The film’s title, Obaachan’s Garden, refers to the rebuilt garden in Steveston, B.C., where Asayo were evicted from during World War II. The hostility towards Japanese reached its climax in Canada during World War II. The uprooting is a collective trauma for all
Japanese Canadians. As Ohama indicates in Obaachan’s Garden, in February 1942 the government of Canada authorized the removal of all persons of Japanese origin. 21,000 Japanese Canadians, be they Issei or Nisei, Japanese aliens or Canadian citizens, were ordered to leave the “restricted area,” moving 100 miles inland from the West Coast. That
8 Fumiko Hayashi’s The Diary of a Vagabond was first serialized from 1928 to 1930 in the journal, Nyonin geijutsu (Women’s Art). And what turned into the prologue of the book was initially published in the journal Kaizō (Reconstruction) in 1929. The complete story appeared as a separate volume in 1930 issued by Kaizōsha (Reconstruction Press). According to Joan E. Ericson’s Be a Woman: Hayashi Fumiko and Modern Japanese Women's Literature, the book “became an immediate best-seller” (121).
order inaugurated a process through which Japanese Canadians were uprooted from their homes, deprived of their property, confined in the internment camps, and forcibly dispersed across Canada or repatriated back to Japan. As all Japanese Canadians were treated as
“enemy aliens,” Japanese immigrants were torn between their Japanese ancestral origin and their Canadian residency.
In Obaachan’s Garden, the reenactment of the New Year’s Eve in 1941 vividly demonstrates the complexities of Japanese immigrants’ political orientation. On the scene, though it was a New Year’s Eve celebration, all immigrants were anxious about how the government and the public in Canada would react to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
While young Obaachan and her friends avoided discussing about the war since, as Asayo pointed out in the talking head, “as women, we [Asayo and other female immigrants] learned to put our feelings inside,” their husbands directly expressed their helplessness and anger towards the rampant anti-Japanese sentiment in British Columbia. As one of the men posed a series of questions regarding their favorable outcome of the war, no one could answer easily, until one man suddenly stood up, toasting in honor of the Japanese emperor: “Long live the emperor! To the emperor!” Meanwhile, others followed him to shout “Banzai,” a Japanese term meaning “Long live the king.”
As the sequence of these immigrants’ shouting of “Banzai” dissolves into an archival footage of Japanese soldiers’ feverishly yell of “Banzai,” these immigrants were compared in a way to their patriotic compatriots. According to Eiichiro Azuma in “Helping Japan, Helping Ourselves: The Meaning of Issei Patriotism,” before the end of the 1930s when the tensions between Japan and the Western powers steeply increased, “standard interpretations draw little distinction between the nationalism of those still living in the homeland and that of overseas Japanese” (163). Indeed, even though Japanese immigrants lived overseas, they witnessed, if not experiencing in person, the developments of Japanese nationalism, militarism, and
imperialism. As Azuma indicates, during the rise of Japanese militarism in Manchuria in the early 1930s, many Issei collected and sent money as well as other relief supplies for the Japanese soldiers in China and their families left behind in Japan (164-65).
Although Obaachan’s Garden does not mention this sort of immigrants’ monetary and material support for Japan, it introduces a few glimpses of the Imperial Japan’s rise and fall.
As indicated above, the Japanese people of Asayo’s generation experienced the Meiji Restoration, which modernized Japan and turned it into a nation resembling western
colonizers. Before their immigration, all immigrants were educated to be faithful subjects of the emperor. Historically, Japanese emperor is the highest authority of the indigenous religion of Japan, Shinto, since he and his family are believed to be the direct descendants of the sun-goddess. During the Meiji era, the emperor’s legal and cultural authority was even elevated. According to Gordon:
From the 1880s through the 1930s, the imperial institution became an all too-powerful unifying force. It served as a touchstone for personal, social, and national identity. It came to link individuals to immediate communities of family, workplace, and neighborhood—and beyond that to the imagined community of nation and empire. (70)
The emperor became the political and cultural anchor of all Japanese, and this emperor-centered nationalism is explicitly presented in Obaachan’s Garden. The
documentary includes an archival footage of Emperor Hirohito’s enthronement, in which the jubilant atmosphere prevailed. All men bowed to the emperor, showing their respect and loyalty to him. Ohama’s voice-over suggests Asayo’s great esteem for the emperor. According to Ohama, “in 1926 Hirohito became Japan’s new emperor, she [Asayo] avidly started
collecting anything to do with the royal family and her clippings became a big part of the family albums.” Also, believing the emperor to be a living god, when Asayo mentioned her
two missing daughters who she thought were taken to live near the Imperial House, she emphasized that “they are near the Emperor now, so they are fine.” Even after the outbreak of World War II and the evacuation of Asayo’s family to Manitoba, Asayo kept her faith in the Japanese emperor and believed that her two missing daughters were well-protected in Japan.
Like her compatriots, Asayo’s enormous faith in the Japanese emperor was eventually destroyed because of the two atomic bombs that dropped on Hiroshima (August 6) and Nagasaki (August 9) and the ensuing surrender of Japan in 1945. In the documentary, there was a reenactment depicting young Obaachan’s emotional breakdown after hearing the news of the atomic bombing in Hiroshima. She took her violin, cried out her Hiroshima family members’ names, and staggered on a barren field. As the camera frame switches back and forth between scenes of Obaachan’s emotional breakdown in Canada and the fearful images of the victims of atomic bombing, the immigrants’ psychical trauma is presented as parallel to the wartime sufferings of Japanese nationals. Ohama’s voice-over indicates: “For the entire nation, their belief was destroyed. The emperor was no longer a living god, but human. It was unimaginable that god could fail her [Asayo].” Japanese surrender left deep emotional scars for all Japanese, including those already immigrated to Canada. The end of World War II stood for the fall of the emperor-centered Japanese nationalism and the beginning of the demilitarization in Japan.