Chapter 9
Remembering the Mailing Lists
Various voices edited by Joy Kogawa and Addie Kobayashi
The war zone is a stormy zone and we’re all in the weather together. Across the country, here and there, little grey-haired old niseis with their fiercely determined hearts are huddling together for warmth. “It’s winter’s feeble stand,” they say. “The ice will disappear.”
And within our cocoons, something is being formed. One by one, we are coming forth with dewy fresh wings. The more meetings we attend, the more we need to attend. We’re learning how to fly by stuffing envelopes.
Joy Kogawa, Itsuka1
Some of the most energetic Redress publicity work took place in Toronto. This was due not only to Toronto’s proximity to Ottawa, but also to the individuals who had the skills, connections and determination to provide information to Japanese Canadians and the general public.
For example, in the early days of Sodan Kai, a newsletter, Redress News, was started to communicate important information on Redress. The first issue was sent out in the fall of 1983. Jim Matsui was the primary mover behind Redress News, and was responsible for most of the content. Marjorie Hiraki donated time, effort and funds to get it printed. For some, it seemed that Toronto area Japanese Canadians were putting forth the major media effort, but it was not being recognized. Redress News was mailed to only those who had attended and signed in at one of the Sodan Kai meetings at the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre in 1983.
By 1985, the NAJC Newsletter was being produced in Vancouver and shipped to various centres across the country for distribution to their membership. However, the Toronto JCCA would not release its membership mailing list for Redress News, nor for the NAJC Newsletter.
It was late February 1985, in the law office of the famous Toronto lawyer, Clayton Ruby, champion of civil rights. Marcia Matsui, one of the young sansei lawyers in the Sodan Kai, was working at Ruby’s firm at the time and had arranged to use his office for an informal Sodan Kai meeting.
What started off as a routine meeting turned into a memorable brainstorming session. Out of it came the impetus to create a Toronto Japanese Canadian mailing list. Time was slipping away. The group realized that getting the Redress message out to fellow Japanese Canadians was essential to the cause particularly since the only other sources of information were The New Canadian and The Canada Times. The Toronto Chapter of the NAJC undertook to create a list of Japanese Canadians in Metropolitan Toronto and outlying areas. About a month after the meeting in Ruby’s office, Joy Kogawa opened her home for one of the most tedious, labour-intensive projects of the campaign—creating a mailing list of approximately 5,000 names in a month.
The computers for the work at hand were provided by Ben Fiber and Joy. Computers were still quite new at the time and not too many people knew how to use them. With a basic database program in place and Ben Fiber’s crash course in data input, the work began. Joy recalls calling up everyone she could think of, Japanese Canadians and otherwise, to see if they could help with the list. As a result, people were coming and going at her home at all hours. Some came once. Others came many times. Churches and community organizations supplied some of the lists, but the vast majority of names were located by searching out Japanese sounding names from the huge Metropolitan Toronto telephone directory and suburban directories. The names and addresses were then entered into the database.
Since the government’s dispersal program of the mid-1940s had been so effective, we had no Little Tokyos and no central meeting places, aside from the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre and the churches with Japanese dominated congregations. We were forced to rely on telephone directories. However, the difficulties that arose were enormous. First of all, one could not be sure whether the name was Japanese or if the person lived in an apartment. The telephone directories did not supply postal codes. This necessitated endless phone calls and long hours of scouring the postal code directories. It was painstaking but organized work.
The numbers of people who descended on Joy’s Montrose Avenue home were impressive. Many of the volunteers and their friends and relatives—and a network of other friends and relatives—came to work in shifts of an hour or more. At times there were 30 or 40 people in the house. There were some volunteers who got caught in the all absorbing task of compiling the lists and became mailing list addicts and, in some cases, life long friends.
In the end, when the horrific task was accomplished, the mailing list ended up with about 5,000 names and insufficient funds for postage. Wes Fujiwara came to the rescue with his postage meter and Matthew Okuno did the same when the chapter was sending out mail later. The mailing list that was created provided the base for the Toronto chapter’s list and later the Nikkei Voice list. It was a kind of turning point in the community’s awareness of Redress as the information began to reach large numbers of people many of whom did not subscribe to either of the two, long established community newspapers.
When it was decided to write this book, a handful of people gathered to reminisce about the mailing list days—people such as Van Hori, Shirley Yamada, Harry Yonekura, Yuki Mizuyabu, Joy Kogawa, Blanche Hyodo, Bill Kobayashi, Blackie Okuno, Polly Okuno and Roger Obata. Bill Kobayashi acted as a facilitator for this round table conversation. Excerpts from their conversation follow. (While Addie Kobayashi was not present at this gathering, her taped comments have been included.)
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Bill: We are going to try and recall the tremendous work that was done at Joy’s house. Was it a month, Joy?
Joy: About that.
Bill: A month of invading Joy’s home to get a list together which was to become the basis for the readership of our newsletter at that time—a list that eventually became the mailing list for Nikkei Voice.
Joy: I was trying to remember how it started in the first place. I went away somewhere. But before that, Sodan Kai had a meeting and decided that we were going to do this mailing. When I got back nothing had been done, I remember, so I just plunged in and got started.
Roger: Is it correct Joy, that this mailing list was started because the Toronto JCCA refused to give us their mailing list?
Joy: That’s right.
Addie: As I recall, the Toronto JCCA wouldn’t release its mailing list even though many of us were members. I could not help but interpret it as an attempt to keep Redress information from the community. Other organizations and churches gave their lists freely.
Van: The NAJC already had a newsletter. It was called The NAJC Newsletter and it was being produced in Vancouver. We had to get it out there to the community. I recall the sense of urgency to produce this mailing list as soon as possible. That’s why we were in such a tremendous rush to get it done, which meant that we were working almost around the clock.
Roger: I think that was the first time I met you, Van.
Joy: Yes, that’s the first time I met Van too.
Van: It’s the first thing I worked on as far as Redress was concerned so it was a very important project for me.
Roger: Joy, could you please give us some idea of how the mailing list work got started?
Joy: The first thing that Ben [Fiber] and I did was to try to get computers. Computers were sort of a new thing back then. Not too many people knew how to operate them. Anyway, I brought my computer downstairs and Ben brought his over and he borrowed another one from somewhere and then he and I turned my living room into a work station, laying planks and doors on the backs of chairs to create work spaces…And I started to call everyone I knew from Earth to Mars and people came. People I called and people I didn’t call came. Japanese Canadians and non-Japanese Canadians.
Shirley: Joy didn’t know me from a hole in the wall, but I just suddenly got a call and thought holy cow—this woman is calling me and asking me to a meeting and I think that’s terrific! She went out and recruited me and the others.
Joy: I always knew that the nisei were organized, but they were just phenomenal. What a sane, steady, cool headed and hard working bunch of people. It’s just amazing to me how basically organized they were and it’s a good thing because if they weren’t, it would have been a total shmoz. Tosh [Toshi Oikawa] did a lot of work. She’s an excellent organizer. She used to say to me, “People have to have something ready for them to do.” And she was so clear on details. So the nisei went into the community and gathered lists from churches and organizations.
Addie: In addition to the community lists, we used the Metropolitan Toronto and suburban telephone books. Do you know the size of the Metropolitan Toronto phone book? It was painstaking work, and the many people who came during the evenings would pore over the directories page by page, name by name in search of Japanese sounding names. The process was orderly. A person would come in and be given lists and directions and sometimes wouldn’t be heard from or seen for the rest of the evening. Volunteers were everywhere. We usually served ocha (green tea), senbei (crackers) and fruit and it was then we often found people tucked away in the corners of Joy’s house working diligently. Joy’s housemate at the time, Bin Chan, suffered many invasions of her privacy during that hectic period.
Joy: A lot of people just came one time, like Ken and Mary Adachi. They went upstairs and worked in the bedroom by themselves. They were going through the postal code books.
Shirley: Looking up the postal codes was absolutely the worst job of all. It was so tedious. It was awful.
Addie: In working through the directories, we knew many people were missing because they had non-Japanese names. And then there were a few African, Chinese and Italian names that sounded like Japanese names. People were phoned to verify they were Japanese.
Van: And Irish and Greek names too. The errors and weaknesses in the lists only became apparent later when we found out there were hundreds of apartment numbers missing. And there were other errors because the names being taken out of the phone book were so tiny and people, after typing for an hour or two, were so tired that they started misreading the numbers in the phone book.
Joy: What a mess! Mary Obata had a big job cleaning up the lists when we were done. All the mistakes that we made. What a headache we handed over to her.
Van: And Wes was left with it too. And what a mess the old computers were.
Joy: There were people who were excellent typists, and who knew about computers, like Addie, Shirley and Emi Nakai, but there were others who didn’t know the first thing about computers so the systems got fouled up. Another nightmare.
Van: The computers themselves, and the basic programs were real dinosaurs. Very primitive. All of a sudden everything would get wiped out and we’d have to start all over again. It was incredible. It would have been much easier to compile the list by hand with file cards. I remember the panic when Ben Fiber would just suddenly say, “Oh no” and then our hearts would freeze and we’d think, “Oh no, what happened, what happened?” And he’d say, “I lost it. I lost it all.” And we’d think, “Oh no. Ben!”
Shirley: This happened several times and you’d think, “Oh, gosh, just think of the hours of work that went into that.”
Joy: And we’d stay up late into the night trying to fix the mess-up. We couldn’t sleep worrying about it and then getting up at 5:00 in the morning to get ready for the morning shift.
Addie: I’d often arrive in the morning to find Joy and Ben wiped out from overwork and computer problems.
Joy: We had about 5,000 names when we were done. And after all that work, when we wanted to use [the list] to do a mailout, there was an objection that it was going to cost too much in stamps because we had too many names—and so guess what? People started to cut the names out and cut it back to about 4,500. I was kind of brokenhearted by that.
Addie: I remember one time Joy told me that when I brought food in it was like having a mother. I would cook meals sometimes or bring over dinners to heat up. Other times we’d eat whatever happened to be in Joy’s refrigerator. Joy had been footing the bill for most of the meals and feeding the masses who came in the evenings, but sometimes generous volunteers would come with refreshments to share.
Joy: Emmy Nakai was always bringing something too. Food and tons of supplies.
Addie: I felt a particular camaraderie with Emi, Ben and Joy. We were all driven by the need to get this list done. The major work fell to Ben and Joy. During the day and following evening sessions they would back up the data and gather together the work of the day and prepare the assignments for the next day. Emi was a loyal after-work-and-every spare minute data entry and odd job person…When I reflect on that crazy time, I think the mailing list blitz was a major turning point for the Toronto community because of the number of people we reached. Information was starting to get through to thousands of people who did not subscribe to any of the community newspapers. And working on the lists had a further benefit. Many of us were thrown together to work for Redress. And flowing from that mailing list work came the wonderful mailing work parties. When Nikkei Voice had to go out, it involved many people in an operation that later became very refined. There was a solidarity that was pleasant and unifying. All in all, I’d say that the work I did on the mailing list was one of the most satisfying volunteer jobs I’ve ever had.
Van: As far as Redress was concerned, it was a very important project for me too.
Joy: It was a lot of hard work for a lot of people. I wish I could remember all their names. Ko and Yae Ebisuzaki contributed a lot of work too. They came every day, you know, because they lived right down the street from me. Yae almost always brought food.
Yuki: I think we should mention the fact that we held at least one session at Ko and Yae Ebisuzaki’s to do some corrections. don’t you remember? I think Matt Matsui was there too. A lot of our mail was being returned because of wrong addresses.
Joy: Anyway, in spite of every imperfect thing, we did get it done and it had its moments of fun.
Van: Just an additional comment, I think that we owe a great deal to Ben Fiber.
Joy: Yes, we do.
Shirley: Remember the party at the end when those volunteer appreciation certificates were given out?
Joy: Oh, those funny things.
Shirley: But they must have meant a lot to us, Joy. Van has kept his all these years and I’ve kept mine. The certificate has a gold seal on it and the title reads “COMPANION OF THE ORDER OF BUGS OF REDRESS”. Mine said, “A great personal sacrifice and with unfailing good cheer, one Shirley Yamada did labour to create the mammoth mailing list. In recognition of this act of supreme good naturedness and devotion to the community of Japanese Canadians, she is hereby, by those present made a Companion of the Order of the Bug of Redress. Signed and sealed at Toronto on the 14th day of April in the Year of our Lord, 1985.” And there was also this wee little pin made of a computer chip that had two little antennae and big wobbly bug eyes.
Yuki: It was at one of Joy’s parties that I met Abe Kabayama for the first time since Hastings Park. I don’t think he remembered me, but I knew him because his father was a Protestant minister. And we were supposed to be atheists. We used to get a kick out of seeing the whole family praying before they ate at Hastings Park.
Joy: I guess that kind of re-connecting—that’s really what the mailing list was all about. Trying to get people back in touch with each other, establishing links with each other—and with our past.
BEN FIBER, a reporter at The Globe and Mail, was a true friend of Japanese Canadians and the NAJC, assisting in innumerable ways to further the cause of Redress. He was an active participant in the Toronto Ad Hoc Committee for Japanese Canadian Redress, working tirelessly on the creation of the mailing list, on press releases, on organizing educational events—and together with Roger Obata, Bill Kobayashi and others, he discussed key strategies. Ben remains to this day, a much loved community friend whose invaluable contributions are remembered with gratitude and respect. (Photo courtesy Roger Obata)
KO EBISUZAKI (right) and the late YAE EBISUZAKI (left) with former Ontario Premier Bob Rae September 11, 1992 at the NAJC National Award ceremony. Yae and Ko received this award for their years of dedicated volunteer service to the NAJC Toronto Chapter. Living just down the street from Joy Kogawa, they were at her house daily during the hectic weeks of compiling the mailing lists. (Photo courtesy Ko Ebisuzaki)
JOY KOGAWA was born Joy Nozomi Nakayama in 1935 in Vancouver, the second child of Lois and Rev. Gordon Nakayama. In the spring of 1942, the family was sent to Slocan City where they remained until 1945 when they moved to Coaldale in southern Alberta. Joy really needs no introduction for she has established herself firmly in Canadian literary circles with her poetry collections and three moving novels: Obasan (1981), Itsuka (1992) and The Rain Ascends (1996).
Joy was one of the early Redress activists. Her interest in Redress is reflected in many of her artistic expressions. Her book, Obasan, had a huge impact not only on Japanese Canadian readers, but on the larger Canadian population as well. It got people thinking and talking about the expulsion period. Joy’s concern for justice led her into the Redress movement where she became involved in the Sodan Kai and a few years later spearheaded the mammoth task of compiling the mailing lists. She was also a driving force behind the formation of the National Coalition on Japanese Canadian Redress, enlisting the support of many high profile contacts in the arts community. In many ways, Joy has led the way in helping our community break the silence and begin the healing process. (Photo: John Flanders)
MARY OBATA, wife of Roger Obata, contributed in numerous ways behind the scenes throughout the Redress years—inputting names and addresses for the mailing lists, typing letters, preparing refreshments for meetings, maintaining meticulous files of newspaper clippings on Redress, and doing all those tedious jobs that need to get done. But perhaps her most valuable contribution to the Redress movement in Toronto, was her enormous support and patience during all those years when the struggle for justice consumed her husband’s life.
Mary Obata was born in Ashton, Idaho in 1915. After receiving her B.A. from the University of Wisconsin, she ventured to Japan where she worked at St. Luke’s Hospital in Tokyo and the American Consulate in Kobe. When the Pacific War broke out, she was placed under house arrest. She was repatriated to the United States in 1942. When she reached her homeland, she experienced what she describes as “the greatest heartbreak of [her] life.” She was detained on Ellis Island for questioning by representatives from the F.B.I. and the Army and Navy Intelligence. Realizing that she was not a threat to national security, Mary was invited to work for the U.S. War Department in Washington, D.C. There she met and married Sgt. Roger Obata in 1946. He had been posted to the Pacific Military Intelligence Research Centre in 1946. Mary’s brother, Edward, of the 100 Battalion/442nd Regimental Combat Team, was killed in action in October 1944 in Bruyeres, France. (Photo courtesy Mary Obata)
VAN HORI was born and raised in Toronto. After graduating from the University of Toronto (double major psychology and zoology), he entered the insurance field. Then in 1984 a major change occurred in his life when he attended his first Toronto JCCA Redress Committee meeting at Nikko Gardens. He recalls that he was president of the Toronto Tennis Club (a Japanese Canadian tennis club formed in the late 1940s) at the time. Fellow sansei and Toronto Tennis Club member Dennis Madokoro approached him to get approval of the club to act as its representative on the new Redress committee. Van went along with Dennis to several meetings as an observor.
It didn’t take long for the Redress movement to consume his life. From 1988 to 1994, he served as executive director of the NAJC, Greater Toronto Chapter and was thus at the heart of JC activities for several years past the achievement of Redress. He recalls, “The struggle for justice had a significant impact on my life. I became heavily involved in the JC community…I made an enormous number of friends within the JC community as well as outside that community since this essentially political movement forced us to amass support from outside the JC community. [And] I became very interested in all human rights issues and the furtherance of [human rights] through political action.”
One of his strongest memories from the Redress period is the Annual General Meeting of the Toronto JCCA of July 1986: “This meeting indicated how undemocratic, treacherous and dishonest JCs could be to attain a self serving objective. But it also showed that JCs did have the fortitude to fight injustice and become involved politically at the highest levels. So in a very real sense, it was this meeting which motivated me to double and triple my effort to secure a just and honourable Redress settlement.”
Through the years of the Redress struggle, Van became much more aware and proud of the history of our community. As he puts it, “I came to realize the enormous price our parents and grandparents (and indeed future generations) had suffered because of racism and the internment. And finally, I also came to realize that the weight of history, for good or bad, has shaped the Japanese Canadian community as it is today.”
Van recently came back to Canada after exploring his roots in Japan for almost four years. (Photo courtesy Roy Ito)
Notes
1 Kogawa, Joy. Itsuka (Toronto: Penguin Books Canada, 1992), p. 211.