It’s not a piece of history people like to discuss or recall but in WW2 there were an estimated 12 million people living in Canada Including 22,000 Japanese people who were either deported back to Japan or placed in concentration camps in Canada. With rough math skills, that is 0.1833 percent of the population, pretty small. Probably slim chance most people in the general population would ever know someone personally.
At 19, I was between high school and university and working as a bookkeeper for an accountant, a lovely middle-aged Japanese Canadian woman. We didn’t talk much about our personal lives, but it came out one day that she had been an actress and had lived in London, mostly doing theatre work but was in a movie or two. Curious, I asked, and she told me she played a prostitute in the Life and Times of Suzie Wong. By coincidence it was on tv the next weekend and I saw her in the movie. I had to tell her. We started a dialogue, she was incredibly interesting, and I later pulled it out of her that she was also in the James Bond movie, Dr No.
Never one for not asking questions, I wanted to know everything – how she got into acting, why she stopped, where did she grow up, why she went to London and then came home. It was in this barrage of youthful curiosity she let it slip that she spent many years, as a child, living in a concentration camp. In Canada.
You would think in my fabulous public education I would have heard about concentration camps in Canada during WW2, but I was clueless and shocked. She went on to explain that her parents had a business and a home and all of it was taken away and they were, as people of Japanese descent, sent to live in a concentration camp in British Columbia during the war. The odd part about this very odd conversation: she held no bitterness. Instead, she was the most positive person constantly taking on new challenges. She talked about how much time she spent with her parents who she truly loved, and the solid education she received during that time. She painted a picture of life in a concentration camp with guards and fences, yet with loving parents that cared deeply for her well-being. And guards who let them be. She viewed everything as a positive.
My boss was pretty, witty and funny, loved to laugh and loved to talk. She taught me an important lesson on perspective and positive outlooks, even in hard, hard times. She also never spoke of it again. It was a phase of life, just like her acting career. On she went.
