Two Views and Asahi Baseball

Japanese Canadian relocation - Women's dormitory
VPL Accession Number: 1492, May 13, 1942. Photographer: Leonard Frank

I traveled to the Surrey Museum to see Two Views, photos of the Japanese internment during WWII in Canada by Leonard Frank and in California by Ansel Adams. What I felt was missing in the show was the voice of the Japanese people themselves. It's important to note that one of the first things taken from the Japanese people after Pearl Harbor was their cameras. Frank was hired to take these photographs as part of his role as official photographer for the Dominion of Canada. Adams went to the camp on his own dime to show how the Japanese people had created a dignified community life in spite of their living conditions and the terrible injustice that had been done to them.

The following eyewitness account is an example of what I felt was needed to contextualize the photographs:

The whole place is impregnated with the smell of ancient manure and maggots. Every other day it is swept with chlorine of lime, or something, but you can't disguise the horse smell, cow smell, sheep, pigs, rabbits and goats. And it is dusty! The toilets are just a sheet metal trough, and up until now they did not have partitions or seats. The women kicked so they put up partitions and a terribly makeshift seat. Twelve year old boys stay with the women too, you know . . . as for the bunks, they were the most tragic things there. Steel and wooden frames with a thin, lumpy straw tick, a bolster and three army blankets . . . no sheets unless you bring your own. These are the "homes" of the women I saw . . . these bunks were hung with sheets and blankets and clothes of every hue and variety--a regular gypsy tent of colours, age, and cleanliness--all hung in a pathetic attempt at privacy. . . an old, old lady was crying, saying she would rather have died than to come to such a place . . . there are ten showers for 1, 500 women.

--Muriel Fujiwara Kitagawa to Wesley Kitagawa, 20 April 1942

The Pacific National Exhibition: An Illustrated History by David Breen and Kenneth Coates

This Sunday, there was a fantastic documentary on the history of baseball in the Japanese- Canadian community before, during and after WWII. I highly recommend listening to the podcast.

Morning Sun:

It was an anniversary that passed with little fanfare. Last month, on September 18th, a group of baseball players gathered in an old park in Vancouver's downtown eastside. They were there to pay their respects to the Asahi, a Japanese-Canadian baseball team that played its last game in the same park 70 years earlier.

There are just a few of those original Asahi players left today. This was perhaps the last chance to thank those men for what they meant to the community. It was also a chance to think about their legacy.

Back in the 20s and 30s, the Asahi was the sporting cornerstone of a bustling neighbourhood, the pride and joy of Japantown. But then the Second World War came ... and then Pearl Harbour ... and Ottawa ordered Japanese-Canadians off Canada's west coast. Twenty-two thousand people of Japanese descent were rounded up and sent to camps in the BC interior. Families were torn apart, and many never returned to the west coast.

Japantown quickly withered and died. And the Asahi baseball team was suddenly no more.

But as you'll hear in John Chipman's documentary, Morning Sun, that wasn't the end of baseball for Canada's Japanese.

--http://www.cbc.ca/thesundayedition/shows/2011/10/23/no-syrian-spring---asahi-baseball---ibsen/