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Broken Promises
Broken Promises The Dispossession of Japanese Canadians By Leah Best, Head of Knowledge Can Canada offer a just home for all? This question is posed by the upcoming exhibition Broken Promises: The Dispossession of Japanese Canadians. It feels as relevant to today’s events as to the events of Canada’s second internment era, in the 1940s. [ ]
The exhibition is one of several legacies of the Landscapes of Injustice project: a seven-year, multi-million-dollar research and communityengagement effort to investigate and document the forced dispossession of Japanese Canadians. Led by the University of Victoria and funded in large part by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the project is supported by the Nikkei National Museum, the Royal BC Museum, Simon Fraser University and 11 other organizations across Canada. The project brings together those with lived and intergenerational experience of the dispossession, academics, museum professionals, educators and archivists to expose new details and new remembrances of a deeply racist period in Canadian history. (continued on the next page)
Japanese Canadian Redress Rally, Parliament Hill, Ottawa, ON. Photograph courtesy of the Nikkei National Museum, 2010-32-124
Murakami family. Photograph courtesy of the Salt Spring Island Archives.
Children looking in the window of a Japanese store, closed after the relocation of Japanese nationals. Jack Lindsay Photograph. courtesy of the City of Vancouver Archives, 1184-1537. Visitors to Broken Promises will trace the evolution of the dispossession through the experiences of seven narrators (one, Mary Kitagawa, still lives in Vancouver) who were living with their families on the west coast before World War II. Their experiences— life in wartime internment camps; letters of protest against their incarceration and dispossession; the struggle to rebuild their lives in post-war Canada—are presented as a humanizing counterpoint to new details on the state machinery that was used to confiscate their personal and business assets. The 186-square-metre (2,000-square-foot) exhibition combines text panels with room re-creations, high- and low-tech interactives, and oral history listening stations. Notably absent? Artifacts, of which there are only a handful (including a Tagashira family obi), a stark legacy of the loss experienced by Japanese Canadians. These expository elements grapple with the central questions of the Landscapes of Injustice project. Why did the dispossession occur? Who benefitted from it? How has it been remembered and forgotten?
As a subject for contemporary contemplation, the dispossession of Japanese Canadians continues to resonate. As the Landscapes of Injustice website says, “This history still matters. A society’s willingness to confront the past provides a powerful gauge of democracy.”
Broken Promises opens at the Nikkei National Museum in Burnaby on September 26, 2020. From there it will travel to the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre in Toronto, returning to British Columbia for a final showing at the Royal BC Museum in early 2022. For more information, visit the Landscapes of Injustice project at landscapesofinjustice.com.
