7  Of Ice Cream, Potatoes, and Kimono-Clad Japanese Women Forgetting and Remembering the Japanese Racialization of Lethbridge’s Sensuous Geographies

Strategizing “Crap Happens”

On March 21, 1951, a gala banquet was held to celebrate Japanese Canadian / City of Lethbridge co-operation. To the “delightful” spectacle of Japanese dancers in “colorful native costume,” the city fathers waxed lyrical (Lethbridge Herald 1951, 6). Mayor Turcotte observed how far Japanese families had progressed, while Alderman Virtue declared Canada to be “a Land of New Hope.” Indeed, since the “dark days of 1942” and especially since their full release into the Canadian civic sphere in 1949, these erstwhile “enemy aliens” had emerged so fully and quickly from their wartime ordeal as new model citizens that Alderman Huckvale opined, “Your Evacuation may prove a blessing in disguise” (Lethbridge Herald 1951, 6).

In retrospect, it is a remarkable statement. To be certain, the patronizing judgment implied in the phrase blessing in disguise was in keeping with the conceit of contemporary British white Dominion authority. Yet the blithe erasure of Japanese Canadian suffering was powerful in its exonerating effects. It turned a deaf ear to Lethbridge City Council’s vitriolic opposition just a few years earlier to “having the Japanese established as a permanent resident” (Lethbridge Herald 1944, 7). It ignored the City’s resolution that, in keeping with restrictions against Japanese entering and residing in the city, “they be removed” from the province (Lethbridge Herald 1944, 7). More broadly, it perfunctorily wiped the slate clean of the City’s facilitating role in the “Evacuation,” as this “politics of racism” (Sunahara 1981) later came euphemistically to be known. In 1942, some 21,500 individuals, or 95 percent of Canada’s Japanese, most of whom were born or naturalized Canadian citizens, were systematically removed from British Columbia’s west coast and displaced into a variety of policed surveillance settings. One of these was the sugar beet farms of southern Alberta. These became a destination for thousands of Japanese who supplied industry-saving cheap labour and a transit point in subsequent waves of forced migration (see, e.g., Kobayashi 1989; Adachi 1976).

The compelling nature of this will to forget should not be underestimated. Indeed, the spirit of reconciliation that seemed to pervade the banquet was neither unique in the apparent sea change it marked in the welcome of the Japanese (e.g., see Roy 1990, 38) nor exceptional in a wider national trend. In public discourse and media, “yellow peril” wartime stereotypes of the Japanese as “mysterious” and perfidious—“they ‘sneak’ into City” and “Grin About it,” declared the Lethbridge Herald (Lethbridge Herald 1945, 7)—were abruptly replaced by portrayals emphasizing Canada’s Japanese as “unthreatening” and “victims” (Hawkins 2009). Some of this is explained by an emerging new social ethos—as epitomized by the 1945 United Nations Charter—that cast the “Evacuation” as morally dubious and potentially classed aspects of the federal government’s eugenically informed assimilationist program to scatter the Japanese as a “crime against humanity” (Sunahara 1981, 138; see also Bangarth 2008). It certainly helped that, in their “industry and thrift,” the Japanese were “being successfully re-established, largely through their own efforts” (Lethbridge Herald 1949, 4): they were proving themselves to be good neighbours and citizens. Crucially, too, the Japanese themselves seemed to couple forgetting with moving on. “Crap happens and [you] gotta get on in your life, keep working and you’ll make it back,” explained Dick (personal interview, March 11, 2011) of shō ga nai, a phrase his father had used to describe his “Evacuation” experience.

Japanese Canadian forgetting and the silence that attends it have acted as narrative cues that stimulated the discursive emergence of this history from the late 1960s onward: Adachi (1976) attributes Japanese middle-class mediocrity to it (358–59); Sunahara (1981) likens the mute Nisei (second generation) to a rape victim (166–67); Kogawa’s ([1981] 1994) canon-setting Obasan paints a portrait of individual becoming as a moral-historical emergence into the cacophony of words, a narrative trajectory that finds its conclusion in the historic achievement in 1988 of a formal textual and material apology to the Japanese—the Redress Movement—as memorialized by Miki (2005); Sugiman (2013, 2009) amplifies in her oral historical explorations the trauma especially of women and the complexity of the “Evacuation” experience; and Oikawa (2012) seeks to flesh out the carceral sites of the “Evacuation” through spoken testimony. This list is not representative of Japanese Canadian historical production. But it does illustrate the overwhelming propensity to characterize forgetting in terms, understandably, of reaction to the war and its aftermath, whose effects are loss—of property, community, rights, and the future—and the violation of one’s human dignity. There are other ways, however, to approach forgetting and silence, ones to which this chapter will now turn its attention.

First, let’s return to shō ga nai, less in terms of its meaning and more in the way Dick said it: plainly, gruffly, “crap happens.” It is hardly a helpless response betraying the crushing of one’s spirit. Nor is it tactically defensive, for instance, “kodomo no tame,” as Kogawa’s obasan whispers, almost inaudibly—“for the sake of the children” ([1981] 1994, 26). Instead, his approach and the deployment it describes are almost celebratory, an assertion of indefatigability whose credence is his success as the owner of one of the region’s most successfully enduring potato-farming enterprises. In this light, it is a performative moment in our oral history encounter as he narrates himself through—in Josselson’s (2009) conception of the relationship between memory and history—an “autobiographical” appeal in the present to the authority of his own history. Nevertheless, this rendering of shō ga nai also speaks his truth about the navigation of racist discrimination and state violence. In a number of portraits, we’ll explore a selection of similar strategies, negotiations, and appeals: historical forgetting through heritage, imaginations of microstrategic confrontation, and the narrative assertion of Canadianness.

Second, take a moment to consider Pete’s childhood memory of his visit to a Lethbridge ice cream parlour presented epigraphically at the outset of this chapter. In privileging this voice, we specifically situate a history of Japanese Canadians—personal and collectively—in the latter half of the twentieth century. This is a critical intervention. Although every Japanese Canadian introduced in this chapter can trace the “Evacuation” as part of their pasts, we nevertheless step out of the overdetermining shadow of the Japanese Canadians’ Second World War, which is not to ignore its influence. We seek instead to amplify the complexity of their human experience: the (re)building everyday of family, livelihood, affiliations, and community; the nurturing of ambition through success and the suffering of hardship in failures; and above all, the resilience to which the portraits presented here all give witness. In paying respect to the integrity of Pete’s and many others’ lives that cannot and should not be explained always, already, and only as an effect of the war, we actively engage Eve Tuck’s (2009) critical response to “damage-centred” research to enact, in her words, “an axiological intervention that is intent on depathologising the experience of dispossessed and disenfranchized communities so that people are seen as more than broken or conquered” (416). This is of historical importance because when we interrupt the teleologies of the mid-century rupture, we can begin to understand the situated complexity of belonging and unbelonging, the contingency of racism even as racist practices are perpetual, and the inherent contradictions of race and nation as they intersect.

And then there is Lethbridge. We define it as the city, which includes, in our conception, its surrounding agricultural environs. Lethbridge is not simply a physical setting, a backdrop to the scenes of one’s life or just the stage with its props through which historical actors move. Rather, Lethbridge is an “experience of the senses,” a “sensuous geography” (Rodaway 1994, 3). According to Rodaway, the senses “are not merely passive receptors of particular kinds of environmental stimuli but are actively involved in the structuring of that information”; the senses are “significant in the overall sense of a [. . .] living world of everyday life as a multisensual and multidimensional situatedness in space and in relationship to places” (3–5). In this light, the racial environment that painfully scripted an interracial non-encounter for Pete was played out as the denial of the senses, and especially of taste. Unlike all the others in that shop, Pete would not get to eat ice cream that day: the discrimination he experienced in Purity Dairy would map an emotional geography that linked his father and their exclusion from a taste, temperature, texture, and story of ice cream that forever after could only be narrated as rejection. Taste “has been described as an intimate sense [. . .] structurally—it generates an immediate or local geography—and emotionally—it establishes a strong bond between person and environment,” writes Rodaway (67). Perhaps reflective of this memory that is stained by racist exclusion, Pete struggled to remember the address of Purity Dairy, and in describing how his father and he simply walked away, this story poignantly froze one moment in Pete’s Lethbridge, where space is generated into a meaningful—racialized—place (see Relph 1976). Through the focus that sensescapes sharpen on the embodied raced experience and interaction of racial identities, we can begin to map Lethbridge as a postwar history of Japanese race.1

Re-visualizing the City to Forget History

That the 1950s has come to be remembered as a period of progress not just by the city fathers but by Japanese themselves is suggested in this next memory anecdote. “It was a beautiful float, Mt. Fuji, [. . .] that’s a cherry blossom tree,” said Helen (personal interview, February 30, 2018; see figure 7.1), describing her photograph of the very first Japanese Canadian Citizens Association (JCCA) entry into Lethbridge’s annual summer exhibition parade. As she tabulated the facts of its conception—it was the inspiration of Hideo Nagata, the flowers were handmade by the church ladies, it won first prize—her tone softened when she came across the image from a few years later of another float since, looking out as if directly at us from the monochrome matte was her younger sister in a kimono. “That’s Amy [pseudonym],” she said. It was difficult to pin down the year. Similar photographs held in the Galt Museum Archive date JCCA participation to as early as 1949, but for Helen, who bedecked one of these annually appearing floats in 1953 or 1954, this collection of snapshots captured a distinctive historical moment. “Wow”—half whispered, this was no exclamation of surprise. Rather, as Helen’s position to try to recount objectively what had transpired six decades ago blurred into a subjective inhabitation of these moments, she marvelled in contemplation at the achievement of what the float represented: “It was a moment of pride for the Japanese, ’cause here we’ve been evacuated in, we’re all trying to rebuild lives, and we’ve gotten comfortable.” As one of the collective “we,” she seemed in wonder at from where Helen herself had come to where she had arrived.

In both the example of the float and of the 1951 banquet, a recurring motif is suggested. Note how each premises civic participation and ethnic projection on cultural display, which are evocatively dynamic: dancing, a procession through the streets. From the perspective of both the city officials then and one person sixty years on, these furthermore emphasize transformation. To be certain, long before the Multiculturalism Act was enacted in 1988 to redefine Canadian identity away from Dominion-era Anglo-assimilationism (see, e.g., Hopkins 2008 on Dominion decolonization), ethnic diversity with an emphasis on (cosmopolitan) sensory stimulation for mainstream white society—the sight of foreign dress, the sounds of unfamiliar words and song, strange food textures and tastes—had long scripted civic celebration. The inauguration of Alberta’s Heritage Day bank holiday in August 1975, for example, invited Lethbridge residents to encounter Italian, Irish, Japanese, Lithuanian, First Nations, Scottish, and Ukrainian performances and displays (Lethbridge Herald 1975, 16). While scholars like John Price have critically argued that cultural heritage was easily reduced to “remnants”—and that the only forms and customs “that survive are usually these innocuous ones that escape the conforming crush of law” (quoted in James 2003, 209)—this is to misunderstand the foundational role that heritage could and did play, at least for the Japanese. From the very year of their release into the civic sphere, Japanese Canadians selected and coordinated images that in their deployment tactically reimagined space and time as Japanese: those few minutes when the parade float passed by inscribed into the Lethbridge mise-en-scène a landscape of Mount Fuji and cherry blossoms; through rhythmic gestures, the gaze of the white authorities was beckoned and held by Oriental women’s bodies draped in silks. This cultural projection was not simply an act of intercultural sharing. Nor was it to expand the local iterations of official multiculturalism, though such displays may have helped cultivate the discursive ground for this eventual development in civic identity. Instead, it was creatively compelling: iconic images of the Far East evoked distance traversed (a Japanese landscape brought to Lethbridge) and closeness embraced (Japanese Canadian families animating this fleeting landscape who might also actually live next door). It was intentionally gendered too: traditional dress that fixed a lens of Far Eastern exoticism focused on women only, an Orientalist fantasy of unthreatening feminine softness to replace dangerous feminine mystique.

Critically, as Aoki deals with elsewhere (e.g., Aoki 2019), this appeal to the homeland and its heritage was highly ahistorical. In ways reminiscent of Japan’s postwar attempts to rebrand itself as a “nation of culture” and pacifist partner in America’s trans-Pacific security order, the appeal of Lethbridge’s Japanese in civic celebrations to images and icons redolent of their premodern world enabled them to skirt the messiness of the recent past. Whites were confronted with neither feelings of guilt nor tricky questions of complicity in anti-Japanese racism; Japanese, for their part, could reassert a certain pride in the defused cultural provenance of their displays. That is not all, since the scopic remapping of Lethbridge as Japanese in the early 1950s became a longer-term trajectory of sustained cultural and ethnic projection. In 1957, the JCCA gifted the city imported cherry blossom trees (Lethbridge Herald 1957, 4); in 1961, the Civic Sports Centre was host to a “Japanese Variety Night,” the first of similar cultural events over the next three decades like the Bunka no hi (culture day) that attracted thousands to the El Rancho Hotel Convention Room in 1986 (Horvat 1986, A5). The Galt Museum commemorated its relationship with southern Alberta’s Japanese Canadians by opening its dedicated exhibit in 1980.

Finally, there was the construction of the Nikka Yūkō Japanese Garden. In its aim to be “as authentic as possible,” it was importantly not religious in denominational affiliation or funerary in practice. It was specifically not a cultural centre to facilitate a diasporic transmission of knowledge and skill nor was it a museum that curated heritage. The expertise that was imported from Japan to architect its traditional tea house and to design a garden based largely on classical forms and principles (Van Luven [1980] 2000, 4) was less an exercise in mimetic foreign transplantation than animated by a desire to grow a transforming Japaneseness into the longer-term civic identity (and tourism-based revenue sources) of Lethbridge. The genesis of what continues to be one of Lethbridge’s most iconic attractions reads as a trans-Pacific story of community co-operation in a surprising alignment of eclectic interests and idiosyncratic personalities (Hiro, personal interview, April 17, 2019). But what we’d like to emphasize here is this. If at one time the imaginations of Japaneseness were limited to transitory projections into borrowed civic space, a part of the city—actual land in one of its most important public-use parklands—was now claimed and materially transformed to create new sightlines and vistas: the white panels of its boundary walls demarcating this space; glimpses through manicured vegetation of the greying cypress-wood teahouse made with no nails; its moon bridges, stone pagodas, and its giant bell visible from the opposite shore of Henderson Lake. As an immersive sensual experience, the garden is crafted to provoke stillness, yet its apparent timelessness is illusory, not least because as the city’s representative big-budget project to commemorate Canada’s centenary in 1967, this space was built as a civic place of declarative celebration, where dignitaries could be conspicuously welcomed. It was opened officially by members of Japan’s imperial family, whose next generations would visit to reaffirm this link at the garden’s twenty-fifth (1992) and fiftieth anniversaries (2017). At each of these events, at least two elements of the scopic genealogy that had been set in the trajectory of Japanese progress would be extended. The first was kimono-clad women dancing and adorning. The second was, in their active display of tradition, the effacement of history. The appearance in the middle of the Alberta prairies of a Japanese garden is, doubtless, explained in part by the existence of what was Canada’s third-largest postwar concentration of Japanese. Yet its authenticity, until very recently, was not made through appeals to Japanese Canadian history and, specifically, the very reason why southern Alberta was home to so many Japanese: the “Evacuation.” This erasure was not accidental. Not only were proposals to memorialize this history rejected—for example, the erection of a statue (Hiro, personal interview, March 18, 2011)—rather, the garden divided the Japanese Canadian equation to highlight the former. When Aoki pressed Robert Hironaka (personal interview, March 13, 2011), one of the original members of the Japanese Garden Committee about this, he responded, “We felt this should be a Japanese garden.” He asked for further clarification: “As opposed to a Japanese Canadian enterprise or [. . .] endeavour?” He nodded and said firmly, “Yeah, yeah.”

Lest the impression be given of a precisely choreographed ethnic presentation to which all Japanese subscribed, it should be remembered how diverse the Japanese were. The “Evacuation,” in fact, served to augment already existing divisions between small Japanese settlements dating back to the beginning of the twentieth century: ethnically distinct Okinawans from the Japanese Empire’s colonial periphery worked coal mines north of the city; main-island Japanese were farmers to the south. To this, the “Evacuation” brought differences in religion, generational authority, regional dialect, occupational background, educational attainment, and a range of west-coast experiences. That the Japanese appeared as a cohesive group was due in part to their efforts to present a united front, especially in the face of white hostility. Indeed, destructive internecine conflict that erupted in the 1960s, for instance, remained largely unknown in the wider community. Apparent Japanese cohesiveness is also explained by the geographical configuration of their postwar urban residence that, to apply Oiwa’s observations of Japanese in postwar Montréal, was characterized by “dispersion” as a “style of collective thought” (Oiwa 1986, 34). Although the northern half of Lethbridge, for example, was a residential destination for many incoming Japanese (Kamitakahara [1975?]), no concentration of Japanese ever emerged. But in contrast to new communities emerging “east of the Rockies”—for example, Montréal (Oiwa 1986), Toronto (Makabe 1998), Winnipeg, and Edmonton (Loewen and Friesen 2009)—longer-term “self marginalization” (Oiwa 1986, 20) was not tantamount to complete invisibility.

In her critical exploration of the multicultural polity, Sarah Ahmed describes the constitutionally inscribed legal imperative to welcome “the stranger.” Although her example is Australia, this phenomenon is also germane to Canada. Yet the “ontology” of the stranger is not only often maintained; it is to conceal social relationships within a “fetishism” of the embodied other that constitute “processes of inclusion and exclusion, of incorporation and expulsion [. . .] the boundaries of bodies and communities.” Through these, “the prior histories of encounter that might violate and fix others in regimes of difference” are reopened (Ahmed 2000, 4–8). Yet for the Japanese, perhaps we might see how in their emergence from colonial violation and survival of state violence, the fetish of the stranger might be selectively self-embraced and powerfully deployed. Such projections not only reflected the post-colonial wobble of white Dominion power in the postwar retreat of imperial Britain but sought to charm an emerging post-Dominion/post-colonial sensibility, stroked its ego, decorated its banality with a touch of exotic beauty, and in the process, transformed a once hostile space into a relatively safe place called home. This is not to misrecognize public conventions of polite interracial tolerance as the end of Anglo-conformist racial regimes. As the next section makes clear, so powerful were these that they could provoke crises in self-certainty. However, a distinctive moment mid-century is illuminated in which an ahistorical Japanese visual imaginary of the city infused foundational historical racialized narratives.

Imagining Confrontation: Haptic Significance

Introducing his contribution to the Nikkei Tapestry, a local history project celebrating southern Alberta’s Japanese Canadian community, Saburo “Sab” Nishi (1926–2015) described an encounter: “I was accosted by a ‘hakujin’ [Caucasian] acquaintance on the street and asked a rather accusatory and pointed question: ‘Why do the Japanese grow potatoes?’” He continued,

As I did not have a ready answer, I shrugged my shoulders and walked away from him. But, in mulling over the question, my wits and stubborn pride came to the fore, and my answer would have been something like this: “Why you stupid fella, it is the white man’s staple. If we did not grow them, you could be in the same situation as the Irish were during their great famine. We have you by the—and don’t you forget it!” (LDJCA History Book Committee 2001, 49)

The passage is certainly colourful, and it reflects this man who was known as a “character,” a “happy go lucky guy” (Dick, personal interview, March 11, 2011). Nonetheless, there is a sting in Nishi’s humour because it exposes as dissonant the racial harmonies amplifying Lethbridge’s postwar multicultural settlement. Here, we can see the specific forms discrimination might take and begin to appreciate why it was powerfully felt. In Nishi’s umbrage, we become witness to what can be understood as a “racial microaggression,” which Sue et al. (2007) define in their study of the Asian American experience as

brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral and environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory or negative racial slights and insults. [. . .] Simply stated, microaggressions are brief, everyday exchanges that send denigrating messages to people of color because they belong to a racial minority group. These exchanges are so pervasive and automatic in daily interactions that they are often dismissed and glossed over as being innocuous. (72)

According to their typology of “microaggressions,” Nishi was the target of a “microinsult”—that is, “a behavioural action or verbal remark that conveys rudeness, insensitivity, or demeans a person’s racial identity or heritage,” and we might add to this, an individual’s community and its history (Sue et al. 2007, 73). Indeed, foregrounding the engagement is the conspicuous postwar record of the Japanese Canadians in the region’s potato-growing industry. Starting from modest beginnings at the end of the war—growing “a few spuds [on] a few acres” all by hand on flood plains (Dick, personal interview, March 11, 2011)—“Evacuee” families like the Nishi’s joined established farmers from the pre-war period like the Hironaka’s (LDJCA History Book Committee 2001, 48) to define southern Alberta as one of the continent’s premier potato-farming areas. Producers like Tona Ohama, who worked the province’s largest potato farm at 850 acres, and Min Fujimoto—Canada’s biggest grower of elite seed potatoes in 1965—were celebrated for the records they set (Ohama and Ohama 1973; United Farmers of Alberta Co-operative 1965, 2–3). They also pioneered crop innovation, mechanization, and storage to transform the industry while also leading it: chairmanships and directorships of the Alberta Potato Growers’ Association (LDJCA History Book Committee 2001, 48). Along with other Japanese producers of vegetables, they owned vast tracts of farmland stretching across the southwest region of the province. Far from being “innocuous,” then, the question asked by Nishi’s accuser was a critical interrogation and, in turn, an implied invalidation.

Nishi’s delayed response further complicates the scenario. On the one hand, his l’esprit de l’escalier moment—the frustration of the perfect comeback come too late—invites the reader’s sympathy if only because it is all too familiar. On the other hand, for the Japanese Canadian target audience of the Nikkei Tapestry, it perhaps gives voice to another shared experience. Far removed from the “old-fashioned” type of racism where “racial hatred was overt, direct, and often intentional”—to this we must add systemic, systematic, and eugenic—the “power of implicit racist attitudes and beliefs” is nevertheless exerted, and it is all the more injurious because of the “contemporary” microaggressive form it takes, “subtle, indirect, and [. . .] disguised” (Sue et al. 2007, 72, 73). “Was it really intended this way?” “Am I being too sensitive?”: calling into doubt one’s own perception and judgment, these are the everyday “dilemmas” experienced each day that sociologists of microaggression like Sue et al. describe. As such, they result in “severe conflict about whether to respond [. . .] given that most [perceived microaggressions are] unintentional and outside the level of awareness of the perpetrator” (78). Even so and even as Nishi imagines his retort, to have confronted the insult might have been ineffective, since it might have “only [made] the victim appear ‘paranoid’” (78).

I’d like to draw attention to one other implication of Nishi’s anecdote. Punctuating the biographical account of his and his family’s past, which forms his other contribution to the Nikkei Tapestry, is the formative, central role of the land itself: on their forced arrival in Alberta as part of the “Evacuation” as sugar beet labourers having been dispossessed of their berry farm in British Columbia, “it was an inauspicious beginning where they had to start with few possessions and a little money” and in which “despite the gruelling ‘widow maker’ work [. . .] they managed to survive the harsh conditions” (LDJCA History Book Committee 2001, 314). A decade and a bit later, moving to Bow Island, a new chapter began: “They raised potatoes, sugar beets, and wheat” and “in the beginning, farming life was hard”—“the young bride from Tokyo [. . .] had to deal with the hardships of life in rural Alberta and raising 6 kids” (313). With its repeated emphasis on overcoming adversity and privation, this is a sensuous (or more specifically, haptic [Rodaway 1994, 41]) moral tale whose value is generated and measured through the acts of touching the soil itself, space—the land planted by hand and working the landscape. This is invested with profound meaning not simply because it provided the basis of a productive and eventually successful livelihood; rather, it is of life: “I have a tremendous affinity for the land, which is ultimately what sustains life,” read the closing lines of the Nishi reflection, reiterated in his obituary (LDJCA History Book Committee 2001, 315; Southland Obituaries, n.d.). The body and the land merge where skin touches the soil so that place is integral to one’s own sense of self, and within that identity are inscribed race and racism as the traces of history.

In highlighting Nishi’s words, it becomes easier to understand why the white man’s question about Japanese and potatoes came as such an affront. In the moment of its utterance, the ground on which Nishi stood was transformed from being just a bit of material space into the core of an environmentally embodied historical tale that was his and his community’s past, present, and future. His farm, his family’s home, this area of southern Alberta—they were shaped by other Japanese like him whose lives and memories bear witness to two lifetimes of graft and integrity. In one, racist state violence scripted a history of dispossession and dislocation; in the other, resilience, aspiration, ownership, and authority narrated a new journey of personal affirmation. The challenge of discrimination—the microaggression—was not simply that of a personal insult. Rather, it put at stake the land itself that Nishi shaped and made productive, that guaranteed in Nishi’s imagined silent retort the moral worth of himself and the Japanese more widely. In other words, discrimination was about whose place southern Alberta was.

Narrativizing Race in the Sensual Geographies of Lethbridge

In our various encounters with the postwar Japanese Canadian experience, there is an ironic twist that perhaps helps explain the efficacy of individuals’ responses and memories. In Dick’s citation of ethnic value (shō ga nai) and Helen’s appeal to cultural tradition, remembering (of heritage) is in order to “forget” history—the “Evacuation.” In Nishi’s imagined confrontation, his provocative retort was a silent microstrategic response to deflect microaggression. What then of Pete? When we spoke with our two student researchers to review their oral history encounter with him, they reflected on how—occurring so early on in their engagement—his recollection about being excluded had the effect of fixing a narrative premise. Generalized as one instance of discrimination to which he was subjected, it was returned to and grappled with till effectively, as the second epigraph doggedly asserts, it was worked through with Pete appearing to have erased it and any experience of discrimination from his entire life story. For our students and indeed us, this was an inexplicable conundrum that we put down to the vagaries of memory and a retreat into a discourse of national belonging, one whose avowal of multicultural Canadian equality is a an easy if morally powerful patriotic expression: “We’re all Canadians and that’s it.” Yet according to Ahmed,

The construction of the nation space takes place alongside the production of national character as instance in which “the nation” itself is fleshed out [. . .] as place and person. The nation becomes imagined as a body in which personhood and place are precariously collapsed. Through a metonymic elision, the individual can claim to embody a nation, or the nation can take the shape of the body of an individual (“bodyscape”). (Ahmed 2000, 99)

Ahmed is certainly correct to warn us that the multicultural imaginary of the nation can have the effect of concealing difference, and in this light, we might interpret Pete’s assertion as the internalization of this ethos of “repressive tolerance”: despite (acceptable) cultural differences, we—in mantra-like fashion—“are in fact the same underneath” (106; emphasis in original).

But that’s not quite right. “Easy going” and by his own admission someone who likes “to kid around,” Pete (personal interview, November 17, 2017) is “serious” when it “comes to [. . .] history.” Fully aware of the vulnerability of the survival of Japanese culture, language, and tradition, he explained why he joined the JCCA and other Japanese groups like the Lethbridge Chōjūkai (“seniors’ association”), even taking a leading role in the Kagoshima Kenjinkai (“hometown” association to maintain immigrant prefectural affiliation): “It’s something that, I won’t give it up; it’s something that I like to see my generation, my kids, my grandkids continue with.” Importantly, Japaneseness as described in his everyday relationships is not that of a purist so that when he conceptualizes history as a “continuation with the present, the past, and the future [. . .] with the cultural system in the future,” the intimate experiences he shares epitomize diversity: his marriage to a woman of eastern European descent and the identification of his children and relations in terms less of Japanese Canadian than of Japanese Hungarian, Japanese French, Japanese English, Japanese Métis. In practice, the JCCA New Years party, which he used to organize, was aimed at celebrating and nurturing Japanese camaraderie from the past into the future, all of it facilitated by liquor and Chinese food. And then there is Lethbridge, which his network of family, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances map in a geography of all his senses, of which perhaps sound—specifically every time his name is heard—is particularly potent: “Yes, at St. Michael’s [Hospital; that’s] where I got my name. ‘Pete,’ was from [. . .] the doctor that delivered me, it was Dr. [Pete—changed to protect pseudonymization], and that’s where I got my name.” Just as “St. Mike’s,” as this institution was popularly known, inscribed Lethbridge into his very identity, so too did Purity Dairy. In the painful episode for which it came forever after, Purity Dairy is also nevertheless central to a narrative of transformation. In this—as with Dick, Helen, Nishi, and indeed, Lethbridge itself—it gave Pete historical and moral impetus to affirm this space, this city, as his place in a will to “forget” (“we didn’t have any discrimination”) in order to remember from where it is he came to where it is he has arrived.

References

Acknowledgements

We’d like to express our sincere appreciation to all the individuals who have shared their time and memories with us. We’d like to acknowledge the generous support of the University of Plymouth (Faculty of Arts and Humanities Research Impact Seed Funding) and the University of Lethbridge (Community of Research Excellence and Development Opportunities grant). These have been instrumental to the foundation and growth of the Nikkei Memory Capture Project, including engaging our student research team. Special thanks go to Shannon Ingram, Simon Lyon, Shelby Simpson, and Elaine Toth, who developed the newspaper database from which this chapter draws. We’d like to recognize our collaborative stakeholder partnerships that have offered invaluable local support and assistance: the Nikkei Cultural Society of Lethbridge and Area Galt Museum and Archives and the Nikka Yūkō Japanese Garden. Finally, thanks to the many colleagues for their advice and comments.