Mona Oikawa. Cartographies of Violence: Japanese Canadian Women, Memory, and the Subjects of the Internment

Mona Oikawa. Cartographies of Violence: Japanese Canadian Women, Memory, and Subjects of Internment. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. Xvii + 457 pp. Maps. Photographs. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $39.95 sc. A few years after Redress Settlement of 1988, Mona Oikawa used a semi-structured approach to interview eleven women of Japanese origin who were forcibly removed from Pacific Coast in 1942. Her goal was to map the Internment [which] physically and socially expelled Japanese Canadians from nation as well as rights of citizenship (13). She also interviewed ten of their daughters to determine legacy of Internment through generations. The interviews confirm much of what is known of war-time experiences of Japanese in ghost towns, beet fields of Alberta and Manitoba, and other places in which, to use Oikawa's word, they were incarcerated. What is new is emphasis on loss of important intangibles such as destruction of networks of families and friends, educational opportunities, and language. The loss of language, of course, is not unique to descendants of Japanese immigrants. Regrettably, except in some of later chapters, interviews comprise only a minor part of book. The early chapters deal mainly with theory--including Foucault and feminism--and include an overview of a selected historiography of Japanese Canadians in war years. The historiographical section is very critical of Mutual Hostages, a book of which I was one of four authors. That book has problems but it was published almost twenty-five years ago. I was surprised that Oikawa did not engage with my The Triumph of Citizenship (2008) which reflects further research and reflection. Of course, Oikawa and I have a very different approach to methodology. Whereas she judges historical actions by standards of her own time, I believe historians must also endeavour to explain events in context of times in which they occurred. Although Oikawa is much too young to have been directly affected by expulsion of Japanese Canadians from Pacific Coast, her anger at treatment they endured during and immediately after Second World War is apparent in very use of word Violence in title. Calling them euphemisms, she rejects such terms as interior housing centres, and sugar beet projects. Instead, she describes all locations to which Japanese Canadians were sent as carceral places. …

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