1While the growing body of criticism on Canadian literature has already devoted a great deal of attention to certain aspects of the enforced removal of 21,700 Japanese Canadians from their Pacific Coast homes during the Second World War, the narratives about their peculiar kind of journey have not been analyzed as examples of travel writing.1 Instead, the works concerning what has been rightly called ‘the largest mass exodus in Canadian history’ have generally been considered within the contexts of autobiography and fiction, or more precisely, ‘historiographical metafiction, ’ which was defined by Linda Hutcheon as ‘fiction that is intensely, self-reflexively art, but is also grounded in historical, social and political realities.’2 Scholars in the field have focused on a wide range of issues, including those related to political effectiveness, nationalism, multiculturalism, racism, stereotyping, family relationships, gender, the power of memory, irony, and the specific communicative skills based on the paradigmatic dichotomy of speech and silence. However, the literary treatment of the actual journey eastwards has not yet received the careful scrutiny it deserves.

2As the rhetoric of travel writing traditionally derives elements from pragmatism, ethics and aesthetics, it is quite common to observe how the components coming from such disparate or even antagonistic sources often collide with each other. But, far from clashing, all three kinds of constituents tend to fuse and become complementary within the narratives depicting the decreed mass removal of Japanese Canadians during World War II. Indeed, Canadian writers of Japanese ancestry have simultaneously combined pragmatic, ethical and aesthetic purposes when dealing with this extremely arduous transportation experience. They have invariably adopted a pragmatic approach that stresses— rather than contradicts—reciprocally reinforcing ethical and aesthetic values. By emphasizing the qualities of beauty, pleasure and harmony that are essential features in any artistic creation, such authors have both stimulated moral reflection on the part of their audience and strengthened the practical efficacy of their factually grounded works of fiction.

3All these writers are eager to provide accurate representations of the traumatic journey they were forced to undertake when, following the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the Canadian government issued an Order-in-Council to remove all persons of Japanese origin from a 100-mile ‘protected area’ along the coast of British Columbia and to relocate them in the interior of the province and in Alberta.3 Although many similarities can be noticed whenever these narratives are compared, it becomes clear that they are far from being uniform, because their authors have chronicled the same events analyzing them from various perspectives, and have focused on different aspects of their ordeal. Their literary texts are marked by the categories of genre, gender, and ethnicity, as well as by the personal circumstances and attitudes of each individual writer.

4Date and place of birth are important factors to be taken into account when contrasting how these writers reacted to the cruel treatment that was inflicted upon them during their uprooting and compulsory resettlement, first in the interior of British Columbia and, later on, east of the Rocky Mountains. Some of these authors were adults, whereas others were still youngsters when the events occurred. Grown-ups were already familiar with racial hatred, tended to be more aware of the dangers concerning their situation, and had a better capacity to articulate their thoughts and interpret complex facts. On the contrary, most little children were excited to undertake a train ride that they imagined as a holiday adventure.4 Furthermore, there is a correlation between the age of the writers and the time when the actual composition of their texts took place, a period ranging from the war years to the late twentieth century. Most of the older authors wrote very close to the events, sending letters with recent news to their homes, recording episodes in their diary entries on the spot, between 1941 and 1944, or composing memoirs shortly after the War. Consequently, their points of view differ from the innocent-eye or naïve perspectives that characterize novels inspired by scattered and blurred childhood memories, recalled several decades later.

5As for the disparities motivated by the place of birth of these writers, it should be noted that, among the people of Japanese origin living in Canada during World War II, strong discrepancies arose between the ones born in Japan and those born in Canada, the former being first-generation immigrant workers and the latter being their children, many of whom had never set foot in Japan. The first-generation immigrants, called Issei, had been raised on traditional Japanese values such as strong loyalty to the Emperor, unquestioning obedience to one’s superiors in rank or authority, duty towards one’s group and country, stoic endurance and verbal restraint. The second generation, called Nisei, had to face the enormous challenge of assuming a double identity, both Japanese and Canadian, at a time when the two countries were at war. Unlike their parents, they spoke English fluently, had learnt the principles of democracy, and were outraged when they were stripped of their civil rights in Canada, a country they considered to be their own. In his autobiography, The Life-History of a Japanese-Canadian Fisherman, Ryuichi Yoshida clearly explained how the two generations reacted to their banishment: ‘The Issei were quiet but some Nisei were furious, protesting that it was unfair to treat them that way when they were born here.’5

6First-generation Japanese-born Issei immigrants such as Koichiro Miyazaki (1902-1978), Kensuke Kitagawa (1895-1974), Kaoru Ikeda (1875-1946) and Genshichi Takahashi (b. 1904) experienced the evacuation from the Pacific Coast personally when they were adults with family and professional responsibilities. The memoirs, diaries and letters they wrote in Japanese were finally translated into English and collected by Keibo Oiwa in the volume entitled Stone Voices: Wartime Writings of Japanese Canadian Issei (1991). These four authors had in common an explicit allegiance to their native land, for which they expressed intense longing. They called themselves Japanese rather than Japanese Canadians, and easily understood why they were regarded as enemy aliens by the vast majority of Canadians. In her ‘Memoir’ of the three years she spent at the Slocan ‘relocation camp’ (which was not exactly a prison camp), Kaoru Ikeda stated that she felt like a ‘Japanese taken prisoner in an enemy country’ (1994: 124), and openly wished for Japan to succeed and restore her lost dignity. Koichiro Miyazaki and Kensuke Kitagawa, two men incarcerated in prison quarters for refusing to quietly comply with the Canadian government orders, also hoped for the victory of Japan over the Allies. The prospect of repatriation to Japan, whether accepted or rejected, made sense to them. On the other hand, Muriel Kitagawa (1912-1974), a second-generation Canadian-born Nisei, was thoroughly committed to Canada, and felt betrayed when her own government branded as ‘enemy aliens’ all Japanese Canadians, regardless of their nationality, thus discriminating against a minority group of Canadian citizens just because of their ancestry. For her, as for all Nisei, the so-called ‘repatriation’ to Japan would have meant in fact ‘expulsion’ or ‘deportation’ to a foreign country. Kitagawa makes it clear not only in her poem ‘Weep Canadians! ’ which was inspired by a newspaper headline, ‘Rule Some Japs Deportable, ’ but also in her letters entitled ‘Canada is Our Choice’ and ‘Deportation is a Violation of Human Rights.’6

7Roy Miki’s introduction to Muriel Kitagawa’s posthumously published papers begins with a long quotation from a notebook in which she described how she felt on leaving Vancouver by train, saying good-bye to all those who went to the station to say their farewells: ‘I had the queerest sensation of living in some fantastic dream as the train slowly moved out of the station’ (1985: 1). This impression of being driven into an unreal world while being transported eastwards is quite common in the writings of people who could hardly believe what was actually happening to them.7 But such feelings did not prevent Muriel Kitagawa from being deeply concerned with the practical details of what she envisaged as a rather uncomfortable train trip, having to prepare food for the lengthy voyage and pack enough diapers for her baby twins (1985: 123, 192). This pragmatic approach to the journey is typical of female writers, who always present the domestic sphere as a politicized space in which concrete assistance is much more appreciated than mere good will. As these female writers emphasize the need to foster solidarity by the provision of mutual help among the members of their community, they describe how they join other women in order to generously and discreetly place themselves at the service of their fellow travelers, devoting particular care to support the ones in special need. This utilitarian attitude is exemplified by Kaoru Ikeda when she recounts, for instance, how she ‘made many rice balls to stuff into our lunch boxes’ and ‘packed our bags with bread, butter, roast chicken, canned goods, and fruits to take with us on the long trip’ (1994: 123). While concentrating on down-to-earth aspects, in their narratives women pay as much attention as men do to the fine panorama they admire when looking through the train windows. And both men and women equally focus on weather conditions, recording warm, clear, sunny, rainy, chilly, or cold days.

8One of Muriel Kitagawa’s cousins, Shizuye Takashima (1928- 2005), was only thirteen when she, together with her parents and sister, was uprooted from her native Vancouver and sent to a ‘relocation camp’ near New Denver, while her four brothers were separated from the family and moved to another camp. Three decades later, she published A Child in Prison Camp, a poignant book she wrote and beautifully illustrated with her own watercolors so as to make children acquainted with this painful episode of Canadian history. According to a ‘Personal Note’ she appended at the end of her little volume, when she characterized herself as Shichan—the protagonist of this first-person narrative—she pictured herself two years younger than she really was at the time, and ‘in order to keep the account uncomplicated, ’ only wrote about one brother instead of the four she actually had. Thus, although the issues addressed throughout Takashima’s text are complex, the plot is straightforward and the language used is simple and direct, for the speaker is supposed to be an eleven-year-old girl observing the world around her, and trying to make sense of it.

9Shichan finds it difficult to understand why Japanese Canadians have become the target of such abuse and, being a very perceptive child, she carefully records everything she sees and hears. She realizes that ‘the older people are frightened’ and that her mother is upset when the news about their impending evacuation arrives (1971: 5). Then, at the railway station she witnesses how ‘an empty bottle is tossed in the air’ and ‘a train window is broken’ while ‘an angry man is shouting’ and ‘the men are dragged violently into the trains’ among curses and threats (6). Her own father is pushed onto the train, in spite of his protests, and she remains at the station with her silent mother, whose ‘tears are slowly falling’ whereas other ‘women cry out loud’ (7). When the female members of the family receive the final notice for their repeatedly postponed evacuation, Shichan imagines that ‘a handsome prince will come and carry us all away in a shining, gold carriage with white horses’ (14). Although the real train turns out to be ‘black, dull colored, ’ she feels so excited about her first ride that her mother has to remind her that they are not ‘going on a vacation’ but ‘being evacuated’ (14). On the train, she pays attention to every sound, and thus she captures the scene in aural terms:

Bang... bang... psst... the old train gurgles, makes funny noises. I, seated by the window, feel the wheels move, stop, move, stop.
Finally, I hear them begin to move in an even rhythm slowly. (15)

10She is also aware of the silence among the sorrowful passengers, while she looks out of the window and enjoys the sight of the blue Vancouver sky, the far mountains and tall pines (15).

11Once Shichan is confined in the camp, and denied freedom of movement, she develops the habit of closing her eyes to imagine that she is visiting exotic countries. At school, when her teacher asks her where she lived before coming to New Denver, Shichan is tempted to answer that she has just arrived ‘from China, with camels, bells and all’ (27). She often daydreams about Marco Polo, whose adventures she likes to read because they transport her to ‘another world’ (30). When the family gather for Christmas, missing the brother who has been sent to another camp, she evades suffering by traveling with her mind to Japan, where she contemplates an idyllic scene of ‘happy rice planters with their bright kimonos, their black hair tied with printed towels, the gentle wind, with lovely Mount Fuji, Fuji-san itself, in the distance’ (37). Apart from the love of her family and the moral support of some people, the two elements that help the protagonist of this story to cope with her dreadful transportation experience are: 1. her enthusiastic perception of the beautiful scenery around her, and 2. her capacity to mentally travel to a fantasy world while daydreaming. Nature, both material and idealistically imagined, provides her with strength to survive and even makes her feel cheerful amidst the worst circumstances.

12Joy Kogawa (b. 1935) was an even younger Nisei8 than Shizuye Takashima when she was abruptly relocated from her native Vancouver in 1942, first to the ghost town of Slocan, in the interior of British Columbia, and in 1945 to Coaldale, Alberta.9 Therefore, in order to write about the experiences of Naomi—the protagonist of her largely autobiographical novel entitled Obasan— Kogawa had to supplement her childhood memories with documentation provided by older eye-witnesses. She probably learnt many details through the oral accounts of the senior members of her family, but she found her main source of inspiration in the letters written by Muriel Kitagawa.10 Thus, the fictional character of Aunt Emily was based on the real Muriel Kitagawa, a woman who was passionate, courageous and actively engaged in the struggle to redress the wartime wrongs that the Japanese Canadian community had suffered.11

13Joy Kogawa’s description of the journey eastwards in Obasan is rather similar to that of Shizuye Takashima in A Child in Prison Camp, published ten years earlier. Their young protagonists feel equally close to nature, and do not seem to be particularly traumatized by their journey.12 When they leave Vancouver, Naomi on May 22^nd 1942 and Shichan on September 16^th of the same year, they are similarly excited about the train ride they are undertaking. The attitude of these children toward their transportation does not accord with that of the mature members of their community, such as Kaoru Ikeda, who sums up how she and other adults reacted: ‘even if we were kicked around, we could do nothing but grit our teeth, swallow our tears, and obey orders’ (1994: 121). Muriel Kitagawa explains why they gave the impression of accepting their evacuation with cheerfulness: ‘I felt again the fears and confusions, the hysteria, the feeling of being caged in helplessness. And if, out of the welter of those dark days, we wrung from our battered resources any cheerfulness, it was the cheerfulness inherent in all peoples who rise above disaster’ (1985: 187).

14In Obasan, Joy Kogawa renders in highly poetic terms the trip that Naomi, her aunt and her brother are undertaking:

We are leaving the B.C. coast—rain, cloud, mist—an air overladen with weeping. Behind us lies a salty sea within which swim our drowning specks of memory—our small waterlogged eulogies. We are going to the middle of the earth with pick-axe eyes, tunnelling by train to the Interior, carried along by the momentum of the expulsion into the waiting wilderness. (111)

15During her journey from Vancouver to Slocan, Naomi appreciates the beautiful landscape: ‘The train moves in and out of tunnels, along narrow ridges that edge the canyon walls, through a toothpick forest of trees’ (116). This perspective is diametrically opposed to that of Aunt Emily, who presents the evacuation deprecatorily: ‘Just plopped here in the wilderness. Flushed out of Vancouver. Like dung drops. Maggot bait’ (118). Three years later, when it is time to move again, this time to Alberta, Naomi resorts once more to poetic language to describe her painful experience:

The day we leave, the train station is a forest of legs and bodies waiting as the train jerks and inches back and forth, its black hulk hissing with steam and smelling of black oil drops that drip onto the cinders.
We are all standing still, as thick and full of rushing as trees in a forest storm, waiting for the giant woodsman with his mighty axe. (179)

16 Apart from Obasan, Kogawa wrote two more novels about the physical, emotional and economic hardships endured by Japanese Canadians during their banishment from British Columbia: Naomi’s Road (1986), which is a juvenile-fiction version of Obasan, and its sequel, Itsuka (1992). This topic also became the central theme of some of the poems included in her collections A Choice of Dreams (1974) and Woman in the Woods (1985). In the first stanza of her poem ‘Bird Song, ’ Kogawa sums up in elegiac terms how the Japanese Canadians were evicted from their homes between March and May 1942:

Flung from our nests
In the late spring
And ordered to fly
Or die we are
Weaned to the air.13

17In Naomi’s Road, the first-person narrator describes the line of evacuees moving along one by one in order to board the train as ‘a giant caterpillar’ (62). Kogawa’s graceful literary representations of her fellow Japanese Canadians as birds ‘weaned to the air’ and as ‘a giant caterpillar’ can be set in sharp contrast with other metaphorical descriptions, which picture the same evacuees disparagingly as various kinds of animals. Indeed, virtually all these writers refer to the dehumanization of their people by resorting to unflattering animal metaphors and similes. For instance, in A Child in Prison Camp, Shizuye Takashima quotes one of the women complaining that they are ‘treated like animals’ (8), for they are being housed ‘like pigs’ and the authorities even try to feed them ‘pig’s food’ (9). The fact that they have been confined in the Exhibition grounds of Hastings Park, inside a building where livestock had previously been displayed, leaving an ‘unmistakable foul smell’ (8), reinforces this disagreeable impression.14 In the same book, the author recalls how the Japanese Canadians who chose to remain in Canada, rather than returning to post-war Japan, were derogatorily ‘called ‘dogs’, slang for traitors’ (90).

18Apart from birds, pigs and dogs, the most frequent animal metaphor in these writings is that of cattle. In Obasan, it is reported that one of the women confined in the Livestock Building angrily protested to a Mountie: ‘Do you think that these women and children are cows, that you can beat them back?’ (100). In another passage of the novel, Aunt Emily declares that the Japanese Canadians held in custody were ‘treated worse than livestock, which at least had their own pens and special food when they were there’ (90). And a few paragraphs below, the same speaker sees herself as ‘a caged bird, ’ and likens her people to ‘a bunch of rabbits being chased by hounds’ (90). In a different section of the same novel, Aunt Emily graphically describes how most Japanese Canadians obeyed the evacuation orders with fatalistic resignation: ‘What a bunch of sheep we were. Polite. Meek. All the way up the slaughterhouse ramp’ (38). In Itsuka, it is explicitly stated: ‘We were rounded up like cattle’ (9). In fact, being ‘herded’ was a common expression among Japanese Canadians to refer to how they were moved together, and Muriel Kitagawa went as far as to say that what the Canadian government was doing was ‘no different from the action of the Germans in herding Poles and Jews toward annihilation, whether in the ghettos or the gas ovens’ (1985: 207).

19Roy Miki’s work as a poet, editor, biographer, and scholar often focuses on the Japanese-Canadian displacement experience. He was born in Manitoba in 1942 on a sugar-beet farm that his parents had been forcibly sent to only six months earlier. He dedicates his poem entitled ‘era sure’ to his mother, whose ‘pregnant body’ was uprooted from British Columbia, transported eastwards by train, and ended up in Winnipeg.15 Recalling an often-repeated image, Roy Miki refers in his poem to ‘the train as cattle/car’.

20Kerri Sakamoto, a Sansei born in 1959 and raised in Toronto, vividly evokes the wartime mistreatment of Japanese Canadians in her first novel, The Electrical Field (1998), which she dedicated to her parents and published in memory of Juji Matsui (1923-1942).16 In an interview, she remarked that her parents, her aunts, her uncles and her grandparents were all interned in camps during the war.17 The Electrical Field is set in the late twentieth century but Asako Saito, its protagonist and first-person narrator, is haunted by her past trauma, which she constantly relives in the bleak surroundings of her present. One of the male characters, Yano, was deported to Japan after the war. He is back in Canada, where he gets involved with the redress movement to the point of becoming obsessed with it, and repeatedly questions Asako about her uprooting from Vancouver Island and her arduous existence in the camps. Her temporary displacement has caused her a permanent and intense emotional dislocation. The only beauty in her past and present life stems from her memories of the Pacific Ocean and her fantasies about Japan.18 Unlike most displaced Japanese Canadians, who found comfort in the scenery of the Rocky Mountains, she remembers how much she hated them: ‘Mountains all around. I too was sick of it, sick to death of them all, before it even began. I longed to get away, just Eiji and I, out to sea, to Japan’ (101). She is convinced that the mountains were ‘cluttering up the sky’ so that ‘it was always dark’ (296), and when someone reminds her that there was also light, then she recalls: ‘If it wasn’t dark it was bright, ice bright, so your eyes smarted, so it was hard to see sometimes’ (297). Long after the war, two troublesome thoughts hurt her still: having been ‘herded up’ and feeling ashamed of her Japanese origin (94). Asako Saito is probably the most distressed character in Japanese- Canadian literature, wholly unbalanced as a result of the war ordeal. This character has been very well drawn by an author who had no firsthand exposure to the expropriation, evacuation and internment, but who heard personal accounts about her family history as told by her own kin, and also worked hard to be fully acquainted with the topic, seeking out the historical research sources she needed to fill in imaginatively whatever she lacked in direct experience.19

21Caged Eagles is the aptly metaphorical title of a novel which won the 2003 UNESCO Children’s Book Prize. It is authored by Eric Walters, who explains in his Afterword why he found this a difficult work to write, but nevertheless decided to face the challenge in order to help a new generation of Canadians understand a sad time in the history of their country, and one of the greatest injustices perpetrated on its citizens. Tadashi is the fourteen-year-old protagonist and first-person narrator of the story, extensively documented, but not based on the author’s personal experiences, nor on those of his own family or ethnic group, for Walters himself admits that he wrote from the perspective of someone whose heritage he did not share. Although Walters reveals a thoroughly sympathetic attitude to the plight of the mistreated minority group, some readers may feel that his novel lacks the genuine insights that most writings by Japanese Canadians provide.

22When reading the narratives authored by Japanese Canadians themselves, one is inclined to conclude that they managed to extract something positive from the period when the strength of their people was put to a test through an unusually exacting transportation experience. In their writings there are recurrent descriptions of evacuees standing on railway platforms while being insulted and threatened by vociferous crowds, but there are also testimonial statements of friendly gestures on the part of the local hakujin together with references to how ‘at rail crossings here and there, crowds of Japanese gathered to wave and call out their good wishes’ (Ikeda 1994: 124). Once their cars had been confiscated and with their fishing boats impounded, these involuntary migrants generally kept silent when they boarded CPR trains with their remaining possessions crammed into the single suitcase that each person was allowed to carry as luggage on the trip eastwards. Although most of them are portrayed as law-abiding citizens, there are also examples of rebellious men who refused to obey the government’s directives and, as a result, were arrested and incarcerated.20 Such die-hards ended up their mandatory journeys in prisoner-of-war camps, where they lived isolated, while their families were sent to ghost towns, where there were more opportunities for socialization and for strengthening their community ties.21

23The characters portrayed express a wide range of feelings: hope, patience, calmness, serenity, resignation, fear, shame, distress, bitterness, and anger. They invariably miss the ocean, which they mentally connect with their past freedom, and some of them soothe their emotional wounds when the landscape of the prairies brings them memories of their beloved sea.22 Most of these displaced people find comfort in the magnificent scenery that is ironically set up as the physical background to the hardships suffered. Unable to move on unrestrained once they have reached their destination in the internment camps or in the ghost towns where they have been exiled, they also resort to fantasy in order to escape through imaginary voyages that release them from their otherwise unbearable situation.