Forgiveness Read online

  The army made the first presentation. Major-General Maurice Pope, vice-chair of general staff of the Canadian Army, sat squarely in his chair and stated that the Canadian Armed Forces had no interest in the proposed evacuation. Even at the pinnacle of Japan’s military prowess, the position of the Canadian military brass was that there was absolutely no need to consider moving the Japanese population from the coast. RCMP officials agreed with the army’s assessment.

  H.E. Reid, vice-admiral of the Navy, was up next. He reminded the committee members that all Japanese-owned vessels had been seized and confirmed that a naval threat was nonexistent.

  Next, the B.C. politicians took the floor. They were led by George Pearson, B.C.’s minister of labour. He was half mad with rage. His position was that the entire Japanese population could not be trusted and he sought a final solution for his province: drive them all out. The committee chair, Ian Mackenzie, himself a B.C. politician long known to harbour vehement anti-Japanese views, thanked Mr. Pearson and adjourned for the day.

  Escott Reid, a long-time External Affairs official, later wrote, “I felt in that committee room in the presence of evil.” Pearl Harbor was a gift to biggots who wanted to remove the Japanese from B.C. and its economy. It mattered little that Canada’s national security—army, navy, and RCMP—were all on record stating there was no national security issue. Vitriol of that degree gets attention. It whips up, it grows, and it often wins.

  Prime Minister Mackenzie King, ever the cautious politician, sought a compromise. On January 14 he announced that all Japanese aliens would be evacuated to protected areas that fell outside of a one-hundred-mile radius of the coast. It seemed King was hoping to avert the calls for a full Japanese evacuation by sacrificing those Japanese who had not yet become Canadian citizens. He failed.

  As resentment hit the street, the Security League continued to incite intolerance among the general population. The prime minister was fearful of more race riots—the sort of violence that would make the riots of 1907 look like schoolyard tussles. King was also afraid that news of attacks on Japanese living in Canada would elicit harsh retribution against the Canadian soldiers being held in Hong Kong. He tried to solve the problem by sending the Japanese away. He banished them instead of protecting them.

  After the call went out to evacuate those Japanese who weren’t Canadian citizens, the fear was that all Japanese would be sent back to Japan, even those born in Canada. Lots of politicians were calling for this. Now that the Japanese boats had been confiscated, nothing seemed off-limits. Japanese Canadians had run out of high ground. There was no shelter to be had.

  The one thing that was clear was that single men would be treated differently. They were being sent to work on road camps out east, where conditions were terrible. They felt like slaves.

  Yosuke gathered his family into the living room for what he knew would be a critical family meeting.

  Hideo and Mitsue decided to move up their wedding date. Not sure how long they had, they hastily set a date. This left Mitsue with a lot of work to do. She had to make a dress, find a place to get married, and plan a little party for their friends and family. She only had two weeks—perhaps not even that.

  She spent the next fourteen days sewing her wedding dress and the bridesmaids’ dresses. Tomi had purchased Mitsue’s wedding kimono three years earlier from family in Japan. It had chrysanthemums on the shoulders and all down the front and a beautiful white and pink obi that went around her waist. Mitsue would pin a flower in the back of her hair.

  Mitsue sewed a traditional dress for the reception. It was a long silk dress with full sleeves. The sheer, train-length veil had scalloped edges and silk embroidered irises at each corner. Mrs. Yamamoto had helped her select the fabric. Mitsue was thankful for that. She and Hideo were getting married so quickly they hadn’t had any time to save money. With the boats gone, everyone was trying to save the little cash they had. Nobody knew what was around the corner. On the fourteenth day, Mitsue finished her sister Mary’s dress. Mary was to be her maid of honour.

  Hideo and Mitsue were married on January 29, 1941, a cold and miserable day. Mitsue spent the morning getting ready at home in Celtic. It would be her last day there, as she would move to the boarding house with Hideo the next day. She liked her house better, but a wife had to live where her husband lived, not the other way around. Mary, Susanne, and her mother all helped her prepare.

  At ten in the morning, Yosuke honked the horn from the driveway. Mitsue dashed outside and climbed into the car so as not to get her dress wet. She caught sight of Ichuri standing on the sidewalk, soaked to the bone. Tears ran down his face. He must have been standing in the cold, hard rain all morning.

  Mitsue got out and went to him. “What are you doing?” she asked. He was shivering and crying. He begged her not to get married. He professed his love.

  She felt so bad for him that she forgot about her dress, hair, and makeup. She put her hand on his forearm and pleaded with him to go home. It took some time, but he finally relented.

  Mitsue got into the car and they made their way down to the church. Because of wartime rules restricting Japanese people from meeting in large numbers, Hideo and Mitsue had had to go to City Hall to get a permit for the fifty-five wedding guests.

  When Mitsue and her family got to the church, they all walked up the stairs together. There were two RCMP guards at the front door to check the registration cards of all the guests. They wore uniforms and caps, and held clubs and guns. They demanded to see the family’s registration cards. Everyone showed their card except Mitsue. She didn’t have her registration card on her. There are no pockets in kimonos, and she wasn’t carrying a purse.

  “Where’s yours?” the guard said, sticking his chin out. There was disrespect in his manner. Mary rooted around in her purse for her sister’s registration card. The officer stared at Mitsue, who was worried that Mary had forgotten the card and they’d have to go all the way back to Celtic. Mary finally found the card and handed it to the officer. He took it and looked at it, looked at Mitsue, looked at the card again, and looked at Mitsue again. Finally he grunted and nodded towards the door.

  The wedding was a nice affair, given the circumstances. The children from Mitsue’s Sunday school sang. Their voices were like a spring rain, and Mitsue let it wash over her.

  After the ceremony, everyone went to a Chinese restaurant. They had to eat in a hurry as they had to be home by the eight o’clock curfew. The two RCMP officers followed along to the restaurant too. At seven-thirty they said, “Time’s up.” Everyone got their jackets and went home. What else could they do?

  There was no honeymoon. The next day, Mitsue moved into the rooming house with Hideo’s family. She hated living there. There were five bedrooms in the house on Jackson Street, just a few blocks off Powell Street. Hideo’s parents slept on the main floor beside the kitchen. On the second floor there were two bedrooms and a large bathroom. Hideo and Mitsue had one room and Hideo’s sister June had the other. The third floor had three more rooms, which were rented out. When Mitsue moved in, there was one man in each room. They were all labourers who worked at the mills and stayed in the house when they had days off. The house was constantly dirty. She would spend all day cleaning the men’s clothes, their sheets, and their rooms.

  Mitsue washed the men’s clothes with a scrubbing brush. It would take hours to get the grime out of their work shirts and pants and underwear. She’d scrub them with powdered detergent, hang-dry them, press them with a stove iron, fold them, and leave them on each man’s bed. She never did get a thank you, at least not from the men. Hideo’s mother, Wari, was grateful for the help. She had been doing all the work by herself for so long. Hideo’s father, Hanpei, was hardly ever around. He worked at the lumber camp, half a day’s drive away, and would come back to Vancouver on the weekends. He was gruff and liked to gamble, so most weekends he wasn’t around either. Hanpei hardly knew his son. They never really talked.

  Mitsue toil
ed away at the rooming house. Breakfast, clean, lunch, clean, dinner, clean. Hideo went back to work at the paper mill, so she was often alone with Wari. Wari was a sharp woman. She had spent her life running a boarding house after working on the farm back in Japan. She had never gone to school. She worked every day. And she was often alone with boarders, so she had to be tough. She was very different than Mitsue’s mother. It took Mitsue a while to get accustomed to living with Wari, who only spoke when she had to give orders.

  Mitsue was able to stay on at Mrs. Yamamoto’s dress shop. She went in every other weekday. White customers were not coming around as much, and Mrs. Yamamoto was becoming worried about her business. She was widowed and had no family in Canada aside from a cousin who worked at a mine up north. She was always looking for information about what was happening to the people who had already been sent away from Vancouver. Where were they going? What was it like? Nobody really knew. It was all just speculation in those early days. Only a few people had actually been evacuated. They had been sent to ghost towns in B.C.’s interior. The thought of living in a ghost town terrified Mrs. Yamamoto. Night and day, she thought about this.

  Notices of evacuation were everywhere. Everyone feared opening their mailbox. A clearing was underway. It was systematic and ruthless. It was coming for everyone.

  Some received as little as two hours’ notice to leave their home. When her time came a few months later, Mrs. Yamamoto was one of the lucky ones. She was given one week. Mitsue helped her pack. She gave most of her fabric to a hakujin family, good customers who lived just down the street.

  When Mitsue was packing clothes she noticed several canning jars in the bedroom. There was cash on the bed. Mitsue never asked but she guessed Mrs. Yamamoto was planning to bury money in her backyard. Mrs. Yamamoto didn’t know who to turn to, didn’t know who to trust.

  The day came for Mrs. Yamamoto to report to Hastings Park. She walked through the gates, feeling like a prisoner. Everyone was quiet and hung their heads. Cots were assigned in the livestock building. The cattle stalls were still up. Cows had just been in them. The troughs were still there. Hay lay on the ground, smelling of manure and urine and blood.

  Some people had put up sheets in the stalls for a little privacy. But mostly they were just sitting on their cots with nothing to do. There was a big mess hall in one of the other buildings. Gruel was being served, but no one ate. More than two thousand people were confined in that park. Armed guards patrolled the premises. People arrived completely unprepared for the brutality of the situation. It was worse than any rumour that had been conjured up. Not in their wildest dreams had Japanese Canadians thought they’d be locked up in cattle stalls among lice and manure. These were honest people: mothers and fathers and children and grandparents. Their lives had been stolen. Their sole crime: being Japanese.

  Mitsue thought: this can’t get any worse. She was wrong.

  On February 26, 1942, Justice Minister Louis St.-Laurent gave the B.C. Security Commission absolute power to implement the evacuation. The commission moved with ruthless efficiency. By March 4, a committee of three men was empowered to remove all individuals of Japanese origin, Canadian or not, from the hundred-mile coastal region. They were efficient and brutal. Within twenty days of the first committee meeting, more than fifteen hundred Japanese Canadians had been shipped to Hastings Park. Many more were in a queue. In all, over twenty-one thousand would be taken away.

  There had not been a single reported incident of conspiracy or treason among the Japanese in Canada. No judicial proceedings took place. There were no Blue Ribbon Committees. There was very little public debate at all. Not a single institution came to the defence of the Japanese.

  With radios confiscated, it was difficult to know what was happening. Mitsue’s stomach was in knots throughout the early spring of 1942. Folks were moving out all the time, making their way to Hastings Park. Some went to ghost towns in the interior, some to road camps in Ontario. Some families were going to the prairies. Everyone knew it was just a matter of time before they were removed.

  As May turned to June, Mitsue’s spirits began to lift. The Americans had won the Battle of Midway. If the Japanese military was not a threat, certainly she would not be sent away. If there was no national security issue, then they could just go on with their lives. Her father would get his boats back and she would not have to leave Vancouver with her new husband. If a Japanese invasion was now impossible, surely there would be no more internment. She allowed herself to think that she could just carry on, forget that this whole ugly episode had ever happened.

  But the resettlements continued. Her dad was right. Canada just wanted them out. It was as simple as that. And then Mitsue’s time came. Just like everyone else, she got a letter by registered mail. That is how she learned she was being uprooted. She didn’t feel shock. She had seen it happen to so many friends. It was happening everywhere. She felt numb as she opened the envelope.

  The letter said that her family could stay together if they went to the sugar-beet work camps on the prairies. Mitsue took the letter to her parents’ house. They had received a similar letter just the day before. For the final time, they all sat in the living room of the Celtic row house—this time to make the most important decision of their lives. In the end there wasn’t much to decide. They had to stay together. It was the only thing that mattered.

  Pat was livid. How could this be happening to them? They had done nothing wrong. They were all Canadian. But Yosuke was prepared. He looked each family member in the eye in turn. He looked at these people who were close to his heart and whispered: “Shikata-ga-nai.” It can’t be helped. He whispered it so they would listen closely.

  And that was that. They would have to do their best and cling to their dignity. Shikata-ga-nai. Mitsue repeated the words in her head over and over. She had heard the phrase before, but on that terrible day it felt like the finest gift she had ever received. If you can’t help it, you have to survive it.

  That night after dinner, they filled out the request form to stay together as a family. They would try to go to southern Alberta. Hideo took both replies to the post office the very next morning. The forms went to the Security Commission for the government to decide. Their fate was no longer in their own hands.

  The fields of Alberta were empty. The men had all gone off to fight. The war had cut off the sugar supply from Southeast Asia and the government had to ration sugar consumption, so Alberta farmers started to grow sugar beets. It was hard work and the province had too few workers to do it. The Japanese were their only option. Alberta begrudgingly accepted them.

  While the Sakamotos waited to find out their fate, life went on as usual. Of course, the evacuation was always on everyone’s mind like a bad headache, leaving them feeling hollowed out.

  Mitsue tried her best to focus on the tasks at hand as she waited to see if her family would be permitted to stay together. The men in the rooming house still needed their three square meals. The bedding still needed to be washed, and the ironing and cleaning had to be done. For the next few weeks Mitsue went back to work. Hideo went back to the lumberyard. He thought he might as well earn some money in B.C. while he was able.

  Mitsue didn’t like to be left alone. Powell Street didn’t feel safe anymore. She half expected a brick to come crashing through the window. But they were going to need the money. She was left with Wari to manage the house. Since Wari was unwell that week, Mitsue ended up working especially hard as she packed up as much as she could in preparation for their evacuation date.

  Finally, the wait was over. The Security Commission granted passage to southern Alberta to Yosuke, Tomi, Pat, Mary, and Susanne. They’d be on two farms in Coaldale.

  Nobody had any idea where Coaldale was. They tried to look it up on various maps of Canada, but it was too small to be included. Coaldale. Mitsue said it in her mind a few times. It didn’t sound like a very nice place. But at least they would be together. They actually felt lucky. Almost grateful
.

  The fog of confusion had begun to lift, but the reality was painful. Mitsue went to her parents’ house to talk about what they would take to Coaldale. Susanne was in her bedroom crying. She had just started at Point Grey Junior High and had been elected vice-president of her class. Teachers and children alike recognized her keen intellect. When the order came, none of her teachers had asked her about her fate. Susanne wondered what was behind their indifference. Her school friends seemed unaware of what was happening to her. Just before the order came, she was to have gone into the city with her class to see the Ice Capades. She was in the schoolyard as everyone boarded the bus.

  “Why aren’t you coming, Susanne?”

  “I can’t. I have a curfew.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m Japanese.”

  They couldn’t understand. Neither could she.

  Susanne had known for some time that her days at school were numbered. She was determined to continue her education in Alberta. A few days after the order came, she went to see the counsellor for a transfer slip. No questions were asked, and the counsellor barely looked at her as she signed the paper. Susanne left, clutching that form like it was gold. It would allow her to continue school wherever she ended up. That done, she went to Miss McKillop, her history teacher, and told her that she had to leave. Miss McKillop just stood up and told the class that Susanne was moving away. That was it. Susanne said goodbye and, as her classmates looked on, she left, feeling like an enemy alien. She walked down the empty hall with tears pooling in her eyes. What were her classmates thinking? Why were they silent? Why didn’t anyone say something? Their silence left her with an uneasy sadness.