ACROSS TOWN, SHIZUKA OKADA is getting ready for her Japanese dance class at the seniors’ centre. The cotton kimono jacket feels cool against her skin and brings momentary relief from the hot, muggy air wafting through the bedroom window.
Shizuka perches herself before the dressing table and lifts her brush. Her hair is completely silver now and much shorter than it used to be, but it has kept its soft lustre and is still one of her greatest assets. Brushing it slowly, she eases into the com-fort of the bristles massaging her scalp. After all these years, the calm reassurance she gets from this simple solitary act is much the same as it was in her youth. In front of the mirror, Shizuka communicates with herself. Her beauty makes her feel secure, insulated from troubles.
She ponders her large, almond-shaped eyes. They are set wide apart above her high cheek bones, black and shining like her hair used to be and a marvellous contrast to her flawless white skin. The memory that springs forward is of her first Christmas concert in Chemainus. She imagines the little girl seen through the eyes of an audience.
Shizuka is alone on the school stage. Except for the light shining on her and the rustling of paper, the room is pitch black and silent. Earlier, Miss Dyke lowered the burlap costume she had made over Shizuka’s head. Then she grasped Shizuka’s long, thick black tresses, dividing them evenly into three bunches and braiding them with exquisite deftness. To finish, she poked a raven feather behind the thin red band that creased the young girl’s forehead.
Miss Dyke did not have any Coast Salish girls to dress as the Indian princess because they were in the residential school on Kuper Island. When Shizuka came into her class that September, Miss Dyke thought that she would make a fine substitute. The fact that she did not speak English added authenticity to the scene, for Shizuka would naturally emanate the wonder and star-struck innocence necessary for the part.
So Shizuka stands alone on stage, motionless under the beaming light, watching darkness. Soft lyrical voices sing “Silent Night” behind her somewhere. She can neither see her classmates nor understand a word they are singing.
Shizuka finishes brushing her hair and goes into the living room. Her husband, Hitoshi, has already gone to the car, so she locks the front door and walks down the steps. She opens the car door, deep in thought. A year from now, they’ll be locking up for their trip to Chemainus. They had gone back once in 1972, and she had headed straight for the beach. Like a salmon returning up river to spawn, Shizuka waded into the frigid salt waters of her birthplace. Perhaps she would do so again.
Hitoshi is waiting for his wife outside her odori class. The summer heat is stifling. He checks his rear view mirror and sees Shizuka coming out of the seniors’ complex. At seventysix, she is still an attractive woman. He chuckles, remembering how jealous other men were when they married. She was a real beauty in those days. He recalls the sense of power he felt when they first got engaged, as if he could wrench mountains from the earth. As it turned out, life did that to him instead. It has eased off since, of course. All that is behind them, thank goodness.
Now they are going back again. He has.mixed feelings about their visit in 1972, but he hopes this time will be different. Old baseball friends he hasn’t seen in a long time—chums like George Ridgway—may be there. In ’72, hardly anyone knew them and nothing was left of Okada camp. His former stomping grounds were within the mill compound: fenced and inaccessible. Memories of his childhood sifted through the sand along the now-forbidden shore. He did not feel he had gone home at all; that home didn’t exist anymore.
What’s more, he could find neither the graves of his mother nor his young brother, so they left some flowers in the area, hoping it was close to the burial sites. Standing in the cemetery in 1972, Hitoshi recalled the times when he helped clean up the grounds, with his way of it. He was just a child, but no one was excluded from the communal task; it was an annual ritual in August in preparation for the O-bon. The whole community showed up, carrying rakes and wearing gloves, prepared to do some serious weeding.
But Hitoshi learned that soon after the April 1942 evacuation, some yahoos drinking at the Horseshoe Bay Inn got riled up about the “Japs” buried in their cemetery. Swinging into action with plenty of beer in their bellies, they fired up a front-end loader and levelled the Japanese section at the rear of the cemetery. The jumble of headstones and simple wooden markers that they dropped from the front-end loader into a grove of trees over the fence would lie under dirt and debris for some forty-seven years—with the exception of headstones that people stole for chimneys or for use in their yards and homes. In 1989, long-time resident Pat Allester took it upon himself to try and clean up the town’s cemetery. When he noticed headstones with calligraphy protruding from a pile of dirt outside the cemetery fence, the whole sickening inci-dent came to light. No one dared mention names, but some knew who had done the deed. Almost fifty years later, no one bragged about the nasty event as they once had; now they cursed the fact that it hadn’t been kept quiet. When Hitoshi heard about it, an odd mix of rage and grief rekindled the bitterness he had tried so hard to exorcise. Thinking about it made him nauseous, for some things never changed.
Shizuka opens the car door, interrupting his thoughts. She slides onto the seat beside him, and he points their Oldsmobile towards their Begin Street home in Thunder Bay.
“I guess we’d better write to Shunichi soon and let him know we’ll be coming to the reunion,” Shizuka says, watching the flat concrete landscape scroll past.
“Yes, he’ll be wanting to know.”
“I wonder who else will be there,” she says, turning to study her husband’s strong profile.
“Hard to say. I hope some of my old baseball buddies are around this time,” Hitoshi replies as he pulls into their driveway. “But it’s hard to say.”
Shizuka Taniwa and Hitoshi Okada grew up quite apart from each other as children, but both had their share of happiness and heartache. Although born in Chemainus on January 31, 1915, Shizuka spent most of her first seven years in Steveston, where her father worked as a fish buyer. When Risaburo Taniwa brought his family back to Chemainus in 1922, they moved into a house on the corner of Oak and Croft streets right in the heart of Kawahara camp. Hitoshi, on the other hand, lived in the heart of the camp named after his father, along the shore facing the booming grounds. They called it Okada camp.
Both of their fathers were prominent men among their peers. It was to Shizuka’s father’s credit that Chemainus had a Japanese language school, for Risaburo Taniwa spearheaded the drive to build the community hall and hire teachers. Hitoshi’s father, Bukichi Okada, was one of the more well-off Japanese residents. It took some years to get established, but when he negotiated the boom contract with the mill, Bukichi achieved what most immigrants only dreamed of when they left Japan in search of wealth. He had elevated his status and standard of living well beyond what would have been possible in Kawauchimura, the village on the island of Shikoku which he left one fine spring day in 1906.
After a stopover in Hawaii, Bukichi sailed on to San Francisco, working his way up the coast into Canada. By 1907, he had found work in a logging camp near Chemainus and sent for his wife, Rakuju, and three teenaged sons, who reluctantly left their home for the wild unknown. It was a commonplace experience then, where men scouted out the territory and the wives and offspring followed. But Bukichi was a man who set himself apart in other ways. His parents had arranged his marriage to Rakuju to curb his habit of drinking in bars, but it did not work. Neither marriage nor parenthood had curtailed his drinking and carousing; what did, eventually, was love.
When Bukichi first settled his family in Chemainus, he spent most of his days in the logging camp in the bush south of town and left Rakuju, Ryoichi, Haruyuki, and Osamu to fend for themselves in the frontier. He only had one day a week respite from the back-breaking labour, doing his part to clear the land of giant Douglas fir stands. But it was not his wife and sons that he came home to on Sundays, his day of leisure. Instead, he spent his time visiting Miki Mizuta in her parent’s store on the corner of Esplanade and Oak.
Bukichi fell for Miki shortly after arriving in Chemainus. He had gone into her parent’s store for some inconsequential drygood and stumbled out the door without his usual keen sense of direction. The next thing he knew, he was back inside, rummaging through his brain to think of something—anything—that might enable him to linger a little longer.
“You’ve forgotten something, Mr. Okada?” Miki inquires, seeing him step back inside.
“Oh, yes. I believe I need some, uh, tea. Yes, tea would do.”
“You already bought some tea, Mr. Okada. You would like more?”
“I need some extra,” he says firmly, trying not to feel like a fool. He would have enough tea to last three years now.
Miki turned to the shelf behind her, stretching for the boxes of green tea stashed just within reach.
“Will that be all, then?” she asks.
“All? Well, no. I know there must be something else,” Bukichi replies, bracing himself. “I wonder if we could. . . .”
Unsure of himself for the first time in his life, he stops. What if she says no? he wonders.
“Mr. Okada?” Miki says, a bit perplexed. She is no longer sure of herself, either. This older man is so intense; he is studying her face at the same time that he doesn’t seem quite here. “Are you all right?”
“Yes, fine. Of course. I was just thinking that maybe we could have tea together sometime.”
Miki smiles. “That would be very nice, Mr. Okada.”
Bukichi flashes back. He feels his heart race, as if waiting for the crash of a colossal timber he has just falled. “You are very pretty.”
Miki is stunned and avoids his gaze. She cannot believe what is happening. It is all so improper, for a go-between should make the first approach, with her parents’ approval of course. She has, momentarily, forgotten the larger impropriety that looms—his marital status. But she is flushed with an excitement that she cannot ignore. Tentatively, she raises her eyes to meet his, and the chemistry of love begins brewing.
Bukichi continues to court Miki on his days off. The precedent he set during that first encounter becomes a tradition. He is always searching his brain for one more item, one endearment left unsaid, one kiss yet to cherish as he approaches the door to go. But he cannot leave. Like wrenching huge tree roots from the ground, dynamite works best.
Over the next two years, Bukichi works his way into town, first as a labourer on the boom, and then negotiating the con-tract. Meanwhile, Rakuju returns to Japan, leaving her sons to work the boom with their father while they, too, prepare themselves financially for wives and families. From the outset, she knew not to expect love in marriage; now she equates it with abandonment and retires to her homeland like a stone hurled back in time. Within months of her departure, the Baptist minister in Chemainus, Reverend Cook, marries Bukichi and Miki.
One year later, in 1910, Miki gives birth to Takeshi, followed by Hitoshi in March 1912. She brings two more boys, Satoru and Tamotsu, into the world before death reaches into their happy home and crumples hope in its hands. Tamotsu is just an infant in 1918 when Miki, now in her early thirties, falls victim to the influenza epidemic following the First World War. Bukichi spares no cost to try and save his young wife, delivering her into the hands of the best doctors in Vancouver. But his effort is in vain. It isn’t him who buries her ashes or gives his three-month-old son to an Oriental orphanage in Victoria; it is his own ghost.
Hitoshi watches his father going through the motions, but he is not sure where to turn. He is six years old, standing with his feet wide apart and his hands crossed behind his suit jacket. His eyes follow the musky wisps of incense drifting over Bukichi as he places the urn in the ground. A breeze is stirring the branches of fir trees nearby as Hitoshi stares into his own wee void, thinking of the hot lunches his mother once brought to Takeshi and him halfway between school and home. He can see her spreading out a picnic in the little shed they found on the mill grounds. She is piling hot, steaming noodles, rice balls, white radish pickles, and seaweed into bowls. Hitoshi knows this will be followed by her scrumptious sweet bean cakes and pulls the food from her, smelling the sweet-sour mixture and diving into the exotic mix. He examines her face while he eats, studying the translucent glow of her skin and her dark penetrating eyes. She returns his gaze nonchalantly, dreamily.
They finish eating and grin at her, rubbing their bellies like little Buddhas. Giggling at their silliness, she deftly packs up and goes home. The two boys run all the way back to school with the comforting swell of a full belly fuelling their antics.
Hitoshi’s daydream is brought to an abrupt halt when his father rests a hand on his shoulder, indicating it is time to go. Bukichi, Takeshi, Hitoshi, and Satoru leave the cemetery together, numb and aching for solace that cannot be found.
Hitoshi and Takeshi don’t return to school for a year and the days roll into one another without incident. Their playground in Okada camp stretches right around the bay. There is a hard patch of dirt behind their house, where they play marbles and ball with the neighbourhood boys. Sometimes they play hideand-seek with the Indians who live in houses on posts below the government wharf. A smaller group of Indian families live on the other side of the bay too, below Bare Point. Hitoshi likes to watch them come into shore in their canoes, which can be tricky business in strong seas. But they are expert canoeists and manoeuvre about as if nothing short of a gale-force wind presents a challenge.
Something is always happening on the harbour. Hitoshi often sits on the seashore, watching the men work the boom, or the Indian stevedores loading up scows with timber that they row out to schooners anchored in the bay. It’s common for five or six great tall ships to be bobbing about at once, the sun beating down on their decks while the sea sparkles around their huge hulls. Hitoshi thinks watching a sou’easter working the harbour into a sweat is the best, though. Mounting swells rock and roll huge timbers like some god is piling them up for kindling. After such storms, Hitoshi often sees the Izumi kids out there with makeshift fishing gear in their hands, running along the logs like cats. They skitter across the bay on the logs to the base of the train trestle, which they climb with acrobatic fearlessness. Hitoshi never once sees them slip or fall.
One afternoon some years later, Hitoshi is playing marbles with his brother Takeshi and the other neighbourhood kids behind the house. It is one of those cold, crisp days in early January when the sun coats everything in primary colours. A westerly is gusting out on Stuart Channel. Hitoshi sees Gordon Cathey and Harvey McGinnis walking down the hill to-wards them. He looks up from the game as Gordon and Harvey walk straight up to Takeshi.
“Want to go duck hunting?”
“Where?” Takeshi asks.
“We’ve got a little punt out at Bare Point,” Gordon says. “C’mon, let’s go.” He whispers something in Takeshi’s ear. He smiles and nods.
Hitoshi returns to the immediate challenge: knocking his friends’ marbles out of the circle. He is collecting quite a pile and doesn’t pay any mind to his brother’s shenanigans. The afternoon passes and he goes inside, rubbing his hands together over the stove to get warm. Takeshi still isn’t home when Hitoshi hears his father’s caulk boots on the wooden floor. Daylight is fading fast.
“Where’s Takeshi?” Bukichi asks his son, yanking off his boots and looking around.
“I don’t know,” Hitoshi replies. “He went with Gordon and Harvey early this afternoon. Something about going duck hunting on a punt out at Bare Point.”
Without saying a word, Bukichi stands and stares out his front window. Then he checks out back, squinting at the path leading to Bare Point, praying for his son to walk into the clearing. No one does. The landscape is hushed.
It is an engineer from a foreign boat docked in Chemainus who hears the boys. Walking along the point to take a picture of his boat, he hears their screams fighting the wind. Rushing back to his ship, he puts out a call for help. But by the time anyone reaches the point, it is too late. All they find is the wreckage of the punt floating in the chop.
For a week, fishermen from as far away as Steveston criss-cross the channel, dragging for bodies. The night they find Takeshi’s crab-eaten remains, Hitoshi stumbles into the living room and stops. His father’s silhouette hunches against the dying light, his head in his hands.
Miki and Bukichi’s firstborn son drowned at the age of thirteen. Hitoshi and his father bury Takeshi in the cemetery close to his mother’s ashes. It is 1923, five years after the influenza epidemic swept Miki’s spirit away, two months before Hitoshi’s eleventh birthday.
Bukichi sends for his first wife, Rakuju. His younger sons need a mother, and the household needs a woman to do the cooking, cleaning and laundry. Since Miki died, the wives of Bukichi’s adult sons have done the women’s work in the house. But they have children of their own now; it is time to welcome Rakuju back into the fold. Hitoshi does not love her like his mother, but he is happy to have her nonetheless. He feels a little less vulnerable with her around, although he can’t say why. And now that she is back, Bukichi decides to bring Tamotsu home from the orphanage. Hitoshi’s five-year-old brother is a stranger about to discover a new meaning of home and family, but it is a family that needs time to knit itself into something whole again.
Hitoshi likes his little brother, but he desperately misses his walks to and from school with Takeshi. He misses playing baseball with him too. He can’t quite digest the fact that Takeshi isn’t going to come busting into the house ever again. Often he turns to tell him some joke or to throw him a punch, remembering the tumbles they had—some of them so hard and fast that they hurt and made him mad. Sometimes Hitoshi reaches for Takeshi and feels the empty space surge.
Spring and summer come and go. Hitoshi goes back to school in September, as another wet winter approaches. One Saturday in November, he is with his friend George Ridgway in the ball park when they hear the fire whistle blow at the mill. Curious, they stop playing and sit on a knoll overlooking the mill grounds. Billowing clouds of smoke, like elephants roaming the sky, pour out of the east side of the mill building.
Suddenly George nudges Hitoshi. “Look, the whole roof is on fire!”
Hitoshi has already seen the burst of flame erupting out of the smoke and dancing across the mill roof. Fascinated, they sit and watch the flames consume it over the next forty-five minutes. Then they hear it crash with one tremendous crack as hordes of men work like ants to keep the fire from spreading. Hitoshi can’t make out if his father or half-brothers are in there with the other men, but he figures they are. The mill, directly or indirectly, puts food on just about everyone’s table in Chemainus. And now it is levelled.
A month of uncertainty follows before the mill owners announce they will build a new mill. In January 1924, one year after Takeshi’s death, work begins on what will become the most modern and expansive mill of its day. Hitoshi’s father gets a job cleaning up the old mill site. His half-brothers get work sawing and bucking logs from the boom to fuel the locomotive bringing the rebuilding equipment onto the mill site. Times hold the promise of prosperity again.
In 1927, when Hitoshi is fifteen, street lights appear in Chemainus and homes are wired for electricity. Conveniences they haven’t dared dream about become commonplace; everything from electric lights to radios and gramophones begin to appear in the homes of those who can afford such luxuries. The Okadas are among those who can.
As it turns out, it is a short-lived prosperity. When Hitoshi starts school in the fall of 1929, he is seventeen. Whatever hopes he has of graduating from high school are thwarted when the New York stock market crashes in December, affecting the lumber market in demand and price. Operations in Chemainus are cut back, including his father’s boom contract. Bukichi cannot comfortably keep all his men employed, so he fires six men. Soon after, Hitoshi leaves school to work for his father. What begins as a temporary arrangement soon becomes permanent.
Hitoshi grows into manhood on the boom. He enjoys strong-arming his way around the bay, where the pungent smell of wet Douglas fir mingles with salt air and the fishy odour of carousing harbour seals and sea lions. The work is heavy, but satisfying. Occasionally, his footing slips and he falls into the chuck. No one wears life jackets. Some years before Hitoshi started working, a young worker was crushed to death between two logs near the log dump. It isn’t uncommon for the train to dump so many logs at once that it creates a log jam, and breaking it up is dangerous. Hitoshi soon learns to pinpoint a log to jump to in an emergency, never allowing his concentration to lapse. He earns less than twenty cents an hour, seven hours a day, six days a week, to take such risks.
Shizuka Taniwa is just eight years old in 1923 when news of the drowning seared the community. She barely knew the boys to see them, having been back from Steveston for less than a year. But she learns that her neighbour, Mr. Isoki, found one of the hakujin bodies after dragging through the waters in his fish boat, Joker. The day of the funerals, the whole town is shut down. Shizuka wishes she could play tag with her friends along the alley in Kawahara camp, but her mother, Naka, forbids it because it would be disrespectful.
She goes to her room, which looks onto Oak Street, and feels a bit homesick for Steveston. She has made new friends since returning to Chemainus, but she misses her classmates from the Japanese language school. Her English is improving now that she is in the local public school, but she will still think in Japanese for some time yet. This is to her parents’ liking. In fact, her father is very busy these days, among other activities, organizing the other Japanese men in the jijikai to raise the necessary funds to start a Japanese language school in Chemainus.
Like his peers, Risaburo Taniwa thinks it more important that his children be educated in Japanese than in English. To that end, he and his wife took their firstborn, a son named Norimichi, to Japan for his first years of schooling. But they could not straddle two continents forever. With a growing family in Canada, they had little choice but to return. There was neither enough money to bring the family to Japan, nor the means to establish themselves comfortably there. In that respect, Risaburo’s original intentions, like those of countless peers, were thwarted.
In 1905, when he left his small village home in Wakayama, Risaburo left his young bride behind while he got established in Canada. He had finished his apprenticeship with his fatherin-law and wanted to break free from the grinding poverty of life in Wadamura. One year later, feeling raw and vulnerable, Naka Taniwa swallowed tears as she said goodbye to her family and boarded the steamship in Yokohama. She was not quite twenty-one when Norimichi was born at home in Chemainus a year later. If it hadn’t been for the other Japanese women living close by, Naka believed she would perish. But she grew accustomed to the changes and, as the years rolled by, she thought back to how frightened she had been and laughed.
Her pioneering life included many unexpected hardships and some rare light-hearted moments. Helping Kume Yoshida in childbirth was, in retrospect, one of the funnier experiences. Shigetoki Yoshida arrived at the door one morning, pleading with her and her friend Miki Mizuta to attend the birth of his child until the doctor arrived. Shigetoki was clearly desperate, not knowing what had happened to Dr. Watson, so the young women went with him in his rickety Ford pickup to the Yoshida’s home. They lived on Matthew Howe’s property on the outskirts of Chemainus in those days, isolated from the various Japanese camps in town.
Naka is recounting the story to her daughter one afternoon, and Shizuka sits at her feet, embroidering a brilliant butterfly. “When we stepped into Kume’s bedroom, I became frightened. But I walked over to her bed and took her hand. I didn’t know what to do then,” Naka says, looking out the window.
“Miki and I felt very queasy watching Kume grip the side of her bed with the pain. Shigetoki was pacing back and forth, muttering ‘Dr. Watson,’ over and over again.
“Miki had not had children of her own; in fact, she was not even married yet. Even though I had Norey, I knew nothing about how to deliver someone else’s baby. We were all in a dither, except Kume, who was oblivious to everything. Miki and I were taking turns running to the door for signs of the doctor.
“When the baby’s head began to appear, we swallowed hard and set to work. Within half an hour, a baby girl was born. When it was over, Kume smiled weakly. ‘Having you here is a comfort,’ she said, drawing her infant to her breast. The baby stopped screaming then, and for just a little while we were in a different world. Something happens when a baby is born. . . . It’s hard to explain.”
Naka laughs, remembering how silly she felt at the time. Quietly, she watches Shizuka pull the bright yellow thread through the fabric, wondering if her daughter can grasp that bygone era. Her generation speaks English and goes to hospitals to have babies, whereas in 1915, Echi Tanouye coached Shizuka out of her womb with only the most rudimentary tools. A midwife who had brought babies into the world on both sides of the Pacific Ocean, she had often witnessed life giving birth and birth extinguishing life as well.
Risaburo works as a millwright in the sawmill to feed his family of five. Like all Orientals, he is paid ten percent less than his Caucasian counterparts. Their status worsens in the Depression.
Early in 1930, the mill manager calls everyone together. Risaburo thinks John Humbird a slob of a man, although he never speaks such opinions out loud. He is not alone. Most of the hakujins feel that way about their boss too, but workers are completely at the mercy of their employers.
A light drizzle falls as everyone gathers near the planing shed, stiff and anxiously shuffling their feet. A total shutdown has been rumoured since the stock market crash. The men wonder if they will be the next “Prairie chickens” to ride the rails in rags, thin and haggard as medieval peasants. Everyone has seen them coming through Chemainus, begging for work.
Risaburo eyes Harunobu Higashi at the edge of the crowd. He looks sober, but Risaburo can’t be sure and decides to elbow his way across to stand by him. Risaburo’s distrust of Humbird is equalled by his fear that Harunobu might erupt into one of his violent rages, if the news is bad enough, and jeopardize the entire Japanese working force.
Humbird coughs into the megaphone and begins:
“I have surveyed all sections of the mill, from the booming grounds to the dry kiln and planing shed. If you men are prepared to take a cut in wages, the mill need not close.”
A unanimous affirmative chorus bounces back at Humbird before he draws another breath. Risaburo watches a slow smile creep across Humbird’s face, but his pudgy cheeks straighten almost at once and his brow forms burrows again beneath his curly brown hair.
“Given your approval, I hereby announce that the wages of all Caucasians will drop ten percent,” Humbird shouts. “And all Oriental wages will drop twenty percent.”
Neither Risaburo nor Harunobu speak much English, but they understand enough to get the message. The men slump together, simultaneously angry and resigned to their fate. Humbird surveys the crowd just before he sways off the podium. For a split second, Risaburo makes eye contact with his boss. It is as penetrating as Humbird’s unapologetic racism, but it doesn’t phase him in the least. No matter how unwillingly, the Orientals will accept the terms without comment or be gone. It is as simple as that, and everyone knows it.
At the end of the year, the company proudly announces they have cut the equivalent of 4,800 boxcars of lumber—enough to stretch a train from Victoria to Duncan, which would require the strength of sixty locomotives interspersed among the box-cars to move it. Added to the other years the mill has been in production since 1925, it is enough to build a 347-foot wide roadway of one-inch boards right around the equator.
Before the Depression is over, the Japanese are earning seventeen cents an hour on average to do their part in keeping those boxcars full. When Humbird announces a second cut in wages in the mid-thirties, Orientals lose another twenty per-cent and the white workers another ten percent.
Hearing this news, Risaburo bursts out laughing. The gullible sensibility of his youth seems incredible to him now. Stories of streets paved with gold mock the tight spaces of his life.
Risaburo returns to Japan in the mid-1930s. Life in Canada has humiliated him. He must return, knowing his place in Japanese society cannot be put on hold forever. But his family is established; regrettably, his family is Canadian. Crossing the Pacific, he lets go of them as best he can, sifting through his memories and wrestling with past choices that have provoked so much pain.
Now in her late teens, Shizuka misses him terribly and writes often. Whatever his shortcomings, he is her father and the bond is strong. She checks the post office regularly for his letters. It is a bit of a hike up past Okada camp, but she enjoys the salt air and the wind blowing through her hair. She is often rewarded for her effort, for Risaburo is good about writing. Shizuka never opens the envelope until she is home in her room. No ritual could be more important than to sit at the table he made for her years before. They had sanded and polished the yellow cedar together until it glowed; like everything her father put his hand to, it was a work of art.
Today she smooths the letter open with the palm of her hand pressed hard against the tabletop and begins reading. Risaburo writes in his fine, bold calligraphy about the landscape of the passing days—the mist that hangs in the valley, the cranes nesting on a nearby slough, the opaque velvet blue of the mountains.
Shizuka tucks the letter away when she is finished and lifts her koto onto the table. Recalling the hours Risaburo put into its making, she runs the tips of her fingers along its exquisite curves, caressing it with the same sweet affection a parent reserves for a child. Through her sheer curtains, sunlight warms her room.
She begins to strum, seeking out keys to give expression to her melancholy. She plays a sharp, complex piece called “Dis-array,” which suits her mood. It echoes across the room. Outside her window, the shadow of a high-flying cloud skitters across Oak Street. She remembers the afternoon she looked up from her koto, startled by the silhouette of a man studying her through the glass. An officer on a visiting Japanese ship, he was walking by on the street when he heard her playing. Stunned, he stopped to float on the music. Having been at sea for months, he let the music lift him home. Later, Risaburo invited him and the ship’s captain for tea, but Shizuka did not entertain them. She did not think her playing good enough.
In fact, like her father and her brother Norey, she excels at all artistic endeavours. At school she wins an award for the still life drawing she enters in the Duncan fair. The mother of the little boy she babysits across the street gives her free piano lessons, for Mrs. Jarrett recognizes the young girl’s talent. She is a favoured student at the Japanese language school; her calligraphy is exceptional and her Japanese very good. She comes home from her needlework lessons with vivid magenta peonies and tiny yellow finches flawlessly embroidered on both sides of fine linen.
Although she enjoys sewing, Shizuka hates walking through the mill to Chinatown for her lesson. The men whistle as she passes by, and she can feel their eyes bore into her until she arrives at the base of the hill to Chinatown. It isn’t that she doesn’t feel safe, but she blushes with embarrassment and her body feels awkward. Walking along the train tracks in front of Okada camp, however, she knows nothing of other eyes watching her. Bukichi Okada has already determined she will be his favourite son’s wife, for she is a picture: petite, with shiny black hair and a silky white complexion, her large dark eyes flash above her high cheekbones and classic nose and mouth.
Shizuka knows Hitoshi well because he plays baseball with her brother Norey. The two young men have been the best of friends for years. Hitoshi does all kinds of things for Norey that he maybe doesn’t deserve. Shizuka loves Norey, but he makes her mad sometimes too. He often rides on the backs of others and is always up to something. As well as being the firstborn son, Norey is good-looking, very smart, and charming. No one tells him what to do.
Norey and Hitoshi have been playing baseball together since their adolescence, long before Shizuka took much notice of her brother’s friend. It was Risaburo, before he returned to Japan, who took her to her first baseball games. She wasn’t much interested in boys then. But now she goes with her friends, and together they cheer on the team of their choice, chatting among themselves about the strong, handsome young men on the ball field. It’s always a big deal when the Asahi team from Vancouver comes to play against the all-star team. Everybody crowds the stands to watch those games. Once, Shizuka and her friend Chizuru Yoshida ran home like gazelles as soon as the game was over, some hakujin kids hot in pursuit. The girls, along with many others, were routing for the Asahis, and the hakujins didn’t like it—not because they were a Japanese team but because they were from out of town.
Norey plays on two of the three teams that Hitoshi plays on: the Nippon team and the Chemainus all-star team. Occasionally, Hitoshi plays with the Cowichan Indian team, too. Only his friends know he isn’t Indian. Shizuka learns from Norey that Hitoshi can even speak some Chinook. One of the Indian stevedores taught him when they were playing pool downstairs in their store.
Chemainus has four teams, and they play three games a week all summer long. On top of that, the Nippon team plays two annual series against the Cumberland Japanese team. On July 1, the Nippons rent a bus and go up island; on Labour Day, the Cumberland guys come down island. In the summer, base-ball is a way of life.
One day Hitoshi is having a soda at Taniwa’s store when the Furuya salesman comes in. While he and Norey are taking care of the order, they talk baseball. Mr. Ryujin knows all the baseball teams on the island because he supplies stores in Japanese communities from Duncan to Port Alberni.
“No use you fellows going to play the Port Alberni team,” he tells Norey. “They got an all-star team there that’s pretty good, so you watch out if you go up there.”
“You don’t know who you’re talking to,” Norey replies, laughing. “I bet you five bucks we can slaughter them.”
Norey wins the bet.
They play at the ball field in Port Alberni, halfway between the east and west coast of the island. The day is a scorcher, up in the nineties, without so much as a breeze. As usual, Norey is pitching, and Hitoshi is on second base. Norey works his fast ball on them for five innings and they keep striking out. The Nippon’s manager, Torizo Yamashita, finally decides they should ease up a bit.
“Let them hit a little bit,” he tells Norey.
Norey nods. In the sixth and seventh innings they start hitting, but Hitoshi usually catches the ball before they get to second base. In the eighth inning, Torizo tells Hitoshi to pitch.
“Shall I let them hit?” he asks.
“No, it’s too hot. I want to get it over with,” Torizo says.
Hitoshi throws nothing but curve balls. He faces six batters and the game is over with a score of 23-0.
The Nippons go home cocky as hell.
But there are also teams they can’t touch. In the summers from 1935 to 1938, the Chemainus all-star team plays against barnstorming teams from the United States. Most of them are black men—barred from American professional leagues by virtue of their race—who come to Canada on buses and roam the countryside for competition.
Everyone from Duncan to Ladysmith comes out for these games. One time a team called the Zulu Giants plays in grass skirts, their Olympian legs running like thunder and stirring the dirt into clouds around their skirts. Then there is the House of David team, all six-foot-plus giants with long beards and muscles the size of small boulders. One time the Kansas City Monarchs beat out the Nippons neatly. Two of their players went on to the majors: Satchel Paige and Jackie Robinson. Satchel didn’t play in Chemainus that day, but Jackie did. Hitoshi pumps adrenalin for the next two weeks.
Of course, most of the time it is simply the hometown boys on the all-star team, the cream from each of the four teams: Bob and Dick McBride, Joe Horton, George Robinson, Jack McKinnon, Babe Work, Cy Shillito, Gus Crucil, Jack Naylor, Haley Jackson, Norey Taniwa, and Kaname Izumi. One big happy-go-lucky bunch who play hard together like tight brothers and love every hot, dusty minute of it.
Every now and then Hitoshi wonders how a certain ball game might have ended up if Takeshi had been part of the team. He’d be standing on second base and, without warning, his brother would appear in front of him, smiling his big, gangly grin. Just as quickly, he was gone.
If Hitoshi isn’t coming around to pick up Norey for baseball, he is playing pool with him in the family’s store on the corner of Oak and Croft Streets. Although the Kawaharas’ store and pool hall is just down the street, it is Taniwa’s place that be-comes popular in short order. It is more of a confectionary store than the Kawaharas’, and friends often gather for soda after the baseball games.
One day Hitoshi has lunch with a friend who lives in Chinatown. Impressed with the delicious fruit pies made by the Chinese cooks in the bunkhouse, Hitoshi wonders if Norey could make a profit by selling single pieces. He finds out that they can order as many as ten pies at a time for thirty-five cents each. As soon as he tells Norey, Hitoshi has himself a volunteer job, transporting pies stacked across the back seat of his Buick. Norey sells each piece for twenty-five cents. Hitoshi doesn’t even think about his time or gas money any more than Norey thinks about sharing his profit. They are the best of friends, and money is never an issue.
Naturally, Shizuka notices how strong and handsome her brother’s friend is. But even though she is in her early twenties, she is very shy—some think stuck-up. Other boys come around vying for her attention, but she is naive as well. Still, there is nothing Shizuka loves quite so much as to ride in Hitoshi’s beautiful Buick along the windy roads that hug the coast.
Bukichi has already approached a go-between to help ar-range the marriage. After Miki and Takeshi died, Bukichi held onto life because of Hitoshi. He is happy to see his son grow into such a fine, strong, handsome man. He is happy, too, seeing Shizuka gallivant away with his son to Abbott and Costello movies in Ladysmith. Watching the Buick drive up the road one Saturday night, he whispers after them: “Life is precious, and life is precarious. Make of it all that you can.”
In his ten years on the boom before he marries, Hitoshi works and plays hard. There isn’t a pinch of fat on his stocky body. He has his father’s strong jaw and flat, broad nose. The deaths of his mother and brother trickle away somewhere, creating a distance that seems as unreal as their deaths once had. With its imperceptible passing, time ever so slowly wedges itself between him and those painful memories. He still goes with his family to the cemetery every August to clean up the gravesites and light candles and incense to welcome their spirits home. As the years go by, everything but his mother’s gentle voice and his brother’s easy laugh fades into washed-out sepia tones.
Meanwhile, his athletic talents come to the fore. When Hitoshi isn’t working, he can be found any number of places but home: playing baseball, tennis, sumo, judo, or pool. Then there are the Saturday night treks to Duncan in Takayoshi Kawahara’s truck. As assistant scoutmaster to Shige Yoshida’s boy scout troop, Hitoshi also finds time for the meetings, expeditions and jamborees. Even though the Okadas aren’t as prosperous as in earlier years, neither are they suffering like most. Prosperity aside, the 19305 are the best years of Hitoshi’s life. It is a buoyant decade for him, followed by a calamitous, heart-wrenching one.
In 1938, the year before they marry, Shizuka travels to Vancouver where she works toward her diploma from the Academy of Domestic Arts. She lives with her teacher in Fairview and is in her element, creating beautifully designed clothes. She goes home in August to face the biggest sewing project of her life: three wedding dresses for her Shinto-Buddhist wedding. Over the next seven months until the March 25 wedding, Shizuka sits at her treadle sewing machine, pumping through reams of white satin for her traditional wedding dress. Sewing the hem by hand takes an entire day. When it is finally complete, Shizuka begins making her second dress, a floor-length black silk gown with handsewn looped buttonholes down the back. Two months before the wedding, she begins the final garment she will wear in the ceremony, a vibrant blue silk kimono.
Shizuka goes to sleep the night before her wedding listening to rain pound against the window. The torrential down-pour is typical for March, with gusting winds churning up the waters at the bottom of Oak Street. She drifts in and out of sleep, waking often to the pinging sound of water bouncing off the boardwalk. By dawn, the rains stop and the wind drops. Shizuka sleeps peacefully through the early morning light and opens her eyes to a calm, grey day.
It is Sadako, her older sister, who wakes her with a gentle rap on the door.
“Morning, Shizuka,” Sadako calls, as she pushes the door open and walks to her sister’s bedside.
“Morning, sister,” Shizuka whispers, rubbing her eyes.
Sadako sits on the edge of the bed while Shizuka orients herself, sitting up to look around.
“There is much to do this morning,” Sadako says, watching her little sister comb fingers through her long, black hair. “Mother and I have been up for hours, making inarizushi, sunomono, yaki manju, and kazu noko. It’s all ready now, and the flowers will arrive soon.”
Shizuka looks into Sadako’s face and offers a wan smile. She has been working hard towards this day, and now that it is finally here, she fights an urge to bury herself in Sadako’s lap. But as close as she is to her sister, Shizuka has been raised in the Japanese tradition of keeping her feelings to herself. In-stead, she asks the time.
“Just nine o’clock,” Sadako replies. “Come. Mother has breakfast ready.”
Sadako leaves as Shizuka swings her feet onto the wooden floor and walks over to her dressing table. She brushes her hair abruptly and studies herself in the mirror, whispering, “Mrs. Hitoshi Okada,” over and over again.
Her mother and Sadako fuss over the preparations all morning, flying here and there to look after last-minute de-tails. When the flowers finally arrive from Victoria, they set to work right away, decorating the Japanese hall on Croft Street with bouquets of roses, gladiolas, and chrysanthemums.
Shizuka spends the larger part of the morning grooming herself. With an hour to go, she is pacing her room, unable to settle. Finally she decides to play her koto to ease her nerves. It is the closest she will get to her father today.
Hours later, when she and her groom drink sake from the same cup to consecrate their union, Shizuka breathes a sigh of relief. The strict religious nature of the ceremony gives the ritual meaning, but it has also kept her on edge lest she forget what to do. Shizuka needs everything to go perfectly, and so it has.
At the reception in her father-in-law’s dining room, Shizuka sits quietly next to Hitoshi, waiting obediently until it is time to depart. The candlelight casts a lovely sheen on her blue silk kimono and her long hair gathered softly above the nape of her neck. Her eyes shine like a black ocean under a half moon, while all about her men drink sake and party. At twenty-four years of age, Shizuka is fulfilling a significant part of her destiny, tidily setting aside her apprehension with the knowledge that all is as it should be.
Her brothers, Norey and Marchi, are outside putting the finishing “Just Married” touches on Hitoshi’s Buick when the community follows the newlyweds outside to wave goodbye. It is getting dark, and they have a long drive to the Empress Hotel in Victoria. Hitoshi’s father has spared no expense on his favourite son. After their night in the honeymoon suite high above Victoria’s inner harbour, Shizuka and Hitoshi catch a steamship to Seattle and ride cable cars in the big American city for hours. Atop its steep forested hillsides, Puget Sound stretches into a gleaming silver oblivion; its horizon corresponds with an expansive inner vision that washes over Shizuka in one warm and lovely moment.
Back from their honeymoon, Shizuka moves into her husband’s home in Okada camp, which he shares with two younger brothers and his parents. Hitoshi’s stepmother tells Shizuka not to be alarmed when they all get talking. It has been a household of loud, boisterous men for years. Some days she longs for the quiet of her room in Kawahara camp, where she could play her koto undisturbed. Here in Okada camp, the living room looks out on the booming grounds where Hitoshi works. Noise and activity is constant.
Bukichi and Rakuju return to Japan after Hitoshi and Shizuka marry in 1939. Their pioneering years are behind them. Bukichi has succeeded where others have failed: he has broken the cycle of poverty for himself and his children. Granted, he paid dearly for it, but the new generation is well established. It is time to go home. Hitoshi drives them to the docks in Vancouver, where they are boarding their ship.
They stand by the gangplank as people file past and others, like them, huddle awkwardly to say farewell.
“Goodbye,” Bukichi says, gripping Hitoshi’s shoulder and staring into his face as if to memorize it.
“Goodbye, father,” Hitoshi replies. Swallowing hard, he turns to his stepmother. “Goodbye, mother.”
Rakuju smiles wearily and turns to join the crowd pressing up the gangplank. This will be her third voyage across the Pacific. She is grateful it will be her last.
Hitoshi waves to Bukichi as he turns to follow Rakuju.
“Take care, father. And write. Write often.”
Bukichi nods and waves back, then disappears into the throng. Hitoshi scans the promenade deck for another glimpse, and just as the ship pulls out, he spots his father, waving.
He never sees him again. Pearl Harbor makes sure of that.
On April 26, 1941 Shizuka gives birth to a fine baby boy in the Chemainus hospital. Richard is a healthy nine-pound baby, but he tears his mother badly when he arrives. Two months after he is born, Shizuka still has not healed. She finally goes home from the hospital though, home to her mother and the beautiful bed Risaburo had made more than a decade before. She still has not fully recuperated when Japan bombs Pearl Harbor in December, twisting her life like a toy top spinning and crashing into walls.
She is in her mother’s kitchen measuring out rice for the noon meal when a neighbour comes by with the news. She grabs a chair at once and sits down. Richard is playing on the floor by her feet. Her brother, Marchi, was working the late shift at the mill the night before. She can hear the floorboards creaking above her head as she slides off her chair onto the floor. When Marchi comes into the kitchen, Naka is hovering over her daughter.
“What happened?” he asks.
“Some bad news. Japan bombed Pearl Harbor this morning. Shizuka fainted when she heard,” Naka says, fanning her daughter’s face.
Marchi looks past his mother and shivers. Without a word, he carries Shizuka to her bed and leaves to fetch Hitoshi. She is sitting up, drinking green tea in bed when her husband arrives.
“If they invade us next, what will we do? I can’t run,” Shizuka asks Hitoshi. “And if you try to help me, surely you’ll be caught too.”
Hitoshi tries to calm his wife, but he feels her fears are valid. Right now, he cannot think clearly either.
“I don’t know what we’ll do, Shizuka,” he begins, “but don’t worry. We’ll think of something. Try to get some rest.”
In the kitchen, Naka smooths the black drapes tighter into the corners of the window frame, hoping the Japanese navy will not find their little seaside village and her family at all.
The fear of a Japanese invasion soon becomes the much more real threat of a hakujin uprising. The Japanese community reels with each successive government decree that curbs their civil rights, but they believe they must be obedient and law-abiding no matter what. First come the orders to evacuate the Japanese-born men to road camps, then the orders to evacuate the entire town in early March. Everyone dutifully finishes packing the belongings they are leaving in the care of the Custodian of Enemy Property. When the evacuation orders are postponed until the end of March and then again until late April, people begin to feel like a packet of marbles being tossed about in a malicious game.
Before he begins packing his family’s belongings, Hitoshi says goodbye to his three half-brothers on the Esquimalt & Nanaimo train platform in Chemainus. Because all three are Japanese-born, they are among the first to go. Ryoichi, Haruyuki, and Osamu join the other Japanese men from the community who are being relocated to B.C. interior road camps. The government order wrenches husbands, fathers, and brothers from their families with a callousness that few can fathom.
The morning after they are gone, Hitoshi steps onto his front porch and walks down the steps towards the booming grounds. His boots feel heavier than usual as he clumps along the shore. Anxiety cuts the air like a sheer cliff, suffocatingly close and insurmountable. It is shock seeping through closed doors in Okada camp, where young mothers and old women carry on their routines in a void. Hitoshi recalls the night the Indians held a vigil on the beach following the death of a young boy. Although his people don’t wail outwardly against cruelty, a silent wailing is summoning a force that drifts over the water with the same heavy hurt.
The week before they leave, Hitoshi is extremely busy. The mill has hired replacement workers to work on the booming grounds. The booming contract his father negotiated with the mill in the mid-1920s fell into Hitoshi’s hands when his father retired in 1935. Now he is training others in the skills he has acquired since a teenager. Haley Jackson, a team-mate on the all-star team, gets his job.
Hitoshi’s crew has a system for everything they do on the job, but Haley and his men will have to wing it. There just isn’t time to teach them the intricate tactics the Okada crews developed over the years. Hitoshi hopes that by the time they get back to Chemainus, Haley’s men will still be trying to catch up. He will need his job back.
Meanwhile, Shizuka, still recuperating at her mother’s, is embroidering hankies as an okaeshi, or return gift, for those who gave presents when Richard was born. Her family’s custom was to reciprocate on the child’s first birthday, but Richard will turn one in Hastings Park—five days after they are evacuated and the community is scattered. Not well enough to walk any distance, Shizuka sends Hitoshi around the neigh-bourhood delivering the delicate hankies. He squeezes the task in on the few days when he isn’t training the new work crew, packing and boarding up windows or taking his 1937 Buick to Victoria, where he is storing it until they return. When he thinks back on that week, he wonders how he fit it all into the daylight hours before the seven o’clock curfew.
Shizuka can’t even help with the packing. She is still not well enough to lift anything heavy and has to rest often. When Hitoshi finishes all that has to be done in Okada camp, he walks over to Taniwas to give his in-laws a hand. He finds Marchi and Norey boarding up the community hall windows. Grabbing a hammer, he joins in. No one speaks. Almost everything is ready. They only have a day to go.
On April 21, 1942, the SS Princess Adelaide finally arrives at the docks to evacuate the Chemainus Japanese community. Japanese communities from the Cowichan Valley to the south are also bused to Chemainus, swelling the numbers of people caught in the chaos to 470.
Hitoshi carries his family’s luggage onto the passenger ship. His wife is not well enough to hold their one-year-old son, so her sister, Sadako, does; his mother-in-law carries the diapers. Despite Hitoshi’s strength, he finds the luggage unbearably heavy. As the steamship pulls away from the mill wharf, he does not glance back at the row of houses where he grew up: their windows boarded up, their contents sealed.
In Hastings Park, Shizuka has difficulty breathing. She sends a note to Hitoshi in the men’s dormitory.
“It is bedlam here. Tired children crying, the noise of people talking in this huge building with no walls to cut the sound. The terrible odour of animals mixed with disinfectant desperately trying to make it smell better. I can hardly breathe.”
Propped up on his army cot in similar conditions, Hitoshi feels despair creep into his heart. There is nothing he can do for his wife.
The next day another message arrives. Someone has come to visit. Hitoshi goes out into the compound and looks around. A guard points to the fence on the eastern edge of the grounds. His friend, George Ridgway, is waving.
Hitoshi asks the guard for a pass. When he won’t give him one, he asks permission for George to come inside. The guard says no. Hitoshi kicks a rock at his feet and stumbles toward George.
They can’t even grasp hands through the wire fence.
“How are you?” George asks Hitoshi.
“Rotten,” Hitoshi replies. “This place stinks like hell. We’re trying to make the best of it, but it ain’t easy.”
“Why won’t they let me in?”
“Who knows,” says Hitoshi. “Maybe they think you’re going to slip me a hand grenade.”
They both laugh. The notion is as ridiculous as their predicament. For a moment at least, the absurdity of it all seems funny.
“You know that’s the first good laugh I’ve had in months,” Hitoshi says.
“No kidding,” says George. “Hey, these guys ain’t worth losing laughs over. This has got to be a temporary thing just to scare you. It can’t last.”
Hitoshi peers into George’s eyes. “You really think so?”
George looks down. He doesn’t want to be the one to tell Hitoshi about the vandalism going on. He has walked along the beach that was Okada camp. A sou’easter was blowing, breaking up the boom in the bay and howling through holes punched through doors. All along the boardwalk the wind lifted stuff that was strewn everywhere, old rags and dish-pans, Brownie box snapshots, an empty can of shoe polish, and a child’s stuffed bear. Anything of value not stolen by vandals has been taken to storehouses for auctioning. George is disgusted by the greed. He can’t bring himself to tell his friend.
Shaking his head, he says, “I just don’t get it. I never thought Canadians could be so pig-headed. I just can’t believe they won’t wake up soon and let you come home.”
Changing the subject, Hitoshi says, “Hey, remember when we sat on top of the ball park and watched the mill burn down? We kids thought it was spectacular, but our parents thought it spelled the end of everyone in Chemainus.”
“That’s right, now. They did, didn’t they?” George says, the corners of his mouth turned up ever so lightly. It hurts to see his buddy treated like a criminal; it enrages him that there is nothing he can do.
The Okadas are interned in the Slocan at Bay Farm, one of the smaller camps. Shizuka finally gets better after a doctor in New Denver stitches her up. For a while, they share a fourteen by twenty-eight-foot shack with her brother, Norey, and his growing family. Hitoshi works as a swamper on the garbage truck for two dollars a day, but it isn’t enough to live on. They make up the difference by living on the savings they have brought from Chemainus. The B.C. Security Commission does not give welfare to people like the Okadas; people with money in the bank pay for their own internment.
Shizuka gives birth to a baby girl in 1945, just months be-fore the war ends. Karen is one year old and Richard is five when the family sets out on the long trek across Canada to find a new home. After a year in an isolated bush camp in northern Ontario, they finally settle in Fort William in August 1947. People are afraid to trust them, which makes it hard to find work and somewhere to live. But they finally meet an old woman willing to rent her upstairs, and they stay there while Hitoshi finds work in the steel construction industry. They begin setting down roots in the Canadian Shield, determined that even the frostbitten land will come to accept them.
In 1949, the government lifts the ban prohibiting them from returning to the west coast. The war has been over for four years, and the property Hitoshi inherited from his father has been sold, his belongings auctioned or stolen.
When the American government interned its citizens of Japanese descent, the Canadian government followed suit. Prime Minister Mackenzie King bowed to pressure from right-wing British Columbian politicians, not because he believed citizens of Japanese descent were a security threat, but because he hoped it might win him political favour in the west.
When the war was over, however, Canada didn’t duplicate American policy. Even before the war ended in 1945, Japanese Americans started going home. In the United States, Japanese Americans had homes to go home to.
Almost forty years after gaining the right to vote, Japanese Canadians scored another victory. In 1988, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney agreed to compensate Japanese Canadians interned during the war. Shizuka and Hitoshi were among those who received $21,000 cheques and an apology from the government. Money could not buy back the past or replace what was stolen, but the apology signified the promise of a new era. It confirmed their innocence on national television; it released them from the inner struggle of having to prove they are Canadian, not Japanese.