Years of Sorrow, Years of Shame

Part I of III (or more) V

You ever just happen to read one of those books that just kind of widens the scope of your mental lens? One of those very books snuck in through the side window while I wasn't looking.


Okay, I lied. Actually, I was looking. I was also bored and trying to save money. What more could a person want than to visit a used book store? 

"They smeared our windows with dog shit. They'd yell at us inside our houses at night." 

Wonder who would do something like that? So did I. It was these very sentences that had me shake my head, go back and reread. Wondering to myself, "Who did this?"

Issei...the Issei did this. According to the entry Some People Were Bitter in the chapter Some Chose Japan, a number of the older generation were not happy with the younger folks at the camp who did not want to be 'repatriated' to a country that they felt was not their home. 

Years of Sorrow, Years of Shame: The Story of the Japanese Canadians in World War II by Barry Broadfoot.

Here's a little more of that passage, on page 313:

"And those who were bitter, being locked up in those camps all those years, they called us all kinds of names. Names the Japanese call each other when they are really mad. But this wasn't mad as if I punched you and you got mad. This was real mad. You might say burning anger. They smeared our windows with dog shit. They yelled at us inside our houses at night. The Nisei weren't too bad. It was the Issei who did this, the old people. Even though they put dog shit on my windows I didn't get mad at them."

Apparently, up in Canada, there was a lot of turmoil. And people talked about it and a man wrote it down. Years later, that was one of the books I happened to pick up off the shelf. Nothing dry like something written by some academic hack who threw a book together in order to keep getting published. But it is an oral history, kind of like blogging...

What this one book did for me was set off a chain of thought that had me wanting to know more. I started to reevaluate what I'd excepted as truth in the past. And I started asking questions. 

I was surprised at how angry people could be about what they thought had happened. I was surprised at how angry people could be at the questions that were asked. And I was surprised at how the anger seems to blind people, make them deaf, and even aggressive toward people for asking honest and simple questions like "Are you sure?" or "How do you know that?" 

(Apparently Liberals can play the banjo just as well as their Conservative cousins)

Glad I never stepped directly in front of those freight trains of hate.

The mental hobo in me was way too busy looking for clues, picking up those little cigarette butts of discarded thoughts. For a while, it became an addiction. You'd be surprised at the kind of stuff that is just lying around.

Years later, the questions I'd been willing to ask myself by not being intimidated into not following a certain train of thought introduced me to a power like Hurricane Betty with an attitude not entirely unlike Hiroko, only this graceful work of art was into her 90's.  Unlike Uncle Yo, her story was recorded (to be written down at a later date).

To be continued...