Masumi Izumi
O
n a drizzling late afternoon on September 29, 2014, in downtown Van-couver, over a hundred Japanese young women anxiously lined up in front of the Centre for Performing Arts. The Red Carpet ceremony cel-ebrated the world premiere of the film The Vancouver Asahi at the Vancouver International Film Festival (Ishii, Bankuubaa no Asahi). The film’s director, Yuya Ishii, along with two lead actors, Kazuya Kamenashi and Satoshi Tsumabuki, were greeted with loud shrieks and waving hands. When the theater opened, it was filled with a larger crowd of English-speaking Asians of diverse genders and ages. They were Japanese Canadians, descendants of Japanese immigrants who came to Canada mostly before World War II. The film was a fictional representation of the true story of nisei (second-generation Japanese Canadian) baseball players and their issei (first-generation) and nisei fans in pre–World War II Vancouver. Before the show started, one el-derly man walked onto the stage and stood next to the director and the ac-tors. It was Kaye Koichi Kaminishi, the last known survivor of the former Asahi ballplayers. He played in the team’s last years between 1939 and 1942 before it was disbanded due to the mass removal of Japanese Canadians from the west coast. Kaminishi greeted the audience in Japanese and thanked the director and everyone involved in the film production for trying to make the Asahi story known in Japan. Kaminishi received big cheers and heartfelt admiration from those in the theater.During the making of The Vancouver Asahi, its producer consulted scholars of Japanese Canadian history and elders in the community. The director and actors, however, had no contact with the actual subjects of the
story—members of the Japanese Canadian community who nurtured and cherished the baseball team. Perhaps because of this limitation, the movie lacked an urgent sense of storytelling or a compelling universal appeal to humanity. Despite its star-studded casting and abundant budget, the movie failed to achieve box office success after its release in Japan in December 2014. Director Ishii, a 2013 Japan Academy Award winner for his film Fune o Amu (English title The Great Passage), was more successful in depicting the psyche of youths in present-day Japanese society (Ishii, Fune o Amu). The opportunity to popularize the story of Asahi and historical experiences of Japanese Canadians among the general public in Japan was unfortunately missed.
Yet the release of The Vancouver Asahi produced an unintended result.
It connected Japanese Canadians and scholars who study them to a former-ly unknown group of subjects in the story, nameformer-ly the families and descend-ants of the former Asahi members who had returned to Japan before World War II or those who were deported shortly after the war and did not return to Canada. Following World War II, after excluding all persons of Japanese racial origin from the west coast, the Canadian government forced Japanese Canadians to choose between “repatriation” after the war and immediate relocation east of the Rockies (Sunahara 113–124). Those who could not im-mediately move east signed up for repatriation. At the end of the war, the majority of the approximately ten thousand people who signed up for re-patriation wished to stay in Canada, but the Canadian government refused to consider revocation of repatriation requests. After significant public crit-icism, the government eventually allowed revocation so those who wished to stay in Canada were allowed to do so (Bangarth). Those who chose to leave, which ended up to be about four thousand, were shipped to Japan in 1946.
Their Canadian citizenship was stripped away when they embarked the ship, even though for many nisei, it was the first time they were to set foot in Japan. Thus, this policy is considered more of a “deportation” rather than
“repatriation” (Sunahara 101–113). In this paper, I use the term returnee for those who had left Canada and remigrated to Japan before World War II and deportee for those who left Canada through the “repatriation” program in 1946. The returnees and deportees were severed from the Japanese Canadian community for almost seven decades, and their existence had been un-known since the Asahi was suddenly erased from the history of Canadian popular sports, along with the memory of a vibrant ethnic Japanese com-munity in prewar British Columbia.
This chapter first documents the Asahi story from the team’s birth to its dismantlement in 1942 and the community’s recovery of the team’s history since the 1990s. This story is important as it shows Japanese Canadians’
adaptation to anti-Asian racial hostility in British Columbia, and because baseball not only united the Japanese community in Canada composed of
people with diverse class, religious, and ideological affiliations but also pro-vided a common ground where the Japanese and Caucasian players and fans could share enjoyment of the game. The later sections of this chapter eluci-date how families and descendants of the former Asahi players in Japan con-nected with each other after the film’s release and how such fortuitous reconnections led to the inclusion of the returnee/deportee stories into Jap-anese Canadian historiography.
The detention, dispossession, dispersal, and deportation of Japanese Canadians during and after World War II are among the most systematic state violence inflicted on a racial minority in Canadian history (Izumi,
“Japanese Canadian Exclusion”). Twenty-two thousand people of Japanese descent living on the west coast were displaced from their homes, were banned from free movement, had their property confiscated, and were dis-persed across the country. During the war, they were forced to live in horse stalls, wooden shacks and barracks in ghost towns, or barns with low-quality water on the sugar beet fields in the prairies. The government of British Columbia abandoned their responsibility for Japanese Canadian children’s education. It was on top of this that four thousand were deported from their country of birth or of long-term residence. Although between one thousand and two thousand of the deportees eventually returned to Canada, an un-known number of them permanently settled in Japan in the postwar period (Kobayashi, Demographic Profile 51). Through the reinterpretation of Cana-dian history, which was an incremental process that developed as CanaCana-dian diversity increased since the 1960s, and through the Japanese Canadian Re-dress movement in the 1980s, those who stayed in or returned to Canada had a chance to speak of their wartime experiences and the longer history of anti-Asian movement in British Columbia. However, those who never re-turned to Canada did not have a chance to break their silence, as they were literally removed from the history of the nation.
Inclusion of the deportees’ stories expands the subjects of human rights in Japanese Canadian history beyond familiar themes of anti-Asian dis-crimination and exclusion within North America. The reconnection of re-turnees and deportees among each other as well as to the Japanese Canadian community adds important new pieces of information to Japanese Canadian historiography and about the Asahi experience, which contains stories of migration, resilience under discrimination, cross-racial interactions, and era-sure and recovery of a vernacular community history. The returnees’ experi-ences that have been uncovered in Japan involved military service in the Japanese imperial army, the atomic bomb, survival in a war-torn country, and the reintegration of transnational subjects into an ethnic-based imagi-nary of the Japanese nation after World War II. These stories need to be re-covered now because the descendants of transnational subjects who are searching their family histories are the last generation of people who had
direct contact with the migrant generation, and the memories and records of these migration experiences will be lost forever if not preserved at this time.