Friday Picks: Nov 25, 2020 at 7:30 p.m.

The Secret Life of Canada: Where is Japantown?

The Secret Life of Canada, a CBC podcast, highlights the people, places and stories that probably didn't make it into your high school textbook. Through episodes like “The Mounties Always Get Their Land,” “The Nanny” and “Crash Course on Black Nurses,” hosts Leah-Simone Bowen and Falen Johnson explore the unauthorized history of a complicated country.

In this month’s suggested listen, “Where is Japantown,” Bowen and Johnson look at Japanese-Canadian history and how the internment of more than 20,000 Japanese Canadians during the Second World War altered countless lives and divided entire communities.

Why we chose it:

When we were planning this month’s Friday Picks, we knew we wanted to look at the things we knew about Canadian history—and the things we didn’t. Which made The Secret Life of Canada, a podcast about the parts of history that don’t get covered in exhaustive detail in history class, the perfect fit. (Not that the War of 1812 wasn’t important, but we definitely learned about it at least three times. It’s possible the curriculum could have skipped that unit just once and covered systematic racism instead, you know?) As we were scrolling through three seasons’ of episodes, we all stopped at “Where is Japantown.” It posed a question that now seems obvious, but hadn’t actually occurred to us: why is that, though Japanese people started immigrating to Canada in the late 1800s, there aren’t Japantowns throughout the country the way we have Chinatowns or Koreatowns? And what did internment camps have to do with that?

1. Every year, we mark Remembrance Day in November. This year’s Remembrance Day also marked the 100th anniversary of Vancouver’s Japanese Canadian War Memorial, which was built by the city’s Canadian Japanese Association in 1920. What does it mean that we take the time to acknowledge Canadian soliders who fought in wars but largely ignore those who suffered in our own country? Is there a way to do both?

2. The point of The Secret Life of Canada is to uncover the stories that were largely left out of history textbooks. What does it say about our education system that most of the stories that were left out involve racialized people, or showcase past governmental mistakes?

3. As the podcast mentioned, it took almost forty years for the B.C. government to apologize to the Japanese Canadians who were interned. Why do you think it took so long? And what do apologies for past atrocities accomplish?

4. War hysteria during the Second World War was not the only factor that led to the internment of Japanese Canadians—systemic racism was also a factor, as Lisa Uyeda of the Nikkei Museum points out during the episode. How has systemic racism and anti-Asian sentiment continued, particularly with the reaction of COVID-19?

About the host:

Want more Japanese Canadian history? Here are some articles, books and videos that we recommend.

The Three Pleasures by Terry Watanda

1940s Vancouver. The Japanese have just bombed Pearl Harbour and racial tension is building in Vancouver. The RCMP are rounding up “suspicious” young men, and fishing boats and property are soon seized from Steveston fishers; internment camps in BC’s interior are only months away.

Daniel Sugiura, a young reporter for the New Canadian, the only Japanese-Canadian newspaper allowed to keep publishing during the war, narrates The Three Pleasures. The story is told through three main characters in the Japanese community: Watanabe Etsuo, Morii Etsuji and Etsu Kaga, who are known as the Three Pleasures. Morii Etsuji, the Black Dragon boss, controls the kind of pleasure men pay for: gambling, drink and prostitution—the pleasures of the flesh. Watanabe Etsuo, Secretary of the Steveston Fishermen’s Association, makes a deal with the devil to save his loved ones. In the end, he suffers for it and never regains the pleasures of family. And there is Etsu Kaga, a Ganbariya of the Yamato Damashii Group, a real Emperor worshipper. His obsession becomes destructive to himself and all involved with him. He enjoys the pleasure of patriotism until that patriotism becomes a curse.

Forgiveness: A Gift From My Grandparents by Mark Sakamoto

When the Second World War broke out, Ralph MacLean traded his quiet yet troubled life on the Magdalen Islands in eastern Canada for the ravages of war overseas. On the other side of the country, Mitsue Sakamoto and her family felt their pleasant life in Vancouver starting to fade away after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Ralph found himself one of the many Canadians captured by the Japanese in December 1941. He would live out his war in a prison camp, enduring beatings, starvation, electric feet and a journey on a hell ship to Japan, watching his friends and countrymen die all around him. Mitsue and her family were ordered out of their home and were packed off to a work farm in rural Alberta, leaving many of their possessions behind. By the end of the war, Ralph was broken but had survived. The Sakamotos lost everything when the community centre housing their possessions was burned to the ground, and the $25 compensation from the government meant they had no choice but to start again.

Forgiveness intertwines the compelling stories of Ralph MacLean and the Sakamotos as the war rips their lives and their humanity out of their grasp. But somehow, despite facing such enormous transgressions against them, the two families learned to forgive. Without the depth of their forgiveness, this book's author, Mark Sakamoto, would never have existed.

Japanese Canadian Internment (Narrated by David Suzuki)

To remember the 75th Anniversary of Japanese Canadian Internment during the Second World War, Legion Magazine and David Suzuki tell the story of the injustices and atrocities done towards Japanese-Canadians across the country, and in particular, British Columbia

Remembering the ‘bittersweet’ legacy of Canada’s wartime Jewish and Italian internment camps by Morgan Lowrie

Sadly, Japanese-Canadians were not the only ones interned in Canada during the second world war.

For The Canadian Press, Morgan Lowrie takes a look back at the thousands of Jewish, Italian, German and Austrian men who were rounded up by the British government and sent to Canada to be interned. They were categorized as “dangerous enemy aliens” and “were scattered in camps across Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick, where they were surrounded by armed guards and barbed wire,” Lowrie writes.

Many of these men were refugees and regular civilians just working in the U.K., who were then put on a boat among Nazis and prisoners of war. “People were cursing us and throwing stones at us. We had to cross a gauntlet of citizens who knew some of us were prisoners of war, but (didn’t know) some of us were just ordinary prisoners,” says Edgar Lion, a Jewish man who was interned in Canada. “We were in the wrong place. We weren’t supposed to be interned.”

The Fifth Estate: Japanese Deportations in Canada During WWII

This episode of The Fifth Estate originally aired in 1995 and takes a look back at one of the darkest chapters of Canadian history. Linden MacIntyre examines the Canadian policy to deport thousands of Japanese Canadians during World War II, and details how top civil servants responded to one of this country’s deepest moral failures.

Every cycle, we’re suggesting a charity that aligns with our discussion. In November, The Secret Life of Canada co-host Leah-Simone Bowen has chosen Nikkei National Museum and Cultural Centre’s Resilience Fundraiser, which is raising funds to cover the organization’s operating expenses. COVID-19 has affected its usual methods of fundraisinghonour, preserve and share Japanese culture and Japanese Canadian history and heritage for a better Canada. If you can donate, please do!

Where to listen:

CBC

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