Hello world! This week in ASTU 100 we visited the Rare Books and Special Collections (RBSC) Exhibit at the Irving K. Barber Library here at the University of British Columbia (UBC). More specifically, while here, we were looking through the work of Joy Kogawa, a Japanese-Canadian author that experienced the Japanese internment in Vancouver first hand and wrote about her traumatic experiences in her widely acclaimed book, Obasan.

We were given lots of folders to browse through while at the RBSC and they all contained lots of different articles and sources of knowledge regarding the Japanese Canadian Internment as well as reviews and summaries of Obasan the book. The articles I was analysing were ones that mainly summarized Obasan and even showed the impact the book played in relation to Japanese-Canadian individuals affected by the Japanese internment.

The fact that so many reputable news sources, as well as the heavy discussion based around the book in all of the articles we analysed at the RBSC, shows how important the book was at the time as a form of expression of the trauma faced by the individuals affected. None of the reviews we read in the articles painted the book in a negative light, nor did they show any criticism in regards to the book. This initially had me fear that bias might have been in play whilst they were being written. But upon their analysis of the United States of America to Canada and how the two countries acted differently in their method of the Japanese internment, I realized that these articles were less focused on how good a book Obasan is, and more focused on how well it paints a picture through a lens one may not have initially considered.

Many think of Canada as an accepting society with little to no flaws, especially in regards to its closest neighbour, and for the most part, today it is. But before I came to Vancouver I personally had no idea of how vastly different the Canadian government acted towards the Japanese in the time of internment. A lot of people from outside of Canada, myself included, had no knowledge of the Canadian governments actions and assumed that it was solely the United States that had its actions to apologize for.

For those readers still unaware, while the United States did detain their citizens of Japanese descent in internment camps, upon the end of World War Two (WW2) those citizens were given every opportunity to return to their homes and reclaim what was left as well as keep ownership of what was rightfully theirs prior to the detainment. In comparison, Japanese-Canadians were also detained during WW2 by their government, the caveat being that they were asked not to return upon completion of the war and were stripped of most if not all of the belongings they had accumulated prior to it.

It is easy to see how one might have mistaken the treatment of these citizens for the opposite countries if we were to remove their names and compare them with the current political climate– which makes it all the more shocking that Canada, possibly the most accepting country in existence today, was once the prime example of what ones government should not be.

These articles that we were shown at the RBSC helped show how the world reacted to the treatment of these Japanese-Canadians and how Obasan helped portray a first-hand case study into exactly how much these people suffered during those already trying times.