Lecture 1994-12-12

Japan in Canadian Culture

Dr. John Howes

On the initiative of Canadian diplomat Timothy Skye, the December meeting was held in the auditorium of the Canadian embassy, and hosted by Mrs. Catherine Campbell, wife of Ambassador Donald W. Campbell. The speaker was the noted Canadian Japanologist Dr. John F. Howes, and his subject was "Japan in Canadian Culture". Our President, Dr. Ronald Suleski, opened the meeting by expressing our appreciation for being invited to one of the loveliest embassy buildings in Tokyo and greeting the other persons present at the embassy's invitation, and then proceeded to a number of announcements, beginning with the sad news of the death of Council member Alfred Smoular. He then gave the floor to Mrs. Campbell to introduce our speaker.

Dr. Howes began his presentation by saying that he proposed to give instances of the influence of Japan on Canada as gleaned from five decades of research. There were two monuments in Vancouver, B.C. which typified these influences. One was the cenotaph in Stanley Park, which commemorated the Japanese immigrants who fought for Canada in World War I. The second was the memorial garden to Nitobe Inazoh.

The first Canadian to encounter Japanese culture was Ranald MacDonald, who was born in 1824 at what later became Astoria, Oregon, at the mouth of the Columbia River, and died on an Indian reservation near Spokane, Washington, seventy years later. When a young man, he made his way to Japan and became the first English teacher here. What we know of his life is contained in his diary, which was not published until nearly thirty years after his death. His father was an officer of the Hudson's Bay Company, which could reach the Pacific coast by water with just a few portages. His mother was the daughter of an important Indian ruler, but she died soon after he was born, and he grew up thinking his father's second wife was his own mother, until he was refused by a girl he proposed to, on the grounds of his race. After going to school in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and working as an apprentice in Ontario, he travelled down the Mississippi, and then became a sailor and, after a number of voyages, sailed to Hawaii in 1845, and eventually to the west coast of Hokkaido in northern Japan. There, in August 1848, he asked to be set adrift in a small boat. He was picked up and taken under guard to Nagasaki in southern Japan, where he was kept in confinement until he could be sent home on the next Western ship. For seven months he acted as teacher to a class of fourteen interpreters, the best of whom later interpreted for Commodore Perry. MacDonald was always grateful to the Japanese for their generous treatment of him, and Japanese sources confirm that he behaved as a gentleman (unlike other sailors who had been washed up) and appealed to the common humanity of the Japanese. Various entries in his diary indicate his belief in the dignity of all individuals and his respect for all those with whom he came in contact.

He cannot be said to have exerted any influence from Japan on Canadian culture, but the same cannot be said of the next group of people that Dr. Howes spoke about, the Canadian missionaries. By the time MacDonald died in 1894 the Canadian Pacific Railway was running, and steamship lines linked Canada to Yokohama. The missionaries came to spread their faith, but the scale of their activities also affected secular history (and even dietary habits - we are told that Canadians first introduced apples to northeast Japan). The three "Eiwa" schools, in Tokyo, Shizuoka and Kofu, were pioneered by Canadian missionaries, and Canadians participated in founding St. Luke's Hospital, Tokyo Women's Christian College, and International Christian University. Notable names in the early days were Daniel Norman in Nagano, and Percival Powles in Niigata. The missionary activity in Japan was supported by the rapid increase in disposable income in Canada, and the growth of reliable means of transportation (the quickest route from London to Japan was by way of Canada). Early missionaries, such as Duncan Macrae in Korea, who defended his many converts against the excesses of Japanese colonial administrators, and Martha J. Cunningham, who helped establish Shizuoka Eiwa School for Girls, were supported individually by church members at home, and later missionaries were financed by mission boards, which developed as part of the Protestant missionary movement. These boards channelled the donations of individual church members, and examined those who presented themselves as candidates for the mission field. Missionaries worked six years "in the field", and then had one year's furlough at home; this year was not a rest, however, as they had to make the rounds of the various congregations supporting them.

The relevance of the missionaries to Dr. Howes' theme lay firstly in the knowledge about Japan that they imparted to their supporters. Down to the 1930s the reports sent from missionaries and published by the mission boards provided the greatest volume of information on Asia available anywhere in North America. Their visits to local communities while on furlough gave the people there their only direct information about life in the rest of the world; the missionaries were not only the best show in town, they were the only show, and gave their audiences the sense of participating personally in exciting and worthwhile ventures.

Canadian missionaries were highly educated. Many were university graduates, and other members of their families would be well connected in government or big business, so that missionary letters sent home would also go to architects of national policy. The children of missionaries also frequently rose to positions of importance; until recently the Canadian ambassadors to China were all the sons of missionaries. Percy Powles' son Cyril became Professor of Japanese History at the University of Toronto. Daniel Norman's elder son, Howard, continued in his father's footsteps as a missionary, and during the war served on a number of committees to better the conditions of Japanese interned in Canada. The younger son, Herbert, had a brilliant career which ended in tragedy. From the Canadian Academy in Kobe he proceeded to Toronto, Cambridge and Harvard Universities. His doctoral dissertation at Harvard, published in 1940, served as the principal textbook for the Occupation authorities after the war. He became the Chief of the Canadian Mission under MacArthur, and impressed everyone he met with his brilliance, charm and hard work. He became the first postwar President of the Asiatic Society of Japan, and early in 1948 presented a paper on "Andoh Shoh'eki and the Anatomy of Japanese Feudalism" at a meeting held in the Canadian ambassador's residence (still without heating, is the radiators had been requisitioned for scrap). Unfortunately, perhaps because his success created jealousy among his colleagues, he was branded as a communist sympathizer. Eventually he was cleared of all the charges, and appointed to mediate the Suez crisis of 1956-57, but was again accused of being a communist. Concerned that the accusations might endanger the negotiations, Norman took his own life. But his achievements remain as a testimony to the effectiveness of his missionary upbringing.

The third cultural contact between Japan and Canada was associated with the events connected with World War II. During the 1930s the major influence of Japan on Canadian culture came from the Institute of Pacific Relations. This was founded in 1925 by missionaries and businessmen who foresaw the possibility of hostilities between Japan and America, and hoped to avert them. Membership was open to individuals who were not diplomats or government officials, and biennial conferences were planned, the major ones being in Kyoto in 1929, Shanghai in 1931 (just after the Japanese invasion of Manchuria), and Banff in 1933. The Banff conference presented the Japanese with the last opportunity to make their case for the occupation of Manchuria. The man chosen to do this was Nitobe Inazoh, fluent in the major European languages, with an American Quaker wife and five years' experience as Undersecretary of the League of Nations. When he came to Banff at the age of 71, events had already gone beyond the point where individual efforts could have any effect. Shortly after, he fell ill and died in Victoria. Canadian friends erected a stone lantern in his memory at the University of British Columbia, and this was incorporated into the Nitobe Memorial Garden after World War II.

In 1941 a Canadian contingent of 2,000 was sent to shore up the defences of Hong Kong, but they were captured on the way and used as labourers for the rest of the war. The bad treatment of prisoners of war has often been used to justify the internment of Japanese in Canada during the war. But the heart of the problem was the fact that the Canadian authorities at that time were unaware of the distinction between first- and second-generation Japanese; anybody with a Japanese name was considered a Japanese citizen and thus an enemy alien to be treated according to the conventions of international law. British Columbia, where 20,000 Japanese resided, did not grant full citizenship either to Japanese who became Canadians or to the children of Japanese who wore born in Canada. This attitude had a historical basis. The first immigrants came in the 1870s as labourers. In the early 20th century they began to bring over their wives, and soon were prosperous berry producers. Their children went to the regular schools, but also attended special Japanese schools. In so doing, they were only following the example of European immigrants in wishing to keep their old customs alive, but were never integrated in the way the Europeans were. They wore barred from most professional groups, did not have the vote, and were segregated in public facilities such as theatres.

The Japanese tried to work to acquire full citizenship by showing their devotion to Canada; thus a number volunteered to fight in the First World War. But their way was barred by a few racist politicians, notably Ian Mackenzie, a Member of parliament from Vancouver, who constantly lobbied during the war for the permanent removal of the Japanese from the west coast. Early in the war a Japanese submarine lobbed a few shells at a Canadian lighthouse. This started an anti-Japanese panic, and all Japanese were "relocated" - forced to move 100 miles further east. Most of them landed up in primitive quarters in old mining communities high in the Rocky Mountains, and it was not until 1943 that they had managed to improve their living conditions. All their property was sold off, and they received very little recompense. Some were allowed to move further east, on condition that they not return to British Columbia. This period saw the emergence of differences between the immigrants and their children, and the entry into English of the terms issei and nisei. The issei still felt strong ties with Japan, which were made all the stronger by the discrimination they were suffering, while the nisei felt themselves to be Canadian. The greatest contribution of Japan to Canadian culture has come with the success of the nisei in establishing their rights in accordance with the Western constitutional tradition. As a minority of only two-tenths of one percent of the population, they have manoeuvred the Canadian government into a public apology for wartime actions, pronounced by prime Minister Mulroney in 1987, and created a powerful precedent for other minorities who may face discrimination later. They also obtained considerable repayments to each of the individuals who had suffered. Even so, the nature of the problem has not always been clear to Canadians, as evidenced when Prime Minister Trudeau apologized in Tokyo for what he thought Canadians had done to the Japanese in World War II, rather than apologizing to the Canadian citizens of Japanese descent, ironically so, when he was so concerned about the rights of the French Canadian minority.

Part of the impetus for the "Redress Movement" has come from the literary works of a number of Japanese Canadians. The first work to appear, in 1971, was "A Child in prison Camp" by Shizue Takashima, in which she gave a charming account of life in an internment camp. In 1980 the diary of Takeo Ujo Nomura, a labourer who had ended up in the only camp in which the Japanese were treated as prisoners, was published posthumously by his daughter. In it he tells how he later joined his wife and daughter in Toronto, and finally took out citizenship, his emotions about which he penned in a "tanka" poem which won a prize in the Emperor's poetry contest. The one outstanding writer is Joy Kogawa, whose works, "Obasan" and "Itsuka", describe the relocation and the redress movement. The two works together show how the Japanese character traits have merged with Canadian values to reinforce the fabric of Canadian society. Though Kogawa was not a political activist, her work provided much of the momentum behind the redress movement. A stronger challenge to the Canadian majority community was provided by Muriel Kitagawa, who pointed out that racial discrimination of any kind hurt the aggressor as well as the victim. Dr. Howes also mentioned two other persons whose writings were directed more closely to swaying political opinion, Roy Miki and Judge Maryka Omatsu.

Japanese Canadians had also been active, he said, in other professions, such as architecture. Raymond Moriyama was the architect of the building in which the ASJ meeting was being held, in designing which ho had been affected by his memories as a boy in internment camp. Donald Matsuba had converted the one-storey Sanyo pavilion at the Osaka Expo of 1970 for use as a three-storey building at the University of British Columbia by sinking the other storeys underground and lighting them with a sloping garden. The efforts of the nisei to heal the wounds caused by the relocation reflect Japanese values combined with a faith in the Canadian political process. On the other side of the community, William Allister, who spent the war period in a prison camp in Hong Kong, describes in his memoirs, "Where Life and Death Hold Hands", how in the succeeding decades he worked his way from bitterness to reconciliation with his captors through the medium of painting.

In conclusion, Dr. Howes said that Ranald MacDonald, the Canadian missionaries and the Japanese Canadians had each in their own way enriched Canada.

After a short question time, Dr. Suleski thanked the speaker and also offered the Society's thanks to Mrs. Campbell, Timothy Skye and all the staff of the Canadian embassy who had contributed to making the evening such a success. The meeting was followed by a reception, and an opportunity was also given to see the exhibition "Masters of the Arctic: Art in the Service of the Earth" held in the adjoining gallery.