The pain of war, the naiveté of politics
Before becoming a misfit in the Mike Harris cabinet, David Tsubouchi grew up in shadow of World War II, which took everything his Canadian parents had
Little did David Tsubouchi suspect, when arriving at Queen’s Park in 1995, that he was to be fitted with fangs and black cape and become one of the leading villains of Mike Harris’s Common Sense Revolution.
Of course, there was a lot Tsubouchi didn’t suspect back then. But if ever a politician was miscast, he was it — an amiable soul and amateur poet and actor set to work slashing support for Ontario’s poorest.
Now 62, and 10 years removed from the Ontario legislature, Tsubouchi has produced a welcome memoir. Gambatte: A Legacy of Common Sense is the first book written by a Harris insider and, more important from its author’s point of view, tells the story of his family’s appalling treatment at the hands of the Canadian government.
Tsubouchi was the first Japanese-Canadian elected to a Canadian legislature and first appointed to cabinet. He has cheerfully admitted that, after a successful run as a Markham lawyer and two terms on council there, he arrived at Queen’s Park with little knowledge of an MPP’s duty, much less the responsibilities of a cabinet minister. He’d also given little thought to how the hard-right campaign platform that got Harris elected was to be implemented.
Tsubouchi’s naiveté and lack of skill, on arrival, dealing with the media produced infamous episodes in which he suggested that those hit by a cut of almost 22 per cent in benefits shop more carefully, perhaps buying tuna when it was on sale for 69 cents, or dented tins when they were marked down. And the legend of Tuna-fish Tsubouchi was born.
All he was suggesting, Tsubouchi says now, is what he watched his own parents do as they struggled during his boyhood. But coming from the mouth of a man who’d become “a wealthy lawyer from Markham,” it sounded like condescension on stilts.
Knowing what he knows now, Tsubouchi says he would probably never have got out of his backyard pool to accept the phone call from Harris appointing him to the community and social services portfolio — the leading edge of the revolution’s assault. When asked why he thinks he was chosen, Tsubouchi told the Star, “Well, how many minorities were there? I didn’t have qualifications to do that. I had no expectations to be in cabinet. All of a sudden I’m doing this.” In fact, there was lots about the policy that troubled him. “Did I have reservations? Yes, I did.”
It might surprise those who recall Tsubouchi only from those tumultuous days to know he grew up poor, that he read and studied his way to success, that he tried his hand at poetry and the clarinet, has a collection of more than 10,000 books and recently knocked off a 30,000-word story for his grandchildren.
What prompted his memoir, however, a story in which his pain and anger is palpable on the page, is not so much his own political career as how his family and other JapaneseCanadians were treated by their own government during the Second World War.
HIS PARENTS’ LIVES WERE shattered in 1942 when the federal government decreed that all persons of Japanese racial origin — even Canadian citizens born in this country — could be interned, their property confiscated and sold.
Tsubouchi’s parents were born in British Columbia and had never been to Japan. His mother spent her teens behind barbed wire. His father, for the “crime” of arguing that men not be separated from their wives and children when they were interned, was sent to a PoW camp near Marathon, Ont., on the north shore of Lake Superior — PoW number 606.
There is something about being marked with numbers that scalds the human soul. Tsubouchi says he’s amazed at the lack of animosity his parents displayed. (Their anger was stifled as a survival tool; in Tsubouchi it emerged as a quick temper and propensity, as a young man, for fighting on the hockey rink.)
After his parents were released from internment, they had to make their “second start from nothing,” he said. What was lost was profound. What was gained was a deep shame among Japanese-Canadians about their identity. When Tsubouchi was a child, his parents never spoke Japanese at home, he says, because they did not want their children to have accents. He has no photographs or mementos of the sort families pass down.
“Their life basically started after the war,” he said. His legacy from his ancestors is a single sake cup from his grandfather. “That’s what I have left from that heritage.” What he did inherit from his father, however, was the spirit of “gambatte” — which means “do your best” — that was constantly urged upon him.
From his days as a Star delivery boy, Tsubouchi did just that — even though there was always a sense “of being an outsider.”
As he gained experience, Tsubou-
’He seemed like Joe Btfsplk from the Li’l Abner cartoon, who walked with a black rain cloud over his head.’
DAVID TSUBOUCHI
ON ERNIE EVES
chi became an abler politician. For starters, he learned to bypass the circle of strategists that surround all government leaders and insisted on taking matters to Harris himself. (It didn’t hurt that he was a golfer.) He actually came to enjoy his later portfolios as minister of consumer and commercial relations (for which he was well-suited), solicitor general and chair of cabinet’s man- agement board. You become a good minister, he says, “when you don’t care if you’re in cabinet.” Tsubouchi retains a high regard for Harris and lingering resentment of the news media. As for Harris’s successor, Ernie Eves, “he seemed like Joe Btfsplk from the Li’l Abner cartoon, who walked around with a black rain cloud over his head and brought bad luck to everyone around him.” Tsubouchi has concluded that the most honest politics are found at the municipal level. In federal and provincial politics, “the truth takes a back seat to driving a (party or leader’s) message.” SINCE LEAVING POLITICS, Tsubouchi has been named honorary consul-general for Toronto of the Republic of Mongolia and co-chairs the Canada-Vietnam Business Council, while sitting on college and hospital boards and practising a bit of law. He also does a lot of volunteer work in the JapaneseCanadian community and collects Japanese swords and other cultural memorabilia he finds in antique shops around the world. He also has known his share of tragedy and fear. His mother died, he believes, from lung disease caused by conditions in the internment camps. His father was killed by a hit-and-run-driver (the perpetrator never found). Tsubouchi almost died several years ago after a bad reaction to a flu shot. Perhaps that scare prompted him to put his story on the page. Too few memoirs are written by Ontario politicians; too many good yarns and insiders’ views of how events actually unfolded remain untold. David Tsubouchi, left with just that sake cup, knows the cost of losing your history.