Blog #4: What kind of knowledge(s) of World War II did you bring to Obasan and how has the novel affected your understanding of this history?
I know, it’s just roughly a week after Remembrance day, but still, “We will remember them”, “lest we forget”.
This week, right after Remembrance Day, and Remembrance Sunday, our ASTU class began discussing about Obasan by Joy Kagawa, and one of the things that was inevitably discussed, in conjunction with content delivered by Professor Greer in Sociology on racial discrimination, was the fact that Japanese Canadians were discriminated against in World War II, and the resulting internment either saw them in overcrowded internment camps, or sent to the interior where they all led hard lives, with many of them ultimately losing their possessions to the Canadian government which then sold them to White Canadians. Obasan discusses the issue from the different attitudes held by Naomi’s different aunts in regards to the traumatic event, and also plays a major role in bringing forth the reconciliation movements made by the Canadian government towards the Japanese Canadians affected.
To begin with, by ‘knowledge’, I do not believe that bringing out facts, the details of battles,or things learned from history classes, important as they may be, are that relevant to the discussions presented in the blog, as historical facts are different from memory but I would discuss the knowledge, as in the knowledges of the memories possessed by various people looking back at World War II as the basis for the knowledge that I bring into reading Obasan.
Quoting from Obasan, “That is one telling. It’s not how it was“, with World War II being a worldwide conflict, from the Pacific to the Atlantic and from Asia, to Africa, and to Europe, there are many stories and narratives from different people, differed not only by geographical differences, but also from racial differences. No two narratives are the same, but people are more or less affected by the backgrounds that they are raised in. Coupled with how
communications scholar Marita Sturken argues that ‘all memories are created in tandem with forgetting’, and how ‘the writing of a historical narrative necessarily involves the elimination of certain elements, we see that different peoples have different perspectives of World War II.
Having lived in Hong Kong as a Canadian citizen, one of the things I was aware of was the two major narratives that surrounded the history of Hong Kong in the course of World War II. One was the resistence presented by the Chinese, especially communist resistance fighters in Hong Kong, though their role was limited in the grand scheme of things, and the other was the sacrifices given by the defenders of Hong Kong in the Battle of Hong Kong, especially the British, local Hong Kong people, and most importantly, the Canadians, like the Winnipeg Grenadiers, though the latter narrative seems to be diminishing with the local government’s emphasis on the former, and currently the latter, from my knowledge, is mostly remembered in the form of the dwindling traditions of Remembrance Sunday at the Cenotaph, and the ceremonies from organizations like the Canadian Consulate in Hong Kong in places like the war cemetary in Hong Kong. While I was acutely aware of the diminishing of one narrative as presented by Sturken, I was also aware that what I have been presented has mostly been from the perspective of the victorious countries, with the Canada being one of the victorious countries, along with the Commonwealth, in which Hong Kong was once a part of.
To me, it was only relatively later, probably during my learning of, and the reading of books by various Japanese Americans that I began to be aware of the internment of Japanese people in North America, in both in the US and in Canada, but I was never aware of the scope of the damages brought to the Japanese Canadians until my Sociology lesson, and further understood in Obasan, when these memories are brought forth in paper, and presented by Kagawa.
However, perhaps one of the most overarching thing I bring to Obasan, from my knowledge of World War II, and my personal experiences, is that, people seem to forget all about
by reading Obasan, I continue to understand the importance of protecting all these various narratives, as both Joy Kagawa and Aunt Emily in Obasan use these various channels to deliever their memories in their narrative. Another thing that I have learned from Obasan, was how the present affects the past, as gleaned from the most recent ASTU lesson, which sort of helps me understand why some people back in Hong Kong were buying poppies merely to ‘increase their Britishness’, as I understand how contemporary ideas do influence and even take over the original meanings of some memories.