Context
Joy Kogawa was born Joy Nozomi Nakayama on
June 6, 1935, in Vancouver,
British Columbia. Her mother, Lois Nakayama, was a musician, and
her father, Gordon Nakayama, was an Anglican minister. During World
War II, the Canadian government confiscated the Kogawa family's home,
as it did the homes of thousands of Japanese Canadians. Ordered
inland, Kogawa's family moved to an internment camp in Slocan, B.C.
There Kogawa attended elementary school. After the war ended, the
government forced Kogawa's family to move to Coaldale, Alberta.
Like many Japanese Canadians, they found work as field laborers
on a sugar beet farm. After finishing high school in Coaldale, Kogawa
attended the University of Alberta, where she studied education.
She taught elementary school for a year and then returned to school
for graduate studies, attending the University of Toronto, the Anglican
Women's Training College, and the University of Saskatchewan. In 1957,
she married David Kogawa, with whom she has two children. Kogawa
and her husband divorced in 1968.
Kogawa's fiction is deeply influenced by the Japanese
Canadian World War II experience. On December 7, 1941,
Canada declared war on Japan. The following day, the Canadian government
confiscated all Japanese Canadian fishing boats, stating Japanese
Canadians might otherwise use them to escape. Because the Japanese Canadians'
economy depended on fishing, the loss of their boats came as a severe
blow. Many non-Japanese Canadians believed their fellow citizens
of Japanese origin were working as spies for the Japanese government.
The Canadian government forced Japanese Canadians to move to labor
camps or independent farms. In February 1942,
the Canadian government moved 22,000 Japanese
Canadians from the East Coast of Canada—from where, it was believed, they
might be sending sensitive information across the Pacific Ocean to
Japan—to detention camps farther inland. It was the largest human
movement in Canadian history. Families were forced to separate:
Men worked at road camps or on beet farms, while women and children
moved to towns in British Columbia. The government seized and sold
off the displaced families' land, houses, and possessions.
Even after the end of World War II, Japanese Canadians
continued to suffer at the hands of non-Japanese Canadians. They
were prevented from returning to their homes and forced by the government
to continue working in camps or on farms. It wasn't until four years
after the end of the war that the government finally freed its Japanese
Canadian citizens. One judge suggested giving Japanese Canadians
reparations in the amount of 1.2 million
dollars, or $52 per person. The property
of Japanese Canadian property was seized under the War Measures
Act. It was not repealed until 1987, when the
Emergencies Act passed to prevent the violation of civil liberties in
the case of future conflicts.
Obasan (1981),
Kogawa's best-known work, tells the story of one Japanese Canadian
family living through World War II. Although a work of fiction,
Kogawa describes events based on her own life and the novel aims
to present an historically accurate picture of the Japanese Canadian
wartime experience. During the war, many Japanese Canadians endured
brutal mistreatment in silence, rather than voicing their anger
or standing up for their rights. In Obasan, Kogawa
conveys the devastating effects of silence. Simply by writing the
novel, she registers her refusal to keep quiet about the cruelty
of racism. The novel won several awards, including the Book of the
Year Award from the Canadian Authors Association, and the American
Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. The Literary Review
of Canada listed it among the most important books in Canadian literary
history.
Kogawa went on to recast the Obasan story
as two children's books: the Japanese-language Ushinawareta (1983)
and the English-language Naomi's Road (1986),
adapted into an opera by the Vancouver Opera, and eventually translated
into Japanese and published as Naomi No Michi (1988).
Kogawa continues Naomi's story, the main character in Obasan,
in her novel Itsuka (1992), which
examines Japanese Canadian efforts to win redress from the government. Itsuka was
republished as Emily Kato in 2005. Kogawa's
other works include the novel The Rain Ascends (1995) and
the poetry collections The Splintered Moon (1967), A
Choice of Dreams (1974), Jericho
Road (1977), Woman in the
Woods (1985), A Garden of
Anchors: Selected Poems (2003), A
Song of Lilith (2000).
Kogawa participated in the Redress Movement, a demand
for compensation that culminated in 1988,
when Prime Minister Brian Mulroney signed a Redress Agreement that
allocated $21,000 to each
surviving Japanese Canadian interned during World War II. The Agreement
also reinstated Canadian citizenship for every Japanese Canadian
deported to Japan during the war years. In 1986, Kogawa
was made a Member of the Order of Canada. In 2006,
she was made a Member of the Order of British Columbia.
