Dan Fumano: '2020 is the time' for Japanese Canadians to 'grab' redress
Credit to Author: Dan Fumano| Date: Sun, 29 Dec 2019 21:17:36 +0000
The way Lorene Oikawa describes it, the goals of the spiral-bound publication she hand-delivered last month are somewhat more forward-looking and broad than the official title — “Recommendations for Redressing Historical Wrongs Against Japanese Canadians in B.C.” — might suggest.
“It’s about history, but it’s also about now. And it’s about our future,” Oikawa, president of the National Association of Japanese Canadians, said in a recent interview. “And it’s about all of us.”
Oikawa presented the report last month to B.C.’s Minister of Tourism, Arts and Culture Lisa Beare during a ceremony in Vancouver. Beare called the event “a very symbolic milestone for both the B.C. government and the Japanese Canadian community,” and it followed several years of efforts toward redress for the state-sponsored dispossession and displacement of 22,000 Japanese Canadians during the Second World War.
Now, Oikawa and other community leaders say 2020 will be a pivotal year in the long push for redress, which could involve measures including education, recognition and commemoration, as well as reclaiming seized properties.
“It’s been a long time coming,” Oikawa said. “2020 is the time. … Everybody sees this opportunity, and we just need to grab hold of it, and we are.”
That starts with a meeting in January between the NAJC and B.C. government representatives to discuss implementing the next steps.
After the January meeting, the NAJC will come back to the B.C. government, probably by April, with a more detailed proposal for moving forward with the recommendations in last month’s report, said Susanne Tabata, a director of the NAJC’s national executive board.
Tabata agrees next year will be crucial for redress efforts, she said, “because that’s when the government is really going to have to face these recommendations in some way.”
Judy Hanazawa, president of the Greater Vancouver Japanese Canadian Citizens’ Association, said: “2020 is really important. Now that the province has the report, we’re kind of waiting to see which kind of approach the province is going to take in responding.”
Hanazawa said the B.C. NDP government has been supportive of the process so far, including granting $30,000 last year to support months of community consultations to help produce the November report. But how they’ll actually respond to the recommendations, she said, remains “a big question mark.”
Judy Hanazawa and Maryka Omatsu in front of 269 Powell St. in the old Japan Town in Vancouver on July 18, 2019. Community consultations have been continuing throughout B.C. recently, looking at how the provincial government can make amends for the internment and dispossession of the Japanese Canadian community during the Second World War.
Municipal, provincial and federal governments worked to forcibly remove Canadians of Japanese descent from their homes during the Second World War, placing thousands in interment camps.
Although officials used the excuse of national security at the time to explain their actions, the wartime treatment of Japanese Canadians has come to be recognized as a racially motivated injustice for which all three levels of government have since formally apologized.
It was significant, Oikawa said in an interview this month, that Beare’s official statement that day acknowledged both that the provincial government, specifically, played a role in causing “significant harm” to the Japanese community, and that the harm was not limited to wartime, but also before and after the Second World War.
At the Nov. 15 ceremony, Beare called the interment of Japanese Canadians “a terrible stain on B.C.’s history, the impact of which is still felt by survivors and their family members.”
The November report‘s five “key recommendations” include a formal apology from B.C.’s premier, restoration and reclamation of cultural community spaces, the creation of a “community legacy endowment fund,” including Japanese Canadian history as a mandatory piece of B.C. public school curriculum, and taking “concrete steps to combat hate and racial discrimination.”
The last recommendation, about fighting racism, shows how the redress efforts are not only focused on wrongs of last century, but also look to the present and future. The report urges the B.C. government to develop “policies to counter growing incidents of hate-motivated actions and speech.”
People of Japanese ancestry departing by train for an internment camp in B.C. in 1942. — Library and Archives Canada
Official numbers support the idea that such incidents are on the rise. The most recent data from Statistics Canada shows that police-reported incidents of hate crimes had been increasing steadily but gradually for a few years before 2017, when they “rose sharply,” Postmedia News reported earlier this year.
Police across Canada reported 2,073 hate crimes in 2017, a 47 per cent increase over the previous year, StasCan reported, with incidents targeting the Muslim, Jewish and Black populations accounting for most of the increase.
It’s a sad reality that racism in B.C. did not end in 1949, when Japanese Canadians were finally — four years after the war ended — granted freedom of movement and allowed to return from exile to the coastal B.C. communities they called home before the war.
Hate probably won’t end in 2020, either.
But for Japanese Canadians whose families suffered past racism and dispossession, Oikawa said, “we feel this overwhelming responsibility, this need to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
When Oikawa hears rhetoric today about “those people” and “taking our jobs,” she said, she finds it frightening and “reminiscent of 1942.
“That’s the sad thing. In 1988, there was the (federal government’s official apology and) redress, and it was: ‘Never again.’ And yet, here it is, it’s going to be 2020 and it’s still happening. Not to us, but to other groups,” Oikawa said.
“Someone might say: ‘What do you care if it happens to Muslim, or Jewish or Indigenous people?’ But we’re all humans. And we don’t want anything that happened to our family to ever happen again to any group of people.”
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