{"id":31724,"date":"2019-01-25T03:57:26","date_gmt":"2019-01-25T11:57:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/?p=31724"},"modified":"2019-01-24T09:48:35","modified_gmt":"2019-01-24T17:48:35","slug":"mary-kitagawas-civil-courage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/2019\/01\/25\/mary-kitagawas-civil-courage\/","title":{"rendered":"Mary Kitagawa\u2019s civil courage"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Mary Kitagawa was honoured with the\nWallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Award on Jan. 20. (photo by Pat Johnson)<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

At a convocation ceremony at the University of\nBritish Columbia in 2012, a group of graduates stood out from the rest.\nTwenty-one elderly Japanese-Canadians, ranging in age from 89 to 96, were\nawarded honorary degrees in recognition of an historic injustice that had taken\nplace 70 years earlier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the winter of early 1942, right after\nJapan\u2019s attack on Pearl Harbour, the Government of Canada ordered all\nJapanese-Canadians to be relocated from the coast. This included students at\nUBC. For the next seven decades, the injustice went unrectified and largely\nunrecognized by the university until Mary Kitagawa, a community leader whose\nown family history was ruptured by the events of the war years, took up the\ncause. It was her tenacity that led the university to acknowledge and make some\namends for its complicity in the injustice. It awarded honorary degrees to 96\nstudents \u2013 most of them posthumously.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For this achievement, and others, Kitagawa was\nhonoured with the Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Award on Sunday afternoon,\nJan. 20. This was the 14th annual Vancouver commemoration of Raoul Wallenberg Day,\nwhich, since 2015, has coincided with the presentation of the Civil Courage Award.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In her remarks upon receiving the award,\nKitagawa reflected on the social conditions that permitted the internment of\nCanadians of Japanese descent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThis happened because those in power in Canada\nat that time forgot that this was a democratic country, sending her men and\nwomen to war to preserve our freedom,\u201d she told a packed auditorium at the H.R.\nMacMillan Space Centre. \u201cThe excuse they used for incarcerating us was that we\nwere a security risk. However, if you read all the newspaper headlines of the\n1930s and \u201940s, you will find that the B.C. politicians\u2019 hatred of\nJapanese-Canadians was deep and abiding. They wanted to ethnically cleanse this\none small group of people from the province.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kitagawa said that, at a January 1942 meeting\nin Ottawa to address \u201cthe Japanese problem,\u201d a B.C. representative declared,\n\u201cThe bombing of Pearl Harbour was a heaven-sent gift to the people of British\nColumbia to rid B.C. of Japanese economic menace forevermore.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMy family was swept away from our home in this\nstorm of hatred,\u201d Kitagawa said. From their home on Salt Spring Island, the\nfamily was transported to Hastings Park, in East Vancouver, which served as an\nassembly point for dispersal to the interior of the province.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOur journey through incarceration was brutal\nand dehumanizing,\u201d she said. The family was separated from her father for six\nmonths and they feared the very worst. Eventually, the family was reunited, but\nthey were moved from place to place around the interior of British Columbia and\nin Alberta a dozen times during seven years of incarceration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When the War Measures Act, under which the\ninternment was justified, ceased its effect at the end of the war, Parliament\npassed successive \u201cemergency\u201d laws to permit the continued incarceration\nthrough 1947, and it was April 1949 before Japanese-Canadians were granted\nfreedom of movement and permitted to return to the coast. Her father and\nmother, aged 55 and 50 respectively, took the family back to Salt Spring and\nbegan all over again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt wasn\u2019t just the material things that they\nlost,\u201d Kitagawa reflected. \u201cThey lost the dream for the future they had planned,\ntheir community, their opportunities, education for their children, their\nfriends, their youth, their culture, language and heirlooms. But never \u2013 they\nnever lost their pride nor their dignity.\u2026 My parents believed in forgiveness.\nLike Nelson Mandela, they believed that forgiveness liberates the soul. They\nrefused to look back in anger. Instead, they chose to continue to move forward\nwith the same resolve that helped them to survive their terrible experience.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2006, Kitagawa read in the Vancouver Sun<\/em> that a federal building on Burrard Street in Vancouver was being named to honour Howard Charles Green, a longtime Conservative member of Parliament from Vancouver and a leading advocate of Japanese-Canadian internment. \u201cImmediately, I knew that I had to have that name erased from that building. To me, no person who helped destroy my parents\u2019 dream and made them suffer so grievously was going to be so honoured.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With help from a quickly mobilized group of\nactivists and sympathetic media coverage, Kitagawa successfully had Green\u2019s\nname stripped from the building, which was renamed in honour of Douglas Jung,\nanother Conservative MP, but the first MP of Chinese-Canadian heritage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kitagawa also led an initiative that saw\nHastings Park declared an historic site related to the internment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In her talk on Sunday, Kitagawa emotionally\ncredited an \u201cunsung hero,\u201d her husband Tosh, who, among other efforts he played\nin supporting Kitagawa\u2019s activism, spearheaded the reprinting of the 1942 UBC\nyearbook to include information about the internment and biographies of the\nstudents affected. It was also through his persistence that they were able to\ntrack down the 23 living students and the families of those who had passed\naway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Civil Courage Award is presented by the\nWallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Society, which was formed by members of the\nSwedish and Jewish communities in Vancouver.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Raoul Wallenberg was a Swedish architect,\nbusinessman, diplomat and humanitarian who became Sweden\u2019s special envoy to\nHungary in the summer of 1944, several months after the Nazi deportation of\nHungarian Jews had begun. He issued protective passports and sheltered people\nin buildings that were declared to be Swedish territory, saving tens of\nthousands of Jews. He was taken into Soviet captivity on Jan. 17, 1945, and was\nnever seen again. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chiune Sugihara was a Japanese diplomat who\nserved as the vice-consul in Lithuania during the Second World War. Acting in\ndirect violation of his orders at great risk to himself and his family, he\nissued transit visas that allowed approximately 6,000 Jewish people from Poland\nand from Lithuania to escape probable death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The award presentation was followed by a\nscreening of the 1995 film The War Between Us<\/em>, which dramatizes the\nevents of the Japanese-Canadian experience through the lives of a single\nfamily.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Councilor Pete Fry, Vancouver\u2019s deputy mayor, read a proclamation\nfrom the city. Consular officials from Sweden and Japan were in attendance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mary Kitagawa was honoured with the Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Award on Jan. 20. (photo by Pat Johnson) At a convocation ceremony at the University of British Columbia in 2012, a group of graduates stood out from the rest. Twenty-one elderly Japanese-Canadians, ranging in age from 89 to 96, were awarded honorary degrees in recognition of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":31725,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[1122,8655,2427,3556,313,3050],"class_list":["post-31724","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local","tag-human-rights","tag-mary-kitagawa","tag-racism","tag-ubc","tag-wallenberg-day","tag-wallenberg-sugihara-civil-courage-award"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31724","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31724"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31724\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31725"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31724"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31724"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31724"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}