Part I: Redress: Again?

The federal government addressed its wrongdoing in 1988 after a long campaign by Japanese Canadians and their allies across the country. Art Miki and Maryka Omatsu, negotiators of the 1988 Federal Redress Agreement, stepped up to co-chair the BC Redress Committee on behalf of the NAJC.

Omatsu believes many people in the province remain ignorant of the virulent racism that was the culture of BC for much of its past. Not only did the BC government dispossess First Nations, it alone passed over 170 anti-Asian measures.

“Still,” says Omatsu, “in perusing the BC education curriculum for reference to the Japanese Canadian experience, there is very little. Often all it says is that Japanese Canadians were interned as were Ukrainians and Germans.” 

Though Ukrainians and Germans suffered from discrimination, the dispossession of Japanese Canadians was on a different level, says Omatsu.

“Our communities were destroyed and people came through this experience traumatized, with accelerated loss of language and culture and a 90 percent inter-marriage rate…that trauma of this magnitude has inter-generational impact is accepted as fact.”

Raising redress issues can pose dangers. A recent opinion piece supporting BC redress prompted this anonymous response: “What a laugh. How long are Japanese Canadians going to milk this issue? Have they no shame?”

Such resistance is not new to Mary Kitagawa (Murakami). Uprooted with her parents and siblings from Saltspring Island, she led a long campaign to have the University of British Columbia address its responsibility for kicking out Japanese Canadian students: “First of all, I found out that UBC administrators knew nothing about the Japanese Canadian experience,” she says.

“I more or less had to educate them, and it took a long time.”

She’s unsure whether things are better: “Whenever we speak, people are stunned that such a thing occurred. A lot of people, especially young people, are unaware of what happened,”

Recent research suggests she and the NAJC may have a case.

The only major study on redress education, by Dr. Alexandra Wood, concluded that educational efforts were lacking and that “the federal and provincial government must work harder to demonstrate that their apologies are more than empty pledges, and to counter charges that multiculturalism policies whitewash the past.”

Masako Fukawa, a well-known writer and educator who lobbied the provincial government to provide a learning resource about the Japanese Canadian experience recalls she had “a running battle with the then deputy minister of education to get them to fund such a resource.”

Eventually they did, Fukawa says, but problems remained: “Teachers have a lot of say regarding what is taught in the classroom and they teach what they themselves have been taught so unless we work with them the education just won’t happen.”

Ignorance surfaced during the recent election when Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada misused a photograph of Japanese Canadians boarding a train in Slocan, prompting the National Association of Japanese Canadians to respond: “This photo depicted in Mr. Bernier’s video is not a moment of welcoming new Canadians. It is a moment depicting Japanese Canadians being derided and subjected to sweeping, merciless political violence. We remain puzzled if Mr. Bernier endorses such actions or if this was an error as a result of ignorance to past injustice by the Canadian government.”

The NAJC hopes that legacy measures suggested in their submission to the BC government will help overcome the ignorance.

“Only a negotiated agreement between the Government of BC and the NAJC will resolve this long standing historical wrong,” states Omatsu.  “Just as the Japanese Canadian community did not accept the 2012 apology, which was written without formal consultation, the Japanese Canadian community will reject a ‘take it or leave it’ offer.”