The Three Jewels of Buddhism: the Buddha,
the Dharma, and the Sangha.
Sandon, the Canadian Buddhist internment camp during WWII, proved to be a curse and a blessing. It was as everyone had said: plagued by the devil’s cold breath. The high mountain ranges of the Kootenays on either side of the thin strip of cabins running up and down the valley gave the place only limited sunlight on a good day. A freezing wind screamed up the chasm.
The settlement itself sat beside Carpenter Creek right near its junction with Sandon Creek. A three-storey wooden building, the old City Hall, dominated the area. There were other buildings: an abandoned dry goods store, hotel, and bars, but they were all in disrepair. A Methodist church stood empty, mute in its spreading of the Word of God.
Sato-san, a fireplug of a man with a determined look, of Vancouver led a crew of a dozen carpenters to fix up the existing buildings and build new cabins for about 1,000 internees. The place became busy with noise and activity for awhile. In time, the places were all ready for the new inhabitants.
The church was quickly selected and converted into the Buddhist church since everyone in camp was Buddhist. Reverend Tsuji, fresh from his education and training in Japan (on the last boat back to Canada), arrived to preside. His duties included all the internment camp churches in British Columbia though he was centred in Slocan. He was a Nisei, young but considered to be a good man, mature beyond his years.
The large congregation celebrated with a special service and meal when Sensei brought a gold-painted statue of the Buddha. Where he got it was anyone’s guess. Reminded Chisato of The Jesus.
Chisato, weathered by experience and with a daughter to raise on her own, often wondered what became of her husband Kiyoshi. He disappeared after he set their house on fire. It was gutted as a result. He was last seen, someone said, running down the back alley behind the house.
Kiyoshi Kimura seemingly had everything. A beautiful wife, she immodestly thought. A grand house, well-respected in the community and in the Christian church, successful businessman, and a wonderful child. Yet, he wallowed in sin. She supposed he was a typical Japanese man: outwardly an upstanding citizen while hiding a seedy side. She would never understand. She secretly hoped he was dead, having met a grisly end. Would she ever know?
Life in Sandon wasn’t all that bad, even if she was an Enemy Alien. The injustice, the injustice. She wondered who to blame for all the misfortune and suffering. Life is dukkha. But she had survived and in her own community. There was no need to be a “pretend Christian”. In camp, she got to know and befriend several Buddhist Nikkei: the Yoneyama family; the Yonekura family (the “Yo-Yos” she called them to herself with a smile); the Kuroda family.
Hide Hyodo, the only BC accredited teacher in the Nikkei community, was a Christian but full of compassion. Hideko, Chisato’s daughter, would continue her education once Hyodo-san set up a school system among the internment camps. Hideko started calling herself “Hi-de” in admiration of the principal.
The high school was the top floor of the old CPR train station. Hideko and her fellow elementary school students were somewhere else in the lower portions of the building. The Catholic nuns of the Sisters of Christ the King convent acted as teachers along with some of the older high-school girls. Hyodo-san organized them well. Chisato paid no mind to the Christian influence; Hideko was continuing her education.
A hospital, with twenty beds and run by Dr. Shimotakahara, an itinerant physician, provided care for anyone who needed medical attention. It had a clinic, surgery, and isolation ward. No coal storage bin for the dead and dying. The staff stayed upstairs from the converted BC Security offices. Dr. Tanaka, a dentist, came once a week.
The landscape was beautiful with the tall mountains, rocky terrain, and rushing waters. The air was clean, free of the lumber industry, the abattoir, and Hastings Park, but Chisato gazed at the Colossuses surrounding her and the settlement. She was struck by the natural wall of rock in front of her; she felt small, a mere speck in a vast wilderness. If she stepped into the surrounding forests, the depths would swallow her, and she would be lost forever.
The best part of the place was the fact that there was only one keto-jin: a provincial police officer named James Kennedy. He really had nothing to do; of course, the Nikkei were law-abiding people.
He used to joke with the older Nisei men. “It’s such a quiet life here! If they’d locked up a thousand Irishmen up here, they’d be at least two-thousand cops to ride herd on them!”
His laugh was hearty and Chisato didn’t understand until someone translated. She felt a sense of pride in that. She decided he wasn’t such a bad man, even friendly.
Internees took up gardening when the weather permitted, and they sold their crop to the Doukhobors who lived nearby.
If it wasn’t for the fact that they were forced to live there, she might’ve enjoyed the place. On the other hand, the winters were severe. People worried about avalanches preventing government supplies from getting through.
Kondo-san opined one snowy day, “It cost the government a lot more money to keep this place going than other camps!”
He has such a big face, Chisato chuckled to herself. It matched the rest of his corpulent body. Fortunately, no avalanches occurred until after they left.
The days were short in the winter; the mountains had something to do with that. They blocked out the sunlight, limiting it sometimes to two hours a day.
Late 1942, just before Oshogatsu, a truck rolled up the road into camp. It came to a stop in front of the Buddhist church where a large crowd of internees gathered. Everyone rustled in anticipation as a short man in a suit and overcoat stepped out of the vehicle. His nub of a mustache sat underneath his nostrils and his hair was cut short, nearly bald even in the dead of winter.
“Who is that?” Chisato asked from her vantage point.
“Morii Etsuji.”
So that’s Morii. Short. He didn’t look so dangerous.
Morii arrived bearing a gift: a couple hundred pounds of rice. People gasped at the precious and rare gift. The kids salivated at the prospect of hot, steamed rice.
Morii puffed himself up as he spoke, “You cannot celebrate the New Year properly without rice! Please enjoy this as a gift from your leader and protector. I want nothing in return, except maybe your gratitude.” The breath escaping his mouth made him look spectral.
Who is this man? Chisato questioned. He gives a magnificent gift so generously, yet he does terrible things to women.
No one complained, of course. They accepted the rice with the appropriate amount of grovelling.
The New Year’s feast was a communal meal: the rare treat of cooked rice with dried mushrooms, harvested from the surrounding area and revived in water, fashioned into sushi rolls wrapped in sheets of seaweed brought to Sandon by Mizuno-san, a Powell Street grocery store owner. Others brought what they could to the church, where Rev. Tsuji gave a Dharma Talk about gratitude even in these mean and miserable times.
The celebration brought back memories of New Year’s in Vancouver. A tear came to Chisato’s eyes as she noticed just about everyone felt the loss. It seemed like an age ago.
***
On a crisp January morning in 1943 with rare sunlight reflecting off the snow, Tohana-san scrambled out of his cabin, screaming to the high heavens. Clouds of his breath pillowed into the mountain air as he waved a piece of paper in front of anyone who would listen. A crowd soon gathered.
He screamed at the letter he had received from the government. His small hands clenched the paper tightly as he explained it was from the Custodian of Enemy Alien Property.
“He sold my farm, ten acres in the Okanagan! I received pennies on the dollar. The amount is nothing to what it’s worth.”
“Who did they sell it to?” someone asked in the crowd.
“The bastard Custodian lied to us” was the consensus as others confessed to receiving the same notice.
“Some soldier. I don’t know,” he said as he pulled at his thinning hair. His face distorted with rage as he continued. “And they sent me a bill for room and board—”
“Room and board?”
“Yeah, for this goddamn place!”
“Chikuso!” Damn!
There was nothing to be done. Another cursed “Order-in-Council” gave the anonymous Custodian the power. Chisato wanted to laugh out loud, but she stifled herself. She had no property to be sold. Whatever she had was gone in a fire. Kiyoshi had probably lost everything to the Custodian, though she did not know what that was. She frowned at the prospect and squeezed her hands tightly.
***
In early 1944, everyone was told they had to choose between staying in Canada, just not on the coast, or move back to Japan, giving up any claim to Canada. That meant, the Nisei had to give up their citizenship, their birthright.
Chisato was tempted. It would be nice to see Hiroshima and her family again. She smiled at the memory of her siblings. But no, she would not accept, fearing what it was like in Japan. She also thought of Hideko. She was speaking more and more English with her friends. But she should meet her Baachan (Grandmother) and venerate the graves of her aunt and uncle —just not now but one day.
***
Sandon would soon close, the first of the camps as it turned out, most likely because of the costs as Kondo-san had surmised.
Chisato and Hideko moved to New Denver, a larger camp by a placid lake. Religion was no longer a factor. They were assigned to a crude cabin in what was known as the Orchard, a vast settlement of cabins. At least, she was close to many more people than Sandon. Winters were still snow-heavy and cold; pots with water in them froze by morning, fingers of frost slipped through cracks in the walls. But the many men of the camp cleared the roads quickly and efficiently; they also provided firewood for free.
In 1945, the pressure to choose whether to stay in Canada or go to Japan mounted. The news in The New Canadian was not looking good for the homeland. And on August 6th, a terrible new weapon was unleashed on Hiroshima. One bomb, one single bomb was exploded over the city and killed approximately 70,000 citizens. Two days later another was dropped on Nagasaki, a city filled with Christians.
Chisato dreamed about her sister and mother. Their bodies caught fire and flared into the night sky until they blackened and crumbled with the flames. She often screamed herself awake. While sitting up in the dark, she found it odd that she did not dream about her in-laws in Kure. But then that thought disappeared. She was more upset that she could not be sure of her family at the Akamatsu Compound; all communication had been cut off since the war began. And what of Hideki? In China? So, she waited for word from somebody, anybody. The dreams of fire and incineration continued.
Chisato decided to stay in New Denver for the duration, a relatively short time as it turned out, and then move east of the Rockies.
***
They came to Hamilton, Ontario, by train in late 1945. Chisato heard Toronto was a much larger and cosmopolitan city with more Japanese, but it instituted a ban on Japanese Canadians coming there in 1944—yet another insult to add to the pile. You had to be a University of Toronto student to be allowed to live there. Hamilton was considered a reasonable if not perfect compromise. She could see Hideko going to university. That was when they would move.
It was ironic that the Methodist Church helped Chisato settle in the small city. She stayed in a church-sponsored rooming house right next to the Balmoral Tavern, something called a “Public House” or “Hotel” as Chisato learned. When she found out it was a bar, she bristled at the thought. She watched Hideko like a hawk. The house at 50 Balmoral Street was a three-storey building with many small rooms and a communal kitchen and laundry room in the basement. With its Victorian flourishes, it reminded Chisato of Vancouver houses.
She was encouraged by the landlord to come to service on Sundays where many Japanese congregated. She would feel so at home there. As friendly as the invitation was, she declined, considering it a trap.
The church officials were nice enough, however. Mr. Anderson, a church deacon, even found her a job as a laundry person. Working for a Chinese owner didn’t bother her. The long hours and the stifling conditions did. But it brought in money. She saved most of it, unless it was to buy a necessity for Hideko, like a new dress or school supplies.
Toronto lifted its restrictions in 1949 and so Chisato and her daughter moved to the big city. Before they left, Chisato received two letters from Japan. Trepidation entered her mind as she fingered the envelopes. She took them away so she could read them in private.
Hideko could not help but notice a change in her mother. Chisato’s face was dark, and a gloominess came over her like a shroud. Hideko asked what was wrong, but Chisato turned away and said, “Nothing, child. Nothing is wrong.”
It was quickly forgotten since they had leaving on their minds.
Again, the Methodist Church helped by meeting her at Union Station and taking her to their rooming house on McCaul Street. The station was the grandest she had ever seen. A ceiling so high she thought it next to the Shinto gods. Hideko liked the stone floor, sliding on it as much as she could. The place reminded Chisato of the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, a fond memory of a visit there with Chiemi and her father. Like Hideko, she loved running and gliding along the floor.
Chisato had enough money saved from Hamilton to find a better place to live. She met much hostility. If a house had a sign that said Room to Let, she inquired with Hideko’s help. The owner simply said she was too late—they just rented it out. Chisato knew he or she was lying but said nothing. She finally found a place on Huron Street near Spadina and Dundas. It was a backroom next to the kitchen. Mr. Levy was kind and willing to rent to her and her daughter. She liked his broad smile.
She also found a job as a factory worker nearby, a dress-making business called Nu Mode. Though the owners were Jewish, the manager was an older Nisei with kind eyes and short thin body. Mr. Shintani, a distinguished man with slightly grey hair, welcomed her with open arms. Inside, the place was filled with Issei and Nisei workers. Chisato was finally home, though she had to learn on the job. Good thing, Nobi Kihara, the floor manager, was a patient man and assigned Fuzzy Ohashi to teach and guide her.
Hideko went to Orde School, an elementary school, and then to Jarvis Collegiate, many Japanese Canadians at both schools. She was making her way to university when she met and fell for Hidematsu Hide Nakamura, a student enrolled in the University of Toronto’s dental program. He was only a few years older.
They met at the Oddfellow’s Hall when the Bussei, a club for Buddhist youth, threw a Hallowe’en Dance. Chisato approved of the occasion since it was run by the newly founded Buddhist Church Nisei Club. The place, according to Hideko, was decked out in all the Hallowe’en decorations: haystacks, jack-o’-lanterns, scarecrows, bedsheets for ghosts, and other things. They played bobbing for apples and pin-the-tail. And the music—swing music by a Nisei band, the Swing Kings of Harbord Collegiate. Hideko, telling her mother, couldn’t believe how much fun it all was. She and her girlfriends from school had the best time. Even better when Hidematsu approached her and asked for a dance or three.
“Care to trip the light fantastic?” he asked, his hand extended and smiling face beaming. They danced all evening. His strong arms carried her away. By the end, she was smitten with the tall, handsome man with bushy hair, strong chin, and slight body. She was also tickled by the fact that his Nisei name was the same as hers.
They married once he finished his education and established his practice.