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

Dream Vancouver:
Diversity in our History and our Future

When my great-great grandfather Rev. Chan Yu Tan came to BC in 1896, the roads were dirt, and there was a head tax on Chinese immigrants.

When I grew up in the 1960’s and 1970’s I marveled at the way Hawaiian culture was so ethnically diverse.  Asian faces were on nightly news casts, and Hawaiian culture was embraced by mainstream American culture.  In Vancouver, there was still a sense of racial divisions, and ethnic marginalization.  Chinese-Canadian and First Nations history were more likely relegated to sidebar stories and foot notes.

Today, I am living my dream of making Vancouver and Canada more racially tolerant and interculturally exciting!

Every culture that lived along the Silk Road from Italy to Japan, from India to Egypt now lives in Vancouver.  Through the cross-fertilization of ideas, we are able to express new ways of seeing ideas and expressing customs, of expressing the same oneness through many perspectives of the kaleidoscope of life.  But so many times we talk about Canada as a mosaic or multicultural, and become more concerned with the pieces while we lose sight of the whole.

Vancouver IS an inter-cultural crossroad and we are inter-historic… linking not only Vancouver’s history with each new wave of immigrants – but also with our collective global history.  We carry within us the global cultural history of the world… in our little city on the edge.

Vancouver must become a 21st Century Renaissance City.  The “Gateway to the Pacific” is gone with the passage of steam ships… we are now in the computer internet information era.  Everything is instant – within hours… minutes… seconds.  We know what is happening around the world.    Vancouverites can live here and work all around the world.

We must NOT be afraid of doing something new or borrowing from a different culture, nor to place an idea within a different context.  Creative synthesis takes what already exists and applies it to different scenarios – new and exciting.

This is the simple beauty of Gung Haggis Fat Choy.  How would a Robbie Burns Day be celebrated by Chinese-Canadians?  How would a Chinese New Year be celebrated by Scottish-Canadians?

What if…  Canadians had both Chinese and Scottish ancestry?  What if we celebrated both Robbie Burns Day and Chinese New Year on the same day… with the same families?

This is the future of Vancouver.  We are already acknowledged as the Canadian city with the most intercultural marriages.  

We are all one family.

I see a day for Vancouver when every family will have a member whose ancestry: paid the Chinese head tax; was an indentured Scottish labourer after the Highland clearings; was a French-Canadian settler; is First Nations; left Iran after the Shah was deposed; was in the Japanese-Canadian internment camps during WW2; or fished in the Maritimes; or worked oil fields in Alberta; and is addicted to dragon boat racing.

We MUST know our history to build our future.  How did we come to be here?  Who built and shaped this city?

People told us it was impossible, when we embarked on our campaign to save author Joy Kogawa’s childhood home from demolition.  But in our success we helped to build a corner stone foundation for our future Vancouver.  It gave Vancouver its first literary landmark for a Canadian writer.  It gave Vancouver a landmark from a dark period of its history when Canadians, born of Japanese ancestry were rounded up and sent off to internment camps in the mountains, and their property was confiscated… for no reason other than fear.  

Kogawa House can link history, literature, the arts, social-criticism, heritage, and multiculturalism all together.  By building understandings for our cultural history, through the arts, business, and even recreation sports like dragon boat racing, we can give value to our history… and to our future.

We need to educate and mentor our future leaders.  Our city, our societies and our education must embrace the continued diversity of our cultures. We must build inter-disciplinary social-cultural philosophical infrastructures throughout business, society, arts, politics, academia, sports and recreation.  There is no separation between business and art, between sports and history, between academia and recreation.  All is related, and everything is possible.  This is my Vancouver.

Todd Wong

 

Joy Kogawa's dream statement to be posted soon.