Densho Digital Repository
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Diana Morita Cole Interview
Narrator: Diana Morita Cole
Interviewer: Virginia Yamada
Location: Seattle, Washington
Date: September 30, 2019
Densho ID: ddr-densho-1000-483-18

<Begin Segment 18>

Yeah, and then when the Vietnam War came, my husband had already decided he was a pacifist, my husband is very forward-thinking. And he had already applied for conscientious objector status before he had been drafted, but they rejected it. And so he went to Canada because he was not going to go back to prison. He had seen too much in prison that he knew that when that prison door slams behind you, you don't know what's going to happen to you. And we had already been married, and he didn't want to be separated from me, so he decided the best decision was to go to Canada. And he was one of the few war resisters who actually had a job to go to in Canada because he was so forward-thinking and because he had graduated from university. The "brain drain" became reversed in the '60s, so many times it was the well-educated Canadians that went down to the United States to seek their fortune, but this time, this very well-educated population of my generation moved northward, and there were at least two hundred thousand of them, and they have made a distinct contribution to Canada.

VY: Was that a hard decision for you to make, to leave the United States and move to Canada knowing that you most likely probably wouldn't move back to the United States?

DC: It was terrible for me, I think. Not to exaggerate, I think I'm pretty much a coward. [Laughs] And you know, being married to this person who's telling me this stuff, I just couldn't deal with that. I was thinking, "What is he saying?" Surely to god he's going to... I don't know, avoid it in some way or somebody said he should go into the national guard. Oh, I know. His grandfather, who had come out a general in the Second World War, had told him that he should get a desk job. And he probably could have gotten one through the connections of his grandfather. But my husband did not believe in the military, he did not believe people should go around killing each other, that was not the way to deal with problems in the world, and he still doesn't. And, of course, many people in America have sort of come around to the fact that that war was very wrong and that we shouldn't have been killing, what was it, I don't know how many millions of Vietnamese. And, of course, Muhammad Ali, who was of our generation, felt exactly the same way and was vilified, stripped of his heavyweight championship. So I think America did itself a great disservice by losing some of the best of my generation, and as a result, some of the worst of our generation have become presidents of the United States. People who have not done service, and I could list them, there's three of them that I can think of right offhand. So I think Canada got the best of what America had produced.

But, of course, we didn't, I don't think that our generation was moving in that direction to end up in Canada, we really wanted to transform the world, and we were going to transform it through JFK and Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. We were going to make America this idealistic democracy where everyone truly was equal. And that was our vision but it was all shot down. In 1968, all the assassinations, all that dream was just trashed. And I cry over it even to this day because I think we were so close to achieving that dream. And, of course, the music out of that period, I mean, America was so creative, still is. But I think it was, it had reached an apex at that point, and it could have turned in a much different direction that it has, and it's a tragedy for everyone. Yeah, so is that what you wanted me to talk about?

VY: I was wondering how your family felt about --

DC: Oh, yes. I think they were very conflicted because, of course, my family, the Morita family, came from the samurai class and then there was this whole tradition, right, of going into the military, and so these were the values that I was instilled with. And then the story of Frank Hachiya, and then there's this man standing in front of me that was very fond of saying, "I'm not going to kill anybody for anybody." So, "What am I going to do here, and I'm married to him?" And my family was very silent, and when Nikkei are silent you know that they are being disapproving, basically. Or maybe they were hiding behind the silence themselves, maybe they really didn't want to come to terms. Because doubting your country, right, would be a sign of disloyalty, and they were accused of being disloyal during the Second World War. So it put them in a very awkward state and so my father and mother did say, "We feel safer with you being in Canada," because they knew that I was on the streets protesting the Vietnam War and they were worried about that, so they felt, well, maybe it would be safer for them out of the fray up there. So that's sort of how they came to terms with it, but not really fully understanding where Wayne was coming from. But they, many of them visited me in Canada, it wasn't as if I was, like, discarded. But going into a new country like Canada, was very difficult for me because I felt like I was stepping backwards. I went to Toronto and there was only one Japanese grocery store. There were no Japanese restaurants.

VY: This was in the '60s?

DC: In 1968. And I didn't know anyone there, of course, except for the people that I worked with, and none of them were Nikkei. And it was very difficult to meet up with Japanese Canadians, and when I did and I wanted to relate the stories of the incarceration, they would not talk about it. And so it was, everything was very awkward. And so I think people with white privilege who go to Canada -- they are accepted pretty well because they're the same race. But people like me, I felt very much at odds with the society there. The only thing, when they talked about race relations, they were talking about the conflict between the French and English, right? And I'm thinking, "What is this?" So there was this picture of racial tensions on the cover of The Globe and Mail, and it was white people yelling at white people, and I'm going, "What the heck is this?" But that's sort of old world thinking, it's part of Europe. So they were fighting and then the FLQ happened and all that stuff. But we were always sort of, because of my husband and because of our sympathies, we generally allied ourselves with people of color. And one of the most gracious people was Joy Thomas, and she was from the Caribbean and she was black. And she invited us many times to her home, she was married to a white Canadian, they had many parties at their home. So I got to know a lot about the commonwealth. So it was very much an education for me, hard come by, but I learned about the British empire and Canada as a colonial country and their institutions.

But it was very, very lonely, and the only thing that I could sort of relate to was the architecture that was designed by Raymond Moriyama, who was a Japanese Canadian architect who had been incarcerated in the Slocan, very close to where I live now in the Kootenay, West Kootenay of B.C., and he became a very well-known architect. And so amongst all this landscape that was largely shaped from the British tradition, you would see some of his creations, and so I held those very close to my heart. And I was very privileged to meet him at my launch in Toronto. He was sitting there in my audience, I was just so overwhelmed, he was such a handsome man. And so empathetic, charismatic, such an artist, and I was able to give him a copy of my book and tell him how much he enriched my life, his work enriched my life.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.