Kage in japanese
Therefore, activists in the Redress campaign in Canada had little interest in people in Japan even though their experiences could have been even more serious or aggravated.
Perhaps this was because our campaign emphasized the Canadian nature of the issue, in other words, we raised the issue of unjust treatment of its own citizens by the government and we demanded amendments of the wrongs done to Japanese Canadians in Canada. Most of us heard about “repatriation” or “deportation” but it was rarely talked about during our redress campaign in the 1980s. This expulsion of Canadian residents of Japanese ancestry was a continuation and extension of the policy of removal and incarceration of Japanese Canadians which started right after the beginning of the Pacific phase of the Second World War in December 1941.
From the point of view of the Canadian government, though, they were being sent “back where they came from.” This is probably key to the entire episode. You refer to the exodus of Canadians of Japanese ancestry as exile. The book will be sold there and will be available soon from Nikkei Books of Toronto. On Saturday, May 19th, from 3-5pm a book launch will be held at the Nikkei National Museum and Cultural Centre in Burnaby. Basing his work on interviews with 25 men and women, most of whom were teenagers in internment camps during the war, Kage writes of their struggles to survive and adapt in post-war Japan. The story of those who moved to Japan after the war is largely unknown in Canada. More than a translation, the Japanese text has been re-configured by Kage in collaboration with translator Kathleen Merken for a North American audience already familiar with the situation of the BC coastal Japanese Canadian communities during World War II.
Uprooted Again: Japanese Canadians Move to Japan After World War II is an English-language version of Nikkei Canada-jin No Tsuiho, written by Tatsuo Kage and published by Akashi Shoten in 1998. In 1946, fully a year after the end of the war, some 4,000 Japanese Canadians travelled by ship to a Japan devastated by war-an action that violated international law at the time. Although signing up for the move was voluntary, many felt pressured to agree. In 1945, before the end of World War II, the Canadian government offered to “repatriate“ any ethnic Japanese to Japan after the war ended, even Canadian-born British subjects.