Letters from exiled teens rare peek into B.C.’s past
In 1942, Joan Parolin’s best friend Sumi Mototsune abruptly left town without saying goodbye.
But it wasn’t Sumi’s choice — her family had been ordered to leave the west coast by the federal government.
Sumi was among an estimated 22,000 Japanese-Canadians who were removed from the coast during the Second World War. Initially, her family was sent to Kaslo in the Kootenays, then to Raymond, Alta., south of Lethbridge.
In 1943, Sumi sent Joan a photo of the four Mototsune sisters posing in front of the flat, frozen prairie.
“This was taken on February 8th, ’43,” she wrote. “The temperature was 32 (degrees) below zero. Isn’t it some scenery?”
Joan has kept the photo for 75 years, part of a large body of letters, postcards and photos she received from her Japanese friends from Queen Elizabeth Secondary after they were exiled.
Joan is now 90, and wants to see the letters preserved for future generations. So she’s donating them to UBC’s department of Rare Books and Special Collections, which plans to scan them and put them online for the public.
The letters are fascinating, and sometimes heartbreaking.
“I have been accepted into medicine, despite the fact I was refused admittance into dentistry on the basis of my parentage,” Yoshi Okamura wrote from Winnipeg on July 13, 1944.
“I am pleased that at least Manitoba has forgotten our racial parentage and considered us Canadians.”
Later, he writes: “Did you ever wonder what the world will be after this war is over? I wonder ????? Heck I give up, it’s too complicated for me.”
There are 149 letters in the collection, which have been organized by Steve Turnbull, a former curator of the Japanese Canadian National Museum in Burnaby. He is also Joan Parolin’s cousin.
Turnbull was working at the museum when Parolin phoned to talk to someone about the letters.
“After a few minutes of conversation, it dawned on me that I recognized the voice — it was my cousin Joan,” he said.
Turnbull went to Parolin’s home in Langley and was captivated by the letters, which show a personal side that’s often missed in histories of the time.
“I often found the first one, two or three letters from each of these kids was among the most interesting, because they talk about how exciting it was to be going to the interior,” he said.
“Their parents’ lives were completely demolished, but they were excited by it, because it was a trip — for many of the kids, it was the first time they had been outside of their little community.”
Other letters talk about typical teenage stuff — what’s on the hit parade, how their brother is annoying, whether they look chubby in a photo.
To Dr. Laura Ishiguro of UBC’s history department, it’s all gold.
“I don’t know of any other archival collections that are like this,” she said. “They might exist, but I don’t know of any. The combination of young people’s letters and letters to a non-Japanese Canadian person is just incredible to me. This is really special.
“One of the things I love about them is that they’re so clearly ordinary people. I think sometimes when the story gets told, that gets missed — that these are teenagers who are bored, and curious. It’s just really touching.”
Parolin grew up as Joan Gillis on Scott Road in Surrey, back when it was quite rural — her postal address during the war was RR#1, New Westminster, B.C.
Many Japanese families lived in the area, where the men worked as fishermen or strawberry farmers.
“Sumi and her sisters’ dad was a boat builder,” said Parolin. “They lived down by the river (near the Pattullo Bridge).”
After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour and Hong Kong on Dec. 7-8, 1941, Canada declared war on Japan. Within a couple of weeks, all Japanese-Canadians were required to register with the Registrar of Enemy Aliens, 1,200 fishing boats owned by Japanese were impounded, and Japanese newspapers and schools were closed.
According to a timeline on japanesecanadianhistory.net, on Feb. 7, 1942 the government announced all “enemy aliens” between 18 and 45 would be removed from within 100 miles of the coast, and on Feb. 26 the order was expanded to all persons of “the Japanese race.”
The Japanese community was also placed under curfew.
“There was a radio program called Dollars for Scholars, and I was one of the people on the (school) team,” recounts Parolin, who was 13 at the time. “Sumi and her sisters wanted to listen when the program was on the radio, because it was broadcast live.”
But there was a problem — the government had confiscated all radios owned by Japanese, and the program was on at night, when the Japanese were confined to their houses.
“There were Mounties at the end of the Pattullo Bridge,” said Parolin. “(Sumi and her sisters) went down to talk to the Mounties, because they weren’t allowed out after dark. This is the most asinine story when you hear it now, but they weren’t allowed out at night — I guess they were going to be sneaking around in the dark lighting bombs or something.”
The Mounties said it was OK for Sumi and her sisters to go to their neighbour’s house and listen to the program.
Soon, Parolin’s Japanese friends started disappearing, as their families were removed from the coast.
Most families were moved to internment camps in the B.C. Interior, and many of the men were sent to work in lumber camps.
But others chose to go to the Prairies, where they had more freedom.
“There was a program that allowed the parents, the moms and dads of these families, to choose to do agricultural work on the Prairies, mostly sugar beet farming, in exchange that the fathers wouldn’t be sent away to work camps,” said Turnbull.
“The idea here was that they could all stay together, but the kids were all doing hard labour. At a time when girls were considered to be the weaker sex, one of the girls wrote that she was doing 12-hour days harvesting sugar beets. And equally long hours in the spring, basically sun-up to sundown, thinning the rows (of weeds).”
This is how Sumi’s family wound up in Raymond, Alta., one of several towns near Lethbridge where Japanese-Canadians were relocated.
Jackie Takahashi was sent to McGrath, where he longed for B.C.’s moderate weather.
“On Thursday April 23 when I woke I found that it had snowed two inches,” he wrote. “Today the wind is so cold that your hands and face turns red and purple from the cold. I bet Surrey is so warm that you could go out with no sweater.”
Missing the coast was a common theme in the letters.
“I cannot hardly believe I’m in Alberta,” Sumi wrote. “As soon as this trouble is settled, I’ll come home right away.”
But she didn’t. Like many of the Japanese deported east of the Rockies, she wound up building a new life there and stayed.
“We were best friends in school, and we wrote to each other (throughout the war), but then we lost connection,” said Parolin.
“Then, through her sister, we got reconnected (years later). She came out and she stayed with us. Then she went back to Calgary and we went there — we picked up where we left off.”
Sadly, Sumi died of pancreatic cancer in 1999. Many of her other schoolmates have passed away, as well. But thanks to Parolin’s gift to UBC, their stories live on.