Chuck Tasaka

“What? I have to travel 400 km to work all summer? I will call family services!” No, no, that didn’t come out of the mouth of a Nisei. They followed their parents’ orders. The Child’s Labour Code was not discussed back in those days. Parents just said, “Mo, ichi-nin mae dakara, ichigo chigiri ni iki nasai. ‘Go Home’ kuo tara hazukashii kara, issho-kenmei hataraki nasai!”—Now, that you are grown up, it’s time to go to berry picking. It’s embarrassing to get fired so work hard. That spelled the end of summer holidays for Nisei kids ...

I read on the Discover Nikkei website about a Japanese American granddaughter having to clear out her Nisei grandmother’s house when she passed away. To her shock, she found stacks of plastic tofu containers that grandma “treasured” all her life! I’m sure Canadian Nisei grandparents are the same. However, don’t put the blame on them. It’s the mottainai (being wasteful) spirit.

It probably all started when the first wave of Japanese immigrants came to Canada in the early 1900s, and had to start their lives all over again. The families had very little money to buy ...

Greenwood was the first “internment centre” and Tashme was the last. In-between, there were Lemon Creek, Popoff, Bay Farm, New Denver, Rosebery, Sandon, and Kaslo. Self-supporting camps were East Lillooet, Minto Mine, Bridge River, and McGillivray Falls. Other self-supporting camps like Taylor Lake, Tappen, Blind Bay, Christina Lake, and Grand Forks had much smaller settlements. These were the internment camps in B.C. in 1942–43.

It must have been a shock to go from a bustling city to towns and villages that were slowly becoming ghosts towns. The hastily-built shacks on farmers’ fields looked like old fishing or hunting ...

I don’t have a PhD in linguistics but I hope that a budding linguist major will get interested in this topic. In Hawaii, the first boat load of about 150 Japanese immigrants came to this island as sugar cane laborers in 1868. It was called Gannen-mono, first-year people. However, it proved to be an unsuccessful venture. They were city dwellers, not really farm workers. Nearly one third of gannen-mono immediately returned to Japan because of their work conditions. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act came into effect once the US took hold of Hawaii. Therefore, a considerable work force ...

Dion and the Belmonts made the doo wop song famous with “Teenagers in Love.” We could call this segment “Nisei-gers in Love.” Was this the clash of the old world Issei tradition versus the new world Canadian way?

When the first Japanese immigrants came to British Columbia in the late 1800s, most were single men involved in menial occupations. They worked for very low pay and basically had no hopes for promotion. In their spare time they drank and gambled away their savings. Japanese men went to Chinatown to play mah jong. The lottery ticket game that looked similar to ...