This last week of class has been an absolute blur but all the deadlines and exams were pleasantly interrupted with a little field trip to UBC’s rare books and special collections library in IKB which is a library containing many special collections connecting to Joy Kogawa’s, Obasan. Because we’ve been studying the novel in ASTU 100 we appropriately were shown many different artifacts that the library contains which are connected to when the novel was being published and what the public had to say. Each of us were put in groups and given a different folder that all contained different Obasan artifacts, I was given newspaper articles which came out right around the time the book was being published. The articles were from both Canadian and American newspapers and all had a very similar subject which was to teach people about Japanese Internment in order to get a better back story when reading.

This particular article shown above caught my attention as it was released by The Ubyssey, UBC’s Newspaper. It was fascinating to see how people were initially reacting to Kogawa’s Novel and especially interesting to see UBC’s own newspaper writing about it in that time, this just shows how important Obasan is to Canadian history and remembering Japanese Internment in BC.

What was also very interesting was how different the tones were in the Canadian and US articles, one of the US articles was almost in denial of America’s involvement in Japanese internment during WWII claiming what they did was nothing compared to what Canada did to the Japanese which I believe misses the point of the novel completely. In class we’ve been learning about memory and this novel works to shape the Japanese’s national memory within Canada and the US article further proves we live in a culture of forgetting.