographs and the museum itself is Forging a New Hope: Struggles and Dreams, 1848-1948: A Pioneer
Story of Hope, Flood, and Faidlaw. Published in 1984, it is a 470-page coffee table volume that charts the history of Hope and the surrounding area.11 In this book, the internment of Japanese-Canadians is referred to as a "precipitous over-reaction" leading to the "relocation" of the Japanese population.12 It is noted to be "one of the discordant aspects of the war."13
The five pages dedicated to Tashme in this volume demonstrate to me how even the recording of history is coloured by the celebratory nature of the book and the cultural politics of the time. The people who I think of as internees, and who current researchers in the field refer to as prisoners, are referred to in this book as
"residents." What I think of as internment (what does this term mean to me, I wonder?) and what many current researchers refer to as incarceration, this book refers to as "relocation." The majority of the article is a quote from the R.C.M.P.
Quarterly of 1946 by Constable William Robert Cooper, who was in charge of policing Tashme from 1945. Constable Cooper is quoted exclusively over the next
four pages as he describes the physical layout, the distribution of the population, and
the services and resources provided to the residents. Constable Cooper describes the
Japanese community at Tashme as being vital, resourceful, respectful, and hard
working and who were cared for well by their captors.
"Without excusing the dislocation of people, at Tashme" he reflected, "scrupulous attention to the needs of the evacuees was always observed. This was in sharp contrast to the suffering of refugees in other parts of the world, and no doubt gratifying to the Force to find that many of the residents frequently remarked on the impartial and courteous treatment they always received at the hands of the R.C.M.P."14
The author of the article then concludes this part of Tashme history as told by an occidental with this observation: "Indeed what began as a negative over-reaction of a war situation, given the discipline, pride, and adaptability of a people, the
Japanese and Japanese-Canadian residents of Tashme were able to develop a positive,
self-sufficient and cooperative community."15
Five short paragraphs are then used to describe this part of history from a
Japanese-Canadian perspective. One of the two former child Tashme "residents" quoted recalls how difficult this time was for the "first generation" or Issei: "It wasn't entirely a case of bitterness, but one of loss and deep hurt, the hopelessness of being dispossessed."16 However, this point of view is countered by another voice:
92 "While it was very sad at the rime, especially for the older people, in retrospect,I believe it was the best thing that could have happened. You see," he explained, "before the war, the Japanese were grouped together as one Japanese community in Vancouver, with the war, however, they were dispersed throughout the province, and at war's end they were free to make it on their own, seek their own level, not as a Japanese community, but as new members of the communities of their choice."17
This text stands in stark contrast with Ann Sunahara's Politics of Racism, but they are both considered official versions of the same story. The life stories I have gathered and my memory work challenges my readers to move from certainty to doubt, to seek other voices and to relate this knowledge to their own experiences and perceptions. I believe the more important truth lies in the reader's informed search
for understanding, search for connection. My work provides a rich and multi-vocal environment where multiple versions of this time in history can be explored and challenged.
93 Post-Memory
"In the scopic field," Lacan says, "the gaze is outside, I am looked at, that is to say, I am a picture. ... What determines me, at the most profound level, in the visible, is the gaze that is outside."18
My research with regard to issues of memory, identity, and the photographic image is buttressed by research, theory and artistic practice based on the Holocaust. I wonder at the audacity and authenticity of undertaking my work in the face of all the theory, creative investigation, and memorializing that has been done by the post generation of Holocaust survivors. The Internment of Japanese Canadians was another injustice enacted by a government on its own citizens, and every injustice deserves acknowledgement. It makes me wonder why there seems to be a hierarchy of tragedy? In carrying on my work, the prior writing and creative reconstructions
from Holocaust studies, artworks, and commemoration are essential foundations for work in this field.
Eva Hoffman accurately expresses the desire and compulsion that inspired my work with the stories of my mother and her sisters:
I needed to address frontally what I had thought about obliquely: the profound effects of a traumatic history, and its paradoxical richness: the kinds of knowledge which the Shoah has bequeathed to us, and the knowledge that we might derive from it.19
I know that one of the first attractions for me to this subject matter related to
several perhaps questionable motivations that relate to morbid curiosity, the uncovering of secrets, the solving of mysteries, my relation to the story, my lack of relation to the story, what Eva Hoffman calls "significance envy,"20 and more
94 legitimate motivations such as an authentic engagement with the past—in order to better understand the present, and to learn for the future. She describes how we are
"pulled by some strange evolutionary logic, to feel the palpable need to understand our own patch of the historical past."21
Marianne Hirsch describes postmemory as "the response of the second generation to the trauma of the first."22 She also describes it as "an uneasy oscillation between continuity and rupture."23 The children of survivors feel the affects of postmemory, which are "a consequence of traumatic recall but (unlike posttraumatic stress disorder) at a generational remove."24 We are left with fragments and remnants that illustrate our imperfect relation to a traumatic history. Part of the difficulty for me as a member of the post-generation is a feeling of both intimate connection to and unassailable ignorance of the past events that have shaped these women, and by extension, me. "Our relationship to them has been defined by our very 'post-ness' and by the powerful but mediated forms of knowledge that have followed from it."25
Hirsch observes how our relationship to the past is indirecdy mediated through
"imaginative investment, projection, and creation."26
Recreations of the past created by the post-generation are often made up of the dropped hints, family stories, family and archived photographs, and "testimonial objects."27 These are the pieces of evidence our generation uses to express what we do and don't know of the past, and more importantly how we feel about it.
Invariably, archival photographic images appear in postmemorial texts in altered form: they are cropped, enlarged, projected unto other images; they are reframed and de-or re-contextualized; they are embedded in new narratives, new texts; they are surrounded by new frames.28
I am conflicted with whether my work could be a re- or de-contextualization. I don't believe that any facts can be shared, any testimony can be presented, post or present, without bias or perspective; however, my goal in my artistic presentation of the stories of these sisters is, to the best of my ability and against my desire for artistic control, to present their stories unedited and un-interpreted. I wanted to leave them open to viewer interpretation and conjecture, open texts. However,I am aware that even the conceit of creating an art installation reframes these stories and conditions their response. The photographs in "memory boxes," the one box empty, the photographic and moving image responses to these women, the letters I wrote to them, the items in the gallery, and the timing of events within the space—all these things condition the reaction of the viewer. Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer write about new artistic postmemory texts:
In relation to memoir and testimony, and to historical accounts and scholarly discussions, as within new artistic texts, archival images function as supplements, both confirming and unsettling the stories that are explored and transmitted. On the one hand, they are imperfect documents, as Seiffert shows, already deeply problematic when they are taken; on the other hand, they embody an alternate discourse, create an opening in the present to something in the past that goes beyond the information they record.29
My work with photographs seeks to move beyond record as mentioned. It seeks to engage and activate interest, and to revive echoes of other stories closer to home—to awaken narrative connections.
Art historian Jill Bennet writes of how artistic presentations can promote an
96 unhealthy, bodily identification with traumatic events, a kind of literal sensationalism,
"the capacity to address the spectator's own bodily memory; to touch the viewer who feels rather than simply sees the event."30 She calls this affect contagion, which engages
sensation only, not narrative, moral emotion, or empathy, which come later.31 Eva
Hoffman warns against this when creating works of postmemory:
But it is also true that from our perceptual distance, response can get attenuated, deflected, convoluted. The combination of fascination and partial knowledge, reverence and naivete, can lead to odd distortions of perspective and excesses of sentiment.32
These are the pitfalls that I have worked to avoid. My work is an attempt instead to
create what Deleuze describes as an encountered sign, which "agitates, compelling and
fuelling inquiry rather than simply placating the subject."33
Beyond this, my work is an attempt at something broader than understanding
and identification at the post-generation level. My work seeks to reach beyond the post-generation to those of other cultures and experiences, other specific histories.
The need for this has been expressed by post-generation writers and theorists of the
Holocaust.
I believe we need to transform our living link to the Shoah into a felt, but enlarged, comprehension of history. We need to locate our family stories in the broader context of events, to ponder not only the individual fates of those we know and love, but the larger developmental patterns that propelled those fates.34
Here Eva Hoffman calls for an investigation of the cause of such inhuman
acts. She calls for a broader understanding. She later observes how this has relevance
to other post-generations:
97 It may be that a cross-cultural, or cross-situational, understanding here, too, may be illuminating; and that the testimony and the study of the Holocaust "second generation" may be useful to second generations elsewhere, and emerging from other difficult histories.35
Marianne Hirsch also observes that "this form of remembrance need not be restricted to the family, or even to a group that shares an ethnic or national identity marking: though particular forms of identification, adoption, and projection, can be more broadly available."36 She also speaks of "representational witnessing by adoption,"37 how acts of postmemory
can extend to the identification among individuals of different generations and circumstances and also perhaps to other, less proximate groups. And how, more important, identification can resist appropriation and incorporation, resist annihilating the distance between self and other, the otherness of the other.38
By introducing personal narratives of these experiences I am reframing traumatic historical experiences in less conclusive terms. These are not supports or counters to the official story; they are the unique and individual life stories that underlay them. Hearing these stories, current versions of the lived experience of
"being there" and also what happened after, are presented. They show a variety of ways individuals moved forward beyond this traumatic experience.
What strikes me is that works of postmemory do not often address the tremendous accomplishments that survivors have achieved after a traumatic experience. The success, the insights, the accomplishments, and the freedom to investigate, interpret, and create on the part of the post-generation are living proof of this. It is the gift that survivors have bequeathed to their children and grandchildren.
98 When interviewing my mother and aunts, my questioning went beyond the timeframe and effects of war to determine where "home" was for them. In every instance home was found with a family and in a place they had arrived at after the war. In each case, they built a life for themselves. The key identification for me is that
I am member of a post-generation of survivors, andI believe that the story of how one survives after trauma is critical in getting to know the whole story of these women.
99 Notes
1 Pierre Nora, "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire" in Representations, No. 26 Special Issue: Memory and Counter Memory, (Spring 1989): 22. 2Japanese Canadian National Museum, "Museum Description 94/69/0001 - 5" date of access July 3, 2008. 3 Hope and District Historical Society, "Forging a New Hope - Struggles and Dreams 1848-1948: a Pioneer Story of Hope, Flood, and Laidlaw," (Hope: Hope and District Historical Society, 1984), 132. 4 Roland Barthes and Richard Howard Trans, Camera I Jidda, Reflections on Photography, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1980), 26. 5 Ibid. 27 6 Hirsch and Spitzer "Testimonial Objects: Memory, Gender, and Transmission" in Poetics Today. (2006; 27: 35): 358. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., 55. »Ibid., 91. 10 Monika Kin Gagnon, "Tender Research: Field Notes from the Nikkei Internment Memorial Centre, New Denver" in Canadian journal of Communication, Volume 31 (2006): 121. " Hope and District Historical Society. 12 Ibid., 131. '3 Ibid. 14 Ibid, 134. 15 Ibid. "•Ibid. "Ibid, 135. 18 Marianne Hirsch, "Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory" in The Yale journal of Criticism, 14:1, (Spring 2001): 23. 19 Eva Hoffman, After Such Knowledge: Memory, History and the I^egagi of the Holocaust. (New York: Perseus Books, 2004), xi. 2(1 Ibid, 58. 2> Ibid, 155. 22 Hirsch, "Surviving Images", 8 23 Marianne Hirsch, "The Generation of Postmemory" in Poetics Today, 29:1 (2008): 106. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid, 107. 27 Hirsch and Spitzer "Testimonial Objects: Memory, Gender, and Transmission" in Poetics Today. (2006; 27: 35): 353. 28 Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer "WHAT'S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?: Archival Photographs in Contemporary Narratives" in journal of Modem Jewish Studies, 5:02 (2006): 241. 29 Ibid, 245. w Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma and Contemporary Art. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 36. 3' Ibid.
100 32 Eva Hoffman, After Such Knowledge: Memory, History and the ljesacy of the Holocaust. (New York: Perseus Books, 2004), 157. 33 Bennett, 36. 34 Hoffman, 196. 35 Ibid., xiv. 36 Hirsch, "Surviving Images", 6-7 37 Ibid., 10. 38 Ibid., 11. CHAPTERS
HOME AWAY FROM HOME
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Image 21, The Oikawa Family First Night at my Cousin Emi's House in Japan
This morning, just before 4 a.m., a neighbour's rooster starts to crow. Even after a scant five hours of rest, I am unable to go. back to sleep. Far off in the distance, crows awakened by the cock's racket begin to caw; the world slowly awakens. Smaller songbirds join in, their voices quiedy accenting the morning serenade. The sky slowly lightens from pitch to something almost visible, then to the deepest charcoal grey, and I begin to see the lattice pattern on the curtains that cover the glass walls of the house.
The world is beginning to stir.I have lain awake here for an hour and a half now and my Aunt Kimie is mumbling in her sleep. I can hear the gentle snoring of
Yoshihiro, my cousin's husband, in the adjoining room. The family is immune to the rooster's morning call, but I can hear cars passing and, some distance away,I hear a clock alarm go off. I feel like the city mouse in the country. I begin to wonder about family relationships and behaviour in a place where thin screen walls separate each of us, and the formal behaviour that sets boundaries between people in Japan starts to make sense.
Even after a leisurely breakfast, we are able to depart on our trip to
Fukushima at 6:45. It took about an hour to get into the mountains proper, and for the next two hours we wound through narrow mountain roads with lush, densely packed forests of towering pines. On the way we see a Western-style clock tower in a small mountain town and my aunt starts to sing "My Grandfather's Clock," and I
103 chime in. It has been over 60 years since my aunt has been in Canada, but she remembers every word.
I have no illusions about my place in this culture and society; I don't have one.
Although it stings me a bit to admit this,I am not jaded; it is a simple fact. The saying
that one can never go back does not even apply here since I have never belonged here. This leads me to think of my mother's and aunts' situations, forced to move,
and move again, and then to change nationality, because they were the enemy, because of war.
Image 22. The home of my cousin Emi, her husband Yoshihiro and their grandson Kotaro
It is not long before I feel completely at home here although only simple, awkward Japanese words tumble out of my mouth, rarely communicating what I really want to say. My words are only a pale shadow of the thoughts in my head. I am not sure if it is because I am living with family, but the more time we spend living
together, the closer we become. I know we are living here as welcomed guests, but
Emi and Yoshihiro are so comfortable in their home life that they continue their daily
104 routines even in our presence: Yoshihiro goes to work every day, and Emi cooks, cleans, and nags Kotaro about homework. We have also travelled hundreds of miles together sightseeing Kawasaki style: long road trips that end at home every night because it would be too expensive to stay away. We have seen a lot this way.
Being in a different culture and faced with a foreign language can be disorienting, but this is a condition we tourists put ourselves in frequently with anticipation and excitement. This is also a common experience for those who are displaced, ironically. Context is everything: on this trip I am not so much a tourist as a family member and it has made all the difference in allowing me to feel at home.
Image 23. Uncle Kenchan's Ashes
One family member who is missing from this visit is my Uncle Kenchan. He died shordy before our arrival after surviving many strokes with much courage and the great care of my Aunt Kimie. Aunt Kimie still talks to him and small food
105 offerings from our meals often find their way to his shrine, as did some of my candy
from Canada.
I am beginning to feel that my visit to Japan has been more than an
opportunity to interview my aunt. I spoke before of the fact that one cannot come
home to a place where one has never been. Now I am not so sure. I have been invited to the home and into the lives of my cousin and her family. I am not fooling
myself that I belong here (my lack of language and proper dress and behaviour make
this very clear); however, there are ties that are stronger and deeper than space and
time that are growing between this family and me. I cannot describe it; Emi's house
feels like home. It is a beautiful building, slate-roofed and built in the traditional shoji
style, with tatami mats.
Situated on the boarder between the 7-11 and farmland, we are again awakened in the early morning hours by the crow of a rooster and the irritated caw of crows.
The hum of cicadas is a constant soundtrack to the day's activities, and the heat of
the day sizzles off the roof tiles but does not seem to penetrate the house proper to
the same degree. Every sound and sensation grounds me here.
106 Image 24. Family Barbeque at the Kawasaki's
Emi organized a family barbeque two days before we left and both her boys came home to celebrate with us. We ate the food prepared by Emi and cooked on the barbeque by her son, Yasuhito, and Kotaro, her grandson. We sat on plastic chairs on
the driveway and laughed and talked. The night sky was a blanket of stars that night and even the mosquitoes could not drive us inside until late in the evening.
Returning to Canada
I woke up at 7 a.m. today — late for me. For the second day in a row we are
awakening to typhoon winds and it was cold last night and for the first time I had to use my comforter. Last night we closed all the glass doors in the house and closed all the
shoji screens. The sound of the rooster and the blustering winds were muffled so I was
able to sleep in. It must be cold in winter but my cousin says it rarely snows so I guess it is not that cold. I feel anxious about our travel today because there is a typhoon
traveling up the coast and its projected landfall will be at 7 p.m. in Narita, which is the
time of our departure.
107 Image 25. I jiave-taking
Emi had arranged for us to take the bus to Narita, so after our last breakfast of
farm fresh greens, miso soup and rice, the whole family piled into the car to see us off.
The rain was pelting and the winds were very high — typhoon weather. We told the
family to stay in the car for our goodbyes, but they just grabbed our luggage and setded
us in the tiny bus shelter. I have spent just over a week with this family, and yet I feel like I am leaving a home and loved ones. It is a place where I feel accepted as I am:
awkward "gaijin" (the Japanese word for foreigner) cousin from Canada, and the tears in
all our eyes express the bond there. This just confirms that for me the Kawasaki house is home because of the people who inhabit it and the time I spent with them, and maybe
something more...
It is one of my own lieux de memoire.
108 HOMES AWAY FROM HOME
Memories establish a connection between our individual past and our collective past (our origin, heritage, and history). The past is always with us, and it defines our present; it resonates in our voices, hovers over our silences, and explains how we came to be ourselves and to inhabit what we call our "homes."1
In the quote above, from the introduction to Diaspora, Memory, and Identity: A
Search for Home, Vijay Agnew addresses how memories are essential elements in the construction of "home." Used so often in everyday language, the word "home" evokes a number of emotions, ideas, and concepts that can be both personal and social. Life stories are where memory recounts the origins of home and identity. This can be difficult for people who have been forcibly displaced.
Anh Hua describes diaspora as "the social world resulting from displacement,
flight, exile, and forced migration," causing people to "reconfigure the relationship between citizens, nation states, and national narratology."2 For those who have come to here from over there, or a number of over theres, home becomes a complex concept, and yet it is a critical place that also maps identity. Being intimately tied to identity,
traumatic experiences that involve dislocation are significant. According to Agnew, these experiences "deterritorialize identities, gender, class, racism ethnic origins and home."3 In a broader context, leaving the nest can be seen as a small displacement, migration can be seen as a geographical move toward hope, and forced displacement
forges closer and more desperate ties to homes that are often impossible to return to.
Even if one does return, things are never the same. It becomes a difficult geography to
109 navigate. In some cases there have been so many moves that home cannot be found in a geographic location: it is something else.
When my grandparents migrated to Canada, they were denied citizenship, which was limited by quotas, received lower wages, and experienced racism. In spite of these difficulties they built a life together with their 13 children on Vancouver
Island. During the war my grandparents and their Canadian-born children were declared enemies, dispossessed, interned and finally deported. I do not know how my grandfather felt when he returned to Japan, where he and his family had to live in a storage shed infested with snakes and scorpions.
I do not know what my grandfather's childhood home was like, but his return was not a happy homecoming. In fact, although the family was eventually given subsidized housing for repatriated Japanese citizens in Kengun, near Kumamoto, both my grandparents often had to live off-site to make enough money to support the family, as did my mother. Because of their command of English, my grandparents, and the older sisters, my mother included, found work on U.S. Military bases after the war. English speaking and tainted by the West, working on military bases suited them more than any employment within the Japanese mainstream.
The existence of a location culturally and socially similar to home, the
American military base, probably prevented the older siblings (who went straight to work) from the feelings of alienation and strangeness that they would have felt if they had to find employment and a sense of place in the Japanese mainstream. This also
110 prevented them from becoming part of this mainstream. Within a few years, my mother returned to Canada and two of her sisters married American soldiers and
settled in the United States. For these women, time spent in Japan was more of a
sojourn; it was never really a home.
The younger siblings were educated in Japan and grew into the Japanese culture and ways naturally. Many of the siblings, both the older and the younger, returned to Canada or settled in the U.S. in waves after the war although my grandparents stayed in Japan. The two youngest (Uncle Kenny and Aunt Naomi) have remained in Japan, as well as the second oldest sister (Aunt Kimie).
One by one, willing or unwilling, most of my aunts and uncles found their way back to North America. Raised and educated primarily in Japan, the younger aunts had few ties with Canada, but it was always assumed that they would return. Though they were raised in Japan, two of the middle sisters were destined for import to
Canada; formal marriage arrangements were made for them to marry Japanese
Canadian distant relatives. The experience of these sisters most closely resembles the experience of new immigrants, and their stories tell of the trauma of leaving a home in Japan. They returned to Canada speaking only Japanese, contracted to marry men they did not know, and living with extended family they had never met. Eva Hoffman describes how disorienting the loss of language can be:
I was in effect without language, and from the bleakness of that condition, I understood how much our inner existence, our sense of self, depends on having a living speech within us. To lose an internal language is to subside into an inarticulate darkness in which we become alien to ourselves; to lose
111 the ability to describe the world is to render that world a bit less vivid, a bit less lucid.4
Loss of language affects more than an ability to communicate with others; it
stifles self and self-image. Newcomers in a foreign country, without language, lose
themselves, until they recover the ability to speak in the foreign tongue of the new homeland. The older Kumoi siblings returned to Canada with a memory of life there:
the younger sisters returned to their homeland as strangers.
Life and home was hard won by all the siblings upon their return to Canada, but each one found a home, and the ties of family grew very close even across great
distances upon their return. Vijay Agnew observes that there are two kinds of homes:
the home of our childhood and the origin, which is a given, a fate, for better or for
worse, and the home of our adulthood, which is achieved only through an act of possession, hard-earned, patient, imbued with time, a possession made of our choice,
agency, the labour of understanding, and gradual arrival.5 One would probably have
difficulty identifying the originary home of the Kumoi Family. Each sibling might
select a different location, or none at all. However, every sister that I interviewed identified home as the place where they established families of their own. Although
the whole family has never been reunited since Tashme, the bonds of family are
stronger now than before, during or immediately after the war.
WhenI posed the question "Where is home for you?" to my mother and my aunts, I did not qualify the term, and each sister answered without hesitation, which
112 confirmed that after all their displacements, hardships and experiences, they found home.
The establishment of a sense of place for these women, and for anyone, maps back to a sense of self and the memories associated with that place, be it geographical
or psychological. Memory and identity are essential components in establishing home.
113 Notes
1 Vijay Agnew, "Introduction" in Diaspora, Memory, and Identity: A Search for Home, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 3. 2 Vijay Agnew, "Introduction" in Diaspora, Memory, and Identity: A Search for Home, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 4. 3 Vijay Agnew, "Introduction" in Diaspora, Memory, and Identity: A Search for Home, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 14. 4 Eva Hoffman, "The New Nomads" in letters of Transit: Reflections on Exile, ldentit language, and 1MS, (New York: New York Press, 1999). 48. 5 Ibid. 60.
114 *6
'ST,°Hy
X rwswf-H&ar **S CSxv /estte I'vnd ~fev*ts*fy. X rtfncn&tr- r*£otst t***j &Cy^ /*S tird iKjirttet- cartas cXnd running Gtoessid. X ajso a i? X U/ .5 /cnud (W Vi£hirtf *fev'J.S ma? far .5 X rttsv*rs*f&e:r fyer /Jt/// tind /Wj/? r*fy /»foZ? dr tt-SS js/nt /x*/ '•£/>!&•? . >9ow can ti dreSS £•* -SsftV-TS? •£/*• Cf th X /ov? tii/nT1 US s} frueyh r>nd t<•***-'CXJS rr*&r<^> iXrxJ /jet t&fie lt*ia l&26 '•Me In order to meaningfully situate very specific histories in relation to each other, and to the official narratives of this time in history, I have woven them together to address expected and unexpected themes that arose during my analysis of these women's stories. This both confirms and complicates the common understanding of a significant historical event like the Japanese Canadian Internment. As a researcher interviewing family members, my knowledge of these women, both as family and as historical subjects, has been reframed. This section represents my personal journey as an academic, through the stories of how my mother and my aunts found home. Initially I analyse my mother's and aunts' stories about their life in Chemainus in relation to attitudes and policies regarding the Japanese before the war.I then explore identity construction and social relations during the women's time in Hastings Park and in Tashme. In the post-war section, I explore experiences of displacement, social marginality, and different versions of re patriation experienced by many of the sisters. Finally,I explore the sisters' idea of home and where and when they found it. As my work progressed, I became interested in the way the stories of my mother and my aunts, in tone as well as fact, both supported and diverged from other stories of the war years and after. In their stories I don't have a sense of these 116 women as victims; the stories have less of a sense of shikata ga nai (it can't be helped), and more of sense that "this is the way things are," which requires "getting on with it." These stories expose the complex relations and hierarchies that exist in every family, but in the telling of their life stories as played out against the backdrop of the Japanese Canadian Internment, these women moved to each new location, did what they needed to survive, established goals, and followed pathways which were often forced upon them, on their own terms. Chemainus When my grandparents were first married, they lived in Abbottsford, British Columbia, near my great-grandfather's family. My grandmother, Lucille Ogata, was an only child, born of lssei parents in Canada. She married my grandfather, Tomato Kumoi (a Japanese national) shortly after her father remarried. After the birth of their first child, the young family moved to the town of Chemainus on Vancouver Island, where my grandfather worked at the sawmill. Chemainus is where most of the children were born. Life in Chemainus seemed peaceful and happy for the two eldest Kumoi sisters. They lived in a big house with a radio, a flower garden, and chickens. Both of the older sisters did not do much housework and had lots of time to play with friends. By their own accounts, the two older sisters were "quiet types," but they had their own interests: Lucille loved music and singing; Kimie loved reading, drawing, and the movies. 117 The family lived in Chinatown with ten or eleven other large Japanese families at the outskirts of town on one side of Chemainus. The rest of Chinatown was comprised of housing for the many Chinese men who worked at the local logging camp and saw mill. Most of the men were single or had left their families in China. Many of these men came to logging after the completion of the railroad. There was only one Chinese family there, and they, too, had several children. In her article "Connecting the Internment of Japanese Canadians to the Colonization of Aboriginal People in Canada," Mona Oikawa analyzes where racialized peoples lived and where they were forced to move and the effect this had on their place in relation to other peoples in the formation of the Canadian Identity.1 She employs D.T. Goldberg's termperipbratic spaces to identify exclusionary spaces that contain marginalized peoples who exist relationally to respectable spaces that are inhabited by dominant subjects.2 She additionally observes, as Kay Anderson does, that "racialized areas are not naturally occurring even though they become normalized as such. The pristine, white, elite spaces depend upon the racialized, degraded areas to delineate and legitimize differing entidements to power."3 In spite of this marginalization, the elder Kumoi daughters did not seem to feel marginalized. They went to school with white children and played with them at school. They did not visit each other at home, but this could have been because of 118 their after-school language classes. Image 27. Chemainus Superior, Division 6,1938, Collection ofjean Fujimoto Interestingly, there was also a Japantown on the other side of Chemainus, again on the outskirts. One of my aunts seemed to be a bit embarrassed by the fact that they lived in Chinatown instead. One consequence of this fact was that the children had a long walk to go to Japanese language classes after their regular school day and an even longer walk home after, often in the dark. All the sisters talk at length of this long daily journey to and from school. I remember going to school. I remember we had to walk about an hour to get to school. It was a long walk, we had to walk down a huge hill, and then we'd come done to where the logging camp was, then through the sawmill, and then through the business section, and then the housing area part, and you know, then we went to school.4 Sue, the fifth youngest sister, later talks about the even longer walk home after Japanese classes or other activities, and of how the walk home after dark was made more terrifying by the stories of the older children. 119 The older kids would tease us younger ones that there's ghosts around - so we'll run all the way from — almost from the school to home. Can you imaging walking, running, (laughs), at night, up that hill!5 None of the older Kumoi sisters, Lucy, Kimie, Jean, Lily or Sue, have an education beyond grade school. In Chemainus, the high school was considered too far away and the books, transportation, and other costs were too high. Lucille was working prior to leaving Chemainus and Kimie had just finished grade 8. Even before that, the two older girls were sent to the farm in Abbotsford to help with the farming work during summer breaks. The girls may not have been very experienced at housework, but they were experienced farm labourers. I mention in my letter to my eldest aunt that her situation prior to the displacement is one that is foreign to my experience. You were a transitional half-adult in the family, a state unknown by my children and me. Was it common to have older children working full-time to support the growing family, but still very much children living in a home where mother does all the cooking, cleaning, and child minding, and father goes off to work? Your formal education stopped earlier and you began supporting your family at 14. Did you still feel like a child? Were you eager to start your life? Or is that just what everyone else did?6 It was obvious that even with my grandfather Tomato working double shifts and leaving my grandmother to do all the housework, housekeeping and child rearing, it was hard for the Kumoi family to make ends meet. The elder sisters were sent away from home to work at a number of farming jobs and at a fishing cannery while still living in Chemainus. Oh yes I didn't tell you that me and Ne-san went to Mt. Lehman, in Chemainus, in the summer holiday. Grandpa toe Grandma ne? And we helped picking the 120 raspberry, blackberry, cherries mo te, ohhh! They had a big farm! Hoooo! Surprised jo. ... Just me and Ne-San, that's why I was crying every night, I wanted to go home. Ne-San, didn't cry (laughter).7 Although Kimie tells of crying at night and wanting to go home, her elder sister Lucille did not mind working away from home. She did not feel singled out since there were other youth her age who worked also and she enjoyed their company and the change from the school routine. Kimie mentions her father the most. He is rarely mentioned if at all in the other sisters' stories. She observes that their father was rarely home because he worked double shifts, no doubt to support his rapidly growing family. Ann Gomer Sunahara speaks of how hard-working many of the Japanese-Canadian workers were, and how this spurred the racist beliefs of some, that allowing Asians to work was unfair: By working for less, the racists argued, Asians undermined white living standards. ... Yet while theoretically inferior, Asians were considered unfair competition because they were superior workers. To counteract the debilitating effects of their lower wage, Asians worked longer hours and had higher productivity than their white counterparts. To the labour agitators, compensating for a low wage with high productivity was an unfair tactic.8 I regret that none of the sisters remembers or was aware of the situation in which my grandfather worked. I know that white, Chinese, and Japanese labourers worked at the mill in Chemainus at that time, and that my grandfather had to work double shifts to make ends meet. In their paper "Japanese Canadians and the Racialization of Labour in the British Columbia Sawmill Industry,"9 Audrey 121 Kobayashi and Peter Jackson chart how Chinese and Japanese workers at the Chemainus Mill made almost half the wages white mill workers did. According to government documents and organized labour groups of the time in British Columbia, Chinese and Japanese labourers were considered "the yellow peril," or the "Oriental Threat."10 As a result, governmental policies were put into place such as the head tax on Chinese Workers and the "Gendeman's Agreement" on immigration limits for Japanese. Chinese and Japanese workers made up at almost half of the labour working at the Chemainus Mill prior to the bombing of Pearl Harbour. The fact that my grandfather was always working explains the very few references made of him in the sisters' stories and their frequent references to their mother. Even Aunt Kimie's observation that he worked double shifts was a fact she learned of in later life. She was strict, yah, we were scared of her, Dad was ki(nd).. He was,I don't know, he was good. Dad was the quiet type, de ne\ And he never got mad at us, or, he used to work in the daytime and the nighttime also.I didn't know that, I didn't know he was working night shift too at the sawmill, Mrs. Haraga told me that, our cousin. She told me that: "Your Papa worked day and night de ne\ to raise us up" [shy laughter].11 My grandmother is the person who dominates the sisters' stories of their life in Chemainus. Because her husband was always working, she had to do all the housekeeping, child rearing (she gave birth to eleven children in Chemainus), and housework, including house repairs and log splitting. Considering her workload, the fact that her children were required to do litde work is notable. Kimie recounts this: 122 "We didn't do anything. ... she says mo mendokusai teju ne [she would say its too much of a bother] ... you go outside and play. But she made Jean go shopping to the butcher shop, which is quite far, eh! She used to go almost every day to buy meat."12 My mother Jean was the exception among the sisters. Unlike her older sisters, my mother's first memory is of standing on an orange crate washing diapers. She was the one who, at the age of five or six, made long solitary walks to the butcher to buy meat. She was often the caretaker of her younger siblings. Her childhood was one of work and school and little leisure. She states that she was not aware of what her elder sisters did because she was too busy "looking after the kids, or doing the chores. That's what I really remember, you know, Mom making the stand, you know, for me to stand on, and there was this washboard, because there was one child after another, so Mom couldn't keep up so she made me wash the diapers."13 My mother also states that Kimie and Lucille "did not help too much."14 My mother does remember a wonderful place where she and her siblings used to play in summer that she calls Bear Point. She often took her younger siblings there to play. Aunt Kimie mentions this place too. This is one of the locations my mother took me in my teens on a vacation to British Columbia. I could almost hear the sound of children playing when I visited there. It was near a railway track with a posted Chemainus sign and a large "Keep away from the track" sign. My mother immediately started to run down the track and bent down to pick a familiar wild 123 flower. Large rocks that were covered in beautiful mosses and lichens led to the shore. I can see why the children loved to play there. The next two younger sisters, Lily and Sue, have fewer memories of Chemainus. Their earliest memories have to do with the traumatic death of twin boys David and Stanley, who died of pneumonia, a complication of Impetigo. These girls were litde more than toddlers themselves when the twins died, and they remember childish acts at the coffins. Aunt Sue remembers taking one of the dolls that had been placed in each coffin; Aunt Lily remembers throwing sand into a coffin. Prior to the bombing of Pearl Harbour, the Kumoi family was a large, working-class family consisting of my grandfather, Tomato Kumoi, my grandmother, Lucille Ogata-Kumoi, and their twelve children (including twin boys who died in infancy). The most unfortunate fact for me is the lack of informationI could gather about my grandparents' reaction to the events that occurred after the bombing. They did not share their fears, plans, or strategies for the future with their children. For example, there are conflicting accounts of the reasons for critical decisions made regarding "repatriation" in particular, in the sister's stories. One sister claims that my grandfather wanted to go to Japan in spite of the objections of his wife because he feared for the future in Canada given recent treatment. Another sister states that my grandfather wanted to stay, but that my grandmother insisted on going to Japan because her father chose to go. 124 The official policies enacted against Japanese residents and Japanese Canadians resulted in many changes. My grandfather was sent to Tashme to help build the camp and my grandmother was left at home sell off the family's furniture and larger possessions and to pack up the children on her own. In spite of all this disruption and preparation, prior to being removed the sisters recall very little concern for the events of the war and the effect it would have on their lives. The sisters (with the exception of Kimie who does mention some sadness at leaving a Czechoslovakian friend) do not express a lot of regret about leaving Chemainus. They speak of the opportunity to get out of town and to travel on a train. To them this displacement seemed a kind of adventure. There is some mention of how hard it must have been on their parents, but the idea of adventure seemed to dominate the attitudes of the children. Aunt Sue mentions how hard it must have been for their mother, who had had to liquidate the family possessions and care for the children on her own. She mentions how my grandmother sold most of the appliances and furniture to First Nations families. I don't understand why there seems so little resentment or sense of dispossession on the part of the children upon leaving Chemainus. They speak about the sadness of leaving, but they also recall how they packed their belongings in one suitcase, and set off on an adventure. In the case of the Kumoi family, there would be no house to come back to since their house was rented. The Kumoi family had been residents of Chemainus for fifteen years prior to 125 being sent to Hastings Park. Through the hard work of their parents, the Kumoi children seemed to view their very large, working class family as a good one. One theme that I found interesting from a personal as well as a psychological perspective relates to extraordinary situations—ones that disrupt the idea of a normal existence and force individuals or groups to re-establish equilibrium by establishing a new norm, or to become acclimatized to disruption as the norm. The anticipation of radical or violent disruptions I define as fear. When the unimaginable happens, fear meets reality and it must be faced, so life moves forward. It seems to me that this is a strong personal attitude exemplified by many Nisei, and that my mother and my aunts clearly show this trait. Hastings Park In the spring of 1942, Lucille Kumoi and her ten children made the long train, ferry, and bus journey to Hastings Park. The living conditions at Hastings Park were recalled matter-of-factly by the older sisters who describe sleeping on bunk beds with straw for padding inside horse stalls that still had the chains for livestock on the walls. They describe communal toilet and washing facilities, in particular a sink that was like a trough. They also mention that they had to shower, and not bathe, which was a new experience. My Aunt Kimie also mentions how they were not allowed to shower every day. The experience of those who lived in Hastings Park has been well documented. In The Politics of Racism, Ann Gomer Sunahara gives a very detailed description of Hastings Park. 126 Hastings Park Manning Pool was a holding pen for human beings. Expropriated in the first week of March, it had been converted from animal to human shelter in only seven days. The facilities were crude. In the former Women's Building and the livestock barns, rows of bunks had been erected, each equipped with a straw mattress, three army blankets and a small bolster. Each bunk was separated from its neighbour by only three feet of concrete floor, which still reeked of the animals that had recendy been kept there. Toilets were open troughs and forty-eight showers had been hastily installed: ten in the building housing men and boys over thirteen years of age, the rest in the Livestock Building for the women and children held there. Eating facilities were equally crude — an army field kitchen hastily erected in the former poultry section of the Livestock Building. Designed to produce mass meals for able-bodied men, that kitchen could not provide the dietary needs of babies and the aged, especially the aged of a different culture. Most shocking to the inmates, whose culture demanded fastidious personal cleanliness, was the ever-present stink of animals and the maggots and the dirt that encrusted the buildings in Hastings Park.15 There are a few observations of my mother and aunts that stand out for me about their experiences at this time. Surprising to me, Aunt Sue remembers her experience in Hastings Park as being fun. She points out the opportunity to make many more friends and the novelty of being in a new place. Aunt Kimie also mentions playing with friends when she had time. Sue would have been around nine or ten at the time and Kimie around fourteen. None of the sisters mentions any recollection of experiencing racism during their time in Chemainus, and the fact that the population of Hastings Park was completely Japanese and Japanese Canadian made for a common cultural understanding that probably helped occupants survive in such cramped and unsanitary quarters. My mother, however, did experience prejudice for the first time in Hastings Park. Unlike her siblings, my mother has brown hair and less Asian 127 features. For this reason she was constantly challenged and accused of not belonging by the Japanese and Japanese Canadians who did not know her. This made her time in Hastings Park very difficult. She speaks of constandy being questioned and challenged and of having to constandy explain herself. It made her feel as though she did not belong. The thing about Hastings Park, I don't know, for some reason, the feelingI had, people that didn't know me didn't think I was Japanese. So I was kinda discriminated a bit. They would come and ask me, 'How come you're here?' It was kinda sad (voice cracks with emotion), for me anyways. Because I felt that I didn't belong.16 Another recollection is from my Aunt Kimie who recalls how one of the cooks poisoned the miso soup with Epson salts and caused everyone to be very sick. She mentioned that she guesses that he didn't like Japanese, such an understated way to talk of racism and prejudice. All of the sisters mention the poor living conditions in Hastings Park, but many also mention that it was "only for a litde while."17 When considering the ages of elder sisters at this time, ranging from around nine to sixteen,I can understand on some levels the lack of resentment and acceptance of sisters like Sue who, since she was younger (around nine or ten), found that the novelty of being in a new place and the opportunity of meeting new friends made the experience less of a trial. I can imagine the anxiety of my grandparents and how worried they were for their future. The children, on the other hand were not preoccupied with this concern. Pamela Sugiman refers to similarly positive and nostalgic recollections of Hastings Park. In 128 "Memories of Internment: Narrating Japanese Canadian Women's Life Stories," Sugiman describes similar descriptions of Hastings Park as fun. Pamela Sugiman traces the concept of nostalgic memory through a series of theories beginning with this kind of memory being a "falsification of the past,"18 the ramblings of "incurable sentimentalists,"19 or a more complex view that enables one to "selectively emphasize positive experiences and aspects of the past"20 in order to better deal with the effects of the past and to move on positively in the present and future. She finally observes how nostalgic memory is useful in the formation of identity within the shared experience of this community. She observes this not only in stories of Hastings Park, but those of the camps also. Isolated in desolate parts of the interior of BC, communities of internees had little choice but to develop bonds based on social support and common experience.21 With regard to the experiences of my mother and her sisters,I wonder if something other than nostalgic memory is operating. The elder sisters in the Kumoi family had already had experiences of being sent away to work even while living in Chemainus. Although the sisters had a happy and good life in Chemainus by their own accounts, their quality of life and status would be considered lower or working class. By today's standards they would have been considered the working poor. Living in a community of Chinese male labourers and approximately ten Japanese- Canadian families, most of the supports for the rest of the Japanese community in Chemainus were situated across town in the Japanese area. Not only did the Kumoi 129 family have less to lose than many other Japanese families who were displaced, their standard of living and access to youth and community supports would have been comparable or improved in Tashme. In addition, even in Hastings Park, the Kumoi family had access to a broader social spectrum of members of the Japanese- Canadian community than they had in Chemainus. This leads to the possibility of there being perhaps a different displacement narrative for Japanese Canadians of the lower classes. This does not belittle the hardship experienced by all during this time; however, opportunity as well as confinement may have been operating for some. Tashme The Kumoi family arrived in Tashme in the fall of 1942 and left for Japan in May 1946 (with the exception of the oldest daughter, Lucille). Upon their first arrival, all the sisters describe the rows of tarpaper shacks, around 350 in all, that were arranged in 10 avenues. The family of thirteen all lived in one tarpaper shack with the exception of Jean, who lived next door. The oldest sister Lucille recalls how they thought the house was great until the winter, and then there were icicles on the inside of the shack and it was always cold. Kimie recalls how their mother draped a big plastic sheet on the dinner table so the children could play under the table and their body heat would keep the area relatively warm. Initially both older sisters mentioned the harsh living conditions, but it seems the girls eventually became accustomed to life in Tashme, and for the most part say they enjoyed their time there. 130 Lucille worked mosdy ironing laundry at the hospital in Tashme. She was paid twenty cents an hour. Sue tells of how her older sister was afraid to walk home in the dark during winter for fear of the coyotes. Kimie worked in the laundry department too, and later for a dentist. Both Lucille and Kimie belonged to the sewing club, which they enjoyed, and Lucille was an enthusiastic singer and participated in concerts and musical events, which is where she met her husband, Gord. The other children attended school or were looked after at home by my grandmother. Several of the sisters speak of their time in Tashme fondly. My mother talks of being freed of most of the responsibility of child minding, and of the ability finally to attend a real school again. By that time the kids were grown up so I found when I went to Tashme I had more freer time — cos then, you know, I had started making — then we went to school, in Tashme I was in grade 7? So that by that time I didn't have to look after the kids — the kids were going to school too, except the small ones, but I kinda enjoyed Tashme. I made friends,I had one very good friend that lived on the same avenue as I did. So we went to school together, and then I joined — first it was Tashme Stars it was a girls club that the missionaries started, and then it was the C.G.I.T.. So we did a lot, we had hiking, we had picnics, and we had meetings, you know, made things, so, I really enjoyed — and then weekends me and my girlfriend, we used to go for walks, we used to go to see ball games, and you know, I think we went to a couple of high school dances in grade 7 and 8 — so Tashme,I really enjoyed Tashme. It was a time that I didn't have to do too much, except for myself.22 My mother was an active participant in school and in other youth activities organized by missionaries who supported the camps. She refers to this time in 131 another interview as the happiest in her childhood. Sue also talks of her life in Tashme as a happy childhood. For the oldest sister Lucille, Tashme is where she met and married her husband, and the two of them settled in their first home together in the shack adjoining Gord's parents, so Lucille too, has fond memories of Tashme. When asked what she did outside of school time, Sue immediately mentioned the yearly concerts in Tashme. "Well we had a concert, every year we would have a concert, so everybody would want to do something, ya know? We will get up there on the stage and do it. ...I had lots of friends. [More than in Chemainusj because there were more families in Tashme."23 Sue states without hesitation that life was more fun in Tashme than in Chemainus. She states that being older and able to do more is one reason. In Tashme she sang and attended ballet and tap lessons. She spoke of a library to go to. She also did a lot of hiking — "we were able to walk and walk and walk."24 She also talks of ice-skating in the winter. She describes her time at Tashme as a very good childhood. For the Kumoi girls, it seems that Tashme was not so much a prison as some would think. Although life was still hard for the residents of Tashme, and the harsh winters made life even harder in that season, Pamela Sugiman observes how this harsh existence created a strong and vibrant sense of community in the camps: "Isolated in desolate parts of the interior of BC, communities of internees had litde choice but to develop bonds based on social support and common experience." She later observes how "Some women were reminiscent of these times of mutual 132 support and shared experience, reinforced by gender-based friendships, youth, and a strong identity as Japanese Canadians. Such reminiscences in some sense helped the Nisei to define themselves as a group, and to perpetuate a collective identity in the face of cultural dispersal in the post-war years. Hideko, for instance, explains Those were very interesting years for me. That's where I met all my friends. ... Nobody's rich or poor or educated. We were all the same. And we all helped each other.... In fact, the whole of Tashme was ... We were happy. Nobody sad. We all encouraged each other, you know. And helped each other so."25 Beyond this sense of building community through adversity, there seemed to be more opportunity for some of the Tashme youth than they would have had at home. I think my mother started high school in Tashme. She did not have the opportunity to finish because of the end of the war and the closing of the camp, but a high school education would not have been possible for her in Chemainus. My grandfather would not have had to work double shifts in Tashme, and my mother would have had a lot of support from neighbours in helping to care for her large family. Lily mentions how large families were allotted more food and had clothing supplied for the children. Materially, the Kumoi family had a better standard of living in Tashme than in Chemainus. The two younger sisters have no memory of Tashme, as they were toddlers and very young children at the time. Naomi, the youngest daughter, was born in Tashme. 133 Helene Cixous talks about the violence involved in finding oneself out of the ordinary, a state we are always prey to under the surface of our everyday selves, but one that is magnified by loss, by bereavement: Either there is bereavement between me, violently, from the loss of a being who is a part of me — as if a piece of my body, of my house, were ruined, collapsed. ... When an event arrives which evicts us from ourselves, we do not know how to live. But we must.26 The fact that we must, and do, live, Cixous refers to as "being abroad at home," an "entredeux."27 This is not exclusively a physical or psychological place, but rather a place in-between, a passage, a process, a way of being really alive and on the edge of death at the same time. It can be a place to retreat from or deny. It can be a place of provocation and possibility. Tashme was an entredeux in many ways. Although it might not have been felt by the children of Tomato and Lucille, the uncertainty of being imprisoned in a camp, even one as well supported as Tashme, must have subjected the couple to great anxiety and worry. What strikes me is the paralyzing effect an uncertain future can have on the parents of any family. Having eleven children would have magnified this problem. With the closure of Tashme, the Kumoi family went to two destinations. Having decided to stay in Canada, the B.C. Securities Commission placed the oldest daughter Lucille and her husband Gord in service in a rural area near Hamilton, Ontario. Lucille worked as a housekeeper and Gord worked as a gardener. Lucille recalls that she learned how to clean and cook from the woman of the house, as she did not have these skills when she arrived in Ontario. Gord learned on thejob. 134 The rest of the Kumoi family repatriated to Japan. The sisters give conflicting reasons for the decision to go to Japan, but the only strong objection to going to Japan came from my mother Jean. She wanted to stay with her sister Lucille in Hamilton. She recalls her arguments with authorities about having to leave: Oh that, I had a fight with the Mountie, because I wanted to stay with my sister. So the Mountie said, "You have to sign," I was fifteen then, "You have to sign the paper saying that you are going to go to Japan." So what I wrote,I wrote down, Forced to sign! AndI wrote my name because I didn't want to go. I say I want to stay with my sister Lucille. ... but the Mountie says no. 28 As observed by Pamela Sugiman, for many, the time after Internment was the worst part of their treatment. ... by the War's end, government policy shifted and the Japanese Canadian communities that had ironically been affirmed by the internment, were forcibly dispersed. Many social bonds were severed and ethnic identities and loyalties were denied.29 The Kumoi family was separated at this time, and the whole family has never been reunited since. Japan Although I do not know the actual reason for my grandparents' choice to repatriate to Japan, Ann Gomer Sunahara outlines the difficult and confusing choice facing Japanese Canadians at the end of the war. Repatriates, the inmates were told, could continue to live and work in British Columbia until transportation to Japan was arranged. They would receive relief without first having to use up their capital on deposit with the Custodian of Enemy Property and, upon reaching Japan, they would receive, in addition to their free passage, funds equivalent to the value of their capital in Canada. Those lacking property would receive $200 per adult and $50 per child to sustain them until established in Japan.3" 135 Those who chose to stay received about a quarter of the funds per capita upon leaving government custody, were sent from their current place of residence to Kaslo Internment camp, and would be sent to locations and employment dictated by the government or be deemed "unwilling to cooperate" by the loyalty commission.31 Either choice would be a very uncertain one for a family of 12. My Aunt Lucille and Uncle Gord chose to stay in Canada while my grandparents chose repatriation to Japan along with their 10 children. There were very vivid memories recalled by all the sisters about the sea voyage to Japan. With the exception of Kimie, they were all seasick for at least some of the time. Aunt Kimie recalls her departure and time on the ship. I was eighteen ne, and Taiko was my best friend, and we went on this, ah, we were the first Japanese to go to Japan ne?— and they didn't have this President's Line, ne? The second team went on the President's Lines, but we had to go on a marine ship — dirty ship ne? Ohhh! And all Negros working — marines ne?, but we used to have fun with them though! (laughs) — just the age de mo ne! The trip was awful. We went through the Aleutian Ocean that's why it was rough the ride ne? At the mess hall all the dishes falls down. Everybody got sick too so shite?2 Both Sue and Lily also recall attentive treatment from the marines on the ship who were pleasant company and gave the girls oranges. Upon their arrival at Yokohama, after a period of quarantine on ship, the family was housed and fed in a large building for a few days and then they were released to find their own way. As recalled by June, the family was packed on a train 136 "like sardines"33 and travelled to the southern island of Kyushu, where Tomato's sister had a small farm not far from Kumamoto City. There are also vivid memories from all the sisters from their first "home" in Japan. Once on their aunt's land, the family was setded in an old wooden shed with a dirt floor. Well it looked like a — it was a, a bam at Dad's sister's place and she just laid down a bunch of hay on the ground and put a woven mat on top of all that and that's where we slept and stayed. And you have snakes and scorpions; you know crawling all over the place. Mother got bitten by a scorpion on her leg and it just swelled up like this [hand gesture about 6 inches wide].34 Although the family did not live at this location for very long, it was a place of extreme hardship. In spite of this fact, Sue speaks a collection of rocks that the younger children used to "hang around" and play. The children did not play with other children because they were isolated on the farm. In addition, the family was looked upon as different, and "American lovers" by the neighbours because they spoke English and wore brighdy coloured clothes. My mother mentions how diapers for the babies kept disappearing from the clothesline. Someone from her aunt's house was taking them. Kimie speaks of having to look after her little brother Bobby at this time. My mother Jean seemed to have had the hardest time. She recendy remembered that shortly after her arrival her father took her on a long train ride and left her to work in a restaurant for some time. She was the only one to be sent away. Upon her return, she remembers working in the fields planting rice and using salt to remove 137 leeches from her legs at night. After one of the diaper-stealing incidents my mother came to a decision. So I,I was mad. Then I was getting really upset.I was telling my Dad, Why did you bring us here? We can't understand the language. And you know, no place to sleep. What are we going to do? Next day, I got mad and I just walked out, went on the train and I came to Kumamoto City and then I went to where the American offices were — where they hire people? Employment office? And it was run by American soldiers. So I says, "I need a job." And he says we don't have a job.35 In spite of being very demanding, my mother was turned down, and on her way back to the train station, she was robbed and had no fare to return home. The generosity of a police constable allowed her to borrow money to buy a ticket. By then she had missed the train and had to spend the night sleeping in the train station. Before leaving for home the next day, she visited the employment office again. "And I says 'I need a job!' and so I explained to him what happened, so that's when they found a job for me." She obtained a job working for a U.S. Colonel's family. She worked as interpreter for the Japanese servants and as maid to the colonel's wife. She was the first in the family to get a job and the first to leave the house, living in service for military personnel for the remainder of her stay in Japan. Kimie recalled how her father borrowed a family friend's bicycle to find a job and as he was searching, the bicycle was stolen. As a result my grandmother had to give her sewing machine to the family in payment. Eventually my grandfather found jobs for the older sisters Kimie, Lily, and Sue, all of whom worked at the military 138 base in Kumamoto. Some worked in laundry services, and later all three worked as telephone operators. Eventually, my grandfather heard of and acquired subsidized housing for repatriated Japanese in Kengun (a suburb of Kumamoto City) and moved the family there. He worked as a security guard and lived on the military base. My grandmother also lived away from home working as a housekeeper. The middle sisters June and (mosdy) May looked after the younger children since the older sisters were soon married or were already out of the house. I observed two distinct generations of Kumoi children: those who were educated in Canada and those who were educated in Japan. The older sisters (Lucille, Kimie, Jean, Lily, and Sue) attended school in Canada and all of them found work as U.S. military support staff. As a result, these women, and even their parents, had less exposure to the mainstream Japanese community. For the older girls, with the exception of Kimie, living in Japan was a temporary situation. They all had long- term plans to return to the West. My mother was the first to return when, after about three years, her older sister Lucille sponsored her return. Both Lily and Sue married U.S. soldiers and spent time posted in Europe before settling in the United States. Kimie met and married a young man repatriated from Korea, who lived in their building. She is the only sister, with the exception of the youngest sister, Naomi, who remains in Japan. 139 The older Kumoi sisters, who were sent to Japan, did not easily fit into the Japanese social mainstream. Their lack of language (they spoke Japanese poorly and with an accent) and their more Western ways marked them as different. They found work and a sense of belonging in the U.S. military base because they were useful as English speaking Japanese, and the language, culture, and ways of working were more familiar to them. Acceptance into mainstream Japanese culture would be very difficult given their background. Kimie met and fell in love with another repatriated citizen who also struggled in life because he was a foreigner, but together they managed to reintegrate themselves into the mainstream culture to an extent. The younger generation of siblings were educated in Japan and they all had strong social ties to Japanese mainstream culture. Because they did not speak Japanese well, all the children had to start school at the grade one level, but they soon were placed at an age-appropriate grade level. All the siblings educated in Japan went to high school, but not beyond. They considered themselves Japanese as they were growing up. I suspect that this dual-generation phenomenon is not uncommon amongst displaced families or families who emigrate. What is unique in this family's experience is the fact that there was still a strong expectation that all the children would return to Canada, which most did. Kimie and the two youngest children, Kenny and Naomi, were exceptions. 140 Naomi, the youngest sister in the Kumoi family, is the family secret. Being the youngest, well over a decade younger than her elder sisters, she was raised mostly by the middle sisters. But even now, her story is a mystery. She was not mentioned by any of the sisters in their interviews, except in passing, as an infant. Many of the older sisters had already established their lives elsewhere when she was just beginning hers. Early in her adult life, Naomi became pregnant and spent a brief time with the father, but he soon abandoned them. Naomi then left her son with my grandmother, and has had no contact with the family since. She has had sporadic contact with her son, as far as the family can determine, but my grandmother did not allow the rest of the family to have any contact with Naomi, or to mention her. In my letter to her I reach out to this unknown family member even though I know I cannot reach her. I am glad that you have been able to stay in contact with your son. My naive wish to find you is insignificant compared to the loss of your family so many years ago. Although none of the sisters remembers being very close when they were younger, they are very close now. My mother speaks to all of the sisters frequendy, except of course, to you. There is a special bond between them. Who are you close to? Your son is in his mid-forties now, and you are around 66 — still quite young. Where are you right now as I write this? I hope life has been good for you. I hope you have found your way. I hope you have found a home.36 Canada I am not sure where the expectation that the Kumoi children should return to Canada originated.I wonder if perhaps their Canadian background, as well as the lack of material wealth, education, or influence would have made it hard for Lucille 141 and Tomato's children to prosper in Japan. My grandparents planned their middle children's return through arranged marriages. The oldest son Fred, May, and June were all contracted to initially marry Japanese Canadian relatives from the west coast, but several of the arrangements did not come to pass. All the middle children (Fred, May, June, and Bobby) did return to Canada. The youngest three arrived without any knowledge of Western culture or the English language. Their father's sister, Mrs. Haraga, originally sponsored the family to return to Canada. The oldest son Fred was the first to arrive. He was contracted to marry the daughter of a family friend, but he married my Aunt Reiko, and the contract had to be terminated. Fred and Bobby, his younger brother, both came to live in Toronto with my mother Jean. May did not want to return to Canada, but she states it was expected of her: Well I had no choice because it was already arranged, with Kazuya, parents, you know, but first, I think Mrs. Haraga sponsored] us, from Vancouver, and I don't know how they arranged the marriage — s'posed to be with Mrs. Haraga's sons, one of the sons, but I dunno what happened.37 May was very unhappy when she arrived. When asked if she wanted to stay in Japan she replied, "Ya, I cried for two months in Vancouver, you know — you can't speak any English, I don't have no friends, you know. I knew Kazuya was gonna come, but I didn't know Kazuya either, so — [laughs].38 The feeling of displacement, alienation, and sorrow is an echo of my mother's complaint to her father upon the family's arrival in Japan years earlier. The difference is the self-determination and independent action that my Canadian mother took to get back to Canada versus my aunt's traditional Japanese respect for and abidance of parental expectations, including forced migration and arranged marriage. The older siblings chose their own paths; many of the younger ones had their life paths chosen for them, initially at least. It was three years before Mrs. Haraga brought Kazuya to Canada. May lived in the Haraga household until his arrival. By then, May had been married by proxy for three years. Later, as organized by Mrs. Haraga, June came to Vancouver. June was eager to return to Canada because most of her siblings were already there; she did not want to be left behind. She was brought to Vancouver to marry one of the Haraga sons, but she also met and married another. It seems that different sisters at different times had their lives suspended for different reasons. They either had to set their own life goals and aspirations aside or their life choices were not their own. For the elder sisters who went to Japan, their lives were suspended during the time they spent in Japan. These sisters seemed to have more autonomy in finding work and making life choices. For May it was the three years she spent in Vancouver waiting for her husband to arrive. May, however, had much less control over her life's direction and destination. In this way various sisters in the Kumoi family faced different challenges in establishing themselves and gaining a sense of self-determination. For the older sisters, it required a way to survive in a foreign country: for the younger, how to be the perfect "picture bride" or to at least how to reintegrate into the Japanese Canadian community in Canada and function in Canadian society. For the younger sisters, this was an even greater 143 challenge. Their lives were strictly controlled within Japanese cultural conventions even as they were made to resettle in a foreign country with no knowledge of the language or culture of that land. My interviews with my aunts and my knowledge through family stories has given me a picture of the experiences of many of the Kumoi sisters; however, I have no knowledge of the life and most especially the feelings of my grandparents. I feel that in many ways, they are family mysteries to me. Their life choices loom large in the lives of their children, and yet their hopes and dreams, their trials and anxieties, their triumphs and accomplishments, their sense of identity, and where they found home are a mystery to me. I met my grandmother once when I was fourteen. It was her only return to Canada for a visit with her grandson, Naomi's son. He was four at the time. I corresponded with my grandmother quite regularly as a child and as a teen. She was my only English-speaking grandparent, and she lived in Japan. She was a strong- minded and plain speaking woman and I gready admired her. She struck me, even then, as a very capable and tremendously talented woman: an excellent cook, talented at sewing, knitting, and crochet. She wrote with exquisite penmanship, and ruled her grandson with great control and affection. I was in awe of her, but did not really get to know her. She has always been a dominant figure in the lives of her children. Grandfather is a more fugitive presence. I suspect, however, that Lucille Kumoi has 144 never shared with her children her own trials, her own sense of accomplishment, or her own anxieties. Her children supported her in Japan through her widowhood, and my mother visited as frequently as she could, about every three years. Other family members visited also. What I can imagine is that at every critical stage in the Kumoi family's journey, while the children were shielded from impacts of the war, the parent bore the brunt of it all. The parents—one Japanese, one Canadian—suffered the most, possibly at differing times, in their struggle to find home, happiness, and a future for themselves and their family. I have answers for none of my largest questions regarding the lives of my grandparents. The older sisters were instrumental in supporting the younger ones on their return to Canada: Lucille sponsored Jean; Jean advocated for her brother Fred and supported his moving to Toronto; and May, under her aunt's direction, sponsored June to come to Canada. Both Fred and Bobby and their families lived with Jean; Jean had "a litde fight"39 with Mrs. Haraga to allow May to move to Toronto. As many of the siblings gradually moved east to the Greater Toronto Area, they grew closer than they had been in Chemainus, in Tashme, or in Japan. The surviving sisters and brothers are still very close and see each other often. The two sisters who married U.S. military servicemen still live in the U.S., but there are frequent visits back and forth. Phone conversations and Facebook allow sisters to hear of each other weekly, if not daily. 145 Home When asked my final question, "Where is home?" most of the sisters named the place where they settled, with their husbands, to raise their families. Lucille lives in the same house in Hamilton. Kimie, who has had to move the most of all the sisters, and in many ways has had the most unsettled life, named the apartment for repatriated citizens in Kengun where the family setded and where she met her husband. My mother named the first house she bought with my father, where she still lives. Lily named her little house in Denver, where she settled after escaping an abusive marriage. This is where she raised her three children by herself, and where she still lives; her daughter lives across the street. Sue named her beautiful "A" frame house in Pennsauken, New Jersey that she and her husband bought after returning from military service on the Continent. That house is gone now and two suburban homes sit in its footprint. She has not lived there for more than two decades. June named a city (Toronto) not a particular residence. She setded in Scarborough after living for a short time in Windsor. She and her husband raised their children there. The three sisters, Jean, June, and May live an easy drive from one another and see each other often. The pattern of these sisters' lives often includes time in each other's company. May named her current place of semi-residence in Scarborough as home. It is the house she and her husband bought and raised their family in. May now has two places of residence. She spends half her time in the family home, now 146 owned by her youngest daughter and her family, and half her time in Mississauga with her eldest daughter and her family. Her words at the end of her interview poignandy echo the feeling with which I was left in each of my interviews. When I asked where home was for May, she interrupted me with the answer, "Here. Toronto." She then elaborated, "this is my happy, you know, memory is here." She has lived in Toronto for about 45 years now. When asked if she missed Japan, she shook her head and gave a definite, "No." May also mentioned how the idea of family and especially the closeness she has, particularly with her sisters now, is very strong. Because of the age difference and the difference in life paths between the older and the younger sisters, May did not know her older sisters when she was growing up in Japan. Sister is sister right, we knew [they were my] sister when I was younger, but now, I don't know — blood I guess (laughs) — we live in the same place. Yah, now it's you know, happy, with the sisters [wipes away tears].4" 147 Notes 1 Mona Oikawa, "Connecting the Internment of Japanese Canadians to the Colonization of Aboriginal People in Canada" in Aboriginal Connections to Race, Environment and Traditions, edited by Rich Riewe and Jill Oakes, (Winnipeg, Aboriginal Issues Press, 2006), 17. 2 Ibid. 19. J Ibid. 4 Interview with Susan Olsson. 5 Ibid. 6 Katherine Yamashita, Finding Home, 2011, p. 7 Interview with Kimie Watanabe 8 Ann Gomer Sunahara, The Politics of Racism, 9 Audrey Kobayashi and Peter Jackson, "Japanese Canadians and the Racialization of Labour in the British Columbia Sawmill Industry" in B.C. Studies, 1994: 103, 50. "> Ibid, 30. " Interview with Kimie Watanabe 12 Ibid. 13 Interview with jean Fujimoto Baba 14 Ibid. 15 Sunahara, Chapter 3. >6 Interview with Jean Fujimoto-Baba 17 Interview with 1 .ucille Oikawa 18 Sugiman, 375. 19 Ibid. 376. 211 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 378. 22 Interview with Jean Fujimoto Baba 23 Interview with Susan Olsson 24 Ibid 25 Sugiman, 378. 26 Helene Cixous and Mireille Calle-Gruber, footprints, 9. 27 Ibid, 10. 28 Interview with J ean Fujimoto Baba 29 Sugiman, 378. 30 Sunahara, 105. 31 Ibid. 32 Interview with Kimie Watanabe 33 Interview with June Minemoto 34 Interview with Sue Olsson 35 Interview with Jean Fujimoto Baba 36 Letter to my Aunt Naomi, 37 Interview with May Kumoi 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid. 148 CHAPTER 7 ARTISTIC CONSTRUCTION, PSYCHIC RECONSTRUCTION Image 28. View From Home, K. Yamashita Image 28. Finding Home Exhibition, Katherine Yamashita My research has involved gathering stories about lives interrupted, taken over, displaced. The stories were important to record historically, but their transformative power was found in the way they disrupted my comfortable sense of self, what the process of ingesting them did to break down and to reconstruct my own identity. I see this as a kind of intimate research and creative investigation. There was a time when I searched hard to jind "it," whatever "it" was: the truth, the real story, the combined story seamed together, to create something definitive. I now realise that there are no definitives and that the fascination for me, and perhaps the real insight, came from fugitive, retreating points that are connections, memory triggers, flashes of imagery thatflicker past my consciousness and then move on, or that I could grasp and chase after, explore and take in. 150 Helene Cixous explained one of her motives in writing as an involuntary intention, and a "tendency to rehabilitate what is forgotten, subordinated."1 She writes about justice and how we have lost it. She observes how hierarchies of power and politics have infected everything including our imagination.21 present the formal version of the Kumoi sisters' stories in the previous chapter and through it, this family's history adds texture and at times contrast to the grand narrative of the Japanese Canadian Internment. I felt, however, that the chapter presented a one- dimensional version of their stories and my analysis. The personal journey undertaken through the previous chapters required that my presentation of the each sister's story take a more complex, archival, and artistic format, one that demanded a multi-layered reading and response. In his short essay "Constructions in Analysis," Sigmund Freud presents the role of the analyst as an archaeologist who reconstructs the site of trauma in order to allow his patient to confront it: His task is to make out what has been forgotten from the traces, which it has left behind or, more correctly, to construct it. His work of construction, or, if it is preferred, of reconstruction, resembles to a great extent an archaeologist's excavation of some dwelling-place that has been destroyed and buried or of some ancient edifice. The two processes are in fact identical since the analyst works under better conditions and has more material at his command to assist him, since what he is dealing with is not something that is destroyed, but something that is still alive.3 Freud's construction is conducted in steps, building on subsequent and significant layers of meaning to awaken awareness in his patient. Following Freud's 151 notion of reconstruction, my research practice has been one of collecting, listening, and responding to my research subjects. Initially, a personal relationship with my subjects was built, but later, I felt the need to respond to the stories themselves, to inquire further, to speculate, and to accentuate them with my own observations and related stories. In other words, I had to construct a basis for further understanding. This construction is what I present in the gallery exhibition. As part of the exhibition,I wrote letters to my mother and my aunts. Although they are constructions designed as elements in an artwork, these letters were also given to each of my aunts and my mother. They represent my acknowledgment of their stories and their significance to me as a family member as well as a researcher. I felt that the women should speak for themselves in the exhibition. This was not my original intent, but after recording them and listening to them,I knew that they must be the faces and voices that dominated the room. They are at the heart of my research and the voices that fill the gallery space. Aunts are interesting creatures. They are not my mother, but they are somehow like her. They talk and sound like my mother, but their way of talking is accented by other life experiences and other places. Aunt Sue has a gentle Jersey accent; Aunt Lil has the outgoing drawl of the American Midwest. Aunt June and Aunt May speak softly with the shadow of a Japanese accent. Aunt Luy has a gentle rhythm when she talks; her children have it too. 152 When 1 walked by the gallery exhibition, I was struck by the sounds that drifted out the front door. The voices, the intonations, the accents are as familiar to me as my own voice. They are the comfortable sounds that drift from my kitchen at family gatherings. Image 30. Finding Home Opening, Katherine Yamashita On one level, recorded video interviews are simply testimonials, labeled and deposited into archives as historical records. They add to a body of knowledge about the injustices experienced by Japanese Canadians during the war. They contribute to an archive that preserves the past. My goal, however, was to bring the past into conversation with the present, and the future. In this way these interviews and the other artifacts in the exhibition take on a more complex meaning. I recorded the interviews because of my present interest and my need to know, but they hold even more potential when their significance is projected into the future through transmission and response. It is a question of the future, ... the question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow. The archive: if we want to know what this will have meant, we will only know in the times to come. Perhaps. Not tomorrow but in the 153 times to come, later on or perhaps never. A spectral messianicity is at work in the concept of the archive and ties it, like religion, like history, like science itself, to a very singular experience of the promise.4 Derrida, in this passage from Archive Fever. A Freudian Impression, touches on the spirit of my intent in this artistic practice. I designed my installation as an environment that allowed the voices of each of my storytellers to be heard individually, leaving the visitor to construct meaning from video fragments, photos, letters, and also the gaps and hesitations found in each woman's story. Image 31 Memory Box Covers, Katheririe Yamashita As in my writing practice,I played with several forms in my art-practice. I had a good museological collection of objects to share with my aunts, and the covers of the memory boxes I made for each aunt contains one of my memories of them. I filled each box with a few images that I found from my mother's collection, but each box was primarily a place for each storyteller to fill with things to share with me during our videotaped interview. In this way the framework for our talk together was built by both of us. My mother and aunts became co-creators of this act of memory, or co-memory. As both an artist and a family member, I also have fragmentary offerings in the exhibition. I contributed a short video recollection on the central screen in the 154 gallery, and my letters to my aunts and mother are presented in a reading station in one corner. f Image 32 letters, Katherine Yamashita My presentation suggested that all the fragments have significance, but I challenged the gallery visitor help to construct significance. I wanted their experience of these stories to present what Roger I. Simon calls a "humanized picture of history,"5 one constructed by the viewer, with the help of foundational constructions presented in the form of artifacts, and a video archive that is also an artwork. My research was a personal and private investigation that involved family, but it was also a personal and public investigation into family relations, feminist approaches to memory and identity, and how these things affect one's understanding of history. Although personally rewarding and creatively stimulating, my other goal was to share this constructed archive with an audience. Over the course of the 30 days that the exhibition was installed, over 130 responses were left. Formal responses were left in the guest book at the front of the 155 gallery. Many were congratulatory, however some contained more extended messages that related how the gallery experience brought the visitor's own memories, or family member experiences to mind. At the back of the gallery there were areas for longer, or more creative responses to the exhibition. There was an art making area with pre-made postcards and drawing materials. Another area contained a video recording station where gallery visitors left video recorded responses or stories. The responses ranged from simple congratulatory comments, to the relation of very personal life stories. Many wrote of how being in the gallery revived memories or thoughts of others who survived the Japanese Canadian Internment. Others wrote of how the experiences of these women revived similar experiences from their own lives. Image 32. Creative Response Station Image 33. Video Response Station Examples of written responses: I too am searching for the answers behind my identity. I myself am a boy split between two cultures and histories shrouded in mystery. My mother fled her country due to violence and my Chinese relatives immigrated to Argentina leaving no trace of the family in China. 156 Looking and listening to jour interviews has brought back memoriesfor my mother while she was in Tashme and I am so glad I have visited here with her today. This has brought me even closer to her. Your photographs evoke a feeling of loss and longing, as the sepia melts into remembrance- and I contemplate my own disconnection from family history ... But who can know the past truly, even when having experienced it? The exploration of the relationship between subject, artist/researcher and audience exposed lines of reference, lines of power, lines of energy, lines of pursuit, lines of delineation and mapping for me. Responses from gallery visitors exposed lines of reference, sympathetic experiences and identification. Although I expected gallery visitors to respond personally to the women's stories, the number of personal stories and comments that were left at the response stations demonstrates how the gallery and its contents created a powerful site of memory for many visitors. My goal has been to been to unearth a past that has been repressed. This process has been a vacillation between personal meaning making and more formal analysis that brought me closer to understanding the personal and human impact of historical trauma. The understated way my mother and her sisters talk of living in horse stalls. Packing up and leaving a life behind: in Chemainus, in Tashme, in Japan, in Vancouver. 157 The steady hard work and endurance needed to survive: displacement', the cold, the dirt, the smell, the uncertainty, the seasickness, the snakes, the sense of helplessness, the loneliness... As an artist and researcher, I have employed a version of Freud's method of construction to reconstruct evidence of a site of memory that is the Japanese Canadian Internment.I present the stories of women who experienced this injustice to document not only the chapters of removal, internment and deportation, but also the chapters that go beyond these times to ones of fighting for freedom, re- establishment, and finding home. For these final, more important chapters, there is no meta-narrative. Each story is unique and critical for understanding. Each of my aunts was nervous before their interview. I wasjust as nervous, but of course I was too proud to admit it. I knew these women on one level, and on another, I did not know them at all. Their words brought pictures I had seen in albums and imagined scenes to life: roller-skating in a boxcar at Bear Point; crushes on handsome grade school teachers; the suit andflower worn for wedding vows. Quiet animated voices brought past experiences to light. Each woman emergedfrom the kitchen at family gatherings to become a girl, a woman, a worker, a bride, a homemaker, and a heroine in my eyes. My process for understanding these life fragments was a cumulative one that translated the remembrances of my mother and aunts, and overlaid them onto other documented versions of life at this time. In this way I constructed a version of historigraphic poetics that maps out the experiences of a specific family. I employed the congruence and divergence that resulted from this process to explore themes 158 related to postmemory, reading into photographs, and the slipperiness of oral histories. The relationship between memory and history is complex and slippery, and life stories and contexts can dramatically alter, distort or enhance the interconnections. As my research reveals, it is vitally important to listen closely to individual survivor stories in order to place them in context within the events that make up sites of historical trauma. In this way, oral history places memory in support of documented history, or in counter-memory of documentation and received history. The images and the stories I collected have had a profound effect on the way I view the Japanese Internment. They exposed the experiences of family members who were marginalized, disposed, incarcerated and deported. The stories broke a silence that had been formed by distance, time, survival, and indifference. I had only to ask the questions, and my comfortable sense of self was altered by the knowledge of the trauma suffered by my parents, aunts and uncles, and other Japanese Canadians during the War. As a member of the post generation of Internment survivors,I feel both the guilt of my former ignorance and the responsibility of my present knowledge. More importantly, during my research, an essential identification has taken place. These glimpses of lives lived have changed my conception of identity.I am now no longer merely a Canadian of Japanese descent, but the child of Internment survivors. An expanded understanding of their personal sufferings, alongside the 159 context of other trauma survivors, not only offer us new ways of reading and interpreting Canadian history, but also a new appreciation of the long term impact of historical trauma, and the transmission of "post-memory" from generation to generation. 160 Notes 1 Helene Cixous and Mireille Calle-Gruber, Rootprints Memory and Ufe Writing. 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