My maternal grandmother Tabata passed away from cancer in 1980. Grandfather Tabata passed away before I was born and unfortunately I never learned much about him. From what I know, both of my Tabata grandparents were from Wakayama and immigrated to Canada in the 1910’s. Grandfather Tabata was a fisherman and the family lived in...Continue reading
Learning About Internment
Both sides of my parents’ families were interned during the war. However, since three of my grandparents passed away before I was even 10 years old, I never really had much opportunity to speak to them about their experiences. My paternal grandmother was the only one who really remembered the internment years and she lived...Continue reading
“Where Did You Come From?”
I think that most Canadians/Americans judge or assess people by their appearances first, thus for me it has always been the quickest and easiest to identify myself as Japanese or Japanese Canadian. As there were very few Asians in Coquitlam when I was in primary school, many people would ask, “Where did you come from?”...Continue reading
Post-War Racism
When I asked my parents about their internment experiences, neither of them recalled much since they were both so young during the war. As very small children, neither of them felt particularly traumatized by their internment experiences but they most certainly saw and dealt with plenty of racism afterwards. This racism towards JCs persisted for...Continue reading
Parenting
While both of my parents said they didn’t feel consciously traumatized by their internments, both of their families were quite poor before, during and after the war. My mother’s parents felt that the best way to escape poverty was for their kids to go onto post-secondary education and pursue well-paying jobs using their brains rather...Continue reading
What to take and what to leave behind
When I taught ELL at a secondary school, one of the oral assignments I used to give was to ask students to talk about 3-5 important things they would bring to their new homes. Now as I think about my parents and the evacuation and how difficult this must have been for my family and...Continue reading
Returning to Steveston
When I was 11 my family moved from Montreal to Steveston. My father was a fisherman and didn’t want to commute from Montreal anymore. I remember how shocked I was walking down Moncton Street and seeing so many Japanese people. I had never seen so many, it felt like being in a foreign country. As...Continue reading
“Senso no mae”
My grandparents and my parents had a unique timeline. “Senso no mae” referred to their life before the evacuation and somehow, they never really had a word or phrase they used for the evacuation. Painful memories-best to forget??
Steveston property
When I see the house on the corner of 4th Avenue and Chatham I recall the story I was told about my Jiichan who once offered to buy my grandmother that particular house which still stands to this day. Perhaps that was a good call on my grandmother’s part because they would have lost it...Continue reading
The Future
In the last two years, I was fortunate enough to be able to participate twice online in the Japanese American pilgrimages to incarceration sites. There were 9 weeks of insightful videos, movies and online experiences of the concentration camps as well as healing circles to participate in. I shed many tears as I journeyed through...Continue reading
Japanese Canadians and Contemporary Issues
Some may think that an apology doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things, but it does. It recognizes a wrong. The way the media and some politicians have framed and blamed the pandemic on “the Chinese” in particular have such parallels to the persecution of Japanese Canadians during WWII, it is frightening. It matters...Continue reading
The Sato Gene
Most of what I learned of the internment was briefly taught in school, and from the MJCCA. The suffering and loss was not described in a personal level in my family. I learned much of my family’s involvement as an adult, but we had always held on to things, and loathed to waste, keeping careful...Continue reading
growing up, work in progress
I believe efforts to shield the young nisei during the internment and assimilate after didn’t allow for emotional vulnerability for the issei, impacting relations between generations in my family. My relatives encouraged me to participate in my culture from childhood, as they yearned for the opportunity when they were younger. It was our duty as yonsei...Continue reading
Growing Up, Family, Parenting
I remember always being encouraged by my family to participate in KJCA activities, such as odori, taiko, and language classes. My grandparents were delighted that I was able to do a high school exchange in Osaka. Overall, I spent my childhood very culturally connected to the Kamloops Nikkei community. It’s difficult to trace the legacy...Continue reading
Incarceration, Dispersal, and Dispossession
In my early teens, I took a tour through incarceration campsites. It was the first time I was able to contextualize my grandparents’ wartime lives; during the time when they should’ve been planning their futures, they were instead forced to exist in limbo for years. I don’t think it’ll ever be possible for me to...Continue reading
family historian
My great grandparents passed away while my father was still young, so I had little idea what kind of people they were, or what relationship they had with their nisei children. For a long time, to me, they were just “the ancestors from Japan”. I think it was similar for my Dad and his siblings,...Continue reading
COVID-19 and Racism
The pandemic and subsequent rise in anti-Asian sentiment is just the most obvious way in which racism still permeating our society has revealed itself in the past few years. I think there’s an undeniable commonality with the WWII incarceration. Although COVID-19 is a different beast than a global war, “Asianness” continues to be the way...Continue reading
Intermarriage
While all my family members from my grandparents’ generation, as far as I am aware, married within the Japanese Canadian community, almost all members of my father’s generation intermarried with non-Japanese Canadians. I followed suit and also married someone outside the community. I think this high rate of intermarriage is undeniably a partial product of...Continue reading
Biography, Self-Identity
Name: Nicola Akiko Tabata Pronouns: She/her Birthplace: New Westminster, Canada DOB: in 1994 Life Events: Graduated with BA Philosophy and Sociology 2018, Taking MA International Relations/Political Science (2019-present); married 2019 Identify as Japanese Canadian Whenever I am asked the question “What are you?” I, like many people of colour, have learned that the asker is...Continue reading
Intergenerational Trauma
I can’t pinpoint any specific ways I feel intergenerational trauma has presented itself in my family; however, I think that’s probably a sign that the concept of intergenerational trauma is still often not discussed or taken seriously in the present day. Maybe if I had grown up with intergenerational trauma in my conceptual toolkit, I...Continue reading
Family History
Every time I think about my family history, I come to realise just how much I’m missing. What I do know comes largely from questions put to my grandmother when I was an adult, and so much of my grandfather’s life remains a mystery. My grandmother was born in Vancouver, where her parents owned a...Continue reading
What is your family’s history from your perspective?
My ancestral lineage is rooted for centuries in the lands of Shizuoka and Hiroshima. I’ve visited both of those lands and felt those deep roots in Japan. I felt and can still feel that those roots are ancient, strong and steeped in family, cultural, and religious traditions. Whereas my families’ attempts to root in Canada...Continue reading
Rapids and Replica
It’s not the 1940s, but a whole slough of inheritance, littered with dead leaves and charged with memory, weighed in greyscale, nets cast and prey caught, hundreds upon hundreds upon thousands of voices, each curing the others in moonlight, quicksand, some arc of cello, languid and long, half stretching and half succumbing, just letting itself...Continue reading
Topping sugar beets
Words like “topping” and “thinning” were used often when my family would talk about working in the sugar beet fields. I never really thought about what they really meant until I went on the sugar beet trip in 2019. Someone demonstrated how the tops of the giant beets were hacked off using the very large...Continue reading
First winter
My mom’s family are story tellers. Family gatherings and dinners would usually end up with them talking about their past – growing up in pre-war Steveston and then the war years in Turin, Alberta working the sugar beet fields. And their stories would often include some humour which would result in much laughter. I think...Continue reading