Welcome to Historic Joy Kogawa House

 

Ryukoku students visit Kogawa House in July 2007

Ryukoku Summer Students Visit Kogawa House 

A group of 19 enthusiastic Japanese high school students and their teachers visited historic Joy Kogawa House early on the morning of Thursday, July 26, 2007. Members of the group attend school in various parts of Japan and came together in Vancouver to participate in Ryukoku Sogo Gakuen, a three-week educational program out of Steveston Buddhist Temple that promotes religious, cultural, and international understanding. The Ryukoku Summer English program has been in operation every summer for the past five years.

This year, an important aspect of the curriculum was to create some understanding and appreciation of the Japanese experience in British Columbia. As part of their preparation for their visit to Canada, students were required to read Joy Kogawa’s story of the internment, Naomi’s Road, as well as do some research about the author. The culmination of their learning was the exciting tour of the author’s childhood home during their visit to Vancouver.

Tamsin Baker, regional manager of The Land Conservancy of BC’s Lower Mainland office, was present at the house to welcome the group. Tamsin showed the students photos of the house during various times in the past and explained the history of the house and plans for its future. The highlight of the morning came when Joy herself arrived at the house, accompanied by David Kogawa and their son, Gordon. Her arrival was a completely unexpected surprise. The students and teachers were absolutely thrilled to meet Joy in person and gave her a very enthusiastic welcome. Everyone wanted to have a picture taken with Joy.

The Ryukoku School wishes to thank Joy Kogawa, David Kogawa, and Tamsin Baker for taking the time to make their visit to the house very meaningful and for helping to create wonderful memories for the students to take back to Japan.

—Posted on behalf of Joan Young

Joy Kogawa outside Kogawa House in Marpole 2005. "Photo-Dan Toulgoet, Vancouver Courier" - used by permission

The cherry blossoms have been out everywhere in Vancouver since late March.   In mid-April I was driving through Vancouver's Marpole neighborhood, when I thought I should go visit Joy Kogawa's childhood home at 1450 West 64th Ave.

It had been back the summer of 2005, when I had received an e-mail from Ann-Marie Metten that Joy Kogawa's beloved cherry tree was diseased and dying.  She and a group that included then Vancouver city councillor Jim Green, gathered grafts from the cherry tree to try to preserve it for future incarnations - because it was feared that the owner would not give up the house.

This was the house that the Save Kogawa House Committee, which I was part of, had worked so hard to save from demolition, when the owner decided to draw up plans to demolish the house and build a new one.  It was an intensive awareness campaign from September to December when The Land Conservancy of BC decided to step in and take on this project, deeming it a worthy Vancouver landmark of cultural and historical importance.  Then it was from December until May, as we tried to raise funds to save the house... almost taking a mortgage out before an anomynous donor stepped in with almost $300,000 to allow TLC to purchase the house. 

But now the task is to continue raising funds and awareness to both renovate the home and restore it to the qualities it had before Joy and her family were forced to leave their house due to enforced internment of Japanese Canadians during WW2 - even though they were born in Canada!  We also want to build an endowment and create a writers-in-residence program as well as community programming.

Cherry Tree at Kogawa House Nov 2005 - photo by Don Montgomery

Last spring, Joy was living in Vancouver, and she went to visit the cherry tree to find a few spare blossoms.  The tree was sickly.  At the open house in September - Joy placed manure around the tree's base, spoke kind words and blessings for the tree.  Joy soon returned to Toronto, but has returned to Vancouver briefly for Christmas with her daughter and grandchildren and recently at the end of March to see relatives and to give a reading for the Alcuin Society at Kogawa House on March 30th.

It is like the tree (and the house) knows it has a new life.  It is an old tree but heavy and full with blossoms.
Beautiful... I know if Joy saw the tree with its blossoms, there would be tears of happiness in her eyes.

Blossoms on cherry tree at Kogawa House - photo Todd Wong

Joy Kogawa gives March 30th reading for Alcuin Society at Kogawa House

Seventeen Alcuin Society members and their guests participated in the first of  a new series of members-only meetings on March 30th at the historic Joy Kogawa heritage house in Marpole.  

Kogawa House Committee member Ann-Marie Metten started the evening by explaining the series of successful steps that were taken to save the historic house from demolition.  Future plans are to return the house to its original condition and then to offer the house as a place of retreat for writers of conscience from around the world.

Richard Hopkins then spoke of Joy Kogawa’s considerable literary achievements in the areas of fiction, poetry and children’s literature.  Joy’s books were available for members to examine after the presentations.

The definite highlight of the evening, however, was a reading by Joy herself from her award winning novel Obasan.  The reading had particular resonance for the audience since Joy continuously referred to places mentioned in the novel that were right before the audience’s  eyes. 

After the reading she  spoke with incredible energy and passion about the Japanese internment during the Second World War and all of the hardship and suffering that that injustice caused so many Japanese families and the Japanese community in Canada as a whole. 

Fortunately some reparation for these wrongs have occurred in the form of  Federal Government redress and in the saving of the Kogawa house itself.  All of the audience members felt at the end of the evening that they had received a rare privilege in being able to hear  Joy read and speak  her own moving personal experience.

More Heritage recognition

for Joy Kogawa House

write ups in Vancouver Courier

and Journal of Commerce

Here are some articles about the Vancouver Heritage Awards. 

Fred Lee wrote in the Vancouver Courier
Urban Landscape

Here's the certificate.

Thanks to everyone who helped.

TLC and Save Joy Kogawa

House committee both

receive City of Vancouver

Heritage Award of Honour




It was a great night for the members of Save Kogawa House Committee and TLC: The Land Conservancy of BC.  We were all honoured with the City of Vancouver Heritage Awards of Honour. It was the last award presented following the multiple recipients for awards of recognition and awards of merit. TLC executive director Bill Turner and myself, for Save Kogawa House Committee, were tagged to give the aceptance speeches.

The awards were held at the beautiful and historic Coastal Church, at 1160 West Georgia St.  A reception was held from 5:30 to 7pm, and it was great to see and socialize with all the event's attendees.  I had a great chat with historian Jean Barman. City Councillor Peter Ladner congratulated me on a well-run Gung Haggis Fat Choy that he attended. Other City Councillors Heather Deal, George Chow and Suzanne Anton congratulated us on saving Kogawa House. Friends Kelly Ip, Howe Lee were there. Parks Commissioner Spencer Herbert gave me the latest update on his petition to name the new Vancouver park at Selkirk and 72nd, as David Suzuki Park.  Artist Raymond Chow and house genealogist James Johnstone were there. Dianne Switzer of the Vancouver Heritage Foundation waved to us.

The evening's emcee was Christopher Gaze, creator and director of Bard on the Beach. Gaze gave a summation of Vancouver's early arts and cultural history, accompanied by projected pictures. It started with the first piano arriving in 1851, and included great names and performances such as Nijinksky, Boris Karloff and Benny Goodman, as well as local luminaries such as Dal Richards and Jimmy Pattison. This "introduction" to the awards event finished with a musical performance by Destino, the four tenors "popera" group.

Vancouver Mayor Sam Sullivan came to the stage to welcome and thank all the nominees. Mayor Sullivan handed out the award certificates, after Gaze read descriptions of each of the award winning projects.

Here is the draft of the acceptance speech which I presented at the Vancouver Heritage Awards:

Joy Kogawa House committee

to receive Vancouver Heritage

Award of Honour


A young Joy Kogawa with brother Tim standing beside their childhood home in Marpole prior to 1942 - photo courtesy of Joy Kogawa

On February 19th, at Coastal Church, the City of Vancouver Heritage Awards will give the Heritage Award of Honour jointly to Joy Kogawa House Committee and The Land Conservancy of BC.

Joy Kogawa House was the childhood home of award winning author Joy Kogawa, which she was forced to leave in 1942, at age six, when Japanese-Canadians were "evacuated" from the BC Coast and sent to internment camps during World War 2.  The Canadian government subsequently confiscated all their remaining property and auctioned it off, supposedly to help pay for the cost of internment.

She and her mother always dreamed of returning to the house, but their family was sent to live in Alberta as part of the Japanese Canadian dispersal program, in an effort to keep Japanese Canadians from returning to the Coast, and trying to reclaim their confiscated property.

Obasan (1981), is the award winning book that is a fictional memoir about the internment of the Japanese-Canadians.  It is considered one of Canada's most important 100 books ever written according to the  Literary Review of Canada.  It is the second most studied book in Canadian schools and universities.

I am one of the committee members for the Joy Kogawa House committee along with Ann-Marie Metten, David Kogawa, Anton Wagner, Ellen Crowe-Swords, Richard Hopkins, Jen Kato, Joan Young and Sabina Harpe.  We have all put in incredible hours of volunteer work to help realize this project.

It was only 17 short months ago, when Ann-Marie Metten contacted me for help when she learned that a demolition inquiry for 1450 West 64th Ave. was being made.  In the months to come, we would be asked why it was important to save the childhood home of author Joy Kogawa.  We would also be told that there was little chance to save it.

The 3rd week of September 2005, was a roller coaster for Joy Kogawa.  She learned of the demolition plans in the same week that saw: 1) excerpts from the Naomi's Road opera performed at Vancouver Arts Awards; 2) she received the Community Builder's Award from Asian Canadian Writer's Workshop; and 3) the final event of One Book One Vancouver "Obasan" program where she gave a reading at Word On The Street book and magazine festival.

In December 2005, The Land Conservancy of BC stepped in to become a joint partner in our project to save the house.  They became the chief fundraiser and eventually purchased the house in full in May 2006.


Joy with Richmond elementary students who wanted to save Kogawa House - photo Joan Young

We are ecstatic and honoured to receive the Award of Honour, for projects demonstrating an outstanding contribution to heritage conservation.

Nominations were accepted for:

• Restoration, rehabilitation, adaptive re-use or continued maintenance of a heritage building, a significant interior of a heritage building, or characteristic features of a heritage building;
• Use of innovative engineering techniques or restoration/conservation methods in upgrading a heritage building which may include seismic upgrading;
• Preservation of a heritage landscape;
• Heritage advocacy of a group or individual in the preservation of a heritage site or increasing public awareness of heritage issues;
• Publication, education or exhibit that promotes heritage conservation;
• Efforts in community or neighbourhood revitalization.

Click here to see past Heritage Award winners

The Tyee: Michael Kluckner about the importance of Kogawa House 

and The Land Conservancy of BC

Michael Kluckner is a writer/painter and heritage advocate.  He has done 

wonderful things to promote the heritage of BC, documented in his book

and his works titled  Vanishing British Columbia.  In a recent article by 

Charles Campbell in The Tyee, Kluckner talks about the importance of 

Kogawa House and the wonderful work by The Land Conservancy of BC.

http://thetyee.ca/Photo/2006/12/08/VanishingBC/

On the virtue of taking individual heritage preservation initiatives out of government hands:

"One of the things I can take some credit for being involved in at the very beginning and suggesting it is the privatizing of the B.C. Heritage Trust and the creation of the Heritage Legacy Fund of B.C., which was given $5 million in seed money right in the darkest days of the Liberal government. I was the treasurer, until a few weeks ago.

"The Land Conservancy is one of the partners in the heritage legacy fund, and they're going out and doing things like this marvellous high-wire act with the Kogawa house [where Obasan author Joy Kogawa lived before the Second World War internment of Japanese-Canadians]. In a sense, they are showing how some public money, put into an endowment administered by a private foundation, with private fundraising, can really make a difference. You think of how significant the Kogawa house is as a site on the cultural map of Canada. They're able to save this in the hottest real estate market that Vancouver's ever seen.

"Politicians come and go, and they're focused on their term of office. Stewardship is a longer-term commitment. The National Trusts in Britain and Australia have never been governmental organizations. There are governmental organizations in England that perform really good roles, but I think the evidence is that governments, whether they are left or right, can't be counted on to have consistent policies that allow for stewardship.

"The grassroots desire to save the Kogawa house -- this is not something that was seen by the Liberal or Conservative governments federally as being important. But there were obviously people all over the country who said 'This is important.' The people are ahead of the government on that. A mechanism that allows this to happen is often much more flexible. The reality is that in Australia, England, Scotland, you get people's interests reflected through an organization more than you get people's values reflected through a government. Governments have other fish to fry.

"The city is somehow way more accessible to people. What's missing is the idea of heritage that is more holistic. Going back to the walk-up apartments on South Granville -- somehow these buildings have to be recognized holistically as being part of the city's future as much as they are a part of the past."

On British Columbia's two solitudes:

"But then you get out into the countryside, and you've got the two solitudes, the urban and the rural. In the city, most of the change is due to development. The city's rich, and it can make choices, and most of the time they are pretty good choices. But out in the countryside, change is due to abandonment, and there's no money. And so that layer of human settlement is just disappearing off the landscape, and I think the province is impoverished due to the loss of that layer.

"In terms of heritage planning and inventories, the province has actually been quite proactive at finding money. And now the energy's going into the so-called keynote buildings, because of the development of the national register of historic places. Planning to a certain degree works in communities that are organized. You see it in Kamloops and Kelowna to a certain extent, in terms of retaining these layers.

"But then there's these almost folkloric places. For example, Doukhobor community villages in the Kootenays. There are just a handful now instead of a hundred. This is the evidence of the largest communal living experiment ever in Canada, and fascinating from that point of view. You then get The Land Conservancy [of B.C.] coming in and helping to buy one of the key places. The land conservancies are one of the most positive of the initiatives that have come along, and they've come along privately. The TLC is just a remarkable organization. The Nature Conservancy of Canada is very good too. And they've gotten into cultural sites, as has the land conservancy."

 For more article see: http://thetyee.ca/Photo/2006/12/08/VanishingBC/

Joy Kogawa was invited to be part of an anthology collected and edited by Irvin Studin.

 What Is A Canadian? : Forty-Three Thought-Provoking Responses (Hardcover)
by Studin (Author)

In a year following the release of CBC TV's The Greatest Canadian" and CBC Radio's  "BC Almanac's Greatest British Columbians" there is a book titled: "What is a Canadian? 43 Thought -Provoking Responses.  Each of these essays begins with the words “A Canadian is . . .”. Each one is very different, producing a fascinating book for all thinking Canadians.

Here is Joy Kogawa's response...

For the other 42 responses including ones by Alan Fotheringham, Thomas Homer-Dixon, Roch Carrier, Jake MacDonald, George Elliott Clarke, Margaret MacMillan, Thomas Franck, Rosemarie Kuptana, Gérald A. Beaudoin, Peter W. Hogg, George Bowering, Christian Dufour, Paul Heinbecker, Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, John C. Crosbie, Audrey McLaughlin, Roy MacGregor, Charlotte Gray, Hugh Segal, Janet McNaughton, Sujit Choudhry, Aritha van Herk, L. Yves Fortier, Catherine Ford, Mark Kingwell, Silver Donald Cameron, Guy Laforest, Maria Tippett, E. Kent Stetson, Louis Balthazar, Joy Kogawa, Wade MacLaughlan, Douglas Glover, Lorna Marsden, Saeed Rahnema, Denis Stairs, Valerie Haig-Brown, Guy Saint-Pierre, William Watson, Doreen Barrie, Jennifer Welsh, Bob Rae - you will have to go buy the book!

What is a Canadian? 

Joy Kogawa

A Canadian is a transplanted snail called James who sat down on a brick.  A Canadian is a big fat street party on the Danforth in Toronto, 2004.  A Canadian is hockey night in Canada on a small patch of ice created by buckets of water in the backyard.  A Canadian is a plane full of people from Vancouver flying to Quebec with signs saying:  “WE LOVE YOU.”  A Canadian is the wind on the prairies that who has seen.  And a red-headed girl in a green-gabled house on an island with red soil.  And the Mounties who always always get their man.  A Canadian trusts the law.  And since we generally rank either second or third or fourth or whatever, we try harder.  But weren’t we proud when Gorbachev said, “Look at Canada. They don’t kill people there.”  Or something like that.  That’s because a Canadian is, if nothing else, decent.  Isn’t that the adjective that most commonly comes to mind?  We’re as decent as the day is long, are we not--fair-minded, peaceable, not demanding guns to defend ourselves, abhorring and resisting the culture of violence we are virtually force-fed by the fee-fi-fo-fuming giant close by.  My Canadian friends who travel a lot say we don’t know how lucky we are.  I think a lot of us do know it.  I, for one, am a Canadian who loves Canada more than words can say.

My love is not cheap.  It’s been tested, and it endures.  I can thank my parents for this.  And I can thank the community from which I came, and which was destroyed by the particular brand of racism in my childhood.  I can thank my Grade Two Highroads to Reading that I practically memorized when we were living in that once-upon-a-time space called Slocan (British Columbia).  Books were precious and few.  I can thank the CBC that I listened to when we were finally allowed to have radios again, after we were moved east of the Rockies. That’s when a Canadian became the Green Hornet, the House on the Hill, Share the Wealth, Terry and the Pirates and Johnny Wayne and Frank Shuster and Rawhide, and that beautiful blonde skater, Barbara Ann Scott.  Other Canadians from my community who were exiled missed out on all that.  A Canadian is a group of more than four thousand people who were exiled for no crime.  Oh sweet democratic country that I love. Some people are tired of this drum-beat.

At some point our flag stopped being bold red, white and blue intersecting slashes, and became a red pointy leaf on white, with two red bands.  At some point we stopped singing “The Maple Leaf Forever”, because Wolfe the dauntless hero was being impolite planting Britannia’s flag on Canada’s fair domain.  In Coaldale, Miss McVeety tried to teach us French, but it was a hard row to hoe.  I don’t think she actually spoke French.  She assigned us things to memorize from a textbook.  “Mercy buck-ups,” the kids said.  We all soldiered on.  Mr. Connors and Mr. Bryant taught us about the crazy kings and queens of England, but we didn’t learn about Canadian history.  A Canadian is someone who probably doesn’t know much about Canada.

There was a year of patriotic pride when we sang with great gusto, “It’s the hundredth anniversary of CON fed er a tion.”  And there was no cloudy doubt in the clear blue air that Canada would last as long as the planet did.  There was also no doubt that everyone in Canada was white, including me.  My parents were another matter.  I couldn’t really whiten them.

Years later, I discovered that I wasn’t completely white, and for that I received an Order of Canada.  One of the most memorable moments of that day occurred when a fellow recipient who was sitting beside me leaned over to make small talk as we waited for the ceremony to begin.  “I have been to your beautiful country,” he said.  I was so Canadian and polite and smiled and nodded.  He went on to tell me things about my country--Japan--and I kept nodding.  He was French Canadian.  I don’t know what his name was, but if we were arranged alphabetically, maybe his name started with K. Anyway, as I say, a Canadian is someone who probably doesn’t know much about Canada, including who a Canadian is.

About a year ago, I was visiting Thorold, a small town near St. Catherines, Ontario, when my son introduced me to one of his acquaintances, who looked to be about thirty years old.  He glanced down at this old white-haired Asian foreigner from his not-so-great height and said, “Does she speak English?”  I ought not to have been surprised.  It wasn’t so long ago that only white people were Canadians.  I was a bit put-off, but answered politely, “Yes, I speak English,” and left it at that.  A Canadian is a foreigner who isn’t a foreigner.

A few miles away in the most multicultural city in the world, every subway ride is a trip through the United Nations.  I suppose it’s our role, as Torontonians, to trumpet the news that humans from all over the world can, generally speaking, live together in peace. It’s one of the things that makes me happy about this country.  Our ancestors might have fought each other, but we don’t have to.

In my untypical Canadian childhood, because I was related to the country of my ancestors, I was “a stench in the nostrils of the people of Canada.”  Today, another Canadian child goes through that wringer, running home from school with her books clutched tight to her chest, and after supper she’s fighting with her parents about what she will or will not wear on her head.  And somewhere in a high-rise elevator, a gentle Canadian boy is aware that, even though he is no longer wearing his turban, the old woman has moved aside anxiously.  All these little moments of life are the mirrors that tell us who we are.

These days, I’m more worried about the children on the streets, in temporary shelters, in transitional housing--the children who are living on the hungry side of life in a world-wide apartheid, where the dividing line is as black and white as the rich and the poor.  The mindset to be dismantled is the powerful faith that money is everything.  In its name and for its sake, we are giving our all, sacrificing our lives, our peace, our children and our neighbours as ourselves.  Like others all over the planet, we are drifting in the miasma of a dream of riches that has turned murky.  Is there, as Jane Jacob’s book title says, a ‘Dark Age Ahead?’  Does our country have the kind of enlightened citizenry and moral leadership to guide us through the nightmare of greed?

There was one among us who died recently--a man who helped to shine the light of hope into the darkness of injustice and apartheid in South Africa.  Ted Scott, the former primate of the Anglican Church was, as the title of his biography states, a man of  “Radical Compassion.”  Joe Clark called him, “an almost perfect representation of Canada.”

I was sitting behind a pillar during Ted Scott’s memorial service, leaning this way and that, trying to get a glimpse of Desmond Tutu, who was in the pulpit at St. James’ Cathedral.  He spoke warmly about Ted Scott, about the gratitude of South Africans.  At one point, I could see his left hand as he stretched out his arms and repeated the word “all.”  “All – all – all.  Arafat.  Sadam Hussein.  All.  All.  All.  All.”  He was including every single person on the globe in the human family--the blacks, the whites, the aboriginals, the old, the rich, the despised, the admired, the tyrant, the remorseless psychopath.  All.  All.  All.

And so a Canadian is part of the All that includes our Ted Scotts and our Paul Bernardos, our Conrad Blacks and our neighbours sleeping and dying on the streets.

These days I am working with some of the neighbours in my corner of the world, in Toronto’s Old Town surrounding the St. Lawrence Market.  We are trying to demonstrate, through the work of a community currency, the Toronto Dollar, that the power of caring is still alive, and that we can work together to make a difference.  We are trying to connect the streets and the towers, trying to bridge the horrible gap between rich and poor.  It’s a hard row to hoe, as hard as trying to learn a language from a textbook.  But we do what we can.   

Nelson Mandela says he comes from a culture of ‘ubuntu’, a philosophy based on belonging where the essential identity of a person is based not on “I think therefore I am,” but on “I am because we belong.”  The enemy, then, is not someone to destroy, but someone to embrace.

I think Canada is closer to a culture of ‘ubuntu’ than many other countries.  Je suis. Nous sommes.  Where we fail, I’m thankful that mercy bucks us up.