Letters to my Grandchildren

by David Suzuki

  I’ve always been keen to inform people and raise the alarm about the misapplication of the rules of heredity. When the Nazis and Hitler came into prominence in the 1930s, Germany was a power in science and culture in Europe. Using genetics as the rationale, the Nazis enacted racial purification laws, according to which gypsies, Jews, and mentally unstable people were sterilized and ultimately exterminated in death camps. When the camps were liberated at the end of the war and the terrible slaughter, especially of Jews, was revealed, people reacted with revulsion to the grotesque consequences of extrapolating far beyond solid data. Although no new genetic insights had been gained, scientists reversed themselves and proclaimed that most of the traits deemed by eugenics to have been hereditary were shaped by the environment, not heredity.

  You may think this is all academic stuff that happened a long time ago, but it directly affected me and Nannai and Chinnai. The whole history of treatment of the First Nations, who had rich, diverse cultures and occupied all of Canada at the time of contact with Europeans, is based on racism—their assumed inferiority and backwardness. By imposing a completely alien system of treaties in a foreign language on the First Nations, British and French people took their lands, and promises made in those treaties were not lived up to by the colonizers. The whole thrust of the new government was to break the connection with the land and to inculcate the First Nations with British or French values. This process is shockingly described in Tom King’s book The Inconvenient Indian. The consequences of this policy to stamp out indigenous beliefs and values can be seen in every First Nations community in North America, as well as in the state of indigenous peoples in Australia, New Zealand, South America, and Africa.

  These assumptions about heredity and race had a direct effect on me when Canada imposed the War Measures Act in 1942. Because Japan had launched a “sneak attack” on Pearl Harbor, on December 7, 1941, it was widely believed that “treachery” was a racial trait of Japanese people, and even though we were Canadians, my family could not be trusted. All our rights of citizenship were suspended. Bank accounts were frozen. And eventually, we ended up in the British Columbia interior in a town at the foot of mountains that are now part of Valhalla Provincial Park.

  I was six when we took that long train trip from Vancouver. For me as a kid, it was a grand adventure and I wasn’t aware that all the other passengers on the train were Japanese. What chokes me up is knowing that my parents were just in their early thirties, and their world, their hopes, and their dreams were dashed when they were suddenly considered enemy aliens of their birth country. From then on, they were subject to decisions made by politicians and bureaucrats in the nation’s capital of Ottawa or the provincial capital of Victoria and were helpless to do anything about it.

  My father had volunteered to go to a road camp near Revelstoke, where they were building the trans-Canada highway. He thought that by volunteering, he would indicate his good intentions and save his family from being sent away to camps. But he was mistaken. While he was in a camp taking care of the horses used for logging, we, his family, were being held in the remote Slocan Valley.

  A story that I can’t tell without crying is about the time Dad was injured by a log that rolled over his leg. Because of the injury, he got a pass from the camp doctor to leave camp. Now remember, he was born and raised in Canada and had only been to Japan for a month when he was a boy, but he was a prisoner. Armed with a piece of paper enabling him to leave camp (the doctor assumed he wanted to go to a nearby village), he took a bus to Nakusp, a town where he could get a ferry across Upper Arrow Lake to Slocan City, where we were staying. It was called a city because it had boomed during the silver rush of the 1890s, but when the rush was over, it became a derelict village of decaying buildings. Dad didn’t want to attract attention to himself in Nakusp and get caught, so he found a hotel to stay in but didn’t go out to eat. In the morning he boarded a ferry.

  By the time the ferry started, he hadn’t eaten for a day and was very hungry. He smelled food on the boat and found a kitchen, where he spotted a Chinese cook. In the 1930s, Japan had invaded Manchuria and China, and the bitter enmity between the Japanese and the Chinese had carried over to Canada. Dad’s heart sank when the cook saw him and called out to him to come in. Dad was sure the man was going to sound the alarm and report him. “You’re Japanese, aren’t you?” the cook asked, and Dad nodded. “Sit down and eat,” the cook said. “We’re all brothers.” He served Dad a big meal and handed him a sandwich to take with him after he had eaten—no charge. That act of kindness was courageous as well as generous, and I will be ever grateful to that man, who saw through the racial hatred and treated my father as a fellow human being.

  When Dad got to Slocan, he had no idea where we were living, but he knew that there was still no school and that my sisters and I would probably be somewhere near a playground. He could hear children playing, and sure enough, Auntie Marcia, Auntie Aiko, and I were there. Dad called out to us, but because he had been working outside for several months, he was heavily tanned and had lost a lot of weight. I didn’t recognize him. But Marcia recognized his voice and immediately ran to him. Dad always got emotional when he talked about the moment we ran into his arms.

  Mom was delighted to see Dad, of course, but she was working as a secretary for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police—the Mounties—and was afraid they would catch him. So the next day at work, she confided to one of the officers that Dad had taken a big risk to visit her and asked what he should do. The officer said he wouldn’t tell anyone but that Dad should skedaddle back to the camp. So two days after arriving, Dad left to go back to the road camp. A few months later he was allowed to return to Slocan and stay with us. My sister Dawn was born nine months after his first visit.

  In the camp, most of the kids were nisei and were fluently bilingual. I couldn’t speak any Japanese, so they picked on me. Many of their parents were angry at what the government had done to them and must have talked about hoping that Japan would give Canada a drubbing. I was so clueless that I didn’t understand why we were in the camp or even that there was a war going on. To my parents’ credit, somehow they shielded us from their anger and fears and difficulties. But for the first time, I experienced bigotry—in the way other Japanese Canadian kids treated me, because I only spoke English. I felt like an outcast in the village and preferred to stay away from the other kids. But it was a fantastic place to be a child who didn’t have a school to go to. I spent hours and hours wandering around the lake, fishing in the creek, and hiking up the mountains. Remember, we had no telephones or radio, and television had yet to be invented.

  You all know my dad was an avid fisherman, and one of his pride and joys was a revolutionary reel he had bought before the war—a spinning reel. Most people had never seen one before. Dad had taken it to the road camp and then brought it with him to Slocan. We were forbidden to fish or have a camera, but Dad fished and also had a camera (I have no idea how he got film or had it developed). In early spring, whitefish would come close to the shore in huge numbers to spawn. They would blacken the bottom of the lake, occasionally flashing silver as they turned on their sides. Whitefish are wonderful eating, with a firm, pale flesh, and Dad had an idea for catching the fish—he would put a treble hook on the line, and a white rag on the hook so that he could see it and snag the fish. His idea worked like a charm because there were so many fish.

  Once I was posted as a lookout for the Mounties as Dad and a friend hauled in fish after fish, but I got so carried away by the action that I forgot to watch out. Someone reported us (Dad thinks it was a jealous Japanese person), and a Mountie came right up from behind and nabbed us. As he walked us back to our apartment, he admired Dad’s spinning reel. “Pretty nice outfit,” he mused. “I’ve never seen one of those. You know, it would be a shame for me to confiscate it. Why don’t you tie a hook on a line and wrap it around a stick and I’ll turn that in.” It was an incredible act of generosity on the officer’s part and helpe
d ease a lot of my pain at failing to do my job. Because of that act of humanity, I’ve always had a soft spot for the RCMP.

  So it pains me, Tamo, to see the way you were treated by them when they arrested you for protesting the Kinder Morgan pipeline at Burnaby Mountain, especially since they deliberately pulled you across the line in order to seize you. And then you were harassed by another Mountie, who accused you of deliberately jumping across the line and attacking the officer—it was such a trumped-up story, it took my breath away. I am disappointed that the rcmP doesn’t understand that its high standing has to be earned. It seems that every time there’s an accusation of wrong-doing on the part of government, police, or corporations like pharmaceutical, fossil fuel, chemical, agro-, or forestry companies, the initial response is always denial rather than an immediate concern that they might be real and a commitment to get to the truth.

  But to get back to the war years . . . As you might expect in a country at war, food was scarce. As a group suspected of having connections with the enemy, and having been sent to a remote part of the province, we did not receive great food. Rice was constantly in short supply, and I believe Dad’s prowess at fishing made an important contribution to our diet. But this remote valley had also attracted Doukhobors, Russians who had been persecuted for their religious beliefs and had fled to Canada to live and worship as they wished. They had chosen this remote place so that they would be left alone. They were superb farmers, and I remember Doukhobor men visiting us in their horse-drawn wagons laden with fresh vegetables—a welcome addition to our diet, though I have no idea how my parents raised the money to buy them. But I think the Doukhobors empathized with us because of how badly we were treated, and I’ve always been grateful to them for their role in feeding us.

  The main job of parents is to shield their children from the difficulties and realities of the adult world, and in that, Mom and Dad succeeded amazingly. We felt loved and protected, and the environment around us was a constant source of wonder and joy. We didn’t know that as the war was coming to an end, British Columbia sensed an opportunity to get rid of one of its “yellow peril” threats. The province urged the federal government to offer us two choices: sign an agreement to give up Canadian citizenship for a one-way trip to Japan—a foreign country to my parents, my sisters, and me—or leave British Columbia and move east of the Rockies. As you might imagine, people in the camps were pissed off at how we had been treated, and many decided to express their anger by signing up to go to Japan. In fact, some leaders of this movement urged people to sign up and intimidated those who didn’t. Dad wanted desperately to stay in British Columbia, but that didn’t seem to be an option. One night he came home looking very sad and told my mother that he thought we should go to Japan. I yelled that I didn’t want to go. We couldn’t speak Japanese, and we were Canadians. I threw myself on the bed crying hysterically. It wasn’t an act; I did not want to go. Perhaps Dad was just testing us, but the next day, he said we would stay in Canada. I learned much later that my parents had been branded inu (dogs) and shunned, as more than 90 percent of people were convinced or coerced into signing to “repatriate” (though most would be going for the first time, not repatriating).

  Those signing on to stay in Canada were soon sent to staging sites in preparation for being moved out east. My family was sent to Kaslo, in the Kootenays.

  The tight communities from Japantown in Vancouver and from the fishing village of Steveston were broken up by the evacuation and postwar dispersal of Japanese Canadians, who showed their resilience and resourcefulness in settling in communities across Canada. The economic recovery and success of the Japanese Canadians, their high academic performance, and their assimilation as seen in a high rate of intermarriage are often cited as a positive consequence of the evacuation and dispersal, but ends never justify the means. For me, the history of how Canada treated Japanese Canadians during World War ii forces us to ask, what is this country, and what does it mean to be a citizen?

  ON APRIL 4, 1968, the great U.S. civil rights leader Martin Luther King was assassinated. In the agony that followed his death, students at the University of British Columbia organized an outdoor gathering in his memory and asked me to speak. I talked about how fortunate the civil rights movement had been to have such a powerful leader as King and promised that the struggle would continue. Then I said that King’s death should not make us feel smug but should remind Canadians of our own history of racism, from our treatment of the original peoples to the Japanese Canadian evacuation and incarceration. An editorial in one of the local newspapers chastised me for bringing up the Japanese experience when it had nothing to do with the kind of racism that had led to King’s assassination.

  I also received a letter from a woman from a prominent BC family telling me that the threat from Japan during World War ii had been very real and that the government had had to act to reduce the danger. I wrote back that although she looked at me and saw a Japanese person, I and my family were all Canadians, born and raised here, so Japan had been my enemy too. It was racist to assume that because I was genetically identical to Japanese people in Japan, I too should be treated as the enemy.

  After the war, Japan rose like a phoenix to become an economic powerhouse, and names like Sony, Toyota, and Canon became familiar around the world as icons of the country’s enormous industrial creativity. As a result, I found that being Japanese no longer elicited the kind of prejudice we had lived with before and during the war. But bigotry still exists, and it reflects closed minds, ignorance, and fear of difference. If we witness an act of discrimination but do not speak up or intervene, then we tacitly support it.

  I once met a Chinese Canadian woman who lives in a Vancouver neighbourhood where there is a pocket of First Nations people. This woman, who had herself experienced bigotry against Chinese, described Native people in a stereotypical way, which I challenged. To my surprise, instead of admitting it might be bigoted to characterize all Native people the same way, she continued to justify her opinions on the basis of her personal encounters with First Nations individuals. When those who are victims of discrimination become bigots themselves, then bigotry triumphs.

  I hope that all of you will speak out against racism and other forms of bigotry whenever you encounter it.

  {three}

  FORGOTTEN LESSONS FROM THE GREAT DEPRESSION

  MY LOVELY ONES,

  Another evil to be fought against is greed. Tamo, Midori, and Jonathan, do you remember the financial crisis of 2008? Your parents probably shielded you from it. Banks and other financial institutions nearly collapsed, the stock market took a nosedive, and many people lost their homes or their savings. The only reason we weren’t plunged into a stock market crash and a full-blown depression was that U.S. president Barack Obama injected hundreds of billions of dollars into the teetering banks that had created the crisis, to keep them afloat. A full-blown depression would have caused unimaginable suffering around the world, but we in the rich countries would have had it the worst because so few of us have any idea how to be self-sufficient. It would have been a huge comeuppance for societies like ours, which live as if we can and must grow forever in order to serve our constant demand for more stuff. We would have received a much-needed lesson in humility and would have had to reassess what life is all about.

  A major depression did occur during the lives of your great-grandparents, my parents. In 1929, people were trying to get rich quick, not by producing innovative products, but by speculating on the stock market. Just as miners in the nineteenth century hoped to get rich by striking gold, people in the 1920s hoped they could get rich by buying stock that they thought would suddenly shoot up in price. The result was an inflated market, but no real value was added to the economy. When people began to fear that the banks might shut down, they panicked and pulled their money out, triggering the crash that led to the Great Depression. I am sure it was far more complex than this, but this is my layperson’s simplified history. The Great
Depression of the 1930s lasted for years and was a painful time. Stories abound of people who had made millions suddenly becoming paupers and jumping out of windows. People “rode the rails,” hitching rides on trains to search for jobs. I remember Dad telling me how he travelled from town to town in British Columbia on top of trains and how people died of suffocation from coal smoke as the trains wound through long tunnels. He would stop in “hobo jungles” where one could find pots and pans and people to share meals, and farmers would grow extra rows of vegetables so that people passing through could feed themselves before moving on in search of work.

  Back then there were no social safety nets, such as welfare or unemployment insurance or government-funded health care. There were “soup kitchens,” where people could get food, but most people struggled to get by. Family and community were absolutely necessary to survive those times. During that terrible crucible of suffering, my parents became adults, got married, and had a family. You can imagine the kind of lessons that the experience of this time etched into their lives and that then were passed on to us, their children.