Gambatte

David Tsubouchi

Description

Gambatte' means do your best and never give up and that spirit is at the heart of David Tsubouchi's life story. This memoir of the former Ontario cabinet minister begins as his family strives for acceptance amid the imprisonment of Canadians of Japanese descent and the confiscation of their property, possessions and businesses by the Mackenzie King Liberal government in 1941. Tsubouchi was the first person of Japanese descent elected in Canada as a municipal politician and, as an MPP, to serve as a cabinet minister.'

Sujets

• Histoire
• Canadá
• History of the Americas
• Canada

Informations

• Publié par: Ecw Press
• Date de parution: 01 juin 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781770903739
• Langue: English

Extrait

To my parents, Kiyoshi Thomas Tsubouchi and Fumiko Frances Tsubouchi, who faced adversity throughout their lives with dignity and perseverance and to all Japanese Canadians who shared this experience.


LEGACY
Rice paper thin
a shroud cloaks and
separates us from them.
A common tongue,
fading heritage
seldom spoken memories
all serve to heat the crucible.
We,
the children of the children
search for foreign characters
to define ourselves
and although the words are correct
and formal
they are not right.
Still we try.nbsp;.nbsp;. It will be the legacy of our children
And theirs.
David Tsubouchi


PROLOGUE

February 24 , 1942 , marked the day that shattered the lives of the Tsubouchi and the Takahashi families, as well as the day that destroyed the lives of every man, woman and child of Japanese descent living in Canada. The shock waves from that day continued on through my generation and will not stop until the Japanese Canadians cease to exist as an ethnic group as they intermarry and become assimilated into Canadian society. On that infamous date, the Mackenzie King Liberal federal cabinet passed an order in council under the Defence of Canada Regulations of the War Measures Act. That order gave the federal government the right to intern all “persons of Japanese racial origin.”
In plain language, that meant that every person of Japanese descent — most of whom had been born in Canada — were put into prison camps. The conditions were deplorable. Women and children were forced to live in uninsulated shacks. Several families were crowded together with a single pot-belly stove to heat the entire shack. Most of these people were city people unused to such rough conditions. The “lucky” ones were allowed to do forced labour on beet farms in Alberta. Some men were put onto forced labour crews building roads. The real “troublemakers,” the community leaders, were sent to a POW camp just outside Marathon in northwest Ontario.
When they were forced from their homes, no one would tell them where they were going, how long would they be away or even if they would ever return. Most of them assumed incorrectly that one day they would be allowed to return to their homes and the government would act as trustees for their homes, businesses, cars and possessions.
In 1943 , the Custodian of Enemy Alien Property sold everything that was left behind by the Japanese Canadians. The money that was realized from the sale of all their worldly goods was kept by the Canadian government and used to pay for the imprisonment of the Japanese Canadians.
Besides the general wrongdoing caused to the entire Japanese Canadian community, these events caused some very real tragedies in my family. My maternal grandfather, Chozo Takahashi, became the first Japanese Canadian to die as a direct result of the transportation. I believe that the illness that my mother contracted in the Lemon Creek internment camp led to her loss of a lung and her untimely and early death.
No Japanese Canadian was ever found guilty of any crime against Canada during the Second World War.
The full-scale incarceration caused several generations of Japanese Canadians to feel a real sense of alienation from their homeland of Canada and also from their identity and heritage. We didn’t fit in. Canadians did not view us as Canadians and we did not view ourselves as Japanese. We were told to fit in and assimilate. We spoke no Japanese at home and denied our own roots. We tried to be good Canadians, but we were standing on the outside with our noses pressed against the window.
My parents had never been to Japan. My parents were born in British Columbia, my father in Duncan and my mother in Vancouver. We never spoke Japanese at home because they didn’t want any of their children to have accents. We were to become Canadians. We needed to speak like Canadians, act like Canadians and, they hoped, be accepted as Canadians.
We were living contradictions. There were few visible minorities in Canada in the 1950 s and 1960 s, so as much as we were encouraged to assimilate, we were different.
As much as we had the veneer of being Canadians, inside our house there were many things that were not typically Canadian. We had bacon and eggs, and my mother would occasionally make spaghetti, but many of our meals would be considered exotic to our neighbours. We would eat chow mein for days. Mom would serve rice with the bacon and eggs. My mother’s attempts to cook her version of a Canadian meal were meals that I would have preferred to miss. We never ate hot dogs or Kraft Dinner. Our house even smelled different.
We went to the United Church, yet once a year we attended the Buddhist temple to show our respect for our grandfather.
Other than relatives, we had no Japanese Canadian friends.
Even growing up, I knew there was a connection to my past, but there was no way for me to express what it was. None of us can escape our past. We should celebrate and embrace it. The past is what makes us what we become, even if we are not aware of it.
Because of the attitude of my parents I adopted an attitude of optimism. I have always remembered my father saying that throughout his life and its challenges, he woke up every morning with one goal — to make life a little better for his family and himself. My mother, no matter how bad and desperate things got, always had an encouraging word and a hug.
There is a word in Japanese, gambatte , that literally means “do your best.” Culturally, it conveys a sense of love, like when a mother says it to her child before sending him off to school. Or it expresses a sharing of good fortune, as when someone is embarking on a new venture or trip. When the double disasters of the earthquake and tsunami devastated the Tohoku area of Japan in March 2011, people would say “Gambatte.” It symbolized hope and encouragement. It meant that the sun would rise again over Japan.
I was fortunate in that the feeling of gambatte was stronger in my life and my heart than my struggles with identity, but the struggles of my family have never been far from my mind and have inevitably shaped the course of my life.

CHAPTER ONE
The Tsubouchi Clan

My grandfather Hyakuzo Tsubouchi immigrated to Canada shortly after the turn of the last century. I remember my grandfather as large for a Japanese man of that time. He was about five feet, nine inches tall. He lived in Duncan, B.C., on Vancouver Island and worked in the bush as a lumberjack. My grandmother Ume Hisatsugu came to Canada just after the First World War. She added to the family income by cleaning the homes of wealthy white people. My grandparents Tsubouchi raised six children — my aunts Chizu, Nobu and Setsuko and my uncles Kenji and Eiji, and my dad, Kiyoshi. In the Tsubouchi household, my grandmother obviously had no difficulty producing children. She once jokingly said to me that she would jump onto the table, have the baby, jump off and get back to work.
My father’s middle name was Thomas. It was an acknowledgement by my grandparents that he was a Canadian. He was born on November 20 , 1921 . As in most large families, everyone had responsibilities. It was a humble household and everybody was expected to pull his or her weight.
My dad was the oldest male child and with that position carried more responsibility. Even as a boy, my dad reigned over his sisters. His brothers were much younger than the older sisters. In Japanese families the eldest son is held in great esteem; he will be the heir. This is significant even to a poor family. In Japan when a family had no male child, the family would arrange for a male from another family to be adopted so that the family name would continue. My aunts told me that when they were older, they all jumped when my father came home from work, and that he was an authority figure they obeyed. My Aunt Pat (Chizu) used to say, “Kiyoshi will be home soon — is the rice on?” That used to be the watchword. My father, on the other hand, said it was his three sisters who used to tell him what to do. As with most families, the truth is somewhere in between.
My father always took his responsibilities as the oldest son seriously and at an early age, during the Depression, tried to earn money to help out the family. My dad did any chore that he could get paid for. At the age of 11 , he decided that the way to make money was to become a caddy at the local golf club.
Every morning he would put on his painter’s hat (he did not own a real golf cap), walk down to the golf club and line up with the other boys hoping to be chosen as a caddy. Every night he would return home disappointed.
Unfortunately my dad had two strikes against him. He was the smallest boy and he didn’t look as if he could even carry a golf bag. The second strike was that he was Japanese, and in British Columbia at that time, there was considerable prejudice against both the Japanese and Chinese, who were seen as cheap labourers taking jobs away from “real” Canadians.
If there was one trait that my father had, it was persistence. I think this hard-headedness is a trait that all of his children inherited. He had a determination to succeed no matter how long it took or how many times he was rejected. The next morning he would return again.
My father told me that this had gone on for almost the entire golf season.
It was difficult for my father because he had to endure rejection and bullying and name-calling from the older boys, but the hope that he might get a job and be paid five cents to caddy, an enormous amount of money to my father, kept him coming back.
Some of his enthusiasm had been eroded by the older boys calling him a “dirty Jap” and telling him to go back to Japan, but he was used to this by now. He had earned his place to wait for w