ON AUGUST 9, 1991, several former Chemainus residents launch the reunion near the alley that had once been the main thoroughfare through Kawahara camp. Takayoshi Kawahara hangs his video camera around his neck and strolls along the dirt lane, pointing out where the ofuro, or Japanese bath, had been, the kitchen where his mother and wife cooked meals for the bachelors, and the bunkhouse that sat squat in what is now a vacant parking lot. The notary public’s office on the corner had been his father’s store and pool hall, which loomed much larger when he was young. Up the street on Esplanade, the duplex where his wife lived is one of few recognizable dwellings, a green and white cottage with a side porch, expansive lawn and pale pink rose bushes out front. Unbeknownst to all, it too will be gone in a few years, replaced by a square apartment building without history or character.
Takayoshi saunters back down the alley to Croft Street. The boardwalk that once connected neighbours together has, of course, disappeared—along with the homes, the blacksmith shop made into judo hall, the woodsheds, outhouses, and stal-wart apple tree that had been home base for hide-and-seek games. Gone too was the plot where the community grew its vegetables and the garage where his father kept his 1937 Chrysler Royal taxi. Takayoshi stares at the house in its place. This is where everyone congregated to decorate the prize-winning float for the 1939 parade.
He looks across the street and recognizes the flat roof on the corner building. It was the store, pool hall and living quarters that Risaburo Taniwa built for his son. Takayoshi recalls that its proximity to his father’s store undermined their family business somewhat.
Turning back to face the east side of the street, he trundles up to what was once the community hall. He remembers dragging himself up the front stairs to attend daily Japanese language lessons, wishing he could go play instead. That entrance is gone, replaced by a side entrance. Standing back, he visualizes how the old school sat just so, the lay of the land unchanged where fruit trees scattered their sweet harvest onto the yard.
The street is a hubbub. Takayoshi’s sister, Chiyoko, and her husband are visiting from Honolulu where they now live. She is as animated as the child who raced along the boardwalk with Yoshiko to confirm the words he and Shunichi punched out in Morse code back in their boy scout days. Hunched over the hood of a car, she studies old school pictures brought out by George Price, a nearby resident. Shunichi, Hana, and Yoshiko chat in the middle of the street, remarking how things have changed. Kaname Izumi strolls toward the corner with his wife, pointing up Oak Street. The lumber yard today is a fraction of its former self, when there was nothing but lumber all the way to the highway. Tosh Kamino pauses alongside one of her childhood friends, who swirls the gravel with her foot in a lot where her house once stood. Shige and Sumiko Yoshida’s oldest daughter, Mitsi, arrives just as coal-grey clouds skirt overhead. A child of nine when they were evacuated, she cuts a striking figure now. About to celebrate her fifty-eighth birthday, she looks no more than forty, her eyes shining like irides-cent black ponds.
The wind picks up and rolls down Croft Street. Those still milling about huddle under the shelter of the former Taniwa store entrance, continuing their reminiscences as the clouds split open. Across the street, Stanley Taniwa, the artist son of Matsue and her late husband, Norey, struggles to pull a piece of plastic sheeting over scaffolding to protect his mural. The unveiling is tomorrow, and he still has a few last-minute touches to do.
Stanley was six months old when Matsue carried him aboard the SS Princess Adelaide in April 1942. In the spring of 1990, he returned to Chemainus on a pilgrimage of sorts, hoping to piece his past together. His father, whom he idolized as a boy, had deserted the family in Fort William when he was eleven. Two years later, Norey died of cancer in a Vancouver hospital. His father’s death thousands of miles away triggered a volatile and angry rebellion that would last decades. At forty-nine, he is beginning to make some sense of it all.
A tall, handsome man, he pulls his long, black hair into a ponytail, accentuating the broad features characteristic of Cree men he has known. Often mistaken for a Native, Stanley is no stranger to discrimination. Struggling against oppression is not peculiar to his parent’s generation. For Stanley, it is lumped in with poverty and the loss of his father, a proud man made hollow by the indignities of the war experience.
Stanley believes it was more than coincidence that led him to Chemainus when the town needed an artist to paint a mural commemorating the Japanese community. After hearing about it from someone on the street, he went to the murals’ society office where a kind woman brought out a file full of pictures. Among them was a photograph of the Nippon team, his father in uniform flanked by baseball buddies from his youth. Stanley wept. The heart of the puzzle clicked into place: the leap in his life’s journey brought so much tumultuous, painful zig-zagging into focus with sudden, unexpected mercy.
In June 1991, Stanley left his home and studio in Clanwilliam, Manitoba and set out across the prairie in his old Volvo. When he arrived in Chemainus in early July, he set to work on the mural of The Lone Scout, across the street from the home where his mother nursed him as a newborn.
The murals’ society hired him to depict the story of scout-master Shige Yoshida, and incorporate a picture of the Japanese community standing in front of the hall it built to celebrate Canada’s Diamond Jubilee in 1927. One house away from that same community hall, where his father had entertained crowds in dazzling Kabuki performances, Stanley lines up his paints and brushes, sets out the photos for reference, and begins painting his people’s history onto the side of a fish and chip restaurant.
Although Shige is the focus of the mural, Stanley paints his own family among those congregated in front of the old community hall. He paints himself as a little boy next to his father as a young boy in Japan, standing side by side in front of the white picket fence. He paints his father in his Nippon baseball uniform, sandwiched between Stanley’s uncles, Iwao and Hitoshi. He paints his mother as a young woman and an old woman, surrounded by her children, holding a small bouquet of flowers. Tiny intricate portraits, they form the backdrop to the scoutmaster who symbolizes the resolute strength and spirit of his people. But Stanley is also bringing his family home, and with it, his personal struggle with bitterness and grief. He circles the community portrait with blossoming cherry branches, signifying rebirth and new life.
Just up the street from The Lone Scout, Joyce Kamikura is busy creating one of the most colourful murals in Chemainus, The Winning Float. Born in Steveston and interned in Slocan with her family as a child, she does not share Stanley’s passion for bringing his family home. Her passion is purely artistic, gained in part from post-war years living in Japan where she escaped the discrimination of her peers in Canada. A vibrant and spontaneous woman, Joyce adapts a black-and-white photograph Mutt Otsu took in 1939. Five young girls dressed in fancy kimonos stand in a line before the Japanese float that won first prize in the parade celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Chemainus sawmill. Under Joyce’s brush, the girls transform into elegant young women, their kimonos sweeping gracefully across the outside wall of a laundromat.
The next morning, sunlight streams through a grove of cedar and fir trees in the Chemainus cemetery. Ravens fly high overhead, their raucous cries penetrating the cool, still air. Reverend Harry Costerton has just spoken, and there is healing in the silence that follows his opening words. Words spoken forcefully, they cannot be misconstrued or disregarded, words as simple as the desecration of graves was shameful.
“What was done was wrong,” he begins. “The wholesale removal of grave markers from this space should not have occurred—but it did. We join each other in having sorrow for that.
“The situation might have been corrected at the time by asking the families to come back here for the purpose of having them restore the markers according to their memory of where they should be.
“This opportunity was not taken, and because of the passing of time—and of people—and the absence of a written detailed record of the graves in this section, the location of each grave is now very difficult—it seems impossible—to determine.
“What sometimes is done with really old, old cemeteries, once centuries have gone by, is that the old grave markers that are still serviceable are assembled in an orderly manner—not on the graves but together in one smaller area—and the remainder of the property is developed for use as a park or a church yard, remembering that it has served as a cemetery.
“In what we have done here we are, unfortunately, ahead of the time, forced by necessity. We have assembled serviceable markers; we have added appropriate “common” markers. And this space, once used for graves, has become a little bit like a park.
“It is too bad that we are ahead of our time. But we are. I hope we can live with that.”
The shrill, guttural caw of the ravens echoes overhead, but no one looks skyward. Shunichi Isoki and his sister Yoshiko are praying for their baby brother, Yoneji, who died of pneumonia before his first birthday; Kaname Izumi and his sister Sunao are absorbed in memories distant as well, the early death of their mother, Towa, and baby Nobuyuki whose life was extinguished almost as soon as it began; Hitoshi Okada stands tall next to his wife, Shizuka, remembering the hollow house his mother, Miki, left behind when she died of influenza, and the day his brother Takeshi did not come home from the waters off Bare Point; Mutt Otsu watches limbs of the cedar trees undulating in the breeze, transfixed by the memory of his stepfather, Tairyu Fujimoto; Shige and Sumiko Yoshida touch the memory of little Shigeru, taken from them so very long ago.
One by one, they, and others with family buried here, step forward to lay abundant flower wreaths at the foot of the memorial. When they are done, the marble platform is blanketed in gladiolas, chrysanthemums, and roses.
Shunichi faces the gathering. A lustrous black Buddhist altar at his side, he addresses the politicians and Chemainus residents huddled among the Japanese Canadian crowd from all regions of the country.
“In April 1942, we left our loved ones here, believing they at least wouldn’t have to go through the anxieties of war. It made me very angry when I heard about the desecration of the Japanese Canadian graves in Chemainus. I knew that there were some individuals who did not like us, but I did not dream that anyone would bulldoze our graves. It is anathema to think that anyone could hate another race so much that they would spitefully destroy gravestones on a sacred resting place. It was in-deed shocking news. I lost faith in the British “fair play” about which I had been taught in school.
“The unveiling and dedication of the monument is very significant for me. I have a baby brother who is buried here, and I am assured that now he can, indeed, rest in peace. I cannot forget the atrocity perpetrated upon our sacred grounds, but I can forgive. Let us pray that this is the beginning of the peace and harmony for which we are all striving.”
Bishop Toshi Murakami comes forward in his long, flowing black robe to lead the O-bon service, the annual Buddhist ceremony lighting the way for spirits of the deceased to visit home and loved ones.
“The incense burning here symbolizes purity of intentions, the flowers are the glory of Buddha, and the sunlight shining upon us is the light of compassion and wisdom,” he announces. And the ravens fly over again, their calls muted by the song of dedication ringing through the air.
Overcast skies threaten rain when Chemainus unveils The Lone Scout and The Winning Float that afternoon. The crowd on the street is as thick as the Chemainus River salmon run Shunichi remembers from his boyhood. It also reminds him of the jostling at the sumo wrestling tournament Gihei Kawahara hosted here to celebrate his birthday in 1932.
Old baseball and school friends stumble into one another, laughing, shaking hands, and reminiscing about ball games won and lost. Names are dropped, sometimes jogging memories of those who have passed on: the war, cancer, strokes, heart attacks.… Hitoshi Okada and George Ridgway speak face to face, letting slip the memory of their last encounter through the wire fence at Hastings Park. The man who used to issue the sawmill paycheques hails Shige on the corner. Others circulate, asking for Kaname and Shunichi—not by the English names they used in school. Women in the crowd seek classmates with whom they played jacks and skipping rope.
When the speeches begin, Shige and Sumiko Yoshida are among those sitting under a canopy, facing an archway of red and white balloons bobbing upwards in the sky. The local RCMP sergeant and a corporal are nearby sentries, their red serge uniforms an ironic reminder of changing times. Shige sits with hands folded lightly on his knee, his neck tilted as if to catch some intangible breeze. Somewhere out on the sea, it is stirring a cat’s paw, delicate like the curve of his lips.
After various speakers have paid him tribute, he shuffles over to the podium and chuckles: he has to climb onto a box in order to reach the microphone. “I want to thank all of you,” he booms. Dressed in his original 1930s scoutmaster uniform, he is frail but proud. “I feel so happy. When I left in 1942, I was very sad. But I think it has come to a point where I can go home with happiness.”
Shige steps down from his box to a round of applause. Former scout leaders in navy blazers encircle their diminutive hero as he pledges to keep alive the spirit of the scout movement. “On my honour, I promise that I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country and to live in the deeper spirit of the scout law,” he vows. Then the Cowichan Valley Baden-Powell Guild makes him an honourary member.
As Shige returns to his seat, the spotlight falls on Matsue Taniwa briefly. Short, bald George Price calls her name from the podium, glancing down at his wife, Jessie, for encouragement. She nods her thin head and smiles. In the late 1940s, the couple bought a bakery where the Taniwas had their store. During some renovations in the 19605, George discovered a portrait of Norey in the walls.
Surprised and slightly nervous, Matsue climbs onto the podium and unpins the yellow rose from the envelope. She opens it carefully, her elegant hands wavering in mid-air. The picture of her late husband was taken during his school days in Japan. Dressed smartly in a white judo suit, Norey gazes forcefully at her.
“Thank you,” she says, smiling as George Price pins the rose on her lapel. She surveys the crowd briefly before stepping down. Matsue catches Stanley’s eye, confirming her suspicion that he knew. But she misses Jessie Price’s uplifted face, her grey eyes translucent like a lake at dawn.
The afternoon ends with a song. A young man from Calgary, Allen Desnoyers, accompanies himself on guitar and sings his composition, Chemainus Harbour, April 21, 1942.
I lived in Okada camp . . . until the war
Papa was a boom man like many men before
I grew up speaking English in 1942
The year the ship came to the bay to carry us away
I don’t know where Pearl Harbor is, I do not want to know
I know it made my momma cry to hear it on the radio
I liked the horseshoe harbor where I’d while away the day
Until it let the ship come in to carry us away
I am a Canadian, I may look Japanese
But I was born in ’32 in Chimunesu
It may seem like a drooping shack, it may be weathered as a bone
But this is still my Father’s house and I don’t want to leave my home. .. .
Hitoshi Okada sits among his peers, lost in thought. He glances at Kaname Izumi and Mutt Otsu, friends from his boyhood in Okada camp. All older than ten when the ship carried them away, they are not the boy in the song. They know the child intimately nonetheless.
He plays on the beach still, in front of his father’s house.