Last week, my Arts Studies class (ASTU) at the University of British Columbia (UBC) visited the Rare Books and Special Collections library where we studied artifacts and documents from the time of the Japanese internment. As we poured through fliers and letters, what to us was merely an artifact was astonishingly a piece of paper that forever changed peoples’ lives. And it was this thought that struck me as the most harrowing.

As humans, we are not perfect. We can see this in our thoughts and actions that let racism and paranoia engulf society during World War II. However, we are also not perfect at remembering. While it may be natural to attempt to forget painful memories, there is a importance, a duty we have that emerges from said memories to remember and confront. We cannot change the past, but we can remember for the future.

And as we’ve seen through Kogawa’s novel Obasan, as well as the Rare Books and Special Collections library, there are many genres that allows us to remember. Novels and memoirs let us see into an individuals journey, a raw and in depth encounter, while documents show us the timeframe and the words that affected thousands. Our learning of history is often through an analytical eye, a 20/20 vision of what happened. Yet, sometimes we fail to think of the ramifications or what others have endured. This is where remembrance and the telling of experiences becomes absolutely essential in our national memory. As ugly or painful as they may be, we cannot forget in order to never forget. 

These genres of storytelling and documenting are instrumental not only in telling history of the Japanese internment, but anyone who has struggled. On the other hand, the famous film Grave of the Fireflies directed by Isao Takahata and animated by Studio Ghibli (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grave_of_the_Fireflies), serves as a media genre where it shows a brother and a sister in Japan struggling to survive during World War II. Originally based upon a short story by the same name, the author Akiyuki Nosaka utilizes this genre to remember and memorialize his experience trying to survive with his baby sister during World War II. Similar to Kogawa’s Obasan and the Rare Books and Special Collections artifacts we examined, Grave of the Fireflies uses a type of genre to retell the past in order to not forget, allowing for the memories to live on infinitely in a different form.