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
Category: Yonsei
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
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
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
identity: the struggle is me
A yonsei in the Canadian prairies, reclaiming and preserving Japanese heritage was a principle I grew up with, but it often felt external and performative; how I am seen, as opposed to how I see; what I learned to do with my community rather than what I knew to do at home. Being mixed race,...Continue reading
How I Identify
If I tell someone I am "Japanese", their picture forms immediately.Continue reading
Incarceration, Dispersal, and Dispossession
My family is from Kumamoto (on my Dad’s side) and Fukuoka and Hiroshima (on my Mom’s side). They then moved to New Westminister (on my Dad’s side), Pitt Meadows, and Maple Ridge (on my Mom’s side). Eventually, they ended up on farms around Lethbridge. My grandparents definitely did not talk about what happened. On my...Continue reading
Family History
I don’t know many details about my family history. What I do know is that my family on both my mom and dad’s side were put on farms and not in camps — that’s how we ended up in Southern Alberta. Our history is pretty fuzzy for a couple of reasons: people didn’t want to...Continue reading
The Void (Incarceration, Dispersal, and Dispossession)
While I was certainly made aware that the incarceration, dispersal, and dispossession of Japanese Canadians occurred and that my family was affected by these events, I have never felt as though I feel how I should feel about it. Perhaps the previous thought requires further unpacking… For better or for worse, the treatment of Japanese...Continue reading
We are not free until we are all free
My Nikkei community – do you remember your outrage, your parents or grandparents outrage when you were forced from your homes and shuttled off into deplorable living conditions or to war-ravaged Japan? Do you remember how you felt when your family was torn apart? When the uncertainty of their wellbeing kept you up at night?...Continue reading
We are still lost
I don’t speak Japanese. The war took the urge from my grandparents to pass it down to my father, and to me. I am mixed-race. The war discouraged my father’s parents from settling in neighbourhoods with other Japanese. His stories of internalized racism are not mine to tell. But they are no less real. We...Continue reading
Barrel of shiner eggs
When she and I visited Ucluelet for the first time since 1942, my Bachan told me so many stories. One I would like to share is about her job. She was only about 14 when the evacuation order came. She had been working at a cannery for “shiners” as she calls them, beheading and gutting them for piece-meal pay.Continue reading