Witness to Loss: Race, Culpability, and Memory in the Dispossession of Japanese Canadians ed. by Jordan Stanger-Ross and Pamela Sugiman (review)

This important historical volume comes out of an ambitious seven-year SSHRC project Landscapes of Injustice (landscapesofinjustice.com) which aims to raise awareness of the harsh treatment of Japanese Canadians during and after the Second World War. Through the mechanisms of the Canadian state, former classmates, business associates, and young women who cleaned the homes of white Vancouverites were transformed into the Treacherous Other. Stripped of land, home, and livelihood, sometimes separated from their families, and exiled from coastal BC, the Isssei and Nisei (first and second generations) largely remained silent about these injustices in the years following the war. Their Sansei grandchildren took a different course: by the 1970s young Japanese Canadians were making public these human rights abuses in fiction, fact, and through a push for official redress.

Sansei activists can rightly take credit for inserting this dark chapter into Canadian histories of the Second World War and the editors of this volume want their readers to consider how entrenched racism and fear for personal and national safety led white Canadians to ignore fundamental democratic values. But this book has a deeper purpose. It presents the case of Kishizo Kimura, a Vancouver businessman and leader in the city's Japanese community who participated in the dispossession of his community, forcing the reader to see this difficult history as a complex tale mediated by time, memory, and scholarly interpretation. In many ways Kimura occupies a similarly uneasy historical position as Ga'axsta'las of Alert Bay, a significant female Indigenous leader in the first half of the twentieth century who was a vocal critic of the potlatch and an active Anglican. Witness to Loss is a carefully curated set of testimony, documents, images, information, and interpretation. Stanger-Ross's thoughtful introduction is followed by selections from a memoir Kimura wrote between 1967 and 1974 and four superb commentaries by historians Laura Madokoro and Timothy Stanley, sociologist Vic Satzewich, and author and educator Masako Fukawa. An afterword by Sugiman and an extensive appendix of key individuals and legal regulations, acts, and orders-in-council complete the volume.

History matters – but only if we animate it and bring it to a broad public. I am excited by the possibilities that this innovative volume presents in this regard and hope that it reaches a wide international audience. Educators in Canada and abroad could pair a section of Kimura's memoir with portions of Fukawa and Madokoro's commentaries and challenge students to create mind maps depicting the emotions of dispossession and loss of male livelihood for Japanese-Canadian men. The mixed format of Witness to Loss makes it easy for a range of readers to pull out sections that are of use or interest. Much of the prose is free of the kind of academic jargon that can alienate a wider audience. This is a critical historical moment to ponder how racism and fearful constructions of the Other can cause democracy to come undone. Witness to Loss is an invaluable signpost in this regard.