JAPANESE ATROCITIES REMAIN UNSPOKEN SHAME
Joy Kogawa’s memoirs shine light on brutal wartime events
Joy Kogawa has noticed reviewers of her new book of memoirs have not touched arguably the most controversial section of her intimate exploration of betrayal and hope.
Reviewers have focused on the way the Vancouver-raised author of Obasan and The Rain Descends dealt with her Japanese-Canadian family being sent to an internment camp, the bombing of Nagasaki and how her father was a pedophile.
However, Kogawa, 81, has been publicly forthright for decades about those shame-filled realities.
The most cutting-edge section of her book, titled Gently to Nagasaki, digs into horrors most Canadians and ethnic Japanese want to deny — Japan’s war atrocities.
The peace activist’s memoirs describe her painful relatively recent discovery of the extent of the slaughters and mass rapes committed by the Imperial Japanese army.
It was while Japanese troops were killing millions of Asians and others that Canadian governments in 1942 sent many Japanese-Canadians, most of them from B.C., to internment camps.
Following her family’s ordeal in camps in the Kootenays and Alberta, Kogawa gained wide attention for helping lead the campaign that culminated in Ottawa’s 1988 apology and compensation to 20,000 Japanese-Canadians.
The many honours eventually bestowed upon Kogawa included the 2006 establishment of Vancouver’s Kogawa House, where the family had lived until 1942. It’s now a residence for writers.
But Kogawa has not allowed adoration to stop her pursuit of the authentic. Her mission seems to be to move beyond denial on all fronts: regarding internment camps, racism, global warming, her priest-father’s sexual crimes and her relatively recent discovery of Japanese war monstrosities.
“Love and truth are indivisible,” Kogawa says.
Her wise aphorism has had unpleasant consequences, though. Since most Canadians who don’t want to offend ignore Japan’s grisly war history, Kogawa acknowledged in an interview from her home in Toronto that she’s had to “face the rage” of many.
“It’s cost me some really good friendships.”
Whether in Toronto, Vancouver or Japan, Kogawa said, many people, including ethnic Japanese, “just don’t believe” the atrocities occurred. They’d “rather die” than have the reality exposed.
“Or they feel I’m betraying them by talking about it. But it takes the truth to get to reconciliation.”
CONFRONTING DENIAL
Even though Gently to Nagasaki does, true to its title, take a tender approach to sickening personal and global crimes, the book does not engage in euphemisms.
Kogawa particularly exposes one of Imperial Japan’s worst slaughters, the 1937 Rape of Nanking, a city in China.
“It was not just a handful of aberrant sadists and torturers who gang-raped little girls, old women, to death (in Nanking). There were, according to the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, an estimated 20,000 women and girls of all ages raped in the first months alone.”
She continues: “In his book, Blood and Soil, historian Ben Kiernan reveals that up to 20 million civilians died in Asia between 1931 and 1945 at the hands of Japan’s military. It is beyond imagining.”
Even though Kogawa could barely breathe as she uncovered Japan’s history, she was struck especially by the story of one handsome colonel, Cho Isamu. He would say that in battle “it is a virtue for a man to become a beast.”
When the colonel’s troops refused to machine-gun fleeing Chinese civilian women, children and men, Isamu shouted, “‘This is how you kill people!’ In front of his shocked troops, he sliced into the shoulders of his own soldiers, killing them.” Japan responded by promoting the “dauntless” officer.
“That,” Kogawa says, “was the Japan of the three Alls — Kill All, Burn All, Loot All — the Japan of the ‘chosen people’ destined for glory and domination.”
Kogawa recognizes most interned Japanese-Canadians did not endure suffering “of the order of magnitude of the Rape of Nanking, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Battle of Okinawa (in which tens of thousands of Americans and Canadian soldiers were killed).”
A brave campaigner, Kogawa remains disturbed many Japanese people (including 100,000 Canadians with Japanese origins) continue to ignore the “ghosts” of the civilians killed.
She is often told: “‘Don’t talk about Nanking. Talk about Obasan. Do you want to create conflict?’”
But just as Kogawa has exposed Canadian internment camps and admitted to shame about her father’s abuse of boys, she is also compelled to speak about Japan’s past.
“I had heard of efforts in Japan to excise facts about the horrors of Nanking from school history books, to silence discussion, to minimize the atrocities, to deflect the cries of victims,” she says.
“These are a country’s efforts to hold down the lid of the past…. (So) militarists could dream openly of a rearmed Japanese needing no repentance.”
RECONCILIATION REQUIRES THE TRUTH
The world is well aware of Nazi Germany’s sins, she says. Everyone has been told of the Holocaust of many millions of Jews, gays, activists and others.
“But that did not happen in the East.”
A key factor behind wilful Western ignorance has been guilt over dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as Western geo-political strategy.
Kogawa described how the Allies colluded after the war to hide Imperial Japan’s atrocities. The Allies desperately needed to make the island nation a bulwark against Communist China and the Soviet Union.
Despite her zeal for veracity, the last thing Kogawa feels is hatred toward Japanese. She’s proud of her heritage. She also doesn’t hate Canadians for sending members of her ethnic group to camps.
Nor does she hate her dad. “My dad was not just a devil. He was also good,” she said over the phone.
She sees personal and national betrayals in a similar multi-faceted light. “They often feel,” she says, “like the same thing.”
Instead of the movie industry’s focus on plots of “vengeance,” she sees through the lens of reconciliation. She’s found it possible to trust.
Just as she admires many aspects of justice-minded Canadians, Kogawa justifiably appreciates many features of Japan and its 200 million citizens.
“A country of soaring beauty, with a chilling history. A country of matchless civility and safety. A country of refinement, of violent cruelty, of honour, of dishonour, of economic equity, of gentle kindness, a country of denial — an intensely paradoxical country.”
Even though Kogawa believes there is another thing many secular Canadians will not enjoy hearing about — her religious convictions — she is also becoming more open about how Christian spirituality has helped her face such complex truths.
Kogawa is a member of a small Japanese congregation that is part of St. David’s Anglican parish in Toronto. She worries, she said, people would find her book’s references to Jesus “flaky.” Yet she moves forward.
Kogawa sees herself as a “spiritual activist,” not a political one. Just as she fought for Canadian redress, she wants Japan to apologize more fully for its wartime atrocities so “the victims can finally be heard, even though it’s very late.”
She would dare not ask the victims of Imperial Japan, or their families, to “forgive.” But she does hope Japan will repent so some day the victims can at least “hold onto the dream of forgiveness.”
Reconciliation, as she has learned, cannot be achieved without confronting difficult truths.
A country of matchless civility and safety. A country of refinement, of violent cruelty, of honour, of dishonour, of economic equity, of gentle kindness, a country of denial — an intensely paradoxical country. Joy Kogawa