Obasan

by Joy Kogawa

  Wherever the words "Japanese race" appeared, Aunt Emily had crossed them out and written "Canadian citizen."

  "What this country did to us, it did to itself," she said.

  I handed the pamphlet back to her and started the car. The very last thing in the world I was interested in talking about was our experiences during and after World War II. But Aunt Emily was full of her California weekend and the outspoken people she'd met who obviously didn't share my reluctance.

  "I hate to admit it," she said, "but for all we hear about the States, Canada's capacity for racism seems even worse."

  "Worse?"

  "The American Japanese were interned as we were in Canada, and sent off to concentration camps, but their property wasn't liquidated as ours was. And look how quickly the communities reestablished themselves in Los Angeles and San Francisco. We weren't allowed to return to the West Coast like that. We've never recovered from the dispersal policy. But of course that was the government's whole idea—to make sure we'd never be visible again. Official racism was blatant in Canada. The Americans have a Bill of Rights, right? We don't."

  Injustice enrages Aunt Emily. Any injustice. Whether she's dealing with the Japanese-Canadian issue or women's rights or poverty, she's one of the world's white blood cells, rushing from trouble spot to trouble spot with her medication pouring into wounds seen and not seen. For her, the injustice done to us in the past was still a live issue.

  She thumbed through her pile of papers as we drove down the Mayor Magrath Highway and onto Highway 3. Occasionally she would hold up a paper and shake it excitedly in front of me as if she expected me to drive and read at the same time.

  "Now look at this one," she said. "Here's a man who was looking for the source of the problem in the use of language. You know those prisons they sent us to? The government called them ‘Interior Housing Projects'! With language like that you can disguise any crime.”

  The conference had obviously been a meeting ground for a lot of highly charged energy. Looking at her wildly gesticulating hair caught in the windows' drafts, I felt she should have electrocuted me. But I was curiously numb beside her.

  People who talk a lot about their victimization make me uncomfortable. It's as if they use their suffering as weapons or badges of some kind. From my years of teaching I know it's the children who say nothing who are in trouble more than the ones who complain.

  For a few moments I was afraid she was about to attack me for my lack of enthusiasm about the conference and I tried to muster up some intelligent comments. Talking to Aunt Emily is sometimes like walking through a minefield. I never quite know when she'll explode.

  There were a number of people at the conference, she said, who were cautioning against "rocking the boat". "All they're opting for is 'the good life’.” She threw up her hands and sighed. "You'd think, after all we've been through—you'd think there'd be some collective social conscience."

  She stared out the open window as she talked about one man at the conference who quite openly applauded the wholesale imprisonment of Canadian and American Japanese.

  "He knows the war was just an excuse for the racism that was already there. We were rioted against back in 1907, for heaven's sakes! We've always faced prejudice. He knows we were no military threat. So what is he saying? That the innocent should be made to suffer for the guilty?" She was almost spluttering. "That's scapegoatism. As long as we have politicians and leaders and media people who feast on people's fears, we'll continue making scapegoats."

  "Maybe," I said feebly, "he's trying to be conciliatory and see the point of view of the other side. Or maybe he believes the welfare of the whole is more important than the welfare of the part and the fears of the collective can only be calmed by the sacrifice of a minority. Isn't that the way it's always been?"

  "Some people," Aunt Emily answered sharply, "are so busy seeing all sides of every issue that they neutralize concern and prevent necessary action. There's no strength in seeing all sides unless you can act where real measurable injustice exists. A lot of academic talk just immobilizes the oppressed and maintains oppressors in their positions of power."

  For the rest of the car ride home I kept quiet while Aunt Emily bulldozed on. I could see that we were in for an evening of marathon talking, whether anyone else felt up to it or not.

  Even before the supper dishes were cleared away, Aunt Emily was shuffling and sorting documents and conference papers on the kitchen table.

  "Read this, Nomi," she said from time to time, handing me papers as if they were snapshots. I sometimes managed to catch half a paragraph on a page before she gave me something else. She must have thought I was speed-reading and listening to her at the same time, like switching back and forth between movies on television. A good way to stay agitated.

  "Give you something to chew on," she said. She was eating a slice of Uncle's stone bread with a slab of raw onion.

  You're the one with the strong teeth, I thought to myself. She did have strong teeth. And a tough digestion.

  "Not like woman," Uncle said as he sat at the table and watched her working. "Like that there can be no marriage."

  He waved a toothpick at the documents spread in front of him. "For what purpose, this?"

  "We're gluing our tongues back on," Aunt Emily said. "It takes a while for the nerves to grow back."

  Uncle shook his head. "Nisei muzukashi," he said. "Difficult people."

  "We have to deal with all this while we remember it. If we don't we'll pass our anger down in our genes. It's the children who'll suffer," Aunt Emily said.

  "Children?" Uncle asked. "Too late for Emiri-san, isn't it?" He held up a form letter and started reading it slowly, sucking in air between the words.

  I leaned over and read it out loud for him. I was being more polite than genuinely interested. "...While it is not necessary that this title be available in order to complete the sale it is preferred that it be surrendered to the Registrar of Land Titles. Will you be good enough therefore...." It was obviously a form letter sent to all of us back in the forties asking us to hand over the titles to our properties but advising us that, whether we did or not, our houses would be taken from us.

  "The power of print," Aunt Emily interrupted. "The power of government, Nomi. Power. See how palpable it is? They took away the land, the stores, the businesses, the boats, the houses—everything. Broke up our families, told us who we could see, where we could live, what we could do, what time we could leave our houses, censored our letters, exiled us for no crime. They took our livelihood—"

  The muscle in Uncle's jaw moved back and forth as he put the form letter down. I nodded, not wanting to aggravate the atmosphere further.

  My eyes caught a brief official-looking letter from someone signed B. Good to Aunt Emily. B. Good? I noticed that he was the custodian in charge of all the property that was supposedly being kept safe for us. I read through the short note while she talked on.

  Dear Madam

  This will acknowledge your letter of the 31st ultimo.

  This will also advise you that as Mrs. T. Kato is a Japanese National living in Japan at the outbreak of war, all property belonging to her in Canada vests in the Custodian.

  Yours truly,

  B. Good

  A toneless form letter. I wondered what Aunt Emily's letter to the Custodian had been. "Tell me what happened to my mother's tiny house—the house where my sister was born, with the rock garden in front and the waterfall and goldfish. Tell me what has happened."

  The Custodian's reply to Aunt Emily must have been the same to anyone else who dared to write. "Be good, my undesirable, my illegitimate children, be obedient, be servile, above all don't send me any letters of inquiry about your homes, while I stand on guard (over your property) in the true north strong, though you are not free. B. Good."

  What did Mr. Good feel, I wondered, as he signed his letters—as he read Aunt Emily's questions, or perhaps the more timid letters of the others? Did he even re
ad them? He must have had similar form letters ready to send out automatically. Did he experience a tiny twinge of pleasure at the power his signature must represent? Did B. Good sometimes imagine himself to be God? Or was it all just a day's mindless job?

  Aunt Emily, seeing me reading the B. Good letter, started talking of Grandpa Kato's Cadillac. She said it was sold by the government for $33. Handling charges came to $30 and the amount Grandpa finally received was $3.00 and a few pennies.

  "Next thing we expected was to owe the Custodian money for the services done in relieving us of all we owned," Aunt Emily said. "What a bunch of sheep we were. Polite. Meek. All the way up the slaughterhouse ramp. Why in a time of war with Germany and Japan would our government seize the property and homes of Canadian-born Canadians but not the homes of German-born Germans?" she asked angrily.

  "Racism," she answered herself. "The Nazis are everywhere."

  Obasan was standing at the sink with her mouth set the way it always is whenever there is agitation. She surrounds herself with a determined kind of stillness and a certain slow concentration on anything her hands are doing.

  I picked up a folder of Uncle's documents. One was a mimeographed sheet signed by an RCMP superintendent, authorizing Uncle to leave a Registered Area by truck for Vernon, where he was required to report to the local Registrar of Enemy Aliens, not later than the following day.

  It was hard to think of Uncle as anyone's enemy. One Sunday when Uncle went to church, the clergyman turned him away from the communion rail. But there was no enemy there.

  Aunt Emily was searching through her briefcase. She brought out a yellowing manuscript sewn together with thread.

  "Here. This was my biggest effort," she said. "Read this, Nomi." I held it gingerly on my lap. In the center of the title page in capital letters was printed: THE STORY OF THE NISEI IN CANADA: A STRUGGLE FOR LIBERTY—by Emily Kato.

  The opening words of the manuscript were "I understand the Nisei." So she does, I thought. She certainly knows them better than I do or Uncle does. None of my friends today are Japanese Canadians.

  I read the first paragraph.

  I understand the Nisei, I know them well. Better than do Mr. Green or Mrs. Ralston. [Who, I wondered, were they that she singled them out?] I have seen the Nisei in anger, in exuberant spirits, enthusiasm and despair, in the quiet stillness of resignation or renunciation—I've worked beside them in canneries, on farms, in Red Cross groups—I've seen them in poverty and in luxury, in cabins and stuccoed residences, struggling for higher education on meager earnings, or cushioned through college by a parent's wealth—I've known them as mill hands, lumberjacks, clerks, dressmakers, stenos, domestic servants—I've watched them waltz and jitterbug, play baseball, tennis, rugby, golf, and ping-pong—I've known them in sickness and in health, at weddings and births and face to face with death. In short, I know the Nisei in every mood and circumstance, and because of this intimacy with them, I shall discuss some of the accusations brought against us.

  The entire manuscript was sixty pages long. I skimmed over the pages till I came across a statement underlined and circled in red: I am Canadian. The circle was drawn so hard the paper was torn. Three lines of a poem were at the top of the page.

  Breathes there the man with soul so dead

  Who never to himself hath said:

  This is my own, my native land!

  The tanned brown edges of the page crumbled like autumn leaves as I straightened the manuscript.

  The exact moment when I first felt the stirrings of identification with this country occurred when I was twelve years old, memorizing a Canto of "The Lay of the Last Minstrel."

  So many times after that, I repeated the lines: sadly, desperately, and bitterly. But at first I was proud, knowing that I belonged.

  This is my own, my native land.

  Then as I grew older and joined the Nisei group taking a leading part in the struggle for liberty, I waved those lines around like a banner in the wind:

  This is my own, my native land.

  When war struck this country, when neither pride nor belligerence nor grief had availed us anything, when we were uprooted, and scattered to the four winds, I clung desperately to those immortal lines:

  This is my own, my native land.

  Later still, after our former homes had been sold over our vigorous protests, after having been re-registered, fingerprinted, card-indexed, roped and restricted, I cry out the question:

  Is this my own, my native land?

  The answer cannot be changed. Yes. It is. For better or worse, I am Canadian.

  While I was reading, Uncle was leaning his head back and exercising his neck muscles. "Nisei, not very Japanese-like," he said.

  "Why should we be?" Aunt Emily said. "We're Canadian."

  All her life, it seemed to me, Aunt Emily toiled to tell of the lives of the Nisei in Canada in her effort to make familiar, to make knowable, the treacherous yellow peril that lived in the minds of the racially prejudiced. I pictured her as a young woman in Toronto, gradually getting more hunched as she sat over her typewriter, growing gray over the years, erasing, rewriting, underlining, trying to find the right mix that strikes home. Like Cupid, she aimed for the heart. But the heart was not there.

  Before I could finish more than a few pages of her manuscript she handed me an old scrapbook full of brown and brittle clippings. The headlines crackled as I read them aloud.

  "Bar Japs from B.C."

  "Claim Deportation of Japs Violates International Law."

  Some of the statements were underlined in faded blue-black ink.

  June 21, 1944. It seems highly disturbing that without debate and with agreement by all parties, the House of Commons adopted a clause in the new bill dealing with elections which will disenfranchise men and women of Canadian birth. This is Bill 135.... No other democratic country has such legislation.

  Words of Stanley Knowles (CCF Winnipeg North Centre) were circled.

  What is at stake here today is not so much the rights of Japanese Canadians who have moved from British Columbia to other parts of Canada, but rather the basic concept of democracy and our belief as a nation so far as our belief in the franchise is concerned.

  Mackenzie King's words were also marked.

  ...There would have been riots at the polls at the time of the election when any of those Japanese presented themselves for that purpose [to vote] and certainly it was taking the part of wisdom to see that nothing of the kind should take place....

  The thin wafers of paper were fragile with old angers. Crimes of history, I thought to myself, can stay in history. What we need is to concern ourselves with the injustices of today. Expedience still demands decisions which will one day be judged unjust. Out loud I said, "Why not leave the dead to bury the dead?"

  "Dead?" she asked. "I'm not dead. You're not dead. Who's dead?"

  "But you can't fight the whole country," I said.

  "We are the country," she answered.

  Obasan was not taking part in the conversation. When pressed, finally she said that she was grateful for life. "Arigatai. Gratitude only."

  Uncle, who had been listening tensely up to this point, relaxed his jaws and slapped his lap with both hands. "In the world, there is no better place," he said. "This country is the best. There is food. There is medicine. There is pension money. Gratitude. Gratitude."

  He was right, I thought. If Aunt Emily with her billions of letters and articles and speeches, her tears and her rage, her friends and her committees—if all that couldn't bring contentment, what was the point?

  "What energy," Uncle said good-humoredly and yawned aloud. ''Genki ga ii ne.”

  "Have to keep trying," Aunt Emily said.

  Uncle shuffled off to bed, leaving us in the kitchen. "A time to work. A time to talk. Now time to sleep," he said.

  "Good night, Uncle," I said. I would have gone to bed as well, but Aunt Emily was not sleepy.

  "Life is so short," I said, sighing, "the
past so long. Shouldn't we turn the page and move on?"

  "The past is the future," Aunt Emily shot back.

  eight

  Just at the last minute, before Aunt Emily walked out to the plane, she asked me if I really wanted to "know everything".

  “I’ll send you some of my correspondence and stuff. Would you like that?" she asked.

  "Sure," I lied.

  Now here I am this autumn morning, five months later, with her heavy package on my lap. Many of the conference papers she showed me last May are here as well as her diary and a bulging manila envelope full of letters. The side seam of the envelope is slightly torn and it bursts apart as I try to take out the contents. The pile cascades over my lap, falling onto the floor and into the plastic bleach bottle wastebasket beside me. Obasan bends over to pick up the letters and hands them open to me one at a time.

  There's a copy of a letter to Mackenzie King; one to Mr. Glen, Minister of Mines and Resources; one from General Headquarters of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers; another from H. L. Keenleyside, Deputy Minister of Mines and Resources....

  What, I wonder, was Aunt Emily trying to accomplish through all this correspondence? She was no doubt keeping the home fires burning and shouting "Democracy" to keep the enemy at bay. But all of this belongs to yesterday and there are so many other things to attend to today. All the details of death that are left in the laps of the living.

  Obasan is sitting on a mandarin box at my feet winding the twine from Aunt Emily's package onto a twine ball she keeps in the pantry. Obasan never discards anything. Besides the twine ball, there's a ball of string full of knots, a number of balls of wool bits, and even short bits of thread twirled around popsicle sticks that are stacked up like soldiers in a black woven box. The twine ball is larger than a baseball and slips off her lap, rolling a short distance along the floor.