On October 31, 2017, my ASTU class and I went to the UBC Library to explore the Rare Books and Special Collections section. We were first introduced to the concept of what is considered “rare” or “special”. I was surprised to learn that those can, from what we have seen, range from a simple fan’s letter to very important government documents. “It is anything that would not be easy to find otherwise”, we learned. We were informed by the librarian that to be in contact with those documents, there is no necessity for equipment such as gloves or magnifying glasses like we see in the Hollywood movies. There are certainly some rules and they are very strict about those, however, no special instruments were needed.
At first, I was almost disappointed, wishing we would get the “full experience” and then I realized – there is no full experience, this is it. This is as real as it gets.
It is in those moments that we realized how alienated we are from the media and the fanciful expectations that we create for certain everyday things that do not correlate to what actually happens in real life. One would imagine that something as important as those rare documents would require things like special lighting and could only be manipulated by certain people, professionals to say the least, and certainly not inexperienced freshman students that did not even know the concept of RBSC.
And it is precisely about this alienation that I want to talk about. Just like I was expecting for a certain scenario to occur at the library because of what I’ve seen in television shows, the Canadian government in the years that followed the war was also trying to manipulate people’s views and perceptions. They were basically buying the Japanese Community’s silence in return for minimal amounts of money that would assure their survival during a very short time period.
What shocked me the most was the irony that rested in the contrast between obvious vs. hidden, forgotten vs. documented. What I mean is that although the government was pressuring this hot topic into oblivion, they were still doing a very good job in documenting everything. Even the smallest records like receipts and forms.
Me and my pair Tethba got to analyze some letters back and forth from the Co-Operative committee asking Japanese Canadians to sign a release form of their property in return for something like 5% of the property worth. In that same file, the whole court process was registred.
“How is it that they made an effort to create that much bureaucracy and still managed to make the rest of the Canadians at that time ignorant of was going on?” I thought to myself. That thought was evidenced when another group that got to analyze some fan mail, talked about some – probably caucasian – Canadians that wrote to Joy Kogawa saying that they feel very sorry and ashamed about what happened to her community and that, had they known ahead of time, they would have tried to take action, but they genuinely did not know that that had happened before Kogawa published her book.
From that, we observe the importance of people like Joy, that took the time – even being a single mother of two- to research and write such a novel that evidences all that has been made blind to the rest of the nation. The artifacts we analyzed definitely changed my understanding of the book’s place in Canadian history, as I now clearly see how that book worked as an eye opener and evidenced the horrors of that time and the contradictions in the Government’s actions.
There is so much to talk about all the realizations I had after that visit that I am just really glad that Dr. Luger made the choice to give us the space to get to know this amazing place so that we could see for ourselves the significance of what is behind memoirs and books that discuss topics of trauma and remembering. I will always remember this experience.