by David Suzuki
He was also a dreamer. His parents were constantly nagging him to go out and make money and save for a home and security. As the eldest in a family of seven children, he was expected to be a role model for his brothers and sister, but he wasn't the kind his parents had in mind. He was not afraid of work and labored hard to earn enough to buy the necessities in life, but he didn't believe that we should run after money as an end in itself. He taught us it was bad manners to talk about money with others; we learned to pity the person who bragged about money, new cars, or fancy clothes. Dad loved fishing and gardening, and he was fascinated by plants. To my grandparents, he was a failure, and they constantly berated him to do better, but to me, he was my great hero and role model.
Dad loved to go on fishing, camping, and mushroom-hunting trips in the mountains, where he often encountered First Nations people. He would easily strike up conversations and often ended up being invited for dinner or to stay with them. In the mid-1960s, when he had returned to Vancouver, he became close friends with a Native family near Boston Bar along the Fraser River. On fishing trips he would often stop off to stay with them, and when they came to town, they and their children would drop in to visit and stay with him and Mom.
Once, I accompanied him on a trip to hunt for matsutake, aromatic pine mushrooms that are highly prized by Japanese. On that trip, I met this First Nations family. I was surprised at how uptight I was in contrast to my father, who felt right at home. I, a young professor in genetics, had never met Native people and only knew about them from snippets in the media. I knew nothing about Dad's friends or their background, and I didn't know how to relate to them in conversation. Dad was relaxed and simply accepted them as people who shared his interest in fish, trees, and nature, so he easily raised subjects of mutual interest about which they could converse for hours. But I felt alien and was especially afraid I might say something that would be insulting or patronizing. I was overwhelmed by the fact that they were Indians, and I never allowed our basic humanity to be the main point of interaction. They probably wondered about this guy who had a great father but was too snooty to say much.
Dad's great characteristic was that when he met people, he was totally open, because he was genuinely interested in what they could tell him about their experiences and their world. Naturally, people loved him, because everyone loves to talk about him- or herself, and he was a terrific listener. I realize now that he automatically exhibited the quality that First Nations people tell us is so critical in order to communicate: respect. It would be a long time before I realized how much our shared genetic heritage—that is, our physical features—made First Nations people immediately more receptive to me.
Mom was a traditional Japanese wife, never arguing with or contradicting Dad in front of us or company. Her entire life was circumscribed by work. She was the first up in the morning and the last to go to bed at night, but I never heard her complain or nag my father. She took care of the family's finances, and as each of her kids began to babysit, waitress, or do farm work or construction, all of our earnings went to her. We didn't get an allowance; Mom and Dad bought our clothes, books, and other things we needed and from time to time doled out a little change for a treat, but I was never overwhelmed by a need for anything. I never acquired an interest in clothing fashions, perhaps because my parents bought my clothes for me. To this day, my wife tells me I don't know about color coordination when my socks clash with my shirt, something I still can't figure out. What on earth has the color of my socks got to do with the color of my shirt?
Mom's greatest gift to me was her unfailing interest in what I was doing. My sanctuary as a teenager when we lived in London was a swamp, and I would go home soaking wet, often covered in mud, but triumphantly brandishing jars of insects, salamander eggs, or baby turtles. She never scolded me but would ooh and aah over each little treasure as she helped me take off my clothes so that she could launder them.
Marcia and me on our first day of kindergarten, September 1941
In Vancouver, our next-door neighbors were the McGregors, steadfast friends to my parents. Their youngest son, Ian, was my playmate. The issue of race is not something I remember from those carefree days. On my first day of kindergarten, in 1941, I happily undressed to my undershorts in front of all the parents and without any sense of self-consciousness climbed onto a table to be examined by a doctor, although my parents told me later they were embarrassed that I undressed in front of the white parents.
The rest of my childhood memories are filled with fishing and camping excursions with Dad. We would make trips past Haney, then very rural but now on the eastern outskirts of Greater Vancouver, to fish in Loon Lake, a small lake so full of trout that most were stunted, growing to perhaps seven or eight inches at best. That's where I caught my first trout, for a limit of fifteen, while Dad practiced his fly-fishing. Today Loon Lake is part of the University of British Columbia's Demonstration Forest.
On other occasions, we would drive out to the Vedder Canal near Chilliwack in the Fraser Valley, where Dad arranged for horses so we could ride several miles upstream and camp. I was always fascinated that we could let the horses go at the end of our ride, and they would find their way home. Dad would catch steelhead and Dolly Varden trout as we fished down the river. The first time we went, I accidentally slipped off a rock and into the water. Looking up at Dad, I expected him to chastise me to be more careful. Instead, he told me to go ahead and jump into the creek and have fun—with my clothes on! It was wonderful.
Thinking back on my childhood, I understand that children live in a world of their own making, a fantasy life of real experiences, dreams, and imaginings that are jumbled together in the early state of coalescence into the filtering lenses through which we will see the world as adults. Even as an elder, I find those recollections changing as, more and more, I find my “memories” really are created by priceless photos, like the one of me dripping wet, rather than actual recall of the events.
Buffered from the world by my parents, I didn't know Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on December 7, 1941, and I didn't sense any fear or consternation in Mom or Dad. Many years later, my father told me that when he heard the announcement of the attack, he immediately went to a barber and had his hair restyled into a crew cut, which he retained for the rest of his life. “I knew we were going to be treated like ‘Japs,' so I figured I might as well look like one” was the way he put it. Cutting his hair was an act of both defiance and submission to what he knew was inevitable. The treachery implicit in Japan's “sneak attack” against the United States Navy and the terrible war that followed threw my family and some twenty thousand other Japanese Canadians and Japanese nationals into a turbulent sequence of events, beginning with Canada's invocation of the iniquitous War Measures Act, which deprived us of all rights of citizenship.
In 1941, Canada was still a racist society. In Prince Rupert in northern British Columbia, First Nations people existed under conditions akin to apartheid in South Africa: they were not allowed to stay in most hotels, they were refused service in restaurants, and they were forced to sit in certain designated sections of theaters. There were also prohibitions against any First Nations person in pubs. (My uncle Mar, who was quite swarthy, was once asked in a bar what tribe he was from. He replied, “The Jap tribe.”)
Canada boasts of its high ideals of democracy and all the rights that are guaranteed by its Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but many have been hard won—for example, the right of visible minorities to vote, own property, attend university, or even to drink in a pub—and some have yet to become part of the accepted rights of all citizens. Even today, we are grappling with the recognition that gay people, transsexuals, and hermaphrodites as human beings deserve full legal rights, including the right to marry. Canadians have been prepared to fight and die for those principles. Yet by invoking the War Measures Act in 1942, the government declared that race alone was a sufficient threat to Canadian security to revoke all rights of citi
zenship for Canadians of Japanese descent.
One of the terrible dilemmas of democracy is that only under conditions of duress or crisis do those cherished rights even matter, but that's when they are often rescinded in the name of national security. What good are high ideals if we guarantee them only when times are good? We now know there was not a single recorded case of treachery among Japanese Canadians during the war, despite the conditions to which they were subjected.
But to the white community we looked different; we looked just like the enemy and thus deserved to be treated like the enemy. Most Japanese Canadians were totally loyal to Canada, and many young Japanese Canadian men signed up and willingly fought and died for Canada. Sadly, the evacuation of Japanese nationals and Canadians from the coast of British Columbia and their incarceration in internment camps generated enormous resentment within the community, and many Japanese Canadians gave up citizenship and abandoned Canada for Japan after the war. Under the War Measures Act, property was confiscated and sold at bargain-basement prices, possessions were looted, bank accounts were frozen, and people were warned they would be removed from coastal British Columbia, where they were thought to pose a threat. Within months we were sent to other provinces or relocated to hastily constructed camps deep in the interior of B.C.
As a child, I was not aware of any of these events apart from our relocation, and I can only marvel at how my parents shielded us from the turmoil they must have undergone. Much later, as a teenager, I realized that we—Japanese Canadians—had not been deemed worthy of full membership in the nation. It was an alienation not so much from my country, Canada, as it was from Canadian white society. In my teen years, my identity was based on the consciousness that in the eyes of white Canadians, I was Japanese first, Canadian second. All my life as an adult, my drive to do well has been motivated by the desire to demonstrate to my fellow Canadians that my family and I had not deserved to be treated as we were. And if that was the psychic burden I carried as a result of our experiences during the war, just think of the consequences for First Nations people from the terrible treatment they have been subjected to since first contact.
Of course, Japanese Canadians still held strong ties to Japan. Like those of English heritage who had lived in Argentina for generations yet felt enormous turmoil when Britain attacked the Falkland Islands, the Japanese who came to Canada (called Issei, or first generation) still had family and friends back in the “old country.” Like all immigrant people, the first generation of Japanese-heritage kids born in Canada (called Nisei, or second generation) had to grow up without grandparents or an extended family here. This was a sharp break from traditional values surrounding family and elders, and Issei were especially concerned about the loss of those values. As a Sansei (third generation) born of Canadian-born parents, I did have grandparents living in Vancouver and saw them regularly, but, being unilingual, I was almost as cut off from them as I would have been had they lived on the other side of the Pacific. Most of those among the first wave of Issei were like my grandparents: desperately poor, lacking formal education, and in search not of freedom or democracy but of opportunity. They accepted the bigotry they encountered and the restrictions on their entry into society. The War Measures Act consolidated their belief that in Canada, equality and democracy didn't apply to everyone, only to certain privileged racial groups.
Ironically, it was in the internment camps that I became aware of the pain and irrationality of discrimination, and from the Japanese Canadian community at that. It was my first experience of alienation and isolation, and it gave me a lifelong sense of being an outsider. Soon after Pearl Harbor, my father had volunteered to go to that road camp where Japanese Canadians were helping to build the Trans-Canada Highway. He had hoped that by volunteering, he would demonstrate his good intentions, trustworthiness, and willingness to leave his family as hostages to ensure his continued good behavior, therefore ensuring we would be allowed to remain in Vancouver. But it wasn't to be. I am amazed that somehow my parents, still in their early thirties, were able to shield my sisters and me from the pain, anger, and fear that must have threatened to overwhelm them, as the only country they had ever known branded them enemy aliens who could not be trusted.
One day in early 1942, my father was gone. Yet I don't remember feeling any anguish leading up to his sudden departure, nor during the prolonged absence of the one male in my life, who also was my best buddy, hero, and role model. Left with three young children, my mother had to sort through our possessions, winnowing the necessities from everything else, which then had to be sold, given away, or discarded before we made the long train ride to our eventual destination in the Rocky Mountains. I didn't wonder why everyone on the train was Japanese. I just played games with Martha Sasaki, whose family was seated next to ours, and we had a delicious time.
Our destination was Slocan City, a ghost town. Built during the silver rush of the 1890s, when thousands of people mad with silver fever flooded into the beautiful, isolated Slocan Valley, the town was abandoned when mining declined. Now another wave of people poured into the mountains. I found myself surrounded by hundreds of other Japanese Canadians housed in rotting buildings with glassless windows. We lived in a decaying hotel that must have been quite impressive when Slocan City was booming but had become so derelict that I had to learn to avoid the hazardous floorboards on the porch that encircled the building. My mother, my two sisters, and I were placed in one of the tiny rooms, which were still reeking from past generations of occupants, and we would wake each morning covered in bedbug bites. Cleanliness for Japanese is like a religion, and I can imagine the revulsion my mother must have felt in those first weeks.
The massive upheaval, movement, and incarceration of twenty-two thousand Japanese Canadians who were supposed to be a threat to the country posed an immense logistical challenge. Camps made up of hastily thrown together tents and shacks were soon filled. Food had to be supplied by a nation already preoccupied with war across the oceans. There were shortages, especially of trained personnel like nurses, doctors, and teachers. There was no school for the first year, and for a kid suddenly plunked down in a valley where the rivers and lakes were filled with fish and the forests with wolves, bears, and deer, this was paradise.
I had lots of time to play. One of my playmates was a girl named Daisy, who was about my age and who had ended up in Slocan along with her Japanese Canadian mother. Her father was a Caucasian who was serving in the army, defending the democratic guarantees denied his family. Daisy was one of the few kids I felt comfortable playing with, but she was set upon cruelly by the other children, who would reduce her to tears by taunting her as an ainoko, which can be roughly translated as “half-breed.” She was my friend, and I would never participate in harassing her, but I have felt shame that I didn't have the courage to stand up to the others and defend her. Years later, when we were teenagers, I met Daisy in southern Ontario. She was breathtakingly beautiful but filled with rage toward Japanese Canadians for the torment she had experienced in the camp. I understood the terrible psychic repercussions of discrimination, because I too was on the receiving end of that prejudice.
Although Dad had been taken to Japan for a month when he was about five, Mom had never visited that country. They were Canadians. Both my Nisei parents were bilingual, but they spoke English at home
Displaying my catch (with unidentified man) at Beatrice Lake in what is now Valhalla Provincial Park
unless they didn't want us to know what they were saying. Almost all the other children in the camps were Nisei, so they were fluently bilingual and could switch into Japanese at will. I as a Sansei didn't speak Japanese and often could not understand what they were saying. Because of my linguistic deficiency, I was picked on by and isolated from the other children.
About a year after we arrived in Slocan, a school was built in a settlement called Bayfarm, perhaps a mile away. I had to knuckle down and start in grade 1. I loved school and was a good student. Dad and Mo
m would grill me on what I had learned each day, patiently listening to me prattle on. I thought what I had to say was riveting, but now I know their quizzing was a very effective way of going over lessons and helping to correct or guide me along.
I was seven when I enrolled in grade 1, but I was soon skipped through three grades and passed into grade 4 in a year. My father said that at one point I seemed to lose interest in studies and began to complain about having to go to school. He and Mom were very worried, because our education was one of their highest priorities, so one day Dad decided to go to the school to find out what was going on. As he walked along the railroad track that connected Slocan to Bayfarm, he saw a group of kids in the distance chasing a boy. It was winter, and there was a thick blanket of snow on the ground. The victim would slip and fall and the kids would catch up, kicking and hitting him as he struggled to his feet to flee again. The boy was me. Mercifully, I have no recollection of that particular mode of harassment, although I do remember much taunting in the school yard. It took a long time for me to overcome my mistrust and resentment of Japanese Canadians as a result of the way I was treated in those camp days.
White kids we saw rarely, and those we did encounter were Doukhobors accompanying their parents, who visited the camps to sell fresh fruit, meat, and vegetables. I am ashamed of one incident in which I took part as a result of ignorance and childhood stupidity. I have always felt grateful to the Doukhobor farmers, who perhaps were motivated in part by their own memories of repression and injustice in Russia, but to me at that time they seemed alien and mysterious as they rode into Slocan on their laden, horse-drawn carts. One day, a chum told me a “bad word” in Russian, giggling as he made me repeat it until I had it memorized. We didn't know what it meant, and I have no idea how he knew the word or even whether it was a curse or a sexual term. We leaned out of a second-floor window when a farmer's cart came trundling down the alley and stopped below us. My friend and I shouted out the word. When the farmer ignored us, we kept chanting until he picked up the knife he used to cut the tops off vegetables, shouted something at us, and climbed off the wagon.
