Bittersweet Passage: Redress and the Japanese Canadian Experience

Patricia Morley is professor emeritus of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University and the author of Margaret Laurence: The Long
Journey Home and As Though Life Mattered: Leo Kennedy’s Story.

Torontonian Maryka Omatsu, an environmental lawyer, is chair of the
Ontario Human Rights Tribunal. In the 1980s, she shared in the movement
to win redress from the Canadian government, and was one of the
negotiators of the final agreement.

There are numerous books on the incarceration, that ugly stain on
Canadian history born of wartime fears, much older animosities, and
political expediency. Omatsu’s contribution includes an account of her
parents’ experience and her own odyssey to Japan.

From her vantage point as one of seven negotiators for the National
Association of Japanese Canadians, Omatsu begins with the drama of the
signing on September 22, 1988, then recounts in detail the story of her
second-generation parents and the Japanese events that drove the issei,
or first generation, to emigrate. Later chapters deal with “war
stories” and the painfully slow recovery of the Japanese community in
postwar years.

Each historian of these events brings something fresh to the telling.
Omatsu’s bitter observation that racism is still alive in modern
America is one that fills her “with fear and apprehension.”