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This oral history is from an interview conducted by the Oral History cluster of the Landscapes of Injustice project.
hey reading that funny book!Anyhow, she was pretty good apparently. Do you have any memory of the time when Japanese Canadians were forced to leave? You would have been quite young, but... Very, very sketch. Not hardly at all. Only my parent's comments. And what kind of comments would they make about that? Well, they were really sad with how they were treated. Or they basically came home from school, they had their clothes on their back, and a bag. And away they went. And they were loading them onto trucks, I believe. And I don't know if they went by train or by boat over to Vancouver. Yeah, it was pretty brutal. I know my mom and dad are not happy about it because they had lots of friends. And they were good citizens, I mean. From what I understand. You know, hard working and not much in the way of crime, and stuff like that. As opposed to some others. So were there any particular families that your parents would have said goodbye to, or had seen actually leave? Say that one again? Were there any particular people-Japanese Canadians-or families that your parents would have made a point of saying goodbye to? Or that they would have seen off? I don't recall them saying that. But I would imagine there were. Because my mom had friends in her class, in school. Mind you she graduated high school in '32, '33, I guess. So she would have been gone by that time, you know, out of school. But nevertheless, they went to school together. They knew-I heard their generation talked a lot about different ones that they were friends with. And a lot of them kept track, like, Joe did with that guy. And other people. Saying
Oh I went to see George in Toronto,you know, stuff like that. So there were permanent friendships formed. Do you have any examples of friendships that you heard of in your family? You know, I don't. No. I just remember my dad talking about some of the guys that worked for my grandfather. Most of them he liked. And this one guy he didn't, and I didn't get any-no details about the conflict. But it was an argument of, you know how guys argue politics, and stuff like that probably. That sort of thing. So they actually did talk back and forth there? There was a discourse going on? Yeah. Oh, between the Japanese guys who were working? Oh yeah. Yeah, they'd be discussing probably the US policy on petroleum, which was a big issue. Which is what led to mainly that part of the war. Mind you, it's hard to-two parts of the world all of a sudden are at war, in a war. Crazy. Although we're headed that way again, it looks like doesn't it.
Well, here's what happened.You know, to me. I was an only child, so it was the only when they got the whole group around. I just remember hearing them talk to one-another. And also family gatherings. We had big families, and so there was a lot of family gatherings. We were probably better off than a lot. My grandfather had a lot of money and contracts and stuff like that. But he didn't leave any behind for his grandsons. He drank it away and went to New York with guys from Vancouver and, ah. I've never heard him talk about it but he was a tough guy. But he, you know, he probably respected them because they were hard workers and organized people. But yeah, there was some Chinese and some Japanese. Anyway. He might have had a total of twenty people working for him, plus three or four of his sons. And my dad and his brothers took over the contract for the mine, and they had what was called a Brothers Logging (?), and then in 1958 the mines closed. The last one closed. And they had to go and get another job.
You grew up in Cumberland?And I said,
Yeah, I did.And then he said that his mom and dad had owned the sawmill, which is pretty big. It was a big operation. They had a lot of timber and whatnot. As I found out later. And he said they got nothing. So you know, my realization of the politics of the situation came later. Nobody ever talked about it at school, that I remember. Like teachers. And Henry Watson (?), who was the principal and also a pretty good social studies teacher, he was more interested in getting good government exam results. So he wouldn't bring up issues like that. It would have been a great issue to bring up, you know, so much, you could teach people so much stuff by discussing, you know, the injustice of doing this and differences between cultures and that sort of thing. But he was more or less interested-he trained us to write the government exam. You know,
If you study these four topics, three will be on the exam.You know, for their essays. But yeah. What was the question again? It was when you became aware of the government involvement- Yeah, it wouldn't be until probably high school. Right, right. I think. Yeah. And that sawmill that you mentioned, you met the son of the family that owned the sawmill? Yeah. Do you remember that sawmill in Cumberland, growing up? Yeah, I remember driving by it. It was on the way to Royston. We had a cabin, a beach cabin at Gartley Beach (?), where my mom and dad eventually built a house and lived. And we'd go by it, all the time. Yeah, it was pretty big. And probably within competition with my grandfather. Maybe he's one of the ones that got rid of them.
That'd be a good thing for you to do.So I said,
Yeah, okay.So I went up. Yeah. They tend to do a lot of drinking when they go up there, and I'm not really a drinker. I never have been. I carry the same bottle of beer around all day. And so the group is quite diverse, in terms of culture. For example, what's the diversity of the group who make up- I'd say, it's, let me see. There's two or three Italian. Two, or three, or four of Scottish heritage. Maybe one or two of Slavic origin. We call them sometimes Yugoslav, but Bosnian, and Serbian, and... What's the other place? Croatian? Croats, and there's also the... There's another area there, a mountainous area. On the coast of the Mediterranean. Yeah, well, those guys. And, yeah. So, there's from that point of view. But they're all Caucasian, so I don't remember them ever asking a Chinese guy asked to be a part of it. They kept pretty separate. And anybody who was young, they moved away to do stuff. Jobs and things like that. There was one family, the Leung family (?), who had a grocery store in Cumberland. A good grocery store. And one in Courtenay. And actually, the one, Letters From Home (?), have you ever seen that one? No. She was a CTV person. For years. She went back to a village that her parents had come from. In China? In China. And interviewed people and that sort of thing. And Letters From Home (?), now what was her... Joy Leung (?)
That son of a bitch.