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This oral history is from an interview conducted by the Oral History cluster of the Landscapes of Injustice project.
I wonder what my pro-Japanese friends would think of that.So he did acknowledge that people had different views on it. Speaking of views on that. We're here, obviously, because your grandfather definitely had views and was vocal around anxieties toward Japanese Canadians, particularly in BC. Maybe you could just, I mean, you've got his letters and his correspondence, maybe you can just help me make sense of what you know about what he was thinking at the time and how his opinions and philosophies developed? I just wanted to say something first that maybe gives you an idea of where it all started because that's where Donna and I tried to make sense of. This is their boat from 1907. There is an anti-Japanese article in here. He said anti-Japanese and was scolded, I think, by some professors but he called himself an anti-Japanese person. That was a common term, anti or pro-Japanese. So in this thing is the Japanese question. When he speaks in parliament he talks back to this problem.
This has been a problem since I've been a boy.So that was where it was, sort of, started. That's from Kaslo which is ... This is from Kaslo. Mhm. The swastika has different meanings, right? And ... Sure.
the Japanese have been a problem since I've been a boy.So whether that was ... I often wonder how that happened in a very isolated small town. If you've ever been to ... Have you been to Kaslo? I have but I'm wondering what was ... The mast had said 1907, so, um ... It might have been right after the riots in Vancouver, right? Yeah. So ... Yeah, so there wouldn't have been any Japanese people in Kaslo, right? So he would have never met one. Two Chinese families and I think that was all. So why they would be speaking about the Japanese in a small town in BC is, sort of, beyond my comprehension. Yeah. But they were. But the anti-Japanese riots had just happened in Vancouver, right? So, I mean, if there was a perceived problem in BC it was Vancouver that had the problems. There was a lot of sentiment, right, of ... But why would you have written that in a newsletter? I know, and it would have been like fifteen ... A Merry Christmas newsletter. It would have been fifteen years old, right? Anyhow, that's where I think ... I think that's something that's not been brought up but I think that's important for people like my grandfather. That was their whole life. What they knew, what they accepted was that the Japanese were a problem even though, as you know, they weren't a problem at all but it was a perceived problem. So, anyhow. And not Italians or Germans or other ... They didn't really like Germans because it was in the First World War. But we've never seen where he said anything anti-German, have we? Mhm. Oh, we have. Yeah, he didn't like Germans but my husband's family is German and he didn't reject them. No. It was a very isolated society. I mean, BC was isolated just by the fact of where BC was. Sure. I'm sure Kaslo would have been all Anglo-Saxon at that time, right? There wouldn't have been anybody.
Oh, that was the right thing to do then because they're all ...And he says in an article in the Observer, he says
The Japanese are making fine citizens of themselves in other places besides BC.Then, I think as he got older, we'd like to think he cut out all the articles of the redress when he was very, very old because that was in 1988.
Oh, jeez, big mistake.
The Iraqis never did anything.Yeah, like,
What did I do that for?An American can
I apologize for what happened to the Japanese Canadians in my rule.Even if he felt that he never said it to anybody. Not even to you? No. My father's cousin thinks that he did. To her? Yeah, but she doesn't really remember well enough to ... He certainly speaks highly of the Japanese afterwards and he, you know, Donna's got a picture of him with ... The box. The box. Yeah, I mean, he had lots to do with people from Japan later in his external affairs things but he just ... He thought that he made the right decision at the time but then I think he'd realized that it wasn't. That's what we like to think
Oh, Canada, you should be helping.So they sent these two battalions or whatever to Hong Kong and within two weeks they were prisoners of war and horribly treated because Britain had no intention of defending Hong Kong. So, really, they just sent them to their slaughter. So my grandfather was very involved in that so he didn't want to see the same thing happen in Canada should the Japanese invade. Ottawa just said,
Sorry, we can't help you.That's where he got really, kind of, anxious trying to get the troops out. He got Rawlston to bring all sorts of, you know, strengthen all the defenses around BC, which, when you really think about it, you know, did it make sense that Japan was going to invade? Not really. He probably got fearful of that.
Oh, this is an excellent opportunitybut I don't think that people really were thinking that way until Patricia Roy was even ... A little bit afterward she wrote all her 'White man's' ... The series on them, on BC. It was so ingrained, I think, the anti-Asian feeling that it was, sort of, so accepted, really. Anyhow, that's too bad. Keep going, sorry. So I guess we had the building naming ceremony and, you know, it was all wonderful and people said very nice things about him and what an honor it was. So, you know, that kind of lasted for a few weeks and the whole controversy erupted and ... It was a while ago. No, it wasn't very long afterwards. I think they grieved the name right away. I don't blame them. No, of course not. I never, right from the, well, we tried to make sense of it at first. I did but then I didn't have any ... Help yourself, Josh. I don't think there was anything ... I would have done exactly the same thing. Mhm. I didn't ... I think it still came out of left field for us. We weren't expecting any kind of, you know ... As I said, I was surprised they chose his name in the first place because, what was her name, the historian, Jean Barman, was on the committee, right? I think I even said something to her at the ceremony, because she was at the building dedication ceremony, that I was surprised they chose him because, you know, he had been involved in both good and bad. She was the one who, sort of, dismissed it as, you know, it was the tenor of the times that, you know, it was understandable what had happened and we met with her a couple times afterwards. She was very good about explaining how the committee had chosen and not overlooked, by any means, that but had been able to accept what had happened and what he stood for and, you know, that he deserved the honor for everything else that he had done. So the name goes up on the building, it's 2006? Yeah, it's August 2006. I just want to make a little insight before that. We went on a family holiday which I ended up writing a book for one of my university courses. That summer, and it was right before, we went to Kaslo and there's a wonderful museum there, Japanese Canadian museum. Well, we never even went. We didn't think it had nothing to do ... Well, we went to the internment center in New Denver. No, no. We didn't go to the museum though in Kaslo. Donna knew more than I did but I didn't really ... And then we went to the internment museum in New Denver and I'm looking at things that I'd never seen before, you know, with all the cars lined up. I don't know if you've seen that picture of the cars. I'm going,
Oh, my god. This is awful.We didn't really connect it with our family at all. I didn't. No.
Well, this isn't that badbut then you, kind of, you have to really read between the lines and then put it towards what that would mean to individual people and families. Of course, once you start reading what happened to the Japanese Canadians, their stories, you think,
Oh, my god. That was just so awful.I think that, personally, I think that if he had been, being a prominent BC MP, if he'd be on the other side this never would have happened. No, I don't agree with that. I think he was pretty ... because he was rational people tend to believe rational people. But even Angus MacInnis, at that point, was pro-internment, right? Or pro-moving-them. So I think something still would have happened right after Pearl Harbour but, yeah, whether or not, I don't know. But if at the end of the war he'd said
Okay, everybody come backlike they did in the U.S.,
The war's overthis would never have happened, all this stuff. Yeah. That's a big bright line that you all identified as his comportment or behavior toward Japanese Canadians after the war. Mhm. Yeah, that's the part that I really struggled with when he was ... because that's when people were trying to get their land back, right? Buck Suzuki, he wouldn't even entertain ... He was ... I don't know where that reference is now but he ... I don't know if you know who Buck Suzuki was. He's been honored for quite a few things and he wanted to come back for some reason between 1945 and 1949, and my grandfather got involved and said
No, nobody backwhich made no sense. That made no sense. If they had come back and got their possessions, like a lot of the people even if they're ... I mean, the houses being sold and everything. That's a whole other story. Some people, the neighbors were storing their possessions and stuff but they couldn't come back at all. I mean, that's ... That made no sense and that's so wrong. That was him, you know, saying no because he was afraid of, you know, the discrimination coming back. I don't know if people ... It's hard to say because we weren't there. After the war, did people have a lot of resentment towards Japanese from Japan? I don't really know because it didn't really affect, the war in Japan, didn't affect Canadians as much as Americans. Right. Their sons were all killed and everything but there wasn't really a lot of Canadians. Even our own relatives say that, right, of, like, how mistreated the Japanese, you know, the Canadian prisoners were mistreated by the Japanese in Hong Kong and stuff or prisoner of war camps. I mean, that's how people can rationalize that in their minds of, like, the torture of ... I mean, it's horrible what happened to them but it's like 3000 soldiers. How you can equate what happened during the war to, you know, Canadian citizens losing their possessions and not being allowed back to there after the war makes no sense, right? People will fall back on that if you've interviewed other Caucasians, right? People from that time, but even, like, there's so many people who are older than us but, like, Emery who was saying that she wasn't allowed to play with Japanese kids, like, there was ... Even long after the war was over there was still a lot of divisions or whatever, suspicions about, which makes no sense, right? Well, that's a good question I suppose then. I mean, you're ... Where was your dad in all of this? Was he ... It's interesting because he, our father, had dementia late in life but when all of this was happening he still had all his faculties. He was a very educated and, you know, scholarly man as well. So we did ask him. He says he doesn't really remember discussing it.
We're not going to listen to your side of it.Then they said,
Well, I'm not listening to your side.Well, then now you don't get anywhere. Most people have been very open to us. Yeah. The only thing that we found quite upsetting is that, two people whose names I won't mention, have likened him to Eichmann or Hitler. It's just so far from the truth that it's, we can't continue that conversation because it's just not who he was, right? He made a mistake, like a big mistake, and thought people were different than they were. So it's ... but it's not like, um, you know ... Was he a racist? Well, we've been through that over, and over, and over again with Joy Kogawa. She wanted me ... I don't know if ... She's written a book lately. In it she includes our conversations in her book. At the end of it I say
Yes, he was a racistbecause, yes, he was. He wanted ... He qualified people on the basis of their race which is the definition of a racist, really. It wasn't just something that I've had trouble coming to terms with because I work in a situation at work where, you know, people have to have legitimate ID, right, for instance. This is kind of an offside but if their driver's license expired last week, which happens to us probably, this is at Air Canada, probably once a week at least, so I have coworkers who go
That person is not going. There is no exception to that rule. That is the Transport Canada rule. There is absolutely no exceptions.I'm like,
Come on, you can see that they're the same person.My grandfather was definitely,
These are Japanese Canadians. They are over there. They are different.
What do you have against gays?She says,
Oh, no, no, no.So they're over there, right? Right. So, I mean, everybody's got those ... Tendencies. Tendencies in them and it's just, you know, might be whatever of classifying people. I think that's, kind of, the human mind is to classify people. Now it's gotten a lot better because there's so much mix-raced people and, you know, it's pretty multicultural. Yeah. What do you think you would say about, I mean, so we're not quite in ... Are we in this riding, right now, Vancouver South? No. No. It's a little bit further south of here, a little further west. Point Grey. Yeah. Yeah. What do you think he would say about this Vancouver that we're seeing? Oh, that's what my mom always says.
What would granddad think about all the Chinese here?Yeah, I don't know
Woah, yeah, this is what he doesyou know, talks about them in numbers. It's an interesting read. I would definitely ... And she talks about granddad, right? Only one thing she says, she refers to him. She has a very similar personality. Had they both met they would have realized that they loved Canada in the same way but, of course, they never met. That's actually a very good book about what it was like in Vancouver for ... because she's pretty educated and she's very, very proud of her country. Yeah, anyhow. Yeah, definitely the building was where it changed because ... It became a huge learning opportunity for us, like, we never would have ... Mary Kitagawa who has no relation to Muriel, I don't think, is, I phoned her because she was the person that they had said in the newspaper was, you know, heading the protest or whatever. So I phoned her and I said,
Oh, that's not who my grandfather isand she said,
Get yourself an education.So I did. So I went and took all these ... If I ever write the book, that's what I'm going to call it. What? 'Get yourself ...' I thought she said to you, yeah, something around education, right? Educate yourself. Educate yourself and then we never have really talked at any great length since then. So I took all these, you know, Jordan Stanger-Ross' course on racism and John Price. Do you ... You know him? Yup. John Price, I don't necessarily agree, you know all those racism courses? And then family history, I took the family history course with Eric. He's also involved in your ... Sager. Sager, yeah. He was an excellent professor because to all my theories he'd go
Mmm.You prove that?
That's kind of taken care of.As you said, he was looking for a solution. So they may have found a solution.
People moved, we're preventing them from coming back.I don't think he ever, and certainly that correspondence with Buck Suzuki, you know, trying to appeal to him on a personal level of, like,
I've lost my home. I want my home backI don't think he ... Which is really hard to accept but I don't think he listened to people's personal stories, which is hard. It's like, as you said, it's like,
Okay, this population has moved on. That problem's taken care of. I'll move on to bigger things.I think he saw that the problem was solved from his perspective, however hard that is to admit. Yeah, there's certainly nothing that he got involved anybody's personal appeals for their properties back. That's so ... It's unfortunate. He could have done a lot to help people because there is, I mean, the one family that got their properties back, right? And ... San Zuki. Yeah, I just saw the play of the guy out in Strawberry Hills and he appealed. He appealed the MP who was also an anti-Japanese MP, Thomas Reid. But he knew the guy. He knew him personally. He was the only guy who ever got his property back because of personal political connections. So my granddad could have done that for people but he didn't. Instead he helped the Chinese emigrate from China illegally, I think. Yeah. I think that was, probably, the gist of it. That's what a paper son was, right? The gist of it was not their actual relatives that they'd bring in. Yeah. So I think he did it. That was his ... How do you think he made sense of that? I mean, he sounds like he was such a litigious guy. I don't know. That's interesting because I think that's, kind of, all the ... Yeah, he would've done it for them because he discounted his legal fees all the time, right, to help people. He wasn't doing it for the money. I don't know if he ... Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, it's something we've never really delved into. We should to try and understand. It's all very ... Like, I don't think there's any records of that. People don't know they brought in people and changed their names and stuff when they came here and the wrong birth certificates. I don't know. We don't really know. We tried to go back to his office staff and they didn't really remember. So there's really nobody else to ask. All we have is the mystery of the gifts that would show up at Christmas
Oh, it's the war. That was justifiedand all that. I'm thinking, how would I like it right now if someone took away my home and my money, really, because that's what they did do, and at my age, and then all of a sudden you've got nothing after you've worked your whole life. People don't really understand that. That's what happened, basically. The way the old people were treated wasn't very nice either, really. You know, have to live in these homes in New Denver. Have you been to New Denver? I've been to Kaslo and I've been to New Denver, yeah. Yeah, you know the little ... The shacks. Yeah, the families shared and it was freezing cold. I mean, how would you like it if your eighty-one year old grandmother was living like that? That's awful. Shocking, right? Now your eighty-one year old grandmother could be deemed a threat to Canada
how could you be so wrong?I mean, obviously, he's not. I have a theory, I don't know that you buy into, that, you know, on the Japanese Canadian side they needed a person to be the epitome of evil which they have chosen my grandfather to be, perhaps because he went on to be a very high profile politician. He wasn't at that point. He was a nobody. He was a junior MP for an opposition party. So here's someone who achieves prominence and then, you know, when all the controversy erupted over the building it's like,
Okay, well, you know, here's our chance to ...not get revenge, I don't want to say that at all but just the fact that there's somebody who we see as the epitome of evil and, justifiably, we want to take that honor away from him. That's, kind of, my ... That's the hardest part, I think, for me to try and understand is that they could have that viewpoint of him when, you know, to us he was the most wonderful grandfather, ever. I think, you know, if he had apologized, if he had been able to say, not even personally that he had done something wrong, just that what had happened to the Japanese Canadians was wrong and he was sorry for his part in it, I mean, he could have changed his legacy. The fact that he chose not to do that, that's the part I find the hardest to accept. I think he knew. As Barb said, he had all these things that he'd make the notes on. I mean, his argument became ridiculous the longer the note time went on. He's still doing interviews, we've never heard it, but there was one that he did for Global, I think in the late '70s, it sounded like he was ridiculed.
The interviewer couldn't understand my standpointor, you know, whatever. So he must've, he was a smart man, so he must've realized as time went on that, you know, all these arguments he was making made no sense anymore. I mean, I used to make it a fact of, I mean, I have quite a few Japanese Canadian friends and all this was happening. I would apologize to them and most of them would be like
I've never heard of your grandfather, for one.
I've never heard of him.So there's the people like Joy and Mary Kitagawa who, you know, my grandfather was the epitome of evil to and then there's lots of other Japanese people who have never heard of him. So, it's kind of like ... That's kind of like a seed that we're left with is like
Okay, well, was he as evil as we've been told by some people?He wasn't evil. You know that he's not evil. No, I know he's not evil but I think that's the emotional thing that we debate all the time is like ... Can good people do evil things. Yes, exactly. Yeah. Mhm. Yeah, and what is evil? Yeah, what is evil? They're deep psychological questions but was he evil? No. Did he think he was doing the right thing? Yes. Should he have admitted ... Did he do the right thing? No. Yes. That's why I think it's really important not to get stuck in your belief system. If you think about, if he believed that since he was a small boy, which he says many times, he believed that. During the war he would have been in his mid-fifties because the war is until '45 and he was born in '94 so he would be almost, yeah, fifties. Yeah, he was in his fifties. So you believe something your whole life and then it takes a long time for you to, for the human ... I mean, at the end of your life, maybe, we'll find out something that we believed our whole life wasn't really true. I think it just took him a long time. But why could he have not said, you know, just to somebody. In any war there's never apologies for many things. You know, like Churchill caused all those deaths in Gallipoli. That was just a stupid choice. Do you think Churchill ever said,
Oh, god, I was wrong. What about all those people?No, I know. Apologized, no, to the Australians. There's so many examples of people making a decision that has an impact on a huge number of people and did they ever apologize for it or admit they were wrong? But what of redress? Did your grandfather have any opinions? All that he did was, as far as I know and I think that Donna knows, he clipped out all the stories and put them on a piece of paper. So he obviously followed it. Even though he had dementia himself, by that point, but he was still ... Because he died in 1989 and redress is in 1988, right? You guys keep talking. I'll see if I can find the thing that ... So, yeah, he followed it until his death. There's no doubt about that. Oh, yeah, those are his notes. This would be a note from '87. He would be ninety-two. There he is trying to figure out ...
Pearl Harbor, sneak attack.Yeah. Show Josh the telegram, too. Yeah, that's relevant to his project. This is where he was writing in 1972. Of course, you can see the difference in his handwriting. You can see that this is a really old man and he was not speaking to anybody then. He just was writing it for his own interest. Yet, still Roman numerals and dated. Yeah, very methodical, logical arguments. So, obviously, he was having an argument with himself when he wrote that because he didn't ... Or maybe he anticipated that a journalist would call him, right? No, no. I don't think, no, because he was well passed that. But, I mean, it was in the news, right? Because it was redress. Yeah, maybe. I don't think he would have been interviewed but ... No, I don't think so. I think it must have been on his own. Where's the telegram because there's stuff on that, too, right? Have you ever seen this? Victoria or Patricia Roy said she had seen them. I haven't seen this one, no. As you can see at the bottom, he's made notes of who everybody was because it was very prominent people, right? Like the Woodward family and stuff so he's written all that. So, again, I think that would have been when he was interviewed after the war he would have been showing that telegram to people. Right. This is ... 1942. February 24th, 1942. Yeah, so that's when they were making the decision for internment. So he would have been sending this telegram to all the ... No, that's who it came from. Oh, it came from these people and it was going to him. Yeah. Okay. So all the BC politicians would have had it. That's why Patricia, when I showed her that copy, she's like
Oh, I've seen this before,you know, somebody else's version of it. I can't find it. What are you looking for? Oh, just the ... where the redress thing. So here it is where he cut them. I guess I didn't bring the paper. That's the kind of thing that he cut out. He had all those so he knew all about the redress. Yeah, op-eds from the province. Yeah. So he followed it. There was a piece of paper where he had them all pasted on there and then there was a comment but I guess I didn't bring it. You have a photocopy of all the articles together. Yeah, it's clear that he was thinking about this until the end. Yeah. Yeah, which is sort of too bad, isn't it, that he didn't, uh, ... It would have made for a nice Hollywood ending, right, if he called a press conference as he's on his deathbed. I don't think I have it. No. He was definitely following it right until the end. Yeah. Anyhow, that's ... I have the folder that he ... He had a manila folder like that. It's just called 'Japanese.' There's nothing in it anymore but it's in his handwriting so he was keeping all those articles together. Yeah, I didn't bring it I guess. You feel like they should be ... Somebody should do something with his stuff. Donna's going to write a book. Yeah. I think it's easy to demonize people that do things wrong but if you try to understand why they do it but, now, like I was saying about Trump, we're faced with something totally different. We're faced with somebody who just, I mean, doesn't even mind saying it and, maybe, isn't trying the best for his country. Who knows. Time will tell in another few years. Two weeks. Exactly. You're American, is that right? Yeah. It must be frightening to think what could happen but, yeah, there's not even a war going on, right? and Trump can say these sort of things and people ...
Oh, so and so, he's Ukrainian.There was an order. To be British was the top of the order and everybody else, if you were, you know, even though you're still white you knew if somebody was Italian or they were whatever, right? So that whole thing is totally gone. I don't think ... We grew up in Vancouver. I did, anyway, seen so much change in the city. You would never ... The history of racism in Vancouver is not over. The story of racism. No, but, yeah, you're right. Now it's totally turned, right? People are resentful because there's wealthier people coming here that aren't white. That's how it's all turned. Yeah, I contend that it's a very racist city. The racism, sometimes, can lurk just right underneath the surface. It really hasn't gone away but, maybe, sort of changed form. You probably notice the difference in Toronto, do you? Oh, yeah. I think so. Much more diverse, right? Yeah. I think you do notice a difference. Vancouver is British Columbia, right? That means something. I haven't quite entirely made sense of what that means having not lived here in its deeply monarchist days. Yes. But, that did mean something. Loyalty to the Crown would have been above all, I think. Yeah. I think that there is ways in which that continues to take shape in the region. It hasn't entirely gone away, for sure. When you say it's different, I'm wondering, I mean, was your family ... Were your mom and dad distant enough from the politics of your grandfather to support a more multicultural upbringing? Oh, for sure. There was never ... Nothing. And all of us have Japanese Canadian, or Asian friends. There was never ... My father was not discriminatory in any way. My mom's been ... She would have liked to have come today, I think, but she's quite proud of what we've done. She's very, very supportive. Racism was not taught in our home or in my grandfather's home, at all. No, not at all. I think that's something that's ... There was no ... We were raised in a very political house. We got forced to listen to CBC at dinner time, as it happens. I was like,
Oh, can we please just listen to the music station like anybody else would?So I was very encouraged to pursue education and that kind of stuff. I don't remember any episodes of ... No, not at all. Somebody's lesser than you because of where they were from or anything. I mean, the city ... I graduated from Magee in 1985 and, you know, my class was ninety percent white. Now it's probably eighty percent Asian. So even in those thirty years it's changed entirely. That's drastic.
These are good people.You could see where she ... Anyhow, it was really interesting doing it. I could send you a copy of it if you want because it's quite interesting.
Should the Japs stay?My grandfather was on the other side and, you know, everything he says is wrong. Well, she sends him a letter commenting on that. On the article, yeah. Oh. But he was, my grandfather was always right. She never said anything against it even though he was totally wrong. But then there was dissenting opinion about her opinion of him
My words stand the test of timeand, obviously, they don't if you look at that. So that's the ... So I've read the text but I've never actually seen it and it's something else to see it. Mhm. Mhm. So Angus MacInnis was obviously the person whose words stood the test of time. Yes. Though we have an article, right, that his wife wrote ... Oh, yeah, that's back in the ... Yeah but that was when the first ... Yeah, that was the beginning. I could understand that. But when the decision for internment was being made, they were actually pro-internment, right? They obviously changed their minds much sooner than my grandfather did. Mm. I'll send you them if I can get a copy of my essay because then you can see what his mother said. It is kind of interesting how she supported him. Yeah, it was all involved, as far as she was concerned, it was all involved with religion. Praying they would do the right thing and say the right thing and make the right decision about ... The other thing that was interesting in reading her things was the division of how Japanese people could be good but they were different. Like, she never ... They were always different, right? Which is sort of ... but I think that was how people perceived racism, not racism but, you know, the different races at that time. A proud mother nonetheless. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, the letters are 'he could do no wrong.' Like, there's ... Oh wow. Yeah. Yeah. So I guess, I mean, certainly not from his mother and probably not from his party, would your grandfather have really heard much criticism in his day? I think Diefenbaker criticized what had happened with the Japanese because Diefenbaker believed that it was wrong. I think there was dissenting opinion between the two of them on that. It's too bad Diefenbaker didn't push him to do something about it. He brought up the Bill of Human Rights or Bill of Rights, Diefenbaker. Yeah, I don't know how much ... He got a lot of dissention more about his nuclear positions because eventually they lost the election, Diefenbaker's government, because of that, because of my grandfather's ... I don't know if there was a war hint. Yeah, that was probably where he would have got more criticism from that. On nuclear disarmament? Right, disarmament. Even talking to, well, Eric Boardbush, the guy who when all this kind of happened he was writing the book on my grandfather and he said all this sort of stuff has erupted. He's just, sort of, dismissive of it that, you know,
there's nothing in your grandfather's career.Well, ultimately it's everything but when you have all the other things that he did do right I think most people, sadly, could look beyond what happened with the Japanese Canadians and say
Oh, he did do all these wonderful thingsbut it's like ...
This is what used to be Japanese.You see, because I don't think that people really realize the extent because it was, kind of, pushed aside. Now the school kids, we never learned that in school. No. Yeah. And then now they learn it but it's sort of like,
Well, that's so far back. That doesn't really matteror whatever. When you actually see a piece of land that was owned and was taken away and ... The storefronts. Yeah, the storefronts. The cars, that's what I remember seeing and thinking
Oh, those are all brand new cars. They're well kept.That's what really hit home for me but if you don't ever see that then you don't ever ... And we never saw that at school as kids. We never learned that. No. Oh, that's my family doctor
Educate yourself.Well, it's like, okay, so we have made that ... So we educated ourselves, you educate yourself
The politicians fabricated this or took advantage of itwhereas we've got lots of evidence from my grandfather's stuff that, you know, he was getting so much pressure from just his everyday constituents. So did the groundswell come from the constituents advocating for action or did it come from the politicians trying to make hay out of something or bring prominence to themselves. That's something that I've never been able to really reconcile. Jean Barman told us, so did Patricia Roy, that there were concerns that something was going to happen like another anti-Asian riot if, you know, something could have happened to the Japanese Canadians, if action hadn't been taken but then the Japanese ... You can see in the rhetoric that granddad used over and over and over again to keep people ... Riled up, yeah. Yeah. You have to prove that's all in that cognitive dissonance where you don't hear the things that don't fit in your theory. So whether it was him being sincere or did he want to ... Yeah, was he trying to make a political name for himself? We don't know that. You have to prove yourself right. Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, that's, I think, one of the things that I'm left with is that, um, particularly as you know opposition MP, junior MP, where is the damage done? Perhaps, most notably, it's in the rhetoric and that rhetoric, kind of, then going through some sort of cognitive dissonance or some sort of echo chamber. One thing that disturbed me is he ... There's a ... which has come up with Joy Kogawa because she's friends with this fellow's son. This guy wrote a column, and he was well known, and he wrote a column that, you know, says that, you know, you have to be careful and all this sort of stuff. This particular man actually changed his mind completely but my grandfather kept bringing up the same column five years later in the House of Commons even though he had no longer believed that. So Joy talks about that because Joy's friends with Elmer Philpot's son who didn't know that his father had written this article. She lobs the same thing at Stewart, you know,
Your father was racist.
No, my father, he stood up for people.So this column is, like, well, even he felt this way.
My column, I don't feel that way.I'm wondering, you know, why, I mean, so, you know, Mary says go educate yourself. You have, immensely but, um, do we need to apologize or repair the, the work of past generations? No, I think that that's ... Actually, Joy held a reconciliation event at, um, because she has the house. So I went to that and I did apologize and, you know, I can't remember how I worded it. I'm sure I can find my little notes or whatever just saying, you know, what he had advocated for was wrong. We can't apologize on his behalf because that was his choice to make and he didn't but that we as a family, you know, had felt badly for what had happened. I can't remember my exact words. But you can't really do that can you? No, I mean, we can't apologize for him. Mhm. I almost wonder if your grandfather could find a way to be proud of you for doing this even if he couldn't necessarily ... Yeah, that's an interesting question, like, if he's watching us from the great beyond going, you know,
Stop doing that.It's very much about education and bettering yourself. I think he would be disturbed, probably, by what we've done but I think he would be proud of us. I don't know. Yeah, he wanted a better ... A better society. He wanted a country that worked. His country was really important to him. Yeah, I don't know. We're certainly ... Yeah, like, I think our mom's proud of us for what we've done and I think our dad. By, sort of, 2010 his dementia had taken over for him but when it was originally still happening I think he was proud of us for going out and doing the research and trying to understand. Yeah. One could sort of imagine your grandfather might not necessarily agree with the politics. No, no. We could have had some great debates with him and I do regret not, as you say, in the '70s, even in the early '80s when he was still pretty involved it would have been an awesome time to have had that discussion of, like,
Tell me what happened.But, of course, we are, I think, as a generation, me being the older part of the generation, I don't even know if you're in a different generation than me, but, you know, we've had no experience with war. We don't really ... none, like none, so it's ... I'm totally untouched by it. They have the ... Just because of his experiences with war. One lady, um, Lois Hashimoto, she has since died, she lived in Montreal, she was actually a great foe of Joy Kogawa's. They didn't get along at all. She said it's the war. She says it was all the First World War. Those people were broken from the first. You know, from seeing what the damages of war could be and that's their perspective and that's where we would have had the biggest arguments with granddad, I think, because we'd just have no understanding of it. Yeah. I mean that was the second time the war had happened in his lifetime, right? His son, like, my dad, fought in the war right at the end so he's got his own personal, you know, things that he would be concerned about. So that's where we ... I don't understand. We're not threatened. We live in a little la la land out here, don't we? Not threatened by anything especially in Victoria
It's ancient history. I had nothing to do with it. My family had nothing to do with it.Yeah. We would kind of like to ... Yeah, see more come of it. Yeah, we pushed for reconciliation but that never went anywhere. Nobody on that ... But I think the fact that we went out and talked to people, that's a form of reconciliation right? Hopefully people see it that way. One on one, sort of, personal reconciliation. Yeah we want to hear their stories. When we first started meeting with Joy she'd be like,
You're defending him. You're not listening. You're not open.So I think we came ... As we did learn more we became more open and stopped defending. That must be tough. Mhm. I can't even imagine ... Especially when somebody's dead, right? It's pretty hard to ... You can't ask them. Yeah. It's not a defense of his legacy. No, his legacy is what it is. Politicians do fade after. Anything they do fades. Interesting enough, quite a few of the things that he believed in, especially peace, for a while that was really going somewhere, right? He just wanted peace in the world and now that seems to be changing again. For a little while it looked like ... Yeah, there was peace
Oh, my god. Look what they did to that peopleor, you know, whatever. There's going to be something. Yeah, and I think ... There is the tenure of the times, thing. We agreed that the environment was going to be the thing in 100 years, all the people that ruined the environment will be ... We didn't do anything like that because we're just nice people. We're just nice people. But, yeah, anybody who is involved in ... Like our father's a geologist so it's like
Oh, does that make him an evil man later a hundred years from now?
Oh, you're Hispanic? I'm going to out you.What's to stop people? Yeah, it, sort of, I think, reinvigorates these discussions as not historic. Yeah, it can happen tomorrow, right? If the question is simply one of being scared or fearful, you know, we've got to be able to do better than that. Yeah, and there's not even a war on right now. I mean, there was a war at this time. Reading my grandfather's letter he's talking about the blackout curtains and the air raid sirens going off. I mean, that's a legitimate fear at that particular time whereas there's, certainly we don't have anything to be fearful of right now. Right? I mean, this unknown Muslim enemy, right? I've always compared the Japanese to the Mexicans, myself, like, that's the best I can come up with. It's not the same as the ... It is a bit the same as the Muslims but the Mexicans have been in the U.S. for quite a few generations now and that's the thing with the Japanese is they weren't considered citizens. They didn't have all the rights of, you know, as you know, the white people. So that's systemic racism. The same thing has happened in the U.S. with the illegal immigrants that have been there for a couple generations now. So everybody is American as the Japanese were, but the people, like, exactly what you're saying if Trump actually does send them all back, well, what happens to the kids that were born in the U.S. and have no country and they're not really Mexican are they? Will people say anything? No. I could never have believed, when we started this, that something like that could even be a possibility but you can see it happening. You can see it happening next year. Whether anybody will ... I think that's a very valid comparison is that were the Japanese here at the time, even though they had been here for two generations, they were still Japanese to a lot of people. Yeah, they weren't equal. They couldn't work in certain professions. You're right, they were the equivalent of the Mexicans who could only hold certain jobs. They were the gardeners, they were the ... because they couldn't. Mhm. In Lethbridge, Japanese Canadians weren't allowed to roam the streets freely at night, in Alberta. Yeah, I know. BC always gets tarred with this but it's the people that moved were treated very poorly in Alberta, in Manitoba. You probably had to go as far ... Even Toronto, right? Toronto said they didn't want them either. It wasn't like it was our problem that we hoisted it off on somebody else.
Oh, these people are really nice people.It's just what they were. Nice, yeah, they're well educated, they're smart, they're hard workers. The initial opposition, like, Toronto was like we don't want them. Montreal, we don't want them, right? They were, sort of, the pariahs. Given some of the things that people were saying in parliament ... Yes, yes, see, that's where it all comes back to how did the people out east even know except for people like my grandfather getting up and saying these things which were, like,
We don't want them.If you say you don't want something then people think,
I don't want them either.That's just a natural tendency. That's very true.
Oh, god, am I going to end up doing the same thing?but I think we have such a unique story. When I initially started, because we have all these connections, the letters between my grandfather and his mother and stuff, and then I've taken a few writing courses at SFU. People aren't interested really in the history. They're much more interested to learn that there was a building and that the name was taken off of it and what we've done. So they're not so much interested in the history of my grandfather. They're more interested in our sort of story so I don't know if there's enough there to write something about. I mean, obviously, I would have to pull in all the history because I still think that's the fascinating part but I don't know. I think I'm more here because your story is interesting. Is unique. Is unique, yeah. I mean, I think we all try to contextualize our parents or our grandparents. That contextualization in your case is particularly challenging and has become challenging only, sort of, in the recent years, the last decade. I think it's certainly interesting, you know, there's ... I don't know if it would be a best seller but ...
Well, yeah, but he was a white guy, well educated.Do you think he realized that ... That he had white privilege? I don't think ... Or that he was lucky. I don't think that many people recognize white privilege even now. Do you? I've tried to explain that to people, like, the way we can go into a fancy hotel, like, we were just in New York, my girlfriend and I. We went bike riding and it was a hundred degrees and we were dripping wet and we went into the nicest hotel in New York and nobody comes over and says
Excuse me, can you leave?We don't recognize that just because the color of our skin, I don't think. I think that he ... No, I don't think he had enough exposure to ... because he lived in a small town and then he came to Vancouver. I think that was probably part of his problem is that he didn't have enough exposure, you know, went over and fought in the war, never went back until well after the Second World War, I don't think, to Europe, never went to any African country and then he's in the House of Commons with all white guys, right? Was there anybody that wasn't white in those days? I doubt it. Yeah, I mean there was the one conservative female MP, right? I can't remember her name but she would have been with granddad but, yeah, it would have been, it was all white. Yeah, and he really didn't have the exposure to different ... that's why the 'other' or whatever, the term they used at university often they used the 'other' right? Somebody who is totally different but, actually, they wanted the same things as him. He admits that. He says that how Japanese are family oriented and he recognizes that they want to be with their families. But, still, he couldn't ... Yeah. Lack of empathy, I guess. Mhm. That's the thing about, you know, like, rules are rules and they're meant to be followed but if the people who are making the rules all look a certain way then it seems like a pretty stacked deck. Yeah. Yeah. The Japanese didn't have a hope right? How did those people that worked at the Royal Bank, or did all those house sales, how did they rationalize that? It'd be interesting to speak to some of those people. But they're probably all dead, right? Yeah, I think they're all, largely, deceased. Yeah. Yeah. And their descendants wouldn't know anything right? But you should, I mean, that's something you should feel guilty about, too, later on. How did they ... Yeah, does the son or a daughter of a bureaucrat feel guilty, right? Same thing in Nazi Germany, right? I mean, there's all these people that are perpetuating what's happening, right? I mean, yes, you've got these people who are putting these policies in place but it's the guy down the street who's working, you know. It's people's jobs, right? So ... But your granddad would have been alive to see, um, Trudeau version one, Trudeau's Canada. He didn't like Trudeau because my grandfather was very, very loyal. So he would never ... He didn't like the new flag because that was a liberal thing
Okay, he's not this perfect characterbut ... I think they've learned a lot from naming since then. Yes. I think you shouldn't use it