TOSH KAMINO STEPS OUTSIDE her Etobicoke townhouse and squints at the sun. She reaches for the garden hose by the back door and waters the plants and flowers. Leaning forward, she thrusts her nose into a cluster of sweet peas. Bathing in their fragance, Tosh recalls the sweet peas from her child-hood in Chemainus. Her stepmother used to plant them in the garden plot that Mr. Kawahara provided for his tenants. Tosh remembers the rush of perfume as she raced past them to play hopscotch with friends.
A Siamese cat rubs against her legs, and she stoops to pick him up. Standing in the sunlight with the cat purring in her arms, she sways gently to and fro. A smile creases her lips.
Vivacious, pretty, and petite, Tosh has been widowed for seventeen years now. She counts her blessings that their three children were grown when Yasuo died. It was sudden, his going. But just like the evacuation in 1942, all the signs were there. Somehow, despite all the black blotches in her life, Tosh always finds something to smile about. Now sixty-seven, she knows that troubles come and go in every life. Hers is no exception. The important thing is that they go.
The upcoming Chemainus reunion is a good example. Tosh is thrilled about it, but she is troubled by those who don’t share her enthusiasm. Many do, of course, but some are turning their backs on it, the bitterness is buried too deep.
It isn’t that she doesn’t understand how much it hurts to return. Certainly they were shafted on a grand scale, but many Chemainus people were friendly enough, one on one. She still corresponds with Vera Fraser Grant, a friend from her first year in public school in Chemainus. They never really talked much about the evacuation, then or now. The hakujin community seems rather torn about the whole affair. Maybe they didn’t know what they were doing at the time; perhaps they were both victims and perpetrators of the hysteria. Now they all have to live with the shame, even those who won’t admit that what they did was wrong. Tosh knows that times change as life puts history in perspective.
Tosh thinks of her father, Tomekichi Yoshida, and sets the cat on the ground. He wouldn’t have gone to the Chemainus reunion if he were alive, but she imagines a smile lighting his eyes when she tells him about the murals. The fact that the government didn’t apologize when he was still alive nags her some days. At least her tall, gangly stepmother lived long enough to get redress. Now in her nineties, Hina spends her days enjoying the company of other issei in Nipponia Home. But Tomekichi died without the opportunity to heal those old wounds. He sacrificed so much to offer the family a better life, and then, like so many, got trapped by the hateful mood of the times.
Tomekichi Yoshida was one of the youngest of ten in his family in Hiroshima. Born in 1881, he fought in the Boxer Rebellion in China when he was in his late teens and again in the Russo-Japanese War when he was twenty-three. A descendant of the Samurai class, he then learned the craft of making Buddhist shrines and married a young woman from the country surrounding Hiroshima. In 1908, Okiye Matsuo gave him their first son, Tomiharu, followed by another boy in 1910. Tomekichi’s decision to go to Canada the year Eichi was born came down to economics and class. Before the Emperor Meiji came to power, Samurai families were looked after by the lords they protected. When that class system was disbanded, men like Tomekichi’s father were suddenly forced to support themselves. Canada offered Tomekichi a quicker and easier route to prosperity, or so he thought. But instead of returning to Japan a rich man two years later, he sent for his wife. Tomiharu was four and Eichi was two when their mother left them in their grandparents’ care. She never saw them again.
Tomekichi’s younger brother, Matakichi, had already emigrated and established a grocery store on Vancouver’s Powell Street when Tomekichi arrived. Dreams of getting rich went underground as the young immigrant struggled to adjust to the language, customs, and landscape. Tomekichi tried his hand at fishing, worked in a restaurant, and helped his brother fill food orders for the Japanese logging camps up the mainland coast. For months he managed to save a little to-wards his wife’s steamship passage across the Pacific. When she joined him in 1912, he was still struggling to find work that would bring some security to their lives. He decided to try his luck on Vancouver Island, moving from job to job in Victoria, Duncan, Genoa Bay, Mayo, and finally, Chemainus. Tomekichi had been in Canada twenty years when he found a job as a millwright at the Chemainus sawmill. By then, the Depression squashed any remaining notions of securing a for-tune with which to return to Japan. In the long term, he felt that Canada held more promise for his family anyway. Now it was home.
His third daughter, Toshiye, is born at night in Genoa Bay without an attendant midwife or doctor. In the morning her mother wakes to the golden light of autumn shimmering in the sea below their shack. Born in September 1923, Tosh is Okiye’s sixth and last child. Two years later, diabetes kills Okiye, leaving Tomekichi a widower at forty-four with children ranging in age from two to eleven. In 1927, his first-born son emigrates from Japan to help out. Now seventeen, Tomiharu has not seen his father since he was two.
A year after Tomiharu arrives in Genoa Bay, Tomekichi books his passage to Japan to marry again. A wedding has been arranged with a woman who left an unsuccessful marriage. A burden on her family, she succumbs to the pressure to marry a widower eighteen years older and move to an isolated village 4,000 miles from her home near Hiroshima. Only nine years younger than his stepmother, Tomiharu goes on his own after she arrives in 1928.
Hina switches her talent for sewing geisha dresses and actors’ costumes to falling alder saplings with a bucksaw on the steep slope outside her new home. The sawmill closed down three years before, so she never knows the luxury of having Goshichi Izumi deliver scrap firewood in a horse-drawn cart. Tomekichi is working in a lumber camp and only comes home weekends. When he steps in the door that first weekend, Hina is waiting for him.
“Anta” she begins, eyes downcast. “Please. I chop wood for the cookstove, do laundry, look after the children and cook and clean, but those trees. . . .”
He follows her eyes to the forest outside.
“Those, I cannot cut down. You must do for me.”
Tomekichi still has his overcoat on. Without a word, he strides back outside and falls two alder while Hina watches from the kitchen window. She smiles at him when he comes in.
“Thank you,” she says, and he nods.
There are three ways out of the tiny village. One route involves a long, winding road via the next bay to the north; another is to hire a rowboat or canoe to Cowichan Bay; the third possible exit is to climb the 1,610-foot trail up Mount Tzuhalem. In the months she lives in Genoa Bay, Hina goes nowhere. But within a year of her arrival, the Yoshidas move to Mayo. They are the last Japanese family to leave the deserted sawmill town in Genoa Bay.
Tosh is too young to take many memories with her, but her older sisters won’t forget the picturesque bay. Fishing one fine afternoon off the wharf, they catch so many perch that they cannot carry them all. Fukuko climbs out of her petticoat and lays it on the wharf. Yukiko watches her slide the slippery fish onto the freshly laundered cotton eyelet, which she then curls into a bag and slings over her shoulder for the hike home.
“Mama is going to be mad at you, Fuku,” Yuki says.
“Well, how else would we get them home? We can’t carry them all,” Fuku replies.
“She’ll never get the fish smell out, you know,” Yuki says. Fuku just shrugs her shoulders. “Maybe not, but we’ll have a feed of fresh perch tonight.”
Yuki grins. “Race you home, smarty.”
Later in the week, Yuki spends an afternoon on top of a bluff daydreaming. Her happiest memories of Genoa Bay were here, watching huge schooners sail in and out of the bay. It doesn’t seem that long ago when the cove was dotted with ships waiting to dock for shipments of lumber that would go clear around the world. Tall masts swayed and rigging clacked in the wind as Yuki dreamed about sailing to ancient cities.
But it is nothing so exotic that takes the family away. De-spite the bay’s spectacular deep sea docking facilities, the saw-mill had ongoing problems with water supply. It could not support the bustling port indefinitely, forcing people to relocate to other industry towns. After it shuts down, the landscape slowly reclaims itself until nothing of the former sawmill can be gleaned from the site.
By 1929, the Yoshidas resettle in Mayo, another sawmill town near Duncan named after mill owner Mayo Singh. Tosh starts grade one in the predominately East Indian and Japanese community that year. She has been speaking English with her older brother Noboru since she can remember, and English is common among her Mayo playmates. When she starts grade two in Chemainus the following year, the teacher is impressed with her ability to read a long passage.
“Are you sure you haven’t read that before, Tosh?” Miss Vye asks.
“No,” Tosh replies, surprised the teacher took notice. Then a classmate in the desk behind pokes her back.
“Oh, gee, you’re good,” Mits Otsu whispers.
Tosh searches her classmate’s face. She is baffled by his earnest admiration. She thinks her English average, but life in Kawahara camp changes that. Before the year is out, she speaks Japanese at play like all the others, and her English begins to suffer too.
In 1931, a year after the Yoshidas move to Chemainus, Hina gives birth to a son. Tosh, who has been the baby in the family until now, is eight when Yuji is born. Her oldest sister Yuki is working as a domestic in Duncan, and their sixteen-year-old brother Noboru works in the mill to help support the family. Before long, Fuku also finds work as a domestic. Tosh is Yuji’s only sibling still allowed the luxury of childhood, although they aren’t playmates. Differences in age and personality set them apart.
Tosh is so easy-going that life’s bumps don’t seem to affect her. Yuji, on the other hand, feels every bump intensely. He is a determined, enthusiastic, and happy youngster who plays as hard as he tumbles. Tosh seems to sail among the apple, pear and cherry trees in the compound, deceptively free of troubles as she mingles with her friends. It isn’t that she avoids problems at school or injuries in play. One day, her teacher straps her for giving the wrong answer to a math question. Her hand smarts and her pride is hurt, but Tosh just carries on. Soon enough, she is laughing with abandon again.
Tosh makes friends with some hakujin girls at school during her first weeks in Chemainus. She plays hopscotch and jumping rope with blonde Doreen Scoffield and quiet, skinny Vera Fraser. One day, Doreen asks Tosh to bring lunch to school so they can spend the hour together.
The next morning Tosh asks her stepmother to make her a sandwich for school.
“Why?” Hina asks. “You walk home for lunch.”
“A friend asked me to stay, that’s all.”
“Oh well, I guess so,” Hina says, afraid to admit that she doesn’t know what to put in a sandwich.
Swinging her lunch bag en route, Tosh is soon skipping to school. Inside the classroom, she shoves it in her desk as nearby classmates whisper.
“I wonder why Tosh is carrying a lunch,” Mits says to his chum.
“She always walks home, doesn’t she? Maybe teacher has given her a detention,” Kumeo replies.
Tosh ignores these rumblings, shaking her head at such silliness. When the lunch bell rings, she runs outside with Doreen and they plop themselves in the middle of the play-ground. About to ask Doreen what kind of sandwich she has, Tosh stops short when she pulls two pieces of buttered bread from her bag.
“Oh, my stepmother,” Tosh says, embarrassed.
Doreen glances at the bread. “Doesn’t she know how to make a sandwich?”
“No, I guess not,” Tosh replies, taking a nibble.
It is their one and only lunch together.
As the year progresses, Tosh leaves Kawahara camp less and less to play with her hakujin friends. Running down her front steps and across the alley, she skips past the community bath-house to the dirt playground where she joins the other children. From May until September, she melts into the hubbub and plays for hours on end. For the most part, school is the only reason she steps outside her neighbourhood.
One day, sweet young Chizuru Isoki asks Tosh if she would like to go to Sunday school.
“Sure,” replies Tosh, always game to try something new. The next Sunday she puts on a hat and her best dress, a white cotton one with swirls of sky-blue flowers. It seems to take forever to get to Saint Michael’s and All Angels Church in the south end of town past the mill. Reverend Robathan greets them at the door of the quaint nineteenth century church, leaning down to say hello to Tosh. He has soft brown hair and even softer brown eyes behind his horn-rimmed spectacles.
Inside church, Chizuru and Tosh tiptoe along the aisle and slide onto one of the polished hemlock pews beside two brothers from another Yoshida family. They wait quietly for the swish of Reverend Robathan’s long white gown to approach the altar and begin the morning Anglican service. Soon they are all on their feet singing “Onward Christian Soldiers.” By the time she is whisked off to Sunday school in a back room, Tosh is dying to get her scratchy hat off. A blonde girl with ringlets is standing next to her when she lifts the hat and sighs with relief.
“I hope I’m not in Mrs. Robinson’s class,” the girl whispers into Tosh’s ear. “When she talks, she spits at you!”
Astonished, Tosh stares at her. “Oh my God,” she says, edging closer to Chizuru. In her experience, people don’t say mean things, and Sunday school is the last place she expects it. Soon the teacher seats them around a table to study the Bible, and Tosh’s attention is elsewhere—daydreaming. Mostly be-cause it gives her and Chizuru time together, she suffers through boring Bible study a few more years.
Meanwhile, her stepmother is becoming active with two women’s clubs in the community. The fujinkai is mainly fun, organizing and performing plays in the hall, as well as preparing food and decorations for special occasions in the community. One afternoon, Mrs. Nakatsu brings a cake to the meeting. Pretending to be very solemn, she sets it in front of the ladies and bows. “Make the fukeiki go away,” she says. Every-one giggles. Fukeiki is their word for the Depression—and the pretend ritual, their way of making light of hard times.
The other women’s group has a more serious intent, which is to discuss concerns regarding their children’s progress in school. One afternoon, Tosh bursts into one of their hahanokai meetings.
“Mama, you won the pool,” she says.
“What?” Hina whispers, putting her finger to her lips.
“You know, Mr. Taniwa’s World Series pool. Remember, you bought a ticket last week. He was selling them in the road in front of his store, catching all the men going to and from work.”
“And I won?” Hina asks, blushing. She quickly loses interest in discussing her children’s homework habits and excuses herself with a curt bow.
They march over to Taniwas to collect her pool. Humming under her breath, Hina clutches a hot two-dollar bill in her hand as Tosh skips down the alley and sprints up the stairs to broadcast the news at home.
Tosh blossoms in her early teens. Aiko Higashi is a year younger than her, but they are best of friends. She lives on the other side of Mr. Kawahara’s bunkhouse on the backside of Tosh’s home. A dark beauty and a daredevil, she buttresses herself against the harsh realities of life with long, arching dives off the wharf into Chemainus harbour. More timid, Tosh usually jumps in after her friend, whispering her trade-mark “Oh, my God” in mid-air. They watch baseball games together, and cheer on their brothers and boys whom they fancy. They hike to Bare Point to pick bouquets of delicate wild lilies and admire the fabulous view on warm spring days. They share their secrets and face the world, giggling.
One of Tosh’s other good friends is Kaz Kawabe. The Kawabes live a few blocks north of Kawahara camp in their own house. In addition to the sunporch where Kaz’s father nurtures a colony of chrysanthemums, the garden he created out front is an inviting sanctuary. A little rock bridge crosses a pond where brilliant orange carp skim near the surface under the decorative shade of ornamental maple trees.
A prominent man in the community, Tomoki Kawabe em-ploys dozens of men for his lumber piling contract with the sawmill. His daughter Kaz enjoys the distinguished status she has among her peers, but Tosh pays no mind to Kaz’s uppity ways and likes her for her strong personality and quick wit.
Tosh and her friends ride the bus to high school in Lady-smith every morning. Aiko and Yasumi Nishimura walk down the alley to Tosh’s house, and the three girls carry on to Maple Street, where they turn to pick up Kaz. Inevitably, they find her shaking the dust mop out the side door when they arrive. It doesn’t matter how much they tease her, Kaz won’t leave until the floor is dusted.
On a hot summer day the year before she graduates from high school, Tosh stands outside the Japanese community hall with six of her girlfriends and Kumeo Yoshida for a special graduation picture. Few teenagers are still going to public school or Japanese language school in 1940 because most are working. But every day after school for ten years, Tosh trudged along to the community hall for two hours of Japanese language and history instruction. Among her teachers, Mrs. Sugaya stood out, for she encouraged them not only to be proud of their heritage but also to be good Canadians. Now those lessons are behind her, and with them, her adolescence.
As high school graduation approaches, Tosh watches her dress take shape in Sadako Hayashi’s hands. The seamstress has a knack for working with fine fabrics, such as the dusty rose chiffon Tosh chose for the floor-length gown. At her last fitting, Tosh fingers the puffy sleeves and smiles sweetly at Sadako.
“I’m so pleased with these sleeves, Hayashi-san. Mama didn’t like the idea, but I think she’ll change her mind now,” Tosh says.
“I’m sure she will. The dress looks lovely on you, Tosh,” Sadako says.
Tosh blushes. “Thank you,” she says, the whisper of fine chiffon brushing her legs. “This is the most special dress I’ve ever had. I’m going to keep it forever.”
The next day Hina nods her approval when Tosh models the gown, and they go shopping for petticoats and shoes to match. When the time comes to dress for the evening ceremony, Tosh is in a liquid mood. Her fingers skim the fabric as she lifts the chiffon gently over her head and lets it tumble to her feet. Standing before the mirror in the falling light, she brushes her hair until it gleams. Tosh tiptoes closer to the mirror and applies a creamy layer of dusty rose lipstick. Stepping back, she studies her reflection with satisfaction and moves to the window. Mr. Kawahara should arrive any moment in his taxi.
When his black Chrysler rolls around the end of the alley, Tosh slips over to her dresser and gathers the pink roses from the vase. She slides a doily over the stems to complete her bouquet and checks the mirror one last time. Floating downstairs into the soft June dusk, she hesitates on her front porch. Neighbours are stretched along the boardwalk, waiting for her to appear. Smiling and waving, Tosh drifts down to the street and steps into the waiting taxi. The evening has just begun, and life hugs her with promise.
Tosh celebrates her eighteenth birthday in September 1941 after enrolling in the Kawano Sewing School in Vancouver. She is staying with her brother Tomiharu and his family on East Georgia, happy with life in the city and her new-found freedom.
Three months later, she is oblivious to the gale blowing down Stuart Channel, churning the sea into a frothy mass against the Chemainus shoreline. In Vancouver, the howling wind is accompanied by heavy rain, so she is glad it is Sunday and she doesn’t have to go to school.
Hina is helping clean the community hall on December 7 about the same time Tosh and her brother hear the news on the radio. Mr. Okinobu comes round to the hall to tell the women that Japan has bombed Pearl Harbor. Hina finishes quickly and goes home to find her husband and stepson Noboru listening intently to the radio. Meanwhile, Tomiharu is beside himself, pacing the living room floor. His wife is upstairs napping with their toddler, and he doesn’t want to disturb them. Finally, Tosh can’t stand her brother’s pacing any more.
“I know it’s awful, Nii-san, but you shouldn’t be so upset,” she says.
“Look, Tosh. This is the beginning of the bad news,” Tomiharu replies.
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know what they’ll do to us, but you can be sure they’ll think of something.”
“Who are you talking about?” Tosh asks.
“Politicians like Ian Mackenzie, the MP, and the White Canada Association. I bet they’re knocking on the Prime Minister’s door right now.”
“But what can they do?”
“Push through their campaign to get us out of B.C., for starters. Have you ever heard these guys talk?” Tomiharu asks.
“No.”
“You’ve been living in Chemainus too long, Tosh.”
She shakes her head and goes to her room. Tomiharu’s fears might be exaggerated, but she can’t ignore the queasy knot in her tummy. Staring out her window at the rain, Tosh feels homesick for the first time since leaving Chemainus.
When Tomiharu learns that all Japanese-born men will be sent to road camps, he packs up his wife and child and moves to Kamloops. Within a few months, Tosh’s father is in a Rocky Mountain road camp. Hina, Noboru and ten-year-old Yuji join Tosh in Tomiharu’s house, but with no income they cannot stay. In May they swallow their pride and enter Hastings Park.
Tosh leaves her sewing course on uneasy terms. Her teacher argues that she hasn’t paid her full fee, and it upsets her that she can neither pay nor finish the course. But soon after arriving in Hastings Park, she sees Aiko Higashi moping around. Suddenly sewing school doesn’t seem so important after all.
“What’s wrong, Aiko?” Tosh asks her friend, who is sitting outside the huge dormitory, her eyes a bloodshot mess.
“I’m allergic to that god-awful hay in our mattresses,” Aiko replies tartly. “But more than anything I’m so mad about not finishing high school that I could scream.”
“I haven’t really talked to anyone yet. We just got here yesterday.”
“Awful, isn’t it?” Aiko says, screwing up her nose.
“Yeah, it’s pretty bad. So tell me. What happened with school?” Tosh asks.
“Well, we asked the RCMP for permission to stay behind long enough to write our exams. Our principal, Mr. Spargo, he was on our side, you know.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, he tried to convince them we weren’t a threat, but the police just ignored him.”
“That’s awful, Aiko.”
“I won’t forget Mr. Spargo, though. One day back in January some grade ten kid called me a dirty Jap in the hallway. I whammed the top of his head with my textbooks. Trouble was, Mr. Spargo saw me.”
“Oh no,” Tosh says.
“So he called us into his office and asked me why I hit that boy. I told Mr. Spargo that he called me a dirty Jap.
“He didn’t get mad or anything. He just told us both to go back to our classes and behave ourselves. I thought, ‘A lot of good that’s going to do.’ But the next day he called an assembly and told everybody that we weren’t the enemy, that we hadn’t anything to do with the Japanese who bombed Pearl Harbor. He said we were Canadian citizens just like everyone else.”
“Mr. Spargo said that?”
“Afterwards, a few hakujin students told us they were sorry we couldn’t finish the year, but none of it made any difference in the end. It’s so unfair,” Aiko says, narrowing her eyes and staring ahead.
Tosh is quiet, remembering how much her graduation meant to her. Lately, she has been at a real loss for words.
Tosh and her family leave Hastings Park in September to join her father, who has been transferred out of road camp to help build a few thousand shacks in Tashme. The largest of all the internment camps, Tashme has the unfortunate distinction of being hundreds of miles from the camps clustered throughout the Slocan Valley. With the exception of Sandon, a remote ghost town in the Slocan, Tashme is the most gloomy place to be. The nearest town is Hope, where the landscape leaves the fertile Fraser Valley behind and launches itself toward the rugged Fraser Canyon. Aged, foreboding mountains close in on the settlement at the valley bottom. Cutting winds funnel through, creating huge snowdrifts in winter and carrying torrential rains in the fall. The shacks are so thinly constructed, icicles form on inside windows during winter nights.
For young people like Tosh, the opportunity to meet new friends compensates a little for all the upheaval. On her arrival, Tosh meets her first friend, a young man named Juji Matsui. Climbing out of the livestock trucks into the bedlam, Tosh sees him standing about and smiles.
“I haven’t seen a women in three months,” he says to Tosh, “and you guys come in slacks!”
Tosh laughs. Coincidentally, Juji is one of two young men who will share the cramped quarters of the Yoshida’s tarpaper shack. His own family needs his bed for a younger sibling, so he sleeps in a spare one that Tosh’s family makes for him. But then he falls ill with meningitis, and his mother gives up her bed to nurse him back to health.
Not long after, Tosh visits him. Sitting at his bedside, she forces a smile. He is a shadow of the energetic twenty-year-old who greeted her just a few months before.
“Tosh, say the Lord’s Prayer for me, will you?” Juji asks.
Tosh hesitates and whispers, “I haven’t said the Lord’s Prayer since grade school, but I’ll try.”
Juji repeats it after her, over and over again. Early the next morning he is dead.
They cremate him in an open field by the creek, where his family and friends mourn his death under the mountains that hold them captive on earth.
Tosh makes the best out of a bad situation. She has a job in the B.C. Security Commission general store, earning twenty-five cents an hour. When she isn’t working, she joins friends for as much recreation as she can fit in her day. They find a lake to skate on in the winter, and hike nearby mountains in the summer. Whenever they reach the mountain summit, they reflect mirrors down at the camp to show how high they have climbed. Seen from below, the silver flashes from the mountain top defy their internment.
On many of these outings, Tosh laughs alongside her new boyfriend, Yasuo Kamino. In addition to skating, hiking, and fishing for trout in the creek, Saturday night dances bring the young couple together. In the bleak upset that is her life, nine-teen-year-old Tosh is falling in love.
In the summer of 1944, Tosh leaves Tashme with her sister Yuki. It is Yuki’s idea to go east, and she invites Tosh along. Not one to consider what obstacles they might encounter, Tosh agrees without hesitating. Her boyfriend and his sisters have already gone east, giving her added incentive.
Their father disapproves. “People will laugh and talk be-cause you have left your aging parents behind,” Tomekichi says.
“But Fuku and Yuji can look after you, Papa,” Tosh replies.
“That does not matter. We should all stay together.”
“Papa, we do not know what is going to happen. I am young. I cannot stay here forever. I am going.”
That September she turns twenty-one, waiting on tables at the Toronto YWCA. Over the next year, she works at everything from housecleaning and sewing alterations to assembly line jobs in sunglass and greeting card factories.
Ironically, it is Yuki who breaks free from the menial jobs that characterize the working lives of so many. Tosh got her high school education, while Yuki didn’t return to school after their mother died in 1925. Most of the household chores fell on her when she was only eleven. Hina’s arrival a few years later changed that, but she started working as a domestic when she was sixteen, moving from Duncan to Vancouver. Before the war, she took odd jobs in drycleaning and dressmaking shops.
Even when the war is over there is little reason to get an education. Professions such as medicine, social work, teaching, and law have racist policies that make it excessively difficult, if not impossible, to secure a job. In addition, the concept of a career was foreign to most women of Yuki’s generation, particularly when they were raised in rural Japanese communi-ties. But when she secures a clerk’s job with the National Film Board in Ottawa in the late 19405, she seizes the opportunity to cultivate inherent talents. By 1975, she is a technical producer in Studio D, a women’s production unit. It is the international year of women, and Studio D is the NFB’S response to a federal directive to boost women’s profiles. When she retires in 1978, Yuki Yoshida is part of the team that wins an Academy Award for a series released that year called “I’ll Find A Way.” They are children’s films that portray the diversity of life in Canada. Yuki can’t help but bring the diversity of her own childhood to bear on the production. Out of her burdened past, she wrestles a precious victory. Nothing from her early years on Vancouver Island suggested meaningful work would enrich her life. Nothing, perhaps, except ambition toughened through hardship.
Before Yuki’s career begins to unfold, Tosh opts for tradition and love. In May 1945, she moves out of the housekeeping room she shares with Yuki and marries Yasuo Kamino. Fearing more disapproval from her father, she does not wait for her family in Tashme to arrive. When they do come east, Tosh realizes she needn’t have been so stubborn. Her father could be difficult, but often it is because he can’t let go of the old ways. Nonetheless, it pleases him to see his daughter happily married.
Tosh continues working for a Jewish woman in a dress-making shop until her son is born in 1946. Busy with life as a young mother, Tosh is surprised when a letter arrives from an old Chemainus friend a few years later. It is Meiko Sumiye, whom she has not seen since her family went to Japan in the 19305. But the news is not good. Her sister Hisako was burned in the Hiroshima bombing and suffered a long, agonizing death. Still in grade school at the time of the bombing, Hisako was a baby when the family left Chemainus. Tosh remembers her, but only vaguely. She closes her eyes, and Mrs. Sumiye’s cheerful, round face appears, cooing to her baby as she strolls along the boardwalk one fine afternoon.
In the early 1950s, Tosh has a girl and a boy, while Yasuo works hard to provide for them. She has almost thirty years with her husband, building a new life out of the old. When Yasuo dies in 1973, Tosh is fifty. Childhood dreams of becoming an actress are passed down to her daughter Brenda, while Tosh spends her remaining working years as a floral designer.
Troubles come and go. Yet she laughs often, her eyes shining like polished black diamonds.