The definitive book on the history of Japanese Canadians is a testimony to the courage and tenacity of Ken Adachi and George Tanaka.
ON JUNE 17, 1959, the National Japanese Canadian Citizens Association commissioned Ken Adachi to write the history of Japanese Canadians after his return in September from Europe. George Tanaka speaking for the selection committee of three – Frank Moritsugu, Raymond Moriyama and himself – said the history should be written by someone able to feel and extract the true meaning of the Japanese Canadian experience. It should be a story told from the inside, a history as seen and remembered by people who had shared the experience. Ken Adachi was the unanimous choice.
Adachi was a graduate of the University of Toronto, with a B.A. in English Language and Literature, 1957; M.A., 1959; editor of The New Canadian, 1951 – 53, and a regular book reviewer for the Toronto Star.
Adachi, a shy, soft-spoken Nisei, sought for perfection in his writing. He revealed a little of his shyness and love for writing in The New Canadian: “I find that writing is an immensely satisfying thing. It’s what I have always felt that I like to do, notwithstanding the lack of provocation at times. It’s as interesting a job as any. It widens your outlook by forcing you into new experiences and horizons. I dislike intensely, however, the sight of watch ing someone read my stuff. I hate the thought of watching his facial expression and dread the possibility that he may start to read and then give up. A thrill, however, comes when someone honestly mentions some thing you wrote.”
With $300 in his pocket and no return ticket Adachi had flown to England in January 1959. He was having the happiest time of his life and his weekly columns conveyed his sheer joy of travel and his reports were some of the most interesting writings to appear in The New Canadian. He was a hippie traveler dressed in black unpressed jeans, his face unshaven. “How I hated London in those first dreary days of room and job hunting! Keeping clean was never an easy thing.” In London he tried substitute teaching in a secondary school and quickly decided that it was not for him.
After seeing My Fair Lady in London’s Drury Lane Theatre:
. . . if you are willing to stand and sweat for three hours, peering around the crystal chandeliers near the ceiling. Jostling your neighbour for space on the balcony rail, gasping for breath in the hot air, then you can see My . . .
. . . Fair Lady on any evening. And since I usually have to squint at a pint-sized stage from atop the house in my trips to the theatre, this was no new or trying experience. And in the case of the Lady it was worth it all. It was all that a musical comedy should be; a triumphant synthesis of action and music, visual image and dance. It was melodious, heart-warming. sentimental, bursting out at its quicksilver seams, witty, filled with charm and beauty.
For three months in Paris he subsisted on cheese and bread and yogurt for dessert. He interviewed Marjorie Umezuki, daughter of Takaichi Umezuki, publisher of The New Canadian. Marjorie, after four months of hitch-hiking, had a night job with the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune. Her garret room was on the Left Bank. Adachi wrote with envy: “From the window of her five by fifteen room eight flights up you can see Eiffel Tower, and the domed Hotel des Invalides!”
He advised The New Canadian readers:
Just bring enough francs or shillings to ward off starvation but not enough to waft you, first class, in the plush bowels of best eating and watering places. That, I think, is the prime requisite, otherwise everything . . .
Ken Adachi in Paris, 1959, spruced up for a tour of the city with Marjorie Umezuki.
. . . will be very ordinary in Europe, everything nicely dull, except that the coins are heavier, the grass greener, the people gentler, the beer milder.
He savoured every moment of his holiday and dreaded the thought he might never visit Europe again. Yet, he looked forward with anticipation and eagerness to the challenge of the history project. Had he known beforehand the agony and the grief that would accompany the task, he would have “chucked” it, as he expressed it later. Adachi found him self in a very stressful position of having to produce a manuscript while a critical “community of donors” and a committee watched over his shoulders. The Committee and Adachi had decided on an impossible unrealistic schedule-one year for research and production of the first draft!
When Adachi returned from a three-month western trip in January 1960, he wrote for The New Canadian readers:
From the start, my nearly three-month tour of western Canada was marked by warmth and interest from all of the people that I met. People met me at bus, train and plane stops in all kinds of inclement weather, at all inconvenient hours, wherever I went. I was always happy to note that there was interest in the History. People gave me sustenance, transporta tion, and helpful comments. I hoped that it would be thus; I am glad to report it was so.
Those who have attempted to conduct a series of interviews will understand the quality of elusiveness that accompanies such an effort. And burdened by a rigid schedule, there was not really enough time to root out all that one is seeking. The ideal method is to seek the interviewee and spend most of the day or even several days with him. This I was able to do with the outstanding figures whom I met.
What was I looking for? Briefly it is this: facts and personal accounts about the three major aspects of the story: Immigration and settlement; evacuation and dispersal; resettlement and assimilation.
I am not interested in solely presenting a ‘nice’ picture of the Japanese Canadians through their days of hardship, of being shunted from their homes, and then of acceptance. That would be too facile and glib, the story is really more complex. I want to record a rounded story of both the good and the bad. By the end of 1960 I hope to have the first draft, or at least, most of the manuscript completed.
Six years later Adachi was in London, England, almost in hiding, unhappy, discouraged, burdened by the enormity of his failure to complete his first draft. (end of page 434)
The JCCA Executive Committee and History Editorial Committee met in an emergency meeting on January 7, 1966, at the home of George Tanaka. They had one bit of good news-the submission to the Centen nial Committee for funds had been approved but the mood of the meeting was one of worry and apprehension.
George Tanaka spoke to the Committee. “The Committee acknowledges that during these past years Ken Adachi has lived and worked only for the history. Yet for all this full effort of work-striving, writing thousands upon thousands of words, (at times) living … in abject state of privation due to the National JCCA’s lack of additional funds for the history-Ken Adachi has not been able to produce the manuscript or part of it.”
Tanaka read the letter written by Adachi to him as the head of the History Editorial Committee and his reply. The letters revealed the terrible anguish of both men. There is sympathy for Adachi and admiration for the words of encouragement written by Tanaka. Both men withheld nothing. Both men wrote from the heart.
London, England 29 December 1965
Dear George:1
It’s very difficult for me to write this letter because, in a very large sense, it signals the end of myself as a man. And that is a very hard thing for me to say.
I cannot come up with the manuscript of Part One or even the chapter for submission. This is what I should have said during our phone conversation on Monday; that is what I should have said earlier this month, and even earlier than that. I cannot. I cannot.
After the loss of the manuscript last year, I tried to rationalize, to make new beginnings, to restart a task that had taken too much out of me to get even that far. Perhaps I was written-out; anyway, I found I could not write any more, try as I would. I would sit in front of my typewriter, my turgid brain refusing to work any longer, thinking of the enormous task ahead of me. I’m sorry, too, that at that time, I minimized the job of recouping the lost manuscript by suggesting that I could re-work my rough notes and scrawls, and fashion them into another submission. What I had to do was really to start all over again. I kept this from you, and others, and slowly, gradually and inevitably, I fell deeper into a hole. I fell deeper because of my inability to write, because of the promises I had made and the grinding obligations and responsibilities surrounding myself. All of these slowly worked to bind and strap my brain so that I became helpless.
‘Japanese Canadian History Collection, Box 7, Special Collection, University of British Columbia. A number of paragraphs from Adachi’s letter have been deleted because of their repetitious nature.
I spent each day in fear and trembling. I was depressed and anxious, guilty and hopeless. The history lay inside my brain, cancerous and eroding.
I wonder, really, whether I can explain that corrosive feeling and that blind alley situation of the past year. It is not as if l had erased the history from my mind and actions, not as if l had blithely and coolly immersed myself in the pleasures of life, forgetful of all. How could I have done so under the circumstances? On the contrary, the situation became deadly. Each day that passed added yet another coffin-nail to hopes and wishes.
I lied when I said that the work was proceeding aright, feeling that I could make it so by means of enormous work.
The flaw-even going back to the early period of the project-was to let even the first deadline go by without meeting it. The next deadline then became harder to meet; and then the lost opportunities became cumulative. I have never allowed myself to bypass deadlines, either in my university work or other writing. I had written my M.A. thesis in three months, and notwithstanding the grander conception and scale of the history, I suppose I could have written the history, at least the first draft, within a year. But I allowed myself to shoot off in all kinds of directions, researching into red-herringed fancies, delving deeper than neces sary into certain aspects, and never really getting down into the hard business of writing. But I did manage to pull myself up short, reassess and re-align the process, and come up with that submission which turned out to have such sad consequences.
Long ago I would have chucked and discarded the History if I had been able.
Why were you people so certain that I could write it? If you can remember, I used to question this unquestioning certainty, and say that I myself wasn’t sure be cause, after all, I had never written a book before. There have been many times when dedication wavered, and I wanted to escape and perform some-almost any-task in which I would be happier, at least reasonably content, or furthering an academic career. I would have chucked it, I am saying, if l could have done so with some degree of honour because the job became onerous and heavy, wearisome and burdensome, never-ending. I have chucked away in the process, almost six years of what could have been a fruitful period of my life. I must say this because I want to emphasize what this has cost me, although I fully realize, and am desperately aware, that other things, certain ideals and principles, have hung . . .
George Tanaka
(Roger Obata Collection)
2 The mystery of the lost manuscript. Tanaka wrote to Adachi: “… we should not raise the issue of the lost manuscript at the publishers. For upon this issue the Committee does not possess any facts. It may in the long run do damage to our relationship with the publisher when there exists no factual proof upon which the Committee could support its claim … There are too many questions that cannot be substantiated by logic.”
The manuscript referred to is the one chapter that Adachi completed by 1966. It was 15,000 words in length with 79 footnotes covering the period “The Yellow Peril and The Riot of 1 go7”. The loss of the manuscript and the failure to safeguard with a copy, the result of six years of research and writing, completely paralyzed Adachi.
. . . in the balance, and that it has affected, to varying degrees, the lives of other people.
As time went by, I could never recapture the original idealism and desire that had made me accept the job in the first place; and, of course, it is now perhaps impossible to do so, bearing in mind what has happened and what might happen. Should I have been honest in this too? Should I have said this, after the preparations and the work and the money spent? I would have said this, if I had the money to repay the donors, and I would have conceivably written the book on my own terms; not then, but when I was ready.5
I do not want anymore to be forced into a position where I must lie. I am sick, so sick in soul, diseased and corrupted by it, that I will no longer lie, no longer make promises which I cannot keep.
I need money to keep going. Therefore I will accept an offer from the University of Maryland’s European Division to teach the January 31 – March 25 term.
After that, I shall plunge into writing, ceaselessly and relentlessly. If that does not work, then I shall have had it. I will not then persist with life, or blast further the hopes of others.
Please try to understand why I have done or left undone such things that make me now wilt in disgust and pain.
My Dear Ken:
REPLY FROM GEORGE TANAKA 4
Ken
Port Credit, Ontario January 9, 1966
As I sit down to write this letter to you, my heart is filled with a compassion so large that I cannot blame you too much for your deceptions to me and the others. For it is the larger picture of six years of agony and effort that is so much the cause of your deceptions.
It was Monday afternoon, January 3, that I received your special delivery letter dated December 29. I read your long letter and I felt my heart sink down and down. It seemed to me that hope and faith, the eternal fire and spark that maintained life in this project, was about to be extinguished. For that night and the next day, the history project was a burden in my heart, a burden that did not seem to have any strong hope of lightening. I telephoned Ed [Ide] and told him the gist of the letter. Knowing Ed and his concern for the past year on the history project, I knew that this news would bear heavy on his soul. We decided an emergency meeting of the National Executive Committee must be called and it was held last Friday, January 7, in my house.
I am not, as I say, a weak person. I know this of myself, it is something I have . . .
5 History Committee financial statement, June 10, 1966: Donations from individuals,
$8,126.80; from organizations, $11,318.93. Author’s fee, $18,625.00. Total disbursements, $23,625.00.
Portions of Tanaka’s letter have been Tanaka wrote at length on an article
by Louis I. Kahn, Structure and Farm, in the November issue of the Royal Architectural Journal of Canada. Kahn’s article dealt on the subject of man and his creative works.
. . . derived, in knowledge of myself, from my past experiences working in the JCCA. For there were times in those experiences when I was a very, very lonely person. And of necessity, I had to rely on myself alone for my strength.
Even to this day, because of the responsibilities of that office which I accepted, I must put up or bear with the feeling of a sense of injustice on the fishing question. When, away back in 1949, I faced 200 delegates at the convention in Vancouver of the B.C. Fishermen and Allied Workers Union and had to make a stand which had to be crystal clear either with the Fishermen and Union or with the cannery companies for upon this decision and my attitude which could be read by those 200 delegates, rested at that time, the future of the Japanese Canadian fishermen. I have received no words of thanks from the fishermen but two instances of criticism. I knew that my strongest personal resource, beside my carefully thought out presentations and points, would be my act of sincerity. Sincerity first and sincerity last. This I knew. This was my confidence. This was my act of judgment. At a time very much alone.
. . . there were times when I could not share my feelings with my family, so that
the burden on me could lighten. I remember going into the Imperial Theatre alone at night, to try to forget my great worries, the aching burden in my heart, for an hour or so the burden would lighten a bit, only to crash down heavy on my shoulders when leaving the theatre.
There is another experience which was bitter in my heart but I have grown out of it and I feel now the better and wiser for it. It was twelve years ago that I set out to make a career in life for myself. In my last act of resignation at the JCCA national conference in Vancouver in 1953, I had asked with some emotion, for . . .
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George Tanaka, JCCA Executive Secretary, March 1949. Tanaka gave seven years of his life to the JCCA receiving a minimal salary. He served the Japanese Canadian community for over forty years.
. . . $2000 financial assistance from the JCCA to help me find the means and course for re-establishment of my life in a career of landscape architecture.
I felt the JCCA and the Japanese Canadian people at least owed this to me. For had I not given seven years of my life to the cause of the people? Had I not endured living with a minimum salary compensation? Had I not given up a future of family life? Had I not given up my plan to take a course at Iowa State University as a special student in landscape architecture under a Department of Veterans Affairs grant? And, I was 41 years old starting from scratch, not knowing what lay in the future for me. And all the Nisei of my age, long since had begun to make a life for themselves. Should I not then expect some little financial assistance for rehabilitation in, now, my own life career. Yet, to my request, I did not receive what I asked. The then president of the National JCCA, I was informed later, thought less of me for my request. I had, apparently, not conformed to accepted standards of good form in requesting financial help. I, apparently, should not have stated a figure, I, apparently, should have merely requested help, financially, and left the rest to the good graces of the National JCCA. So it was that I received nothing. Only for the kindness of the Cooperative Committee and their $500 was I able to begin to make a career for myself.
I thank God, humbly and sincerely, for having had the privilege to serve the
Japanese Canadian people during those long years in the JCCA for I know now that I personally received from that experience the wisdom and knowledge of our life and society which I could not have gained otherwise.
What is it that I should say to you, Ken? I cannot say anything unless it comes from my heart. Unless it comes from my feeling for the history. Unless it comes from my person with some conviction that I do know, as a person who has worked in creative effort, and who has experienced some of the magnitudes of the high and the low crests of life with the people, not independent of them, but with obligations toward them. I say again that you will have grown from these experi ences.
. . . write it Ken as you have written the B.C. history. One chapter at a time. Write it from the beginning. And do not concern yourself with the quality of your work in terms of the public. Do the best that you know is within you. You must acquire the necessary discipline that would force you to produce. Yes, one chapter first. Then another chapter. Then another chapter.
. . . All that is necessary is to give it a little bit of the feeling that is of us, for we are the people of Japanese ancestry.
You must do the history, Ken, for you possess the ability to write. You must think of yourself and become a professional in the writing process. I do believe someday you will look back upon the six years of your agony and frustrations, of non-accomplishment and realize that in reality and truth you gained wisdom and experience and a personal philosophy toward life greater than you can at present appreciate .
Adachi’s book, The Enemy That Never Was, published in 1976, was acclaimed by readers and reviewers as a major work of distinction. In countless articles, essays, and books it would be quoted as the definitive work on the history of Japanese Canadians. Barry Broadfoot in the Pref ace to Years of Sorrow, Years of Shame, an oral history of the Japanese experience, expressed his admiration. “(The book) is a scholarly, marvel lously researched, sincere, and dedicated piece of work, sixteen years in the research and writing.” Adachi went on to become an outstanding literary critic and book editor for the Toronto Star. He was recognized with many awards for his critical writing.
On February 10, 1989, the literary world and the Japanese Canadian community were shocked to hear that Ken Adachi had committed sui cide. He was 60 years old.
Tributes poured in. William French of the Globe and Mail: “As a critic, Ken Adachi was a man of great intellectual vigour, quick to rejoice in the genuine and expose the spurious. His death is a terrible loss to Canadian literature and Canadian journalism.” David Colbert of the Colbert literary agency: “Ken Adachi was always looking for what was good with a book rather than what was wrong with it, always trying to build up rather than tear it down.” Coroner Margaret Milton: “Adachi’s death is a personal loss to me, and he’ll never know it. I read him for years. I knew I could always depend on him for three books per week.”
In 1965, when Adachi had faced a major crisis in his life, George Tanaka came to his aid. In 1989 George Tanaka was not there to help. He and his wife, Cana, died tragically on April 4, 1982, in a car accident while on a holiday in the United States. If Ken Adachi had someone to turn to, as he had in 1965, he may have found the help he needed.
TheEnemyThatNeverWas is a legacy left by two remarkable men, Ken Adachi and George Tanaka, and is a witness to their courage, fortitude and perseverance.
(end of page 440)
KEN ADACHI,1928 – 19895
Sometime during the night of February 9th 1989, Ken Adachi took his own life. Just exactly why he did isn’t clear, and never will be. Successful suicides leave . . .
. . . behind only the darkest hint of impenetrable silence. One can speculate and second guess them, but that’s all.
The ostensible cause was an incident in which Adachi plagiarized a 1982 Time magazine article for his January 21 book column in the Toronto Star. Plagiarism is a fundamental journalistic (and intellectual) crime for which there are usually explanations but never excuses. The curiosity in Adachi’s case is why he did it at all. He was an intelligent man with an original mind. He pirated only three paragraphs, and his editing of them was an improvement over the original. The balance of the article was his own, and it was well thought out and written, as were most of his book columns.
By now, most of us have heard the various rumours and theories surrounding his death. It would serve no purpose to repeat them here. Within them lies a world of pain that Ken chose, in his final act, to make private permanently.
Losing a public reader of Ken ‘s courage and skill is a major loss to Canadian writing. He was a kind and generous man, and his thoughtful reviews will be missed. He, and the reviews will be hard to replace. Silence isn’t always golden.
GEORGE TANAKA, 1912 – 1986
He was a man of wisdom and a profound thinker. He was a philosopher, a scholar, and artist, and above all a compassionate human being. He was a man of high principles and unflinching courage. He was dedicated to serving his fellow man. He loved freedom and equality as much as he abhorred tyranny and discrimination. He was a leader in the true sense of the word.
No other Nisei has contributed as much to the Japanese Canadian community as George has done. For forty years, he has served the community and was still contributing right up to the tragic accident. We miss his wisdom and maturity, his philosophy and values, his gentle persuasion, and generous support and encouragement to the Sansei. We are all greatly indebted to him, and the memory of his accomplishments will ever serve to inspire future generations. Everyone he touched was that much richer for having known him. 7
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6 Roger Obata, The New Canadian, April 20, 1989.
7 George Tanaka was one of the founding directors of the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre in Toronto. He was heavily involved with the Centennial celebration of the Japanese Canadians in 1977. In his chosen field of landscape architecture, Tanaka was an outstanding artist. Some of his achievements include the Centennial Gardens of Stratford and Port Credit, interior gardens for the Sherway Shopping Plaza in Mississauga. He was secretary and member of the Board of Governors of the Canadian Society of Landscape Architects from 1972 – 74. In 1975 he was elected a Fellow of the same society.
July 3, 2023
