Redress: Inside the Japanese Canadian Call for Justice

By Roy Miki
361 pages
Raincoast Books
Reviewed by Christine Hearn

Roy Miki is a Governor General's Award-winning poet, an editor, a writer, and a faculty member in SFU's English department. He is also a third-generation Japanese Canadian and, with his brother Art, one of the leading members in the redress movement. In clean, crisp prose, Miki sets out the history of the Japanese in Canada from their arrival in British Columbia in the late 1800s, the racist activities of the Asiatic Exclusion League that culminated in a riot in 1907, a lengthy court case before World War I that ended in a ruling that race rather than citizenship was the basis for enfranchisement, more race-based legislation in the 1920s, and in 1942, the internment of Japanese Canadians in the B.C. interior, the prairies, and Ontario. Miki himself was born in Manitoba, shortly after his parents, brothers, sister, and one set of grandparents were relocated to work on a sugar beet farm. His early years were framed by stories of the mass uprooting and the "exile" from the west coast, by missing photo albums that were to have been kept safe by neighbours but instead were sold at auction, and by an overall feeling of loss and absence. After a lengthy negotiation, Japanese Canadians reached a redress agreement with the federal government in 1988. Shortly after, Roy Miki and Cassandra Kobayashi wrote Justice in Our Time: The Japanese Canadian Redress Settlement. That book outlined the process of getting settlement, but Miki always felt he wanted to do another book on the subject, a behind-the-scenes, more personal book that told the unofficial story of the redress movement. This book admirably fulfills that aim.

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