Internment survivors hear council apologize for racist 1942 motion
When Mary Kitagawa was a little girl, she and her family were removed from their Saltspring Island home when Ottawa interned all B. C. residents of Japanese descent in the months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
She remembers watching an RCMP officer with a gun manhandle her farmer father onto a truck in 1942 — leading her to believe he was being taken away to be shot.
He wasn’t. But the Kitagawas, along with many others, were held in the smelly horse barns of Hastings Park before being transported to points east. The horse and cow barns at the park were used to house female internees, while the men were confined to the Forum.
“Going to Hastings Park was one of the most degrading experiences of our lives,” said Kitagawa, one of many survivors who attended city hall Wednesday to hear councillors apologize for the racist 1942 motion passed by their predecessors in support of internment.
“The reason I continue to speak about this is because my parents were deeply affected by the internment. Their voices are silent, so I use mine.”
Mayor Gregor Robertson acknowledged the memories of those cruel events 71 years ago still resonate for Kitagawa and others who heard his apology.
“I only wish the council of 1942 had the depth of understanding and reconciliation as we do,” Robertson said.
“What sinks in here for me today are the lack of words in our realm for what happened.”
More than 22,000 people of Japanese descent were removed from a 100- mile ( 160- kilometre) zone along the west coast, many to camps in remote eastern B. C., and had their homes and belongings seized.
Ken Noma, president of the National Association of Japanese Canadians, said to the interned, Vancouver is still a spiritual home, akin to the way Jews feel about the Wailing Wall.
Robertson said the city is planning memorial plaques at Hastings Park and may also rename streets “that don’t reflect reality.”
For example, the mayor said he’d like streets in the former “Japantown” — in the modernday Downtown Eastside — to be named for residents who once lived there.
While councillors couldn’t rescind the motions first proposed by alderman Halford Wilson that lent weight to the federal government’s internment order, they pledged never to let council chambers again be used for such purposes.
Coun. Kerry Jang said it was shocking to read Halford’s motion that council adopted on Feb. 16, 1942, in which it urged the federal government to remove “the enemy alien population” because they might lend support to any Japanese invasion.
Jang’s father escaped a beating in the weeks after Pearl Harbor because someone recognized he was Chinese, and so was “on our side.”
But in 2010, when CSIS director Richard Fadden alleged that certain B. C. politicians were under the influence of a foreign power — the People’s Republic of China — Jang and every other Asian- named politician began to get hate mail.
“It made me realize that in many ways, nothing has really changed,” he said.
The apology comes 25 years after the federal government’s 1988 apology and redress. Last year, the University of B. C. offered honorary degrees to those citizens whose education was interrupted by the forced internment.