A Place of Compassion:
Joy Kogawa's Dream Vancouver statement


Joy Kogawa holds up her arms to embrace and support everything she loves in the world
- photo Todd Wong

Joy Kogawa, author of Obasan, has written A Place of Compassion for her submission  to the Dream Vancouver conference and website, organized by Think City. While Joy will not be attending the conference, I will be as one of the directors of the Joy Kogawa House Society. 

Dream Vancouver is an all-day conference which will take participants from their dreams about Vancouver to a possible agenda for change. The conference will be facilitated by Bliss Browne, internationally-renowned speaker and president of Imagine Chicago.  Former City of Vancouver Co-Director of Current Planning Larry Beasley is key note speaker.  Ms. Browne will then facilitate a discussion-based session which will take participants through a series of questions designed to bring them to a collective vision of what the city could be. 

To attend you must register, click here.

Registration: 9:30 am - 10:00 am
Conference: 10:00 am - 3:30 pm
Reception: 3:30 pm - 4:30 pm

Location: Jewish Community Centre, 950 W. 41st Avenue, Vancouver (at Oak Street).

- photo courtesy Joy Kogawa

Is Joy a Vancouver dreamer?  She was born in Vancouver in 1935.  During WW2 in 1942, when she was 6 years old, her family was removed from Vancouver and sent to internment camps for Japanese-Canadians.  She forever dreamed about returning to the the house in Vancouver's Marpole neighborhood, even after the Canadian government confiscated the property of the Japanese-Canadian internment victims, and resettled them to work as labourers on Alberta beet farms.  She lives mostly in Toronto but returns to Vancouver often, and has great hopes for Vancouver as a city, and as a cultural entity.

Joy Kogawa and her brother Rev. Timothy Nakayama, at the opening event for Obasan, the 2005 choice for One Book One Vancouver at the Vancouver Public Library - photo Todd Wong

Joy is acknowledged as one of Canada's most important writers in the 20th Century for her ground breaking novel Obasan - a story about the impact of the internment on the Japanese Canadian community.  Since May 2005, when I met Joy, at the first Obasan event for One Book, One Vancouver event at the Vancouver Public Library, our developing friendship was been a wild ride as I became a key player on the Save Kogawa House committee (See my articles on Joy Kogawa & Kogawa House).
I have witnessed Joy speak in numerous circumstances and she always seems to have an unwavering position that calls for peace and compassion in so many circumstances.  It embraces her anti-war stance, the Japanese-Canadian redress, South African apartheid, the Chinese-Canadian head tax issue, Japanese atrocities against China in WW2, the history of her ancestor's home of Okinawa, the naming of the 401 Burrard building after Howard Green.  Joy doesn't look to find blame for right or wrong, she looks to find resolution.

Joy Kogawa and Todd Wong at the 2006 Canadian Club Vancouver's annual Order of Canada / Flag Day luncheon.  Joy was key note speaker, and Todd was one of the event organizers - photo Deb Martin

Vancouver has long had a reputation for a history with peace activism.  This is part of our social-cultural make up, and can be embodied through social policy initiatives.  Perhaps it has become such because so many people have come to Vancouver after leaving war, destruction, starvation, revolution, upheaval in their home lands.

Joy has given Dream Vancouver a very apt and fitting dream statement to find reconciliation and understanding "within and between the faiths, between rich and poor, among immigrant groups, in established neighbourhoods, in the Downtown Eastside, among those who are still suffering from unresolved injustices of the near and distant past can come to healing and hope and inner freedom."

Joy Kogawa and children from Tomsett Elementary School in Richmond.  After seeing the Vancouver Opera Touring Ensembles production of "Naomi's Road", the children were inspired to helps save Kogawa House from demolition.  Joy and the children stand in front of the house for their own private tour and reading event. - photo Joan Young

On November 10th, come to the 2nd open house event at Kogawa House.
Sunday, 3-5pm.  1450 West 64th Ave. (just East of Granville St.)
Admission is by donation.  Proceeds go to restoring historic Joy Kogawa House, now owned by The Land Conservancy of BC.

A Place of Compassion

Joy Kogawa, poet and novelist: The dream I have for this west-coast city on the edge of the peaceable ocean is the dream I have for the world - a dream of peace. What better time than this to abolish war as we face our common planetary fate?

We have choices - to continue blithely on our way, fighting and devouring one another for the rest of our dwindling days, or we can individually and collectively lay down our weapons and practice the ways of truth and reconciliation, cooperation and peace.

In a city where east-west faces and races meet and mix, where cultures both clash and blend, the ways of peace can be cultivated, watered, nurtured and the seeds of that action can fly to the farthest corners of our hearts and the world.

As a Japanese Canadian, I have welcomed conversations with two granddaughters of Howard Green, the politician whose public words against us during the Second World War were dreaded in our community. If they can seek to make peace with us on behalf of the grandfather they loved, ought we not to walk with them? What an opportunity for peace making and for walking on.

And ought we not, as Canadian descendants from Japan, to stand with those Canadian descendants of China, who seek a fulsome parliamentary acknowledgment from the country of our ancestors for the horrors their ancestors faced in the Rape of Nanking? Or is it our choice to turn aside and say, "These are no concerns of ours." I believe that the morally appropriate action is to respond to those who suffer and who call our names.

But it is not for me to say what is right for anyone else. We are each required to struggle with our own conscience and to respond to the many voices that call us.

read here:  for the rest of Joy's statement

For immediate release

November 3, 2005

120 days given to Kogawa House, as demolition timeline extended

This afternoon Vancouver City Council voted unanimously to grant an unprecedented 120-day delay of demolition for 1450 West 64th Avenue, the childhood home of author Joy Kogawa.

The present home owner bought the house in 2003, unaware that the Save Kogawa Homestead committee was trying to raise funds to turn the house into a writers’ retreat. The owner has now decided to demolish and rebuild on the site, prompting the now renamed Save Kogawa House committee to action, soliciting support from writing and arts organizations across the country.

Gerry McGeough, senior heritage planner in the Vancouver City Planning Department, was instrumental in bringing the motion before city council. He stated that the 1915 house could be registered as Class A heritage because of its cultural value and local and national prominence.

Todd Wong and Ann-Marie Metten led the committee’s presentation to council, with additional presentations from Diane Switzer of the Vancouver Heritage Foundation, Heather Redfern of the Alliance for Arts and Culture, and Marion Quednau of the Writers’ Union of Canada, demonstrating the wide local and national support across Canada to preserve the house,

Kogawa, received the Order of Canada in 1986 and her novel Obasan is school curriculum across Canada and studied around the world. The novel was also chosen as the Vancouver Public Library’s One Book One Vancouver selection for 2005. An operatic adaptation of the children’s story, Naomi’s Road, is now touring BC schools with the Vancouver Opera in the Schools program.

Joy Kogawa arrived via car and ferry from a performance of Naomi’s Road in Ucuelet, BC, just in time to read from her novel Obasan. Kogawa had only left City Hall on Tuesday, November 1st, which had been proclaimed “Obasan Cherry Tree Day”, as a graft from the cherry tree from Kogawa’s childhood home was planted at City Hall.

Council was so moved by the presentation that Councillor Raymond Louie immediately challenged other councillors to pull out their wallets and match his $100 donation. Councillor Ellen Woodsworth wrote an equivalent cheque and said council would challenge other city councils to match their donations as well. At the end of the meeting, the committee walked out of council chambers $540 richer.

An estimated $750,000 is needed to purchase the house from the owner at “fair market value.” McGeough has been mediating with the house owner and the Save Kogawa House committee, and the 120-day delay will give the committee time to fundraise this amount.

Charitable donations can be made online through the Vancouver Heritage Foundation website at http://www.vancouverheritagefoundation.org/Kogawa.html.

To celebrate this milestone in the Save Kogawa House campaign, a performance of the opera Naomi’s Road by the Vancouver Opera Touring Ensemble will be presented free to the public on November 12 at 2 pm. It will take place in the Alice MacKay Room of the Vancouver Public Library downtown. Special guest musician is Harry Aoki, who was interned at age 20.


For further information contact:

www.kogawa.homestead.com

www.kogawahouse.com

www.gunghaggisfatchoy.com/blog/OneBookOneVancouverJoyKogawasObasan


Ann-Marie Metten, Save Kogawa House Committee Vancouver Coordinator
604-263-6586; ametten@telus.net

Todd Wong, Vancouver Committee spokesperson
604-240-7090; toddwcan@yahoo.com
 
Anton Wagner, Committee Chair
416-863-1209; awagner@yorku.ca

Gerry McGeough, Senior Heritage Planner, Planning
Department, City of Vancouver
604-873-7091; gerry.mcgeough@vancouver.ca

Diane Switzer, Executive Director, Vancouver Heritage Foundation
604-264-9642; diane@vancouverheritagefoundation.org

Nikkei Voice asks Japanese Canadian community for support to preserve Kogawa House


Joy Kogawa at Kogawa House, the house she left at age 6, never to return. 

Katherine Mika Fukuma, the English Editor of the Nikkei Voice, has come out strongly in favor of the effort to save the Joy Kogawa House in her October 2005 "Editor's File" column. The Nikkei Voice is the national forum for Japanese Canadians.

Katherine's editorial, "The JC community is again in need of your support," is nearly half a page long. It reads in part:

"As you may have already read in the Globe and Mail (Sept.24) or in the Vancouver Courier (Sept. 28), the house of Obasan (Joy Kogawa homestead) is currently in danger of being demolished. According to sources, the owner of the Marpole, West 64th Avenue house--in which Joy Kogawa lived until her family was relocated to Slocan Valley when she was six years old--applied to the city of Vancouver for a demolition permit in late-September.

The news came as a disappointment and a shock despite the fact that the city of Vancouver will be planting a cutting of the cherry tree from the backyard of the Marpole home on city hall grounds this fall as a way to commemorate the experience of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War.

Other joyous news for Kogawa this year included her book Obasan chosen as the Vancouver Public Library's One Book, One Vancouver selection for 2005, as well as the premiere of the Vancouver Opera's World Premiere production of the opera for young audiences and their family, Naomi's Road. The Vancouver Opera presented four public performances before the production embarks on a province-wide tour, visiting more than 140 schools and community venues throughout B.C. between October 25 and May 2006.  

Furthermore, there was discussion at the September 19, 2005 meeting of the City of Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation of the possibility of naming the new Park for Marpole (at West 72nd Avenue and Osler Street and Selkirk Street) "Joy Kogawa Park." This park will be a neighbourhood park, with a design element representing a Japanese theme to reflect the history of the area.

Now, wouldn't all these events create more than enough meaning to declare the property, or the house as a historical landmark? If it is impossible to purchase the entire property, at least the house itself should be saved, before it is too late.

The house represents more than just a literary icon's childhood home. It is packed with a historical essence of the kind of lifestyle of the prewar Japanese Canadians and may be the last of its kind. Once it is declared a historical landmark much can be done. (Of course, it shouldn't end up as just a museum!)

I surely hope that Vancouver councillors are smarter than those in Toronto...Preserve our nikkei history and heritage and help educate our future generations."



Nikkei Voice, 6 Garamound Court, Toronto, ON, M3C 1Z5
Phone: 416-386-0287
FAX: 416-386-0136
E-Mail: nikkei1@bellnetc.ca

Publisher: Frank Moritsugu
Owner: Nikkei Research and Education Project of Ontario
Circulation: 3000  Subscription: $35.00  Frequency: 10/year

Yusuke Tanaka, Japanese Editor/Advertising Manager
E-Mail: nikvoice@interlog.com