Postscript 2000
By Joy Kogawa
There’s a button on my rice cooker that says “fuzzy start”. When I think about the Japanese Canadian Redress movement and when and how I got involved, I’d say I had a fuzzy start. At one level, the whole thing began the night three new acquaintances came to my door. Maryka Omatsu, Marcia Matsui and Shin Imai were three bright, young sansei lawyers who dropped by to ask how my trip to Chicago had been. Was this 1982? Obasan was still new on the scene and I had been asked by William Hohri to go to Chicago to speak to the Japanese community there. These fellow nikkei were expressing a communal response to a collective history.
Having no political wings at all at the time, I did not consider myself a part of their flock. But their passion was contagious and I got involved. Eventually, I contacted practically every Japanese Canadian I knew. There weren’t many.
About the time the sniping in the community began over the Redress issue, I witnessed darts and arrows flying past, especially in the community press and some of them hit my new friends. My skin was exceedingly thin in those days and I was almost knocked out by the flack. That was an intense time of emotional involvement. It felt too awful for words and the pen disintegrated in my fist. I found myself in a lot of prayer time, asking what I should be doing and not knowing and being afraid of the whole political scene.
And so now, when the request comes to revisit Redress, my reluctant memory scan hits a block as it picks up painful memories—moments of panic, hours and hours of many kinds of labour, disappointments, paranoia, teeth-gritting determination and mind-bending complexity. The fun, if there was any, for it all felt so deadly serious at the time, was in our minor celebrations—the pot luck dinners, those moments when we were so exhausted and wrung out and anxious that we could only collapse into hilarity. The biggest plus for me was getting to know and work with some phenomenal people.
What a cast of characters we were—bulldogs, the lionhearted and skittering rabbits, all making up the army of the quietly passionate. It was a time of high engagement, a time of creating the infrastructures of democracy, a time of rediscovering a sense of community. There were moments of outrage, panicky long distance phone calls. There were people scooting about town delivering press releases. There were private and public meetings with members of the media and with friends and stranger in places high and low. There were endless hours of listening and communicating and planning with committees. It was a way of life for many of us, a donning of a carefully stitched mantel from our collective past. And it was exhilarating while it lasted.
For me, one of the saddest things during this crazy time was the loss of an enormous list of individuals who had responded to any ad that was placed in The Globe and Mail. The Ad Hoc Committee for Japanese Canadian Redress, formed largely of friends from the Church of the Holy Trinity, had placed an advertisement asking for support for our cause. and the support had come in from across the country. Thousands of names. Thousands of dollars. If ever there was a list of our unseen angels, that was the list. But it mysteriously disappeared. Could it still be out there somewhere, in someone’s basement? Or did it get accidentally tossed in the garbage?
The urge to thank people is deep. It comes upon us as a need, like the pressure to breathe out when the lungs are full, or the urge to laugh or dance or hug someone when you’ve learned something wonderful. It’s the completion of a joyous event, an act of celebration and it’s both a duty and a pleasure. The loss of that list of names robbed us of one of these acts of finality that would have enabled us to share our satisfaction with others.
In the context of the missing list, I can understand the drive behind the creation of this book. There still remains a need to acknowledge and thank those many, many people who toiled within and without the community to attain Redress—a need to share the joy, the pride, the strength and satisfaction that comes from knowing one has acted rightly.
I am grateful for the journey and grateful for the companions along the way. I’m grateful too for the people who have died: fearless Kunio Hidaka who was speaking publicly one evening and none of us knew or suspected that we’d never see him again, Emy Nakai who came to the Montrose house every day after work to join the gang coming and going, Ken Adachi who came with me to lobby David Crombie to support the national organization, dear Yae Ebisuzaki with her always cheerful help and her food—and Marcia and Jim Matsui’s sweet mother, and so on. This list of departed heroes will keep growing as we aging nisei join the throng.
And so the fuzzy start has a fuzzy ending. Besides the offering of thanks, there are still tasks to be carried out. Many acts of reconciliation within the community wait for our moments of spiritual courage and challenge. During the Redress campaign, in moments of heated discussions, harsh words and accusations were hurled—remarks which many people, I am sure, now regret. But there were no good guys or bad guys, only individuals with different points of view who were deeply convinced that they were doing the right thing for the community. We are such a small community, a minority among minorities. And we are getting smaller. But the song and the story of the struggle for justice that we have jointly created will endure through time. We can be proud of this and of one another.