Interview with Addie and Lynn Kobayashi

[View of the back of the Lincoln Museum and Cultural Centre building]

[Addie Kobayashi walking outside on the museum grounds and talking with her daughter, Lynn Kobayashi. Video shifts to both women standing at the graves of Japanese Canadians, and Addie places a red maple leaf on top of one of the gravestones]

[Addie and Lynn seated inside the Lincoln Museum and Cultural Centre]

Addie: I’m Addie Kobayashi, I’m a Japanese Canadian. I was interned during the Second World War.

[Photo of Addie Kobayashi as a young woman with two of her non-Japanese friends seated on the side of a bridge]

[Addie holding a copy of her book, and standing in front of an exhibit panel about Japanese Canadians in Lincoln]

Addie: I’m the author of Exiles in Our Own Country: Japanese-Canadians in Niagara, which was written in 1997.

Lynn: I’m Lynn Deutscher Kobayashi and I’m Addie’s daughter. And I’m a third-generation Japanese Canadian.

[Addie flipping through the telephone directory that she helped create]

[Addie and Lynn seated inside the Lincoln Museum and Cultural Centre]

Addie: We made a Niagara directory, telephone directory, and from there it seemed ‘What do we do with that?’ And decided to write this book with the use of interviews.

[Black and white photographs of Addie’s parents, her mother, and a group of Japanese Canadian women and a child sitting on the grass in an orchard]

[Addie and Lynn seated inside the Lincoln Museum and Cultural Centre]

Addie: We undertook this project because we wanted to make sure that the history of the settlement of Japanese Canadians in Niagara was not lost or forgotten.

[Addie walking in a cemetery with Japanese Canadian gravestones; a  picture of a notice regarding Japanese property confiscation; a picture of a young woman and a child looking out the window of a train]

Addie: We also lost our land, our property, our possessions, so we faced extreme racism in British Columbia. That is difficult; our history was…is based on racism, what happened to people; not just the Indigenous people, not just us.

[Addie and Lynn seated inside the Lincoln Museum and Cultural Centre; Video of Addie looking at panels at the museum]

Addie: Japanese Canadians actually came as early as 1942. They were the young, younger people who were sent east and many came through Niagara and worked for weeks, months, maybe a few years.

[Images of Japanese Canadian people being loaded onto trains; image of men working at a labour camp]

Addie: But then it wasn’t until after the war ended…And there were many families left in the internment camps, large families especially. Orchards in Niagara needed field hands and so they had really no choice but to be exiled to Niagara, because, many because of the large families.

[Photograph of Ken Teshima and his sister Ko on the back of an open truck bed covered with baskets of peaches]

[Lynn and Addie Kobayashi, and Jasmine Proteau walking near the Fry House on the Museum grounds]

Addie: It became known that the history of Japanese Canadians was unknown in the Peninsula. People thought that the Japanese Canadians here were immigrants from Japan and they knew nothing about how they actually got here as they were expelled from BC.

[Addie looking at panels at the museum]

[Gravestones showing Japanese family names buried at Mount Osborne cemetery in Beamsville]

Addie: So they were really exiles and they did come to a hostile reception and most of the people did not think of the racism that they faced when they first came because things had worked out and they were gradually accepted.

[Walking on the museum grounds]

[Addie and Lynn seated inside the Lincoln Museum and Cultural Centre]

Addie: Before we faced extreme racism in British Columbia by the government, governments. What it brings home is that it seemed like Canada was built on racism.

[Canadian flag waving in a breeze]

Addie: Things do, have changed and some will never happen like our situation. They recognize that racism has always been here in Canada and it is still here. I think it’s going to become quite a big problem in the future unless we do find some answers.

[Addie and Lynn talking to each other outside on the museum grounds]

[Addie and Lynn seated inside the Lincoln Museum and Cultural Centre]

Lynn: There was always that awareness that racism was wrong, whether it be against Asians, Japanese Canadians, Black Canadians or Black Americans, and I think what I got from that was that I never felt like I wanted to be white. A lot of people, Japanese Canadians my age have told me they wished they were white, and I just never felt that, and I think that was because my parents and grandparents they just felt like ‘This is wrong, and it needs to be changed.’

[Photograph of Lynn’s grandparents on their wedding day]

[Addie and Lynn seated inside the Lincoln Museum and Cultural Centre]

Lynn: I think that my mother has especially done a really good job of slowly introducing the idea because when I did learn about it, it wasn’t really a shock.

[Old video footage of Japanese Canadians discussing redress]

Lynn: She told us details, like, you know, we lived in these ghost towns as they referred to the internment camps back then and talked about the tar paper shacks and how they could see ice forming inside the shacks. But at the same time, they didn’t overwhelm us with information. Slowly we became aware that these ghost towns were internment camps. So it was all very gradual, but when they became involved in the Redress movement we began to understand the bigger picture.

[Photograph of Japanese Canadians marching with signs at Parliament hill calling for Redress, Lynn’s father stands at the middle holding a sign that reads ‘Enemy that Never Was’]

[Addie and Lynn seated inside the Lincoln Museum and Cultural Centre]

Addie: Hattie Tanouye’s story is actually not unique, it’s similar to many women. She had to manage three children; looking after her in-laws; sent to a sugar beets farm in Alberta. She made a very big sacrifice when she had to leave two of her three children in Alberta with the grandparents.

She came to Niagara and ended up being a volunteer in St. Catharines, won many awards. What really struck me was her strength, and then I recognized that that’s a strength that many women had.

[Addie listening to an audio station with the interview of Ken Teshima’s story]

[Photo of a woman caring for three Japanese Canadian children]

Addie: The strength of the women to just be uprooted, displaced, not know where they’re going – that comes home to me as something that maybe hasn’t been fully recognized.

[Image of a newspaper clipping that reads “Toronto refuses to take and B.C. Japs”]

[Addie and Lynn seated inside the Lincoln Museum and Cultural Centre]

Addie: And life was very, very difficult during this disruption. Niagara residents – non-Japanese – they’re really startled to find out Japanese Canadians are not, were not immigrants, did not come from Japan and that most were Canadian citizens. They were also startled to find out how they were treated and there was quite –  there was rampant – racism in the local councils, business, whatever.  So that was a big surprise to them. This kind of thing can happen in Canada, did happen in Canada. Luckily with the Redress Agreement hopefully it will never happen again, but it almost did. Yes, people recognize that Canada is not perfect.

[Addie listening to an audio station with the interview of Ken Teshima’s story]

[Addie and Lynn seated inside the Lincoln Museum and Cultural Centre]

Lynn: Just when I think that, you know, Asian Canadians were feeling part of Canada that the Pandemic kind of drew out this anti-Asian racism in similar ways to what Japanese Canadians experienced: blaming Chinese Canadians for the virus, blaming Chinese Canadians for what was happening in China. So, I think, it’s important that people realize that those kinds of dynamics existed in Canada and are kind of rearing their ugly head again, and understanding that will hopefully prevent, will kind of prevent it from happening, you know, to the degree it happened to Japanese Canadians.

[Text: Lincoln Museum & Cultural Centre: Home of the Jordan Historical Museum of the Twenty]