Although the movie The Vancouver Asahi was not commercially successful in Japan, its creation bore another unexpected fruit: The New Asahi Baseball Team was formed in Vancouver by Japanese Canadian children. The team collected enough donations to fund a trip to Japan in March 2015. The team visited and played against teams in Ashikaga City in Tochigi Prefecture (where the filming took place), Yokohama in Kanagawa Prefecture, Ohfu in Aichi Prefecture, Tenri in Nara Prefecture, and Notogawa in Shiga. The families of the original Asahi members gathered in Yokohama and Notoga-wa, and some of the unclaimed medals were presented during these visits.
The Yokohama reunion was attended by Chinami Kaminishi, a jazz singer and a relative of Kaye Kaminishi in Canada. Chinami is actively in-volved in the peace movement in Hiroshima through her music, and she has incorporated Kaye’s Japanese Canadian experiences in her poetry and song lyrics (Kaminishi, A Thousand Cranes). Chinami heard the story from Kaye about his experience in wartime Lillooet, British Columbia, where one of the self-supporting Japanese Canadian relocation camps was located. Based on the story, she wrote “The Vancouver Asahi and the Bridge of Hope” (Ka-minishi, Bankuubaa Asahi Gun). The same story of white residents and Jap-anese Canadians who established warm relationships through playing softball together is also told in Canada through books and a documentary film (Hotchkiss 179–180; Osborne).
Conclusion
Japanese scholars of Japanese Canadian history and culture have long known that historical materials related to Japanese overseas migration remain to be discovered in Japan. However, because ex-migrants are reintegrated into the Japanese nation-state and are not organized, it is difficult to find individual return migrants other than through personal connections. Communities such as Kaideima and Hassaka in Shiga and Mio in Wakayama have pro-duced many emigrants to Canada. However, these close-knit communities are not necessarily approachable to outsiders, and until recently, prefectural or municipal governments had not been enthusiastic about excavating or preserving the history of migrants. The stigma attached to the notion of emigration has discouraged former migrants from speaking about their ex-periences even to their children and grandchildren. But as the exex-periences of overseas Japanese are popularized through novels, TV, and movies, the atmosphere surrounding these ex-migrants has shifted toward the positive.
The generation who had direct contact with the migrant generation is now rigorously searching for their family history. If this chance is missed, it will be extremely difficult to gather information about the deportees from Canada in Japan as the generation who experienced migration and those who directly knew such people will be gone. The remarkable economic develop-ment in postwar Japan prevented further emigration, and the traumatic and dishonorable war memories have generated collective amnesia among the Japanese citizens about their nation’s prewar overseas colonies and inter-national migration (Oguma 343–348). It is only recently that the general pub-lic and the mass media in Japan have become interested in prewar overseas Japanese experiences. Family archives are mounds of treasure, but through generational transitions, artifacts get lost, and personal memories disappear.
Under such circumstances, the task of preserving transnational Japanese and Canadian histories has gained urgency. The Asahi connection has provided a remarkable opportunity for researchers to access private archives.
The inclusion of return migrants expands the scope of Japanese Canad-ian historiography and the subjects considered in it. While nisei deportees were victims of racial expulsion from Canada, their lives after the deporta-tion from their native country reveal stories of struggle and survival in their ancestral community in Japan, which involved simultaneous acceptance and alienation. For those who left Canada before World War II, the return to Japan brought them various fates. Some became part of Japan’s imperial ag-gression in Asia and the Pacific. Some survived the war while others did not, as the war affected residents in Japan in more directly physical and violent ways than it did civilians living in Canada. The prewar returnees’ lives, on the other hand, illuminate the migrants’ agency in making choices over where to pursue their livelihood.
It is a task of historians concerned with human rights to retrieve voices of those who cannot speak for themselves and write for the rights of all who are destitute. The resurrection of the Asahi story in Canada and Japan recon-nected families dispersed and distanced from each other by the ocean as well as by silenced memories of exclusion, deportation, and war. Digging up and narrating such “microhistories” of individuals remains an arduous task. But sharing such histories as the Kaminishis’, for example, which connects Kaye’s story of bridging racial gaps through baseball games and Chinami’s singing about a thousand cranes in Hiroshima, may help give voice to the subjects of violence that transcend national boundaries.
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