Naomi’s Road as seen by Joy Kogawa’s brother, Rev. Timothy Nakayama

Monday night, May 15, 2006 8:40 p.m.
From the Rev. Timothy Makoto Nakayama, Seattle

Hi Joy, Todd, and  fellow Seattlelites:

My wife, Keiko, and I returned last Tuesday from our 3-week trip to Japan. We are still in jet-lag that keeps us sleepy during the daylight hours and awake during much of the night and early morning.

However, our daughter, Tina,  drove us, and brought her son, Taylor, and we I managed to get to Bainbridge Island by ferry from Seattle and got to Woodward Middle School after having dinner at a local Japanese restaurant 0.6 miles from the ferry dock, and then 1.6 miles to the school last Friday evening in time to see and hear “Naomi’s Road”.  As a bonus I met and spoke with Mary Woodward in the school parking lot after we came outside.

When the young performers were confronted with probing questions about the Japanese-Canadian “camp” experiences and Canadian governmental attitudes which prompted the “Relocation”, as one born and raised in Canada, and an eye witness of the Japanese Canadian “camps”, I couldn’t contain myself and began a response. After the question period was concluded the cast took pictures of me with them.

They were somewhat interested in meeting me as the brother of the author of the little children’s book, Naomi’s Road, whose words inspired the development of this opera. What they had been describing by singing, acting and skillfully moving and inter-changing scenic panels on stage, was a reflection of the past that had occurred!  It stirred my memories!

This was my first experience of this opera, and to say the least it was nostalgic.

I intend to go tomorrow night to the Seattle Downtown Public Library by 7 p.m. to hear and see it again.

Tim

Sent: Tuesday, May 16, 2006 11:34 PM
Subject: Re: Naomi’s Road

Thank you, Chris, for bringing the mike to me tonight! I hope my interloping intervention during the question period was not too inappropriate! At least several people came to speak to me afterwards to express their thanks. My wife, Keiko, and I didn’t stay too long afterwards; I tend to run out of steam these days, so we try to pick and choose where we go and what we do!

The operatic performance was well done. I noticed the Ninomiya Kinjiro Statue on the mobile in-set “piano” during the second time I saw this opera, just as I found myself musing about the vignette about “Roughlock Bill” (a Canadian Buffalo Bill as it were), about which I commented briefly. I found the question about our schooling while in “camp”  an interesting question.

Best wishes to you, for you and your work!

Tim Nakayama

Wednesday evening, May 17, 2006.

Among the questions was one about school during our internment.
I mentioned that at the beginning there appeared to be no provision for our education. Ten women missionaries who came to Slocan City (who had left Japan for North America because of the war – they had been sent by missionary organizations from the USA, the UK, and Canada) – now they were in Slocan City. They lived in a big house outside the camps but helped us. In our gold-mining “ghost town” there was a small St. Paul’s Anglican Church and Parish Hall. So the women missionaries set up a school in the Parish Hall for the high school students who were in their final year whose time in school and opportunity for graduation was cut off when all of us were sent to “camp”. So the women missionaries organized classes in the parish hall to help those so close to graduation.

The time went on the war didn’t end and we were in the mountain wilderness without any school. The authorities must have decided that some things ought to happen. The carpenters in the camps were put to work to build a two storey structure in “Bayfarm”, a camp between the old hotels and buildings in Slocan City, North of Bayfarm, and “Popoff”, another camp South of Bayfarm.

The classrooms had green chalkboards in front with a teacher’s desk, and 2-person desks with bench (I remember having to sit beside a girl at one of those desks). The school in Bayfarm was given the name of “Pine Crescent School”. The School Principal was a young Buddhist Priest, Takashi Tsuji recently returned from Japan where he had been educated.

In the meantime, high school graduates were rounded up to be trained in a short course on how to teach by the retired inspector of schools of the Province of B.C., and recruitment of various persons with skills, such as a cosmetologist who taught personal cleanliness and hygiene, a boat-building carpenter who taught us “manual training” (I remember learning how to draf, and print letters at 60 degrees, how to read blueprints, how to hammer nails straight, cut straight with a saw, how to set the blade of a plane and plane wood, how to carve wood, and use sandpaper, and varnish, etc.). We had been out of school for about a year and a half (we didn’t know how long we would continue to be in camp), and many of us wouldn’t “apply” ourselves, and the inexperienced “greenhorn” teachers had a hard time with us, but during the year and half we continued to be there we did about three year’s school work. About 10% of us caught up the lost time and got up to the grade level we had lost.

The weather was very cold in winter. There was a stove in each classroom and I remember seeing the red hot stove pipes. If we faced the stove we would feel the heat which was burning hot, but our backsides remained freezing. We needed gloves or mits on our hands to keep them warm, but we couldn’t write or print with them on.

The story of “Naomi’s Road” ends with our family going to the sugar beet farming areas of Southern Alberta because we were not allowed to return to Vancouver. During the upheaval about 1/6 of our population had been “repatriated” — “back” to Japan. These words didn’t apply to me so I resented “repatriation” and “back” to Japan because Japan is not the land of my birth, and I had never been to Japan in the first place.

The plan was to close the “camps” as quickly as possible. Those of us who had not been repatriated were to be moved “East of the Rockies”. At the end of August 1945 we moved to Coaldale, Alberta…

Legislation in 1949 made sweeping changes in Canada, opening the opportunity of immigration from all over the world into Canada, no longer with preferences only from the UK and Europe, but from varous Asian countries, and we were finally allowed as Japanese Canadians to return to the 100-mile area along the Pacific Coast that had been designated as a “protectect area” from 1942 until 1949 (even for 4 additional years after the war had ended. Also because all our property had been auctioned off by government order without our knowledge while we were still in camp, we had no place where we could go back.  By the time we were allowed to do so, people didn’t have the resources to make such a move, and most were too weary to do so. Most stayed where there were now living. The centre of Japanese Canadian population by then was Toronto.

I graduated from high school in 1950, so was able to go to Vancouver to attend the University of B.C. After graduating I continued at our theological college adjacent to the UBC campus. This was the time when some Japanese Canadians began to return to the Vancouver area so I assisted the retired Priest, Canon Willam H. Gale who returned to Vancouver after having helped many people in their resettlement in Eastern Canada. We learned by word of mouth about people who were returning and began to re-group them into a congregation.

Because our church buildings had also been sold, we were offered the Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament at St. James’ Church in downtown Vancouver East, where the Japanese work had first begun in 1904. Fr. Gale led the Services in Japanese on Sunday afternoons when the church was not being used by others, and since I couldn’t read Japanese just as most of Canada-born Japanese couldn’t, he gave me a 1926 Ro-maji (Romanized) Edition of the Japanese Book of Common Prayer so I could participate in the Services. We also used St. George’s Church in the Fairview district – one of the areas where the Japanese had once lived – (near the Vancouver General Hospital) for our work among the young people.

These memories were aroused by some of the questions after the performance. These written recollections are a little fuller than the verbal presentations I interjected after the performances of the opera at Bainbridge Island’s Woodward Middle School and in the Auditorium of the new downtown Seattle Public Library.

Tim