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RD: Why don't you tell us how it came about that you wound up being an important figure in negotiations between the Canadian Japanese community and the Canadian government?

OK: In the late '70s, the Japanese Canadian National Association of Japanese Canadians started to raise the awareness of the whole redress issue. The issue of the internment had, by the middle '70s, entered the consciousness of people like myself in the bureaucracy and others. And then NAJC started to talk about redress, mainly within the community, making some rather indirect approaches to government saying this had happened and, "We'd like to talk about it." There was no openness whatsoever on the part of the government. That the, there was a short interregnum of a conservative government in the late '70s, but then the liberals came back with Trudeau. Trudeau, as an individual, was opposed to any talk about apologies, any talk about recognition, any talk about acknowledgement of any of these wrongdoings on the past, on the part of previous governments.

RD: Could I ask, how does this correlate his acceptance in forcing through of multiculturalism?

OK: It's always been a curious thing to me, a contradiction in his character. I can only surmise the reason he was of that mind with respect to apologies was his coming from the French Canadian community, and whether by acknowledging past injustices to other communities, it would open the door to a great demand from Quebec in terms of a recognition of the past injustices that had been served on that community by governments for a hundred years. That it was a contradiction as well that he had kind of acknowledged the past injustices to the French Canadian community with the introduction of the Official Languages Act and the Official Policy of Bilingualism. But he always took the position, "I have recognized the language." And in his mind, he separated the recognition of the language from the recognition of the community, which was, you know, a very artificial distinction when you think about it, because language is people. I mean, without people there is no language. But I think he thought -- and this is purely my own thinking -- that if we recognize what happened to Japanese Canadians, to aboriginal Canadians, to anybody else, then I'm opening the door to having to go back in history and deal with all of the things the French Canadians had suffered, and they had suffered immensely in Canada. I mean, when one thinks about the wrongs that have been directed to that community, that if you worked in Quebec where the majority, the overwhelming majority were unilingual French, you had to work in English because the bosses were English. They made no attempt to learn any French. And so if you wanted to move beyond being a laborer in Quebec, you had to do it in English. You couldn't do it in French. It took until the Diefenbaker government in the 1960s to provide simultaneous translation in the House of Commons for a French Canadian to speak French. Up until that time, if you were a French Canadian politician and you wished to be understood by your colleagues, you had to speak English. That until the Diefenbaker government, all Canadian currency was printed in English only. You could pay taxes in French, but if you got any money, it came in English only. I mean, those sound like small things, but they were absolutely a reflection of the, I would term it, the persecution of French Canadians in Canadian society. And there were a multitude of things like that that had prevailed in Canada for most of its history.

And I think he thought, "I opened that door, I'm opening a door that can't be closed. And so I'm not going to open that door for them, and I'm not going to open that door for anybody else." And it was a blind spot of his. I don't think he could see that he had already opened the door with the Official Language policy. That you couldn't grant status to a language without granting status to a people. And the thing he was worried about came to prevail in his mind, that the whole idea of a distinct society in Quebec, the whole idea of a separate nation came to pass. It's now accepted in Canada at the political level. There's two nations in Canada, an English nation and a French nation. And he absolutely opposed that. To his dying breath, he stood in opposition to that. There was no French Canadian nation. There was a French Canadian ethnic group, there was a French Canadian province, there was a French language, but there was no French nation. And I think he thought that, "If I do it there, I'll do it... if I do it for the Japanese Canadians, if I do it for the Italian Canadians, if I do it for aboriginal Canadians, I've got to do it for everybody, and there'll be no end to this." And I think partly that was his recognition of the nature of what Canadian society had been for most of its history, where it had been one of highly discriminatory society against all kinds of peoples. And you start correcting one wrong, you've got a whole pile of wrongs you're gonna have to correct. My problem with his thinking is that he didn't develop, if you will, a hierarchy of wrongs. Some wrongs were far worse than other wrongs. That some of the things that were done were done out of profound ignorance. Some were done out of deliberate malice, and that's different. I mean, there's a difference in those kinds of things. Maybe those who have suffered the wrongs would never accept that, but I think that was true of what happened in Canada. So that when the approaches were started to be made, the word very quietly went out, nothing big, no big announcements, "I don't want to hear about this. Kill it."

So one of the things that the ministers who were mainly Ontario ministers of multiculturalism did, which was highly objectionable, is they started playing community groups off against each other. Well, the NACJ wants to talk about redress, but the George Imai group in Toronto doesn't want to talk about redress, it just wants to talk about the wrongs that had been done with maybe some kind of acknowledgement, recognition that this had happened.

RD: And what was that second group?

OK: It was, I can't even remember the name of it now. Let me see if I can dig it out really quickly. But the spokesperson was a man named George Imai. And he created a group, if you will, in Toronto, with some representation from other parts of Canada. But basically it was his organization in Toronto. And... [pauses while looking through papers]. They don't even really give themselves a name. Oh, yeah, here they called themselves the Newly Formed Organization, the National Redress Committee of Survivors. And they had a few members from Toronto, a few members from Vancouver, and a couple from Montreal. And basically, they stood in opposition to the National Association of Japanese Canadians who wanted a full negotiation, a full discussion, a full recognition, acknowledgment and apology by the government, and they downplayed that. Some of the liberal ministers latched on to the Imai group, and said, well, they're the ones who really represent the Japanese Canadian peoples. Myself and others said, "Well, just a minute." I know George Imai, he had come to see me on more than one occasion, and I said, "I don't think they represent anybody except the few people that George has got together. I was told, "We're not going to talk to them, and we're not going to talk to anybody else. We're just going to talk to anybody." And basically, the liberal government buried it. They buried the issue. The NAJC kind of withdrew, backed off, the Imai group kind of backed off, they thought they had succeeded. They kind of buried the issue. When Mulroney came to power, Imai, interestingly enough, went to Mulroney and tried to get recognition as his group being the sole spokesperson of the Japanese Canadian community. He wrote to the Prime Minister saying, "I represent, my group represents the Japanese Canadians." We said to the government, "No, they don't. They represent some people within the Japanese Canadian community, but they are not a representative organization." Nor was the NAJC in absolute terms a representative of all of the Japanese Canadian community. There is no ethnic organization that represents all of the ethnic community. It just, I don't care which community it is, it just doesn't exist. You always have disparate elements within any community, they break down on different issues, but I think the government ultimately was persuaded, the organization that is most representative of the Japanese Canadian community is the NAJC. And they, Mulroney and company essentially pushed the Imai group off to the side. And they suffered some bric bracs as a consequence of that, but I guess one of the things that helped them is that the Imai group was basically based in Toronto. Toronto was a liberal enclave even though Mulroney's party in 1982 won an overwhelming majority. They reduced the liberals to forty or forty-five MPs out of 260-some. And the liberals were based in Ontario. So they were an Ontario party with a few MPs who had survived in Quebec. And so it was easier for the Mulroney government to say, 'The Imai group doesn't represent anybody. They speak, it's the liberal party speaking really." So that the NAJC was able to establish itself as the legitimate voice on the issue of redress with the Mulroney government.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.