Cross-Cultural Caring
A Handbook for Health Professionals, 2nd ed.
Nancy Waxler-Morrison, Joan M. Anderson, Elizabeth Richardson, and Natalie A. Chambers, eds., 2005, Chapter 5, p. 183, Conclusion, p. 350-51.
Mrs. Nishimura came to Canada from Japan after her husband died. She hesitated to leave her friends and home in a small coastal town, but her daughter and son-in-law in Victoria convinced her that she would be happy living with them, and they could help her as she grew older. When she first arrived, at age seventy-six, she did much of the cooking and worked in the small garden, a useful contribution because her daughter and son-in-law both spent very long hours in their corner store. She sometimes visited her son, who lived in Vancouver. Once a week when the family went to the Buddhist church, she was able to chat with other older women, some of whom lived nearby and came to see her. One friend convinced her to go to English classes at the church, where she learned enough to carry on a very basic conversation.
Vancouver’s Japanese community developed around Powell Street because Powell Street was near Hastings Mill, the otasuke gaisha, where many Japanese worked. Parallel to Powell Street one block inland was Cordova Street, which until the early 1890s was Vancouver’s choice residential street. The adjacent streets offered hotels, boarding houses, saloons, shops, and entertainment houses. Then, during the depression of the 1890s, the small merchants along Cordova and Powell went bankrupt, the buildings emptied, and the Japanese slowly moved in, establishing their own community. After 1908, with an increase in female immigration from Japan, Powell became more settled. In April 1911, a writer for British Columbia Magazine described Powell Street, noting that it hardly appeared to be a Japanese neighbourhood:
From 1945 to 1947, Muriel Kitagawa wrote numerous articles exhorting the Japanese Canadian community to respond to injustice. She believed that if those who advocated the denial of Nikkei rights remained unopposed, other groups would soon feel the sting of oppression, with the wholesale curtailment of their human rights. Although the leading Canadian and American public advocates for the Nikkei were almost exclusively white males from religious or professional backgrounds, they were not alone. American and Canadian Nikkei did not sit passively while others defended their rights. Instead, they typically expressed their activism through the organizations that represented them: the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) and, in Canada, the Japanese Canadian Citizens League (JCCL), the Japanese Canadian Citizens Council (JCCC), and the Japanese Canadian Citizens for Democracy (JCCD). The Nikkei also conveyed their views through their community publications. In the United States, the Pacific Citizen, the so-called mouthpiece of the JACL, was perhaps the most important of these. In Canada, the New Canadian, initially Vancouver-based, voiced the opinions of the JCCL; the Toronto-based Nisei Affairs promulgated the largely Nisei views of the JCCD. These newspapers acted as important vessels for the Nikkei in North America, facilitating awareness of developments in both nations.
In 1968 Premier W.A.C. Bennett of British Columbia took Mayor Peter Wing of Kamloops, the president of the Union of British Columbia Municipalities, to a federal-provincial constitutional conference. While in Ottawa, Wing may have met another Kamloops native and fellow graduate of its high school, Thomas Shoyama, a senior economic adviser to the government. A quarter-century earlier their presence in any governmental role would have been unlikely. In 1941 Wing, born in 1914, was an active member of the Kamloops Board of Trade; Shoyama, born in 1916, had graduated from the University of British Columbia with a degree in economics and commerce, but until fellow Japanese Canadians appointed him editor of their newspaper in Vancouver he had worked as a labourer in a pulp mill.
