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Joy Kogawa's House
Photo from kogawa.homestead.com
Category: Regulars, Subcategory: Terry Lowe
Contributed by Terry Lowe on November 14, 2005
There is only one literary landmark in Vancouver: the native poet Pauline Johnson's grave marker (died 1913) in Stanley Park. It is so well-hidden I've never been able to find it.
There is nothing noting the long-lost shack in Dollarton where Malcolm Lowry wrote at least half of Under The Volcano; nothing to show that Alice Munro learned to write here; nothing indicating that George Bowering, our very first Canadian Poet Laureate lived and wrote a great deal here. No mention either of George Woodcock, Sinclair Ross (who died here recently in great obscurity), nor the poets Al Purdy or Earle Birney who had such a great influence on the creative writing department at UBC (the first such in Canada, and nowadays widely renowned).
You wouldn't learn any of that from wandering about town, nor from reading any promotional material published by the city. This knowledge exists only in the memories of oddballs like me who consider such things important.
I could show you some if you'd like: the street corner where Lowry met his beloved Marjorie (not much to see there now except fast food outlets); D.M. Fraser's old house up on 28th and Main; the house where Wayson Choy grew up in Strathcona; and I might even be able to track down the house nearby from whence Evelyn Lau fled as a young teenager.
The one I'd most like to show you, though, is the one shown above: 1450 West 64th Avenue, the childhood home of Joy Kogawa who, in 1981, wrote the novel Obasan.
Obasan is an acknowledged Canadian classic. It is a lightly-fictionalized account of Ms Kogawa's early life. Her protagonist Naomi is six years old in 1942 and living a child's life in that house, swinging from her beloved cherry tree in the back yard, and so forth.
Following the attack on Pearl Harbour, the Canadian government stripped all Japanese Canadians of their citizenship, expropriated their property, and auctioned it off for a few cents on the dollar. The people were removed to rural internment camps or to sugar beet farms on the Prairies. Here in Vancouver, they were first held in the Hastings Park racetrack stables, then packed into trains and sent inland. About 20,000 people were thus removed.
Naomi's mother had returned to Japan for a brief family visit when this occurred. She was classified as an enemy alien and not allowed to return, and so had to stay throughout the war in Japan.
Naomi, her brother and her father were sent to Slocan, BC, where they lived in a frozen shack with her aunt and uncle (the word 'Obasan' roughly translates as 'respected elder aunt'). Obasan became her substitute mother.
Naomi's real mother was living in Nagasaki on August 9th, 1945. She initially survived the atomic bombing, although her face was melted off, and she later died in a Japanese hospital. She never returned to Canada.
When the war ended, the Canadian government passed the Dispersal Act, which forcibly removed the internees even further from their previous homes, and forbade them to return. The government also 'encouraged' some 4,000 of them to return to Japan.
Their citizenship and civil rights, including the right to live on the Pacific Coast, were not restored until 1949. They didn't get their property back, and the government refused then and thereafter to admit that they'd done anything wrong.
An entire Vancouver community was thus eradicated. The old "Little Tokyo" (as it was then known) on Powell Street in the Downtown East Side, is now a hellhole of poverty, drug addiction, violence, and desperation. Twenty years ago, there were still some restaurants and corner stores grimly hanging on, but they're now gone, too. There's nothing left. I know of one sign on a boarded-up building that shows faded Japanese characters, but I can find no other evidence that anyone other than street lunatics has ever lived there. I've heard that some architecture is still visible if you go down the alleys and peer into yards from behind. I'm not brave enough to go down those alleys by myself, so I don't know if that's true.
Naomi's family was required to move to rural Alberta and work as field labourers. Kogawa calls this town Grafton, although it was actually Coaldale (current population 6,008). A scan of Coaldale's web site shows a typical small farming town, with no mention whatsoever of Obasan or of Ms Kogawa, its famous former resident.
Obasan was the first novel ever to address this, and in its wake came a flood of other books. It is a lyrical and poetic work, full of history, full of Naomi's longing for her mother and her old life, full of the privations of growing up in an internment camp, and infused with the indomitable stoic spirit of old Obasan. It's one of my favourite books; I think I somehow identify with that tough but still wise and gentle old woman. I was looking for a quote or two for inclusion here, but the work is so seamless it's almost impossible to pull sentences out of their context. It must have taken her years to write.
It is not as widely known that in 1992 Ms Kogawa wrote a sequel to Obasan, and that book is named Itsuka. 'Itsuka' means 'someday', although it is usually used fatalistically to mean its opposite: 'will never happen'.
Itsuka tells the story of the adult Naomi, working quietly as a teacher, and (in her words) "leading a life so uneventful most people wouldn't believe it." Her firebrand Aunt Emily drags her away from her small-town prairie schoolhouse to Toronto, and involves her in the campaign for redress.
Itsuka is a very political book, and is instructive in showing how easily a government can ignore you if it does not wish to acknowledge you. The Canadian government ignored these people's claims for 40 years. The redress campaign eventually achieved a very small victory, but only by threatening to publicly embarrass said government (also instructive, is it not?). That was 17 years ago.
Since 1942 (63 years ago), that expropriated house has been sold and resold - at great profit - a number of times. The current owners wish to demolish it and build something else. An ad-hoc association was formed several years ago to try to save the house, and preserve it both as a literary landmark and as a piece of history that should not be forgotten. They sometimes use as an example Pierre Berton's childhood home in Dawson City, Yukon, which has been preserved and is now used as a writer's retreat.
They're up against the inflamed Vancouver real estate market, which currently assigns a price of about $750,000 to that property. Real estate developers rule around here, although they bring to my mind Oscar Wilde's remark about knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Vancouver City Council claims that they cannot assign it heritage status, because that status is only accorded to structures that have 'architectural value' and this nondescript house has none. Um, so why not just change the rule to include structures of 'cultural value,' too?
Council did, however, unanimously deny the application for demolition for 120 days, and set that deferral to begin on November 30. That sets D-Day as March 30, 2006, and there's a civic election between then and now, so anything can happen. The provincial government has to date shown no interest in cultural history, so no assistance is expected therefrom.
Joy Kogawa was in town recently to introduce an opera created from her work. While here, she was invited to attend a ceremony at City Hall where a cutting from her beloved cherry tree was planted as a sapling in the lawn. In her own gentle way, she said the money required to save the house could probably be put to better use elsewhere, while at the same time admitting the great longing she felt that it be saved. "A lot of heritage has been lost because of money and this too will be a story of money."
The Mayor declared that day to be 'Joy Kogawa Day' but that's not going to accomplish anything. If I had to give odds on sapling versus house, I'd say the sapling has a much better chance of survival.
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