Obasan
This is my first time in Canada. It is a country that I knew close to nothing about before coming here and having been here almost three months, I’ve learned so much about it: the good and the bad. From what I knew about Canada, living so far away in Saudi Arabia was that it was a happy, accepting country where everyone lived together in harmony. Reading Obasan changed that for me. Although I had learned a little about Japanese discrimination in Canada during the war, I did not understand the extent of it until reading Joy Kogawa’s novel.
Having studied history all through high school and continuing with it at university, I believed that my knowledge about the Second World War was quite sound. But little did know about Canada’s involvement in it. Little did I know how brutally Japanese Canadians were treated after the attack on Pearl Harbour. The idea of people being “herded into grounds and kept there like animals” and then and “shipped off to road-work camps and concentration camps” (109) is disturbing and inhumane. I understand that Obasan is a novel, which indicates that it’s fictional but Naomi’s life in the novel relates very closely to Kogawa’s life in reality.
Professor Luger mentioned before we started reading Obasan that she was surprised as to how many of us knew what happened to Japanese Canadians during the war. I was just shocked that after studying the history of the Second World War for so many years, I was not aware of these events until maybe a month ago. I still don’t fully understand however why this particular part of the war isn’t taught to us. Why do we only learn about Germany and America and France? Why not Canada? I guess you could argue that I studied in Saudi Arabia so why would they teach me about Canada. But if that’s an argument, then why did I learn about Germany or Britain or any country other than Saudi Arabia? Discrimination and racism are issues that we, as a global community need to tackle. For that to happen, our generation needs to be fully aware of how prominent racism is and has been in the country that we live in and the countries around us and I feel that Joy Kogawa has done well in educating people about this history of Canada that not many talk about.