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With Japan's bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, 22,000 Canadians of Japanese descent were dispossessed of their property and belongings, and uprooted from their British Columbia homes to various sites of internment. Some stayed in these sites for four years or longer. Utilizing the concepts of vulnerability and composure, this essay examines Japanese-Canadian Nisei (second-generation) women's and men's mixed narratives of these wartime events. At the same time that narrators describe these years as filled with hardship, turmoil, and racial injustice, they also speak of happy times, kindness, and the sweetness of life. The essay points to ways in which the researcher and narrator work towards a "shared authority" in the presentation and interpretation of these complex memories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's perception about the Japanese Canadian internment during World War II, which relies on personal narrative, family memoir and oral history. The author relates that as racial persecution and its memory come across the generations, people use shared pasts and arrived at different historical understandings. However, the author notes that it is important to keep in mind that personal memory should be rooted in the social context in which people remember. The author pertains that she uses her family's narratives in which its different locations have shaped their memories and thereby produced it with lessons of struggle.

Shortly after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, the Canadian Government uprooted roughly 22,000 persons 'of the Japanese race', seventy-five percent of whom were Naturalised or Canadian-born citizens. Women and children, and some men were relocated to ghost towns. Men who displayed the slightest form of resistance were incarcerated as prisoners of war. Families were divided, property confiscated, and after being interned for up to four years, Japanese Canadians were forced to either move to Japan, or disperse throughout Canada. In this article, I explore the ways in which Nisei (second-generation Japanese Canadian) women, most of whom were teens or young adults at the time of war, remember this event roughly sixty years later, and in the context of their lives. Informed by the oral testimonies of sixty Nisei women, as well as my own memories of my family's internment, I focus on the narratives of three women. In presenting these narratives, I consider the relationship between personal reminiscence and public history, the role of biography, and the significance of emotionality in gathering and interpreting life stories. I argue that the women's personal memories extend our understanding of the internment as an isolated event in history to one that is part of enduring historical processes shaped by unequal relations of 'race', gender and class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to bridge the dichotomy of "historical truth" and personal recollection by exploring the sociological concept of memory. Drawing on 30 oral testimonies of Nisei (second generation) Japanese Canadian women, I explore the diverse and often complex ways in which Nisei women remember the internment, with particular attention to the intermingling of past and present, the relationship between teller and listener, as well as the layering of personal and public narratives, in the construction of these memories. The theme of silence and telling is also explored, with the understanding that the literacization of memories is always a political act. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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