Fumiko herself had not been interned. Born in 1929, she was the eldest child of George Chohei Endo and Tomie Endo, formerly of Miyagi-ken, near Sendai, in northern Japan. A cook, George had come to Canada and followed the railroad east, finding a job with the CPR hotel in Moose Jaw. Setting down roots with his wife from an arranged marriage, they raised five children on the prairies. When the war came he lost his job and the family went on relief, but they were not forced from their home.

Moose Jaw was far from the hustle and bustle of Powell Street or Steveston, and Fumiko grew up isolated from other Japanese Canadians except for a few, like Tommy Shoyama, whom she knew as a teenager. Her first real exposure to other nisei came when the government set up a postwar dispersal centre in a former RCAF training facility on the outskirts of Moose Jaw for Nikkei moving east. It was her first taste of community. 

Growing up, my mother had little interest in being a good nisei daughter, with the expectations and obligations that that entailed. With a lifelong desire to be an artist, Fumiko saved the money she made working as a bookkeeper/clerk at a Chinese grocery store and enrolled in art school, first in Regina and then in Philadelphia, where she received a scholarship to the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts. When she returned to Canada she married my father, Tod, whom she had met a year earlier through her art teacher in Regina.

After living and working a few years in Canada, Tod and Fumiko relocated first to England (where my sister Rachel and I were born), then Montreal (where our brother Rafael was born) then Toronto, and finally, in 1969, to Vancouver, at the urging of their good friend and fellow artist Roy Kiyooka, who was also from Moose Jaw.

In Vancouver, Fumiko, now in her mid-forties, began to reconnect with the Japanese Canadian community. Living in a housing co-op in the Strathcona neighbourhood, artists and activists like Takeo Yamashiro and Tamio Wakayama were her new neighbours. It was, she said years later, like coming home.

In the mid-seventies, she heard that the Japanese Canadian Centennial Project was looking for a bookkeeper, and just like that she had found herself embedded in the Nikkei community, getting to know people like Roy Miki, Randy Enomoto, Linda Uyehara Hoffman and Michiko Sakata – sansei and shin-ijusha for the most part. From there she became involved in Tonari Gumi, and then the Redress movement. In 1984 she was among a group of activists who took over the Japanese Canadian Citizens’ Association and their monthly publication, The Bulletin, eventually becoming Managing Editor. With a keen interest in food and cooking, Fumiko started the Community Kitchen column in The Bulletin, which quickly became a favourite among readers.

Following the historic Redress settlement in 1988, Fumiko and a partner received funding to publish a book but the project stalled out. My mother brought me on to finish the project, and while a final report was filed and the grant closed off, the book was never published. 

When Fumiko passed away in Nelson in December 2011, the book remained an unfulfilled dream for her, something that has weighed on me until now. 

In early 2017, I approached Sherri Kajiwara, Director/Curator of the Nikkei National Museum (NNM), with the aim of reimagining the book, bringing together images and memories, poetry, recipes, artifacts and artwork that evoke those years and those places, many of which are now lost to time, and soon, to memory. Rather than document the experience on a linear, factual level, the idea was to reach down into the essence of the experience – to get across as best we could what the people in the camps felt and ate and witnessed . . . and the poetry that it all elicited; not neccessarily to show the injustice of it all (although it was unjust), just to show what it was.

I also wanted to blend in some work and voices of the younger generations – my generation and beyond – to show the echoes of those years, how the internment experience continues to resonate today. Sometimes it is the echoes of silence.

Sherri agreed that the time was right for the book, greenlighting the project. Linda Kawamoto Reid agreed to come on board as co-author and we set about expanding both the size of the book and the content itself, delving deep into the NNM archives and pulling out new photos and new voices, as well as adding photographs of items from the collection.

I like to think that Fumiko would have approved of this finished book, as it carries on the spirit and intent of the original project while expanding on it with material that was not available at the time it was first envisioned.

Thanks to Sherri and Linda and everyone at the Museum who contributed suggestions and material as the book came together in its final form, making it, at long last, a reality.

My hope is that it touches the reader somehow, that it reaches something deep inside, where rivers run through, and the wind blows through – a beautiful, bountiful prison, “a part of Canadian history that cannot be suppressed.”