Writers have to go through many drafts in order to end up with their completed, somewhat interesting, print worthy book; Joy Kogawa was no different. While scrounging through the Kogawa fond in the UBC rare books library, I was able to look at drafts, scribbled notes, editor’s notes and rejection letters written by or sent to Kogawa about her novel Obasan. While the finished product is something that will forever be looked at to remember the events of Japanese internment in Canada, there were many changes made by Kogawa and her editors.

The first editor’s note I found was one from Lester & Orpen Denny’s Publishers which read, “I can’t help feeling that when you get this you’ll start rewriting!” Which was then proceeded by lengthy notes on the back of multiple papers. There were notes about how repetitive chapters and pages could be and unnecessary details. This led to many pages and paragraphs to be crossed out. In those sections I found parts about the letters written to apply for Ms. Kato’s citizenry into Canada, more about Stephen’s Claudine, Naomi’s mother and father and more about how Naomi was treated by other children. It is a bit of a coincidence that these sections were crossed out when in a rejection letter Kogawa was told that her “… characters were shadows…” who readers could not identify with because there were minimal details about them. I have to wonder if I and others would have found the book more interesting if the characters were a bit more dynamic and there was a deeper story behind some of the characters.

This subtraction of pages also led to a rearrangement or loss of a chapter. In the draft I looked at, chapter 25 was changed to chapter 24 which means something that may have been a precursor of information to an event that would happen later in the book, or details of something Kogawa may have found important were cut. Another option would be that the chapter seemed to fit better later on in the book, or the details of that chapter were deemed unnecessary of their own chapter and were therefor spread into pre-existing chapters.

I feel like there may have been details that Kogawa left out of the book because to her they seemed mundane or unimportant. It is the same as when someone is telling you a story and they say something in passing that you find fascinating, but they have deemed it uninteresting because it was so normal to them. Therefor details that may have aided us in better understanding the living conditions and the depth of the segregation were left out. While we know about treatment and living conditions in internment camps, we know much less about how they dealt with having to move away from everything they knew and restart their lives. I saw bits of these accounts in the scrapped material which helped me to better understand the mentality of the characters during this time better than some of the metaphors used in the book.

My last observation of the drafts was how many times Kogawa would write sentences in English and then go back and modify them to include Japanese. This is interesting to me because reading the versions without the Japanese made the story and characters feel less authentic, less of an accurate representation of Japanese culture. By adding Japanese language into the book, I would argue that there is a promotion of cultural understanding between the non-Japanese readers and the Japanese-Canadians who endured internment.

I also had the chance to read the draft of Maya Ardahl’s theatre script of Naomi’s Road, the children’s version of Obasan. In the limited amount of pages I read, I was able to gather that we never learn of Uncle’s death, it is all based on Naomi’s childhood with no narration or viewpoint of the adult Naomi, and everything was very repetitive. Maybe it was to emphasize the point/ meaning of the book in the play, maybe it was to represent youth ‘properly’ in script and maybe it was to make the lines easier to remember, but either way it was different than the version our class read in Obasan. It did however make the information accessible to the younger audiences of both the children’s story and play.

The trip to the UBC Rare books fonds was very interesting and it helped to gain a better understanding of Obasan. Seeing the amount of research Joy Kogawa had to do to give an accurate representation of the events that affected Japanese-Canadians in WWII made the novel seem more like a biography; it made you realize that this is not just another fictional story but these events actually happened to real people. It is because of the attention to detail and passion that Kogawa put into the book that made it a true national technology of memory.

I would argue that as a developed species, humans are capable of many things. We have opposable thumbs and technology that set us apart from most mammals and less than eight legs which means we are not arachnid like, so why is it that when it comes to horrific cultural events we tend to have the memory of goldfish?

In our Global Citizens CAP stream and history class, we are talking about the causes, the events, the outcome, minor and major details, key agents, etc. of World War Two. Yet when looking at all the articles, books and texts, it is easy to notice the year gap from when the war happened and when the books were published. For example the Second World War happened from 1939-1945 but Louie Zamperini’s book Unbroken, detailing his euphoric high of competing in the Berlin Olympics to being taken prisoner by Japanese soldiers was only published in 2010. The same is for Obasan, and Australia’s Forgotten Prisoners being published in 1981 and 2007 respectively.

Maybe we can blame this on the lack of resources to record and print these memories/ stories; there was simply no time to write about what was happening after the war because people were too busy trying to rebuild themselves and their community. We could also blame it on the pain that comes with bringing up such recent and tragic events. Yet, there is The Diary of Anne Frank, which details the extent of her time while hiding in the attic from German troops during the Holocaust. Maybe it is because it is easier to heal when you forget than when you have to struggle through the painful truth. My only other idea could be based on Paul Connerton’s theory of humiliated silence (http://mss.sagepub.com/content/1/1/59.short). In his article 7 Types of Forgetting, he uses the German silence after the war as an example of how tabooed an event can become that it leads to mass silence. Connerton also has this to say on humiliated silence,

         “…some acts of silence may be an attempt to bury things                beyond expression and the reach of memory; yet such silencing, while they are a type of repression, can at the same time be a form of survival, and the desire to forget may be an essential ingredient in that process of survival (68).”

Could this hint that in order for the German people to continue to identify as German and live with themselves after such heinous acts of violence, they had to forget? Or that until recently, there have be no adequate ways to describe what happened?

The thing that interests me most about this subject is that when books or movies are released about these tragic events, they become bestsellers. Which is strange because the thing that everyone was trying to hide, is now the thing that everyone is talking about. We see this with Obasan, which is a very famous Canadian novel, and Unbroken which is a Time 2010 Nonfiction book of the year and is about to be premiered as a major motion picture. The other explanation could be that we like to see how other countries messed up, hence America finding Unbroken and Fury, which obviously make the Axis powers seem like brutal, barbaric, cruel people, very interesting movies. Yet this is not something that just applies to World War Two or other terrible world events.

Mental illness is something that the majority of people tend to not discuss. Just as there was a taboo on speaking about World War 2, there is a certain taboo about discussing depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia etc. There are even asylums built to keep people with mental illnesses out of the general population; which is a concept that existed in WW2 where many of these people were killed by the same Nazi regime that killed thousands of Jewish people. A recent example of mental illness gaining a voice and being drawn to the attention of millions of people came in the form of Oscar award winning movie Silver Linings Playbook. It tells the story of a man (played by Bradley Cooper) who suffers from bipolar disorder and a woman (played by Jennifer Lawrence) who is suffering from neurosis. It was nominated multiple times at 29 awards shows, winning many including Jennifer Lawrence for Best Actress at the Golden Globes and the Academy awards and Best Film at multiple shows. After that something that had remained a very private issue was the subject of a large public discussion.

In a way we have Hollywood to thank for creating such a large discussion and awareness of the things we used to silence. While we still resemble goldfish as we often forget the things that had been so widely talked about and replace it with a new issue or event, memorials, organizations, etc. are often put in place that leave some reminder.

As Remembrance Day approaches, the silence that is usually held around wars is often dropped. There are veterans scattered around towns handing out poppy pins, there are people everywhere wearing those poppies and the media often broadcasts veteran stories or important details. It is the one dedicated time of year when we pay our respects to the people that served, listen to their stories and make all the memories that were silenced, loud. Although many people forget about why we have Remembrance Day the other 364 days of the year, it is a small step to make the things we want to forget something that we can learn from, remember and use to make the future a better place.

Connerton, Paul. “Seven types of forgetting.” Memory Studies 1.1 (2008): 59-71. Web. 18 Oct.

Hillenbrand, Laura. Unbroken. United States of America: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2010. Print.

Kogawa, Joy. Obasan. Toronto: Penguin Books, 1981. Print.

Twomey, Christina. Australia’s Forgotten Prisoners, Civilians Interned by the Japanese in World War Two.      New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Print.