Cbr17bingo citizen
Over the years, I have read a number of books that have dealt with the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. George Takei’s They Called Us Enemy and Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic and When the Emperor Was Divine were all written from personal, family experiences of that shameful chapter in US history that was left out of history books when I was in school (and is probably being removed from them now). I had never heard of Joy Kogawa’s Obasan, a novel about the Canadian experience of Japanese internment, until author Esi Edugyan referred to it in a By the Book interview for the New York Times. Kogawa is one of her “Canadian authors to read,” and I figured this would be an interesting perspective on the internment. I expected that the Canadian experience would have been, somehow, better? More humane? I did not expect that our neighbors to the north would be able to give the US a run for its money in the racism department. This book is devastating to read but also very timely, given the appearance of ICE concentration camps in the US. This is the kind of book everyone should read once. I don’t know if I could read it a second time.
Obasan is told from the point of view of Naomi, or Nomi, from a vantage point in the mid-1970s in Alberta, Canada. Naomi is in her 30s. She, her brother Stephen and her parents were born in Canada, and Naomi has memories of childhood in Vancouver, British Columbia. While her family had a nice home and extended family nearby, not all of Naomi’s recollections are happy. She was sexually molested in her childhood, which contributes to her silent, introverted nature, as did anti-Japanese sentiment in Canada on the eve of WWII. Naomi’s mother and grandmother sometimes went on trips to Japan to visit relatives, and in the months preceding Pearl Harbor, they had gone there and were consequently unable to return to Canada when the war started. The fact that they were Canadian citizens meant nothing to the Canadian government. Obasan is the story of Naomi’s childhood trauma, her brother’s, and all Japanese Canadians’, as well as the actions Japanese Canadians had to take in order to survive WWII and the years afterward.
Naomi prefers not to think of her past, but the death of her Uncle and her return to her post-war childhood home in Alberta force her to confront it. Obasan is “aunt,” and Naomi’s Obasan is quite elderly and in poor health. Obasan and Uncle Sam raised Naomi and her brother during the war and after. Naomi’s aunt Emily, her mother’s younger sister, was able to move to Toronto at the beginning of the war, and has lived there ever since, but Emily has become a crusader to force Canadians to confront what they did to her community during the war. When Sam dies, Emily sends Naomi a box full of letters, newspaper clippings and a diary related to the campaign to destroy the Japanese Canadian community and strip them of all rights, despite their citizenship. Emily kept a diary, in the hope that one day she would be reunited with her older sister and be able to tell her everything she missed about Naomi and Stephen’s childhood. The diary shows the increasing hatred and violence that Canadians exhibited toward the Japanese community. Unlike US anti-Japanese policy, Canadian policy forced men away from their families and into work camps. Emily details the rapid construction of internment centers in Vancouver where women, children and the elderly are forced to live in filthy, unlivable conditions. Curfews are imposed on Japanese Canadians. Stephen is bullied and harassed at school. Naomi, who is just 5, does not understand what is going on, but one day they have to pack up what they can. She, her brother and Obasan must board a train to an abandoned mining town far from home. This is where they spend the war.
The descriptions of the growing hatred toward Japanese Canadians, the squalid living conditions, the destruction of families, and Japanese Canadians’ efforts to endure and build new communities is hard to read. Even when the war is over, the trauma does not stop. Unlike in the US, where Japanese Americans were allowed to travel back to their home communities after the war (even though all of their properties — homes, farms, etc— were gone) and try to rebuild, Japanese Canadians were forbidden to return to their coastal communities. They were either “repatriated” to Japan (where many had never lived) or they had to move inland to farming communities where they worked in the fields. This is what happened to Naomi and her family. The conditions in Alberta were absolutely horrendous, worse in some ways than what they had experienced during the war. The Canadian government destroyed Japanese Canadian communities with a frightening precision.
Reading about these atrocities is hard but necessary, as they are the truth about what Canada did to its own citizens. But this novel is also about the ways in which Japanese Canadians responded to this trauma. While Aunt Emily becomes a crusader for Japanese Canadian rights and the truth, Naomi, Stephen and Obasan do not necessarily share that spirit. In going through Emily’s box of information, they have to confront what happened to their family and find a way to go forward. I found it devastating to read.
While Obasan is a work of fiction, Joy Okagawa did experience the crimes that the Canadian government perpetrated against its own citizens during WWII. The book was published in 1981, and in 1988 both the US and Canada made token reparations to those whom they had interned. Obasan a powerful book and I highly recommend it. As tragic as it is, knowing the truth is important and should spur us on to fight against the injustices that our government is committing right now.