Frank Moritsugu, interviewed by Alexander Pekic, 28 July 2015 (1 of 2)

Frank Moritsugu, interviewed by Alexander Pekic, 28 July 2015 (1 of 2)

Abstract
Frank Moritsugu speaks about his early childhood in Port Alice on Vancouver Island and his family's move to Kitsilano. There he was able to graduate from Kitsilano High school by skipping a grade and it was during this time he discovered his passion for journalism. After Pearl Harbor and the three daily Japanese language newspaper shut down, the New Canadian expanded its Japanese section, allowing Frank to find work writing and editing for Tommy Shoyama before being removed to the road camp in Revelstoke. He also describes his experience in the internment sites as well as how he got his start in the journalism profession. Frank then goes on to describe his enlisting in the Canadian military during WWII and his experiences once deployed to Asia.
This oral history is from an interview conducted by the Oral History cluster of the Landscapes of Injustice project.
00:00:00.000
Alexander Pekic (AP)
Ok so we are recording. We are speaking with Mr. Frank Moritsugu for the Landscapes of Injustice research project. Thank you very much for speaking with us.
Frank Moritsugu (FM)
You are most welcome.
AP
So, broadly speaking, I'm going to start by asking you --just tell me your story, the story of your life.
FM
Oh, okay. We could be here all night you know? laughter Anyway, alright, I was born in December the 4th, 1922 at a little tiny place called Port Alice in the northwest, you know, end of Vancouver Island. It was a company town, BC Pulp and Paper, because there's a pulp mill there and my dad was working there which is why he was there. And I'm the oldest of 8 kids, so I and my next two brothers, Ken and Harvey, were born in Port Alice. And then at which point, my parents were immigrants from Japan, my mother's health was getting sort of a bit rough, Dad decided to leave even though he was the so-called Japanese boss of the gang at the mill and moved to Vancouver, you know, partly for medical attention but also just to change everything. And so this is when I was just hitting four years old which is the first day of kindergarten . And we got to Vancouver and I got settled in and started kindergarten and started my schooling essentially in Vancouver. But in most of it however, halfway through my kindergarten career, 2 year career, we moved to Kitsilano which became a permanent place for us. And in Kitsilano I went to finish both the Anglican Church kindergarten. We still had these kindergartens in both the United and Anglican churches and it was made up of teachers who were, beyond Japanese Canadian, older Canadian-born person, but often white people who are missionaries to Japan or would have been. They were Church workers. And they, the reason why our parents sent us, and including the Buddhist families, they didn't have a Buddhist church kindergarten, so they sent them to a Christian kindergarten, so there are kids who grew up, especially the older ones, with immigrant parents, speaking Japanese --everything was Japanese at home and so forth. And now they have to go into Grade 1 at public school, ok? All English speaking. So they could adjust themselves probably, kindergarten was really the breaking in. So that's how I did it. So in Kitsilano the Japanese community nearby, the closest public school, Henry Hudson Public School, and I went there from Grade 1 to Grade 6. And from there I went on to Kitsilano Junior and Senior High. So that's from Grade 7 to Grade 12. And I was a -- my mother was a school teacher by the way in Japan before she got married to dad --went back together after being here for about 10 years and making enough money to go get a wife and so forth and come back. So I'm the oldest and as a result, naturally the pressure is to do well in school. Both schools. I say both because as well as going to public school we also went after school from say about 4:00 to 5:30 to a Japanese school nearby. So you learn the proper Japanese and everything. Now one of the reasons for the existence of the Japanese schools, we had them and most of the communities, was the parents, the immigrant parents, wanted to be able to communicate with their kids and so forth . But not all of them intended to come here permanently. They got out of Japan and difficult times and so forth and they hoped, and they say the dream is you know, to make enough money and to go back to the village and build a big house there. This only however worked out for only a hand full of people and basically end up staying. My parents learned you know, fairly early in the game decided, okay we're never going back to Japan, because even if we did our kids would be too much trouble getting adjusted despite they're Japanese school training and all that.
00:05:01.000
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FM
But I did grow up, as many of my generation, you know, getting Japanese children's magazines just like my parents getting a men's magazine or a women's magazine, monthly issues coming up from Japan across the ocean. And stuff like that while getting into comic books and famous funnies and little books and so on. So we are going both ways, see? Now I should mention that there are 8 of us. When it got down towards the bottom two boys, most of the language in our house was mostly English including Dad and Mom, even if it was broken English. And so their knowledge of the Japanese language is quite, you know, much less than the older ones. And I have a brother Henry who is now in his seventies and he is a news editor in Long Island Newsday, a daily newspaper there. And he says, you know, he could understand a smidge of what is going on, but he can't talk back to them in Japanese. And my youngest brother who is in Richmond Hill is probably the same way. So this was fairly common among us, you see? So, anyway I should think the thing that was interesting, even from public school, I was -- along with having the bilingual education going along, I really did well in English spelling and composition and everything. Even from public school onwards, English was my top subject in Junior and Senior High School. I was the kind of guy that the teacher would pick to be captain of the spelling bee and so forth. So curiously enough, at Kitsilano High School -- by the way, at Henry Hudson School, where there's maybe one third of say a 35 member class would be Japanese, you got the lesser there because a lot of families couldn't afford to send their kids beyond say grade 8 or 9, because as long as they were 14 years old they could go to work. They were allowed to buy law, provincially. So a lot of people couldn't do that, and in my case, the fact that I was physically small, although physically okay but small and also I skipped a grade so I was young, my parents allowed me to graduate grade 12. Well in my final year of Kitsilano High School among the things that I was into, I was a member of the Postal Club and I was more interested in extracurricular than the actual classes by then. And I was also involved in a new experimental course that my English teacher, that I had for 2 years, was launching. The first high school journalism course. And so because I was in grade 12 she started, I was in both Journalism 1 and 2. was elected the staff of the high school paper which was a genuine paper and not just a sheet and so forth, but actually done out of printers and came out once a month. And not only that, the journalism class that elected, voted for the editor in Chief and got me in, I was the only non-white in the class. So this is my beginning. However, and I love doing it, and we won, paper won the Pacific Northwest High School Award. But, and here is the but, growing up in British Columbia in the pre-war 1930s and so forth, with all the attitudes, not just anti-Japanese, but anti-Asian and anti-Oriental as they used to call it, okay. There are so many limits to the kind of thing that you could do. The reason why a lot of the parents, the immigrant parents, didn't send their sons to university, was that there was no point because no one is going to let them because there was a whole limitation partly because back in the 1890s, the British Columbia government, the provincial government, had passed rules where people of Japanese origin, or Chinese origin or East Indian origin could not have the vote. If you didn't have the provincial vote you could not vote federally and you couldn't vote municipally either, ok. So you know, by the time I'm growing up and getting into my teens and understanding all of this, it says that we're not one hundred percent Canadian.
00:10:01.000
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FM
And that meant that there were so many professions like pharmacy, law and so forth where you had to be a citizen, and had the vote rather -- we are supposed to be citizens -- have the vote to be able to get the job and so forth. So right there we have all these limitations. You could become a doctor, but only if you were going to cater to the Japanese population, that kind of stuff. And it was all limited like this, white Canada forever kind of, you know, policy and racism all over the place. So I never thought, even though I loved the writing, I even loved the editing and making sure it looks good on paper, I never dreamt for a second that I could become a journalist for the Vancouver Sun or the or whatever. Like some of the guys on the paper, that's what they were aiming at, and some of them actually got on. So, this happened, ok. 1940 I graduated and the thing to do, my dad had a landscaping gardening business, my brother next to me was more of an athlete than a student. So the same year I graduated he also quit grade 10, and we both went to work for Dad, cutting grass, weeding and all that, you know, stuff like that, And trimming hedges, and so forth. And that was the most money we could make, you see? And these are the Depression years right, so we did all the work that we can so that the younger brothers and sisters could keep on going to school. And so when December 1941 came around, and you know the Pearl Harbor attack, well the thing was that, as soon as we heard the news come over the radio, that you know the Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor, and said “Oh my God”. The first reaction we had to, you know, since I was 19 then, was, “We're in for it now.” In other words, because of the kind of, world, attitudes that we had to live with. And again, because it was in December and -- immediately, the day after the war against Japan was declared by Canada, along with the Allies and the 'States, the RCMP, the federal police, came. And they closed all three Japanese daily newspapers that existed, ok, and so forth. And all the Japanese language schools we're closed and so forth. All limitations put in, and the campaign began to confiscate motor vehicles of any kind and also radios, even long wave radios and so forth, things like that, you see. So that we're losing all this kind of stuff. So I, with the papers being closed, the three of them, there's one English language paper existing that was put together by Canadian-born guys, some of them would have finished university. And it was strictly for us, you see, at that time. But suddenly it became the paper for everybody and so they're going to have a Japanese section so that the immigrants could understand. And the reason why it was allowed to exist was because the government needed a vehicle to let them know what their announcements were, what the pronouncements were, what was going to happen to the Japanese and so on. So, being in December, even in Vancouver, there isn't enough grass to cut. So I'm sitting around -- almost a couple of days after the War began, I phoned the editor of the New Canadian, his name was Tommy Shoyama, and whom I had met before, and he knew about me being the editor of the high school paper. And I said, “Can you use some help? Because I understand you guys are going to be, instead of a weekly, you're going to be 3 times a week.” Since the other papers don't exist. He said, “Yeah, I can use you. Come on down.” So a week after Pearl Harbor, I'm going downtown by streetcar everyday to work on the paper. First time I got paid for writing and editing. So that was nice. That was for a few months until the time we all got kicked out and we were sent to a men-only camp. And then after I was at the camp, I road camp near Revelstoke, which was the beginning of what turned out to be the Trans Canada Highway, expanded the little bloody two lane, one and a half road that used to go through that part of BC.
00:15:02.000
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FM
And I was there in the camp for 16 months. And curiously enough, what happened was the camp, made up of Canadian born and naturalize people with citizenship. There were a few Japanese men that were given citizenship, earned it, but only because they were ocean fisherman. And the canning companies, Canada Salmon, was called, needed the fisherman badly so they must have pushed the government so these guys got the citizenship, the rest of us, like my parents couldn't get. And so we're in this camp, there are the immigrants too so they are still speaking Japanese. They were in one bunkhouse and we were in the other bunkhouse, the English-speaking ones. Anyways, I was there, and when we had a few problems, strike and so forth, and one point after we had been there for over 1 year, the powder man, Andy, one of the white guys working on the staff, working on breaking the bush and so forth, and he was a serious drinker. The dynamite game, we're going around with picks making holes in the boulders and then they could put the caps in there and blow them up and get them out of the way. And apparently one of the guys was doing this and he found -- just missed a live dynamite cap by a few inches. The guy said the hell with it during the middle of the day, they walked off. And the next day the whole camp is on strike. So the resident engineer and the government guy, you know the highways, that was in charge of the string of camps that we were at, he comes down, we have this big meeting in the mess hall. And although I was one of the youngest buggers there, I probably had, you know, was used to it, High School grad, I was used to speaking and so forth. And I became the spokesperson for the whole bloody camp. The committee head and so forth on the Japanese side and they couldn't do that much in English. So I went and told them what the problem was etcetera etcetera . And so you know Andy got, eventually I think got knocked off, fired, which was just as well. But as we're walking out of this mess hall after the meeting, and the resident engineer is mad as hell, but he was just mad at us for going on strike, and the foreman grabs me and says “Next time you speak up at a meeting you're going to be on a train going east.” Because Selective Service during the war empowered them, even the bugger that was running our camps, to do exactly that and send those out of BC to the east. And you know growing up in BC going on the other side of the Rockies -- “Oh my God” laughs. And I thought okay, I got to shut up now, watch myself, at which point, about a week later, I got a letter from Tom Shoyama, the editor of the New Canadian, the paper that I worked for in Vancouver. And he had moved to Vancouver -- rather the paper from Vancouver to one of the family camps in the interior called Kaslo, an old mining ghost town. Because they had a printing press there and everything so he could move in and do his thing. He could do the Kootenay half of the week and then do the New Canadian the other half. And the guy that was the assistant editor, good friend of mine from Vancouver, had been accepted into McMaster University, the first Japanese ever in an Ontario university. And so Roy was leaving, Tom needed you know someone to replace him and asked me whether I wanted to come down. And I thought “God, would I ever.” Here I am after all of these monastic God damn months up in the mountains and so forth, all these other guys. And the only contact we had with girls was writing them letters and hoping that they would write back. And now we're going to go to a place that has families with kids, and girls and so forth. Of course I would love to go! So I did, and I spent seven months there working with him. And then my family which was in another family camp, and so forth, Dad had been sent to a men-only camp and then they pulled all the married men out, both our camps and the immigrants camps to build these family camps. They had given up on the camp after a month, after just say you're there, decided -- they were concerned about the education of our kids. So they decided the only place that they could move, to leave the camps, move them out of British Columbia. And so we could either go to the sugar beet farms in either Alberta or Manitoba or farming in Ontario, Quebec. So the big choice, with a family like theirs, which was attractive to a farmer because there was Dad and me and my two brothers, we're all workers, right? And war time that's why they needed the families because a lot of guys were there in the military or working in defense, you know, factories. So they moved to St. Thomas and I joined them several months later.
00:20:06.000
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FM
And then after a week, rather a year, of milking cows and in my particular bugger all about farming, pitching manure, all kinds of manure, all kinds of different things because the family was -- the ex Premier Mitchell Hepburn's place. Hundred acres, he had show horses, he had work horses, he had beef cattle, milk cattle. He had chickens and hogs and so forth. So you can imagine the manure. Anyway, after I had been there for about a year the only thing that I can say for it was that we worked like a bugger but I was probably physically more healthy than I've ever been in my life. Until then, I didn't mention this, but Japanese origin, Chinese origin and East Indian origin guys in BC we're also not allowed to enlist in any of the military. Army, Air Force, or Navy. So my high school buddies were in the Air Force and they were writing me from the training camps in stuff like this. And there's no bloody way I can get in, right? And then suddenly there's a secret recruiting campaign for Japanese Canadians. And what happened was this, it was late 1944 and suddenly the war, not just in Europe but also in Asia turned our way, ok? So in Europe they are beating the Germans back and in Asia not just the Americans in the Pacific, but also the British and the Australians are pushing the Japanese back in Malaya and Burma and places like Indo-China, you know, as it was called. And for the first time they were getting all kinds of Japanese POWs. Because up until then if the Japanese had surrounded itself or they wouldn't surrender, they would all killed themselves and die for the Emperor which you know was part of their honor system. But suddenly they were getting all kinds of Japanese POWs, prisoners on their hands, and they couldn't make good use of them because they didn't have anyone really around who knew enough Japanese to interrogate them or to translate the captured enemy documents. So 'wammo', this secret campaign ,because the only place of the entire British Empire at the time where there was a substantial amount of people of Japanese descent was Canada. And in Canada outside of a sprinkling of people in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Quebec, and Ontario, less than a hundred guys had gotten in, but the rest of us were all still in BC, you know, because the immigrants were all still there you see. And they were the adults, we were just growing up. And so suddenly we were allowed to volunteer, but only for this one job. Not to go into any form like everyone else was. We had to join the Army, we're going to be sent to Southeast Asia and be attached to and work with the British forces as interpreters and translators. So I, having gotten this news, from one of my Japanese Canadian buddies who was in Hamilton and some young guys in St. Thomas. And I decided I was going to go and went to this ritual, since I was with my family. A lot of the guys who decided to go we're away from their families and let them know by letter later and so on. But I was there in St. Thomas and told Dad and Mom and my brothers so the young kids got to go to bed. And I said I decided to go. And my dad said, in Japanese, “How can you go and fight for a country that treats us like this?” and my mother said, “And what would our friends say?” which is a very typical group think on the Japanese part. Westernized were individualistic trained but they are -- so she meant the friends still back in BC in the camps and so forth you know. Because how they think of you is very important. So I said, “Well, we are out here in Ontario now. And we're making a new start. We are not going to go back to BC. We are making a new life. And the people here are nicer then a lot, most of the people in BC, but they are still not sure of us because if we hadn't done something wrong, how come we got kicked out?” So I said, “You know, if I join the Army in the uniform with Canada up here” Frank points to his heart area “that is not only going to help me in the new life that we've started but mom and dad and my brothers and sisters.” And that's the real reason why more than the Union Jack and God Save the King and all this. Although that was a part of it in there too you know. But the main reason was practical reason.
00:25:23.000
00:25:23.000
FM
So they finally, after a couple of days, they talked about a lot, and they accepted it and off I went. As it happened I went up to London to enlist unlike a lot of guys that went to the Toronto area to enlist. A Japanese Canadian guy that I grew up with in Kitsilano, Jack Nizaki, he ended up in Chatham. So he came in too. So the two of us who knew each other since we were kids, were in Judo and played ball together and so on, we joined up at the same time. The first two Japanese Canadians to join up in the London District Depot. The great thing that made it such a great fuss, the guys that were doing the papers and so forth, they were more excited than we were because this had never happened to them before. And so there we were and as I said I enlisted, went home with the uniform and so forth on enlistment leave and got that picture taken.
Frank is referring to a picture on the table during the interview.
And then going back after enlistment leave, we are sent back to Chatham for basic training. We had one week and our platoon, so we learn how to salute and march. And the night before when our platoon was finally going to shoot our rifles, and we are the last platoon to be done this segment, Jack and I got called into the sergeant's office. He said “We have marching orders for you guys. You're to get on a train and go to Toronto tomorrow.” And we have been picked of the 23 guys of the second group to be rushed overseas. And the thing was already a group of 15 guys had been sent overseas. And both groups had minimal training, military training, because the British were so in need of -- things are almost hysterical out there. And and London, Winston Churchill, Prime Minister Mackenzie King and wham, suddenly when we were . So off we went, and in our group, as I said of 23 guys, Jack and I were among the most trained. Some guys didn't know which was left foot and which was right foot. And then we got sent overseas. Now we went from Toronto to Nova Scotia and then a place called near Truro, Nova Scotia was the embarkation camp. We were there for about 10 days. And from there we went on a quick train to Halifax and then across the Atlantic, then the UK and in the UK and were in the UK for again about 10 days because apparently they were adjusting your papers because we are the Canadian Army and we had to be attached to the British over there. And then we got on a ship again -- oh and by the way, this all happened after the war, after I enlisted and I was on leave, or going back, 'whatchamacallit', the VE Day came. So now the only war left was the one against Japan and off we got sent. And from the UK right through the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean to Bombay etcetera. And after Bombay we got off and we were sent to a special camp where this secret counterintelligence outfit, called Force 136, and this is what we are a part of. And it was really espionage, propaganda warfare, what this was all about. We were sent to this camp in Pune and we were made to go through an obstacle course and everything else too. But then a big civilian, blonde big tall guy named Trevor Legget, who I got to know a lot of about later because he was quite a special guy, and he tested or Japanese. Both speaking and writing and reading abilities. And after he tested us all, we all gathered in the evening outside of our tents in this camp and he was going to tell us the results. And he was absolutely furious and being a blonde guy he was livid red, you know? And he said “Three of you can do the work you were sent out here to do.” And he mentioned, well, one Edgar was born in Canada that was actually sent to Japan and was educated in Japan. His Japanese was better than his English.
00:30:15.000
00:30:15.000
FM
That was Edgar. And another one was Harold Hirosei and he was one of the older guys in the group and he came from a place on Vancouver Island called Cumberland where they had a mill. And Cumberland had such a large Japanese population because of the men working in the mill that apparently they really spoke more Japanese than English even among the Canadian born. So Harold's Japanese like other Cumberland older guys, they're Japanese was very good. So he passed. And I have never been to Japan, like Harold, but because I was the oldest of eight and my mother is a school teacher and so forth and having worked on the Japanese paper in the war and what not because when I worked on the New Canadian every word in Japanese and in English had to be looked at by the censor. In the case of the Japanese type, the Japanese editor and his number two, everything that they wrote in Japanese had to be in hand and the were thrown into my in-basket. So in my English section work was done but one day was devoted to picking these out and translating them to English which was a wedding notice and a dead notice, and that's all I had to say, didn't give it names. But if it was someone sending in a letter from the camp saying what it was like, I had to give them word for word translation, which we would rush off to Vancouver and wait for a telegram to come. Tell us everything is okay, which sometimes happened, but often cross that line out, cross that line out of this story or don't run that story at all. That kind of crap had to go before we could go to the printer. As a result having done that for over about half a year my knowledge of written Japanese was quite strong, stronger than it ever had been. So I was the third one that passed. Two other guys, Jack that I joined up with and Fred and an older guy, Mr. Legget said, “You can't read or write Japanese but, your pronunciation of Japanese is clear enough that the Japanese troops can understand you.” Because it was a job where you went out in the sound truck and got on a loudspeaker on the roof and told people to surrender and hope that the Japanese mortar doesn't get the range which apparently it didn't 90% of chances. I might have has to do one of those jobs if the war hadn't ended in time, but anyway. So that was the five of us the rest of the you, 17, 18 left you had to go get some language training at the British Army Japanese language school over in Northern India in Shimla. Now, the other guys of the hundred fifty of us who volunteered weathered normal basic 6-week training then were sent to Vancouver of all places, where we were kicked out of, and they had to do school there, the Canadian Army, S-20 Canadian Army Japanese language School. And they got their training there. And the guys who had a fair amount of Japanese they only had about 3 months and then they were able to come overseas. And some guys had to take the whole six months, again because we varied even though we are Canadian born. And so we on the other hand were supposed to go -- and I was wondering what was going to happen to me, later on I wondered maybe if we're going to find out that propaganda warfare thing was a possibility because we had already talked about that in our camps. Then we were sent to Calcutta across the country on a train. And we were waiting in the train to get our orders, especially those of us that had passed, we were in the camp when the war ended with the Hiroshima bomb and the Nagasaki bombs. And suddenly orders change completely. And now one immediate job was to become the language guy with an Allied team, a British team who is taking over say Singapore or Kuala Lumpur was the capital of Malaya or Saigon. Problem with the Japanese accepting their official surrender, ok, which I thought I would be getting one of those jobs.
00:35:01.000
00:35:01.000
FM
And then suddenly what happened was, as soon as the war ended and this happened a couple days later, they automatically, Army thinking, the British close down the Japanese language School they had up in Shimla. And here are the 17 Japanese Canadians who need language training to be of any use. What are you going to do with them? I got chosen to be the other teacher. So a white officer graduate of S-20, Lloyd Harvey, Lieutenant Lloyd Harvey, he was in charge. And I was the second teacher. Not only that, the officer got the beginners, teaching them Japanese ABC and 1 2 3 and so forth. I got the advanced to teach laughter. And I had to make up my God damn list every night in the tent in the monsoon and teach them. So that was my first job, my first main job. For one month I taught some of the guys and a couple of them passed well enough to be able to really work I'm happy to say, eventually, not just because of me. But then I got pulled out, made a Sergeant and sent now across India again, my first plane flight ever, you know rickety rackety plane to Bombay to join a British unit. Again a small unit two Lieutenant Colonels in charge and two other Sergeants. Both from the Royals , so they were Wireless operators. And they had both jumped into Malaya in separate operations and what they did was with a Chinese interpreter -- and in Malaya apparently the resistance often had Chinese guys. So the Chinese Canadian interpreter, they had gotten in there a little earlier than us because that was a first need, they'd go down and meet these guys and get the information about them and then the British wireless operator would Morse code it back. And that's what both John and Ted had done. And then we had a couple other guys, Lance Corporal who was a driver and a clerk. And there we were and we were supposed to go to Japan which the Americans had just occupied. We would have been the first British unit to go to Japan. There was eventually British occupational forces but that came afterwards. And we were to find out what the Japanese had found out about the British intelligence operation in Southeast Asia. A real special unit. Well then, meanwhile we were waiting in Bombay while London and Washington were discussing this thing. That had to get OK from Washington because the Americans were occupying Japan already. And we were there in Bombay, I was there, from early September to early December. Got to know Bombay very well, best part laughs. And then word came down, typical Allied cooperation, there's no bloody way the Americans wanted the British poking about. It was their bloody world for crying out loud. So we didn't go. Just sat around. And after that, really I was offered to go to Singapore again on the way back. But I said no that's enough I've just been waiting around and I've had it. So I didn't go and the good thing was that the two guys that were in Calcutta and told me why don't you come and join us, they went, and we learned this much later, after they had been in Singapore for a week or ten days apparently they were assigned to go to Hong Kong. So they got on a flying boat in Singapore to go up and the boat took off and crashed into the bloody Indian Ocean right there after a few hours. Well pause, George Suzuki who was about my age and we're both high school graduates same year of Kitsilano High School, so he's just a little guy. And the other guy Fred was older but he was a big hefty guy. And so they're both in the water. George couldn't swim, but Fred can. So somehow George got a hold of a guy who was about 50 pounds heavier than me, manage to drag him to safety. And they both got injured. The only one I know of all the Japanese Canadian soldiers that got hurt. A couple of guys got killed but that was a different situation, they were not with the intelligence. Anyhow they had asked me if I would come along and if I had come along I might have been on that plane too. And the thing is even though I grew up in Vancouver near Kitsilano Beach, I couldn't swim. laughter And George couldn't have saved both of us.
00:40:12.000
00:40:12.000
FM
So talk about luck. Anyway, very quickly, back to Canada and took advantage of the veterans benefits which were either accept a 10-acre farm, which you operate, or post-secondary education. And so I had a high school grad, I didn't have matriculation because you know no dream of me going to university, but I managed through correspondence to get one more credit to get grade 12. And then because I was going to come to Toronto to go to University, I had to get the Grade 13 credits. So I got a job in Winnipeg working my 3rd and last time on that same New Canadian newspaper. And I went to the University of Manitoba for one year which qualified as great 13 in Ontario. And I came back and then -- I came back to St. Thomas on the farm. And after I helped and harvested a bit, I had time on my hands and I went into Toronto, some of my friends were there, and one of my friends, an older woman, Dr. Uchida, she became Irene Uchida, who I had known because she worked for and contributed to the paper in Vancouver, that Japanese Canadian paper. She said to me, since she knew that I worked for the paper, three times, she said “You know, why don't you go and see the editor of Saturday Night magazine, Dr. B.K. Sandwell. He was really on our side you know and when they did the--”
The recording comes to an abrupt ending mid-sentence as a result of the recorder's memory card running out space. Frank and Alex continue talking for some time, but this conversation is not captured on the recording. Alex returns to interview Frank at a later date picking up from where this interview left off. This second interview can be found on a separate audio file and transcript.
00:42:02.000

Metadata

Title

Frank Moritsugu, interviewed by Alexander Pekic, 28 July 2015 (1 of 2)

Abstract

Frank Moritsugu speaks about his early childhood in Port Alice on Vancouver Island and his family's move to Kitsilano. There he was able to graduate from Kitsilano High school by skipping a grade and it was during this time he discovered his passion for journalism. After Pearl Harbor and the three daily Japanese language newspaper shut down, the New Canadian expanded its Japanese section, allowing Frank to find work writing and editing for Tommy Shoyama before being removed to the road camp in Revelstoke. He also describes his experience in the internment sites as well as how he got his start in the journalism profession. Frank then goes on to describe his enlisting in the Canadian military during WWII and his experiences once deployed to Asia.
This oral history is from an interview conducted by the Oral History cluster of the Landscapes of Injustice project.

Credits

Interviewer: Alexander Pekic
Interviewee: Frank Moritsugu
XML Encoder: Stewart Arneil
Publication Information: See Terms of Use for publication and licensing information.
Setting: Toronto, ON
Keywords: Port Alice ; Vancouver Island ; Vancouver ; Kitsilano ; Revelstoke ; Pearl Harbor ; BC ; Japan ; School; Military; 1920s-present

Terminology

Readers of these historical materials will encounter derogatory references to Japanese Canadians and euphemisms used to obscure the intent and impacts of the internment and dispossession. While these are important realities of the history, the Landscapes of Injustice Research Collective urges users to carefully consider their own terminological choices in writing and speaking about this topic today as we confront past injustice. See our statement on terminology, and related sources here.