molly kitajima

Molly Kitajima’s retelling of her WWII incarceration experience is a rarely told perspective of the Japanese Canadian story, where 28,000 people were forcibly removed from their homes and the unique struggles with which her family was confronted during the war. Though the circumstances are hauntingly similar to what Japanese Americans went through, there are particular nuances, unique to Canada, that surface in Molly’s memories, such as the selling off of property to the government, the presence of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and the Japanese Canadian redress movement. After moving to California after the war, Molly made her home in the Bay Area, and was active in taiko and the San Jose Nikkei community, as well as with JAMsj. This is the second of two oral histories that she provided to JAMsj interviewers. 

Molly passed away at the age of 89 in 2014. 

It is July 15th, and I'm at Molly Kitajima’s lovely home. And this is Molly and this is me Megumi. And I'm interviewing Molly about her life experiences. We'll start out with where you were born and when you were born. 

I was born on October the 10th, 1925. I was born in a little community called Strawberry Hill Surrey Municipality, British Columbia, Canada. When I was born, they were going to give me away. There was a Catholic home in Vancouver, and my mother and father already had five children. And I guess they saw this teacher in Vancouver, with was the Japanese school teacher of the Japanese school, Mrs. Sato. They wanted to adopt me and my mother, well she, she had me. You know how they stay for like ten days? I guess she decided that she didn't want to give me up, so they brought me home.

Did you ever get to know your parents’ childhood stories?

Oh, yeah. My mother never said much about their childhood story till she was older, you know. But she came when she was only 15 years old. And my father's father was here in Sacramento. And my father was 15 and he was in Hawaii. And he was supposed to come here to the United States. Instead, we had relatives in Hawaii. So he flew out there and pretty soon the Exclusion Act went into effect and he couldn't come here. So my father went to Canada, and that's how my father was in Canada.

But your father's father was in Sacramento? 

My father's father was here. I don't know too much about him either, that I do know that he was here. My mother told me that he must have worked on the railroad or something because he earned enough money here. And he went home. 

Home meaning…

To Japan. But on his way home, he went up to Canada to see my father and said, “I'm getting you a bride. I'm sending her here.” So my father didn't have much choice and my grandfather went home to Japan and he looked all over. His own wife died when my father was born. They went around looking all over. He found out that my mother's family had a whole bunch of kids, too. My mother's family was about ten kids or something. But my mother was the oldest and she was the ugliest. And then the sisters were all asked for already except my mother at age 15.

She was already an old maid. 

So when they asked for my mother’s hand, the grandfather brought her. And then they put her on the ship and he gave her one 5 gold piece, and he said, “I want it back.” And she came with it across the ocean. It took 30 days but my mother comes off this boat and they marry right there at the justice of the peace, you know. Then they went across to Vancouver where they live.  

What can you tell me about the war? About when Pearl Harbor happened? So you were already 16. What was that like for you?

Well, the day of the Pearl Harbor, December the seventh, we [had something] very much like the JACL here. It's a JCCA, which is Japanese Canadian Citizens Association, and I had joined the club at that time, and so did my older sister. She wasn't married yet and she and I and they were having a conference or a meeting or something at the next town in a place called Surrey and, and all of there must have been like a hundred people there, a hundred Niseis there. And so we all went, my father took us.

So that day we went and it was 9:00 or something like that. And by noon time, somebody come running over to the co-op hall that we were at and they said, “Oh, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor.” We're all going, no, no, no. They said better go home. You know, everybody go home. And so my father was going to come to get us at night or something like that. So we were all standing around there, thinking just how am I going to get home, you know, with my sister.

And so this school teacher’s son comes up to me and he asked, “Do you have a way home?” I said, no. So he was saying, “Well, I'll take you home.”

So I talked to quite a few people who said if you've been reading the newspapers and you've been tracking where Japan has been bombing and conquering, you know, it was kind of [expected]. 

Not only that, my father was in Japan before the war and just came back. The next ship turned around in the middle of the ocean and went back. But he was on the ship before. See, my father was given all the property and everything in Japan because he was the only son. And he went back right before he sold the stuff. And he just left.

How long was he gone, about a year or something?

Yeah. And so then when he came back the war broke out and that’s when the first inkling of being evacuated, my father said Canadians are going to be evacuated, too. And we said, “No, we're not going to be evacuated. And my father went around telling all of the neighbors, especially the younger Japanese immigrants, don't spend your money, don't build no more. You know, keep your money and all that. Well, somebody turned him in. So then my father gets hauled in by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and they're saying that he's anti-Canadian. In fact, I was there when he said that because I went to get him. 

What did he say? 

Because he was in the compound for about three weeks and they said, “Your father's too much trouble. Come and get him.”

What do you mean “too much trouble?”

Well because he was yelling. I didn’t even know he could write that much but he did. He says, “I'll go tell everybody to go ahead and progress the way we were, you know. And the RCMP said, “Oh, you can't do that.” [My father] says, “Well, then we're going to camp, aren't we? We're going to be incarcerated, you know.” And then they said, “We don't know. But anyhow, take your father home. He's just too much trouble and tell him to keep his mouth shut.” 

So then my father at that time took me to what's called Hasting Park, just like Tanforan around here, took me to the assembly center. And when I went there and of course there were people that we knew but more so people that my father knew from the island, Vancouver Island. People were brought in first. So they were there and there were babies and stuff like that. And here was this guy, a custodian, with the broom and throwing up this dust, you know.

So I grabbed the broom and said, “You know, don't you have enough sense not to swish around with that dust and all that? Leave the broom here.” The Japanese people do it for themselves because they always get that wad of water and fluff it around. Then they sweep it. I could even [remember] the smell of the horse manure and stuff like that. It wasn't fit for people to live there and sleep there. So when my father walked around the grounds there to visit with the people at that time, I was angry. I was angry saying, “Hey, you know, this is not the way to treat human beings. At least I can go home and go on to my bed, you know?” 

We went to Winnipeg and we were put in what they called an immigration hall. And it could have been very, very disastrous there, too, because of the fact that they had a woman's dormitory and then a men's dormitory and, I don't know, must have been about 300 of each of us. And for the bathrooms there was only like ten bathrooms and six bathtubs or something. And so my mother, she wasn't going to stand for that. So I don't know how she did it, but she did she found a bathhouse. You know, we would get a pass to go to the bathhouse every day. And they couldn't believe that. 

So all these poor people, were all Nihon, first generation young people, they were taken right away before anybody else.

What kind of camps?

Railroad camps, they were all these mountain camps. They were working on the railroads. All these young people. Because they were the most dangerous, I guess they were. And they were from Japan, they were the last immigrants to the country. So anyhow, they were all taken. So all the Kibeis, a lot of the Isseis, were taken first. Nobody knew where they were. They couldn't write to us. Nobody knew where it was. 

What a crisis. 

You know, for these young brides, these young women had maybe one kid or two kid. They had no money, They had nothing. We had to help them. So all the Japanese, all the older Japanese people, they would go and take them food or invite them. They would come and more or less, we'll help them. In fact, the RCMP was centered out of our house.

They used your house as a base in the office. 

No, they used our house as my mother cooked. They paid, so my mother would get these chickens that were perfectly healthy, lots of chickens we had. And she would roast up these chickens like you could not believe.

They never eat chicken like that before in their life. My mother baked potatoes or, you know, stuff like that. And 40, 50 people would come for lunch. And, you know, I don't know whether it was dinner, but I know they came for lunch and my mother would cook all this stuff and then the rest of us would go down to the Japanese school and we would start typing up all this paperwork for the evacuees. I used to do a lot of interpreting when I was 13. I would go to the hospital and interpret, you know. Most of the people from our hill, from Strawberry Hill, all went to either Alberta or Manitoba. And so we kind of went as a group, as a community.

So then when we decided that we would go, they told us you can only take what you can carry. But you know, since we were with RCMP headquarters…when I think about it, it was terrible. But we had to. But then there's now eight of us [except my father]. My father went through a ghost town. 

Why? 

And we didn't know which one or what. So he just said, “Hey, you want to go over there? I'm going to go where they will take me.” So he went the ghost towns. But at that time, all of the people that were unable to do farm work and stuff like that, they had this ghost town set up. So most of the people in the city went there and there was like six or seven ghost towns. And my father went to one called New Denver. 

So you could choose where to go. 

No, they placed you but New Denver was where they they had a hospital and all kinds of stuff there. See where the other ghost towns were, if you got sick or anything they would take you over there to New Denver. 

And these were ghost towns used to be mining towns. 

Yeah. But at New Denver they had built those barracks just like what you have in Tule Lake. 

Oh, really.

Yeah. And they still have them now. It's a museum there and they have these barracks of six of them. 

How far is it from Vancouver? 

Oh, I would say it's about 6 hours or so. We had to go to work on a farm. We were stuck, you know. But then they had schools, high school and they had mess halls and they all those other things just like an American camp. But we were foolish to go to the sugar beet farm.

I mean, all these farmers had sections of land that's 640 acres and they were wheat and all that other stuff, but they all went to do the sugar beets. So we had sugar beets. We did 100 acres. And then they built us a sugar beet house the size of this room right here.

I heard it's the most backbreaking work. 

It is the most backbreaking. 

You're hunched over. 

And if you don't hit it with one sling, that thing comes down. You have to lift it up again and take off the greenery and if you don't get it all done by October 1st, the freeze starts. You don't get paid because it's in the ground. You didn't send it in to the mill. So we all have to work with flashlights on our foreheads because sometimes we thought the frost was going to come, you know? And then we would get it all done. And the sugar content is very important, you know. And for 100 acres, we got paid $1,670.

For the season. 

For the whole season. 

Is that one year?

Well it's half a year really, because you can only work from April to October. Then we all got permission. You know all of us older ones got permission – because how are we going to eat in the winter? So we all went out to work in town.

You couldn't finish school. 

No, no more school after that. So I went to work and I first found a job in a sewing factory. And I worked in a sewing factory between eight and five and from there I went to clean an office, like from seven ‘til nine or ten. And then on the weekend I went to work at a silk lamp factory. A Japanese company that made silk lamps. We had to support the family, I mean, my mother and and the three younger kids, you know?

Boy, that's – I've read only a little bit about the Canadian experience. 

And not only that. Yeah they went and took our land. And sold it. 

Confiscated. 

Yeah. Confiscated the land. They sold it to feed the people in the camp and then they reciprocated by giving us and my mother got $9,000. That was more than she even paid. Standing you know, was a forest when we got it. Not a house. No. Nothing on there. And so, but then, you know, when we went to fight for the redress, we fought for every living Canadian at the time. So everybody got $21,000 Canadian Dollars.

But like a lot of these people, she bought a nursery and all that. They had money, they could pay their taxes while they were away.

But you had no choice. Everything was confiscated. 

Guns, radio. We had no radio. So all we had was a record player. So my poor mother, when we were going to the train station they came with a big army truck and they made everybody [stand up], including my mother. Well she was only 47 at the time but that to me, I thought she was an old lady. They had to all stand up in a truck as it went rumbling down to the train station to man stand up in the train. And boy, I was so mad, you know, but I couldn't just sit my mother on the front seat, you know. I was so angry, you know, about that situation. I would have walked if I had to. 

You feel like cattle.

Yeah. And then when we got down to the train station, they loaded us all and we were in the front cars. Here’s the engine and all the smoke and it's all black and musty like that. But my mother, the day before we left, you know, she went down and cooked 200 chickens. We knew that the men were somewhere along the rail line. As soon as we saw the Japanese, we just threw them out along the way. We saw some of our people. One time we stopped and we saw some of our people from our neighborhood and we all talked to them and they were crying, you know.

They didn't know what happened to their wives and their children because they were the last to be moved. So then they put them in the ghost town. But these people were in the railroad road camps or the road camps. 

And then there’s one RCMP on the front and one RCMP on the back of each car, and know of the RCMP that we had on ours, where one of them was like a 19 year old constable. And so then we start plugging along, he started to talk to us and he can't understand why are we being deported. He was asking 150 million questions and we became very fast friends. We've come for about two days now. We're going up into the Rocky Mountains. And we come to the town of Jasper. 

And you know, they had the best apple pie and stuff like that. So we got to the station then and he gets off the train and puts out his hand to let me off the train. And he almost got shot from the other RCMP. He was so fit to be tied he went into the train station and bought the pie and then he came into give it to me. He just could not understand why I couldn't have gone in and had an apple pie in the train station. But he was so sweet. There was nothing he can do. But he ate our chicken, you know, he had a great time with us.

Do you remember his name?

Yeah, his name was Clifford. He was so, so nice, you know. We talked and he said, “Oh, you guys live the same way as we do. What's the difference?” You know, like his life and our life and…

But as soon as we got there – I don't know how many hundred people were there – we were all like in cots. I think there was six bathrooms for 50 - 100 people.

Were you mad then? 

I wouldn't say I was mad, but I was confused. Very, very confused, you know, And I couldn't figure out, you know, what's going to happen to us, you know? My mother, she heard a lot of bad things, you know, about the camps and that things were going on in camp and stuff like that.

So my mother thought that that's the best thing for us to do is [move to the farm]. And everybody else got their farms and they all went. So we knew where everybody was. We were practically the closest to Winnipeg. We were only like 13 miles out of town, the place called Middle Church. 

And eight of you lived there?

Eight of us lived there. We sectioned out rooms like that.

It must have been so cold in the blizzard.

Well, it was, but then we had a stove and we just burned that all the time, and then we'd have a wire going to the bathroom, we could get lost. You could die, you know, 20 feet outside. So they have this guide wire.

Was it an outhouse or…

An outhouse. So that's how we existed. And so we used to go we never wasted any time. We just, you know, went to work and did everything. And then after four years, they released us from that and we could do whatever we wanted to. So most of the Japanese girls were doing housework in homes. 

When did you move to the states? 

I came in 1948. My husband and I moved here.

You said that your mother got a check for $9,000 for the farm. Why wasn't that your father that got a check?

My father was already dead. And the check went to my oldest brother. My father died in 1946. And he was 56 years of age. 

Molly, maybe you can start out by telling me about the redress movement in Canada. I know practically nothing about it.

Well, I have to go back to the American redress. I'm trying to think of around 1964 I’m very active in JACL. I belong to the Oakland chapter, and in fact, I become President of the Oakland JACL at the time when I was very active with the Northern California District Council.

Some of us started to say that we ought to take some action against the government regarding redress and a lot of the people, a lot of the JACL members thought, no, we are not rock the boat. We all seem to be, you know, doing well economically and even though we didn't have all of the civil rights at that time, we went to fight for the alien land law to erase the wording in the alien land law.

So are you saying that you first took care of the alien land law.

That was a subject that everyone agreed on.

And that was the first target? How could it move so fast?

We still had some people that were against it. I remember getting to a point in the JACL saying, hey, if you don't want the money that we know that we get, you can donate it or give it back to the government. That's entirely up to you. But the reason why – and I'm sure that the most of the people in the United States were not after the $20,000. They were after the apology. And to teach them a lesson that they can't segregate the people because of race or ethnicity.

And so we got 21,000 CAD. It wasn’t equivalent to United States, but that's not even the amount. And the amount was not even that. But my only sad situation was that the people that really, really suffered was like our parents. And even in the United States, if they were deceased, they did not get the $20,000. And I felt very bad because those are the people that really suffered, but we went forth. In the Canadian one, the people that owned property got the land confiscated and it was sold.

So when the property was sold, they no longer owned property so people have no way to go back to their land, whereas in the United States their land was held and sold in what condition it was, they came back to it. But the Canadian government took that money and they used that to feed and house the evacuees. Plus whatever they did with it. So to this day, my family in Canada have the deed to the property, but it's a worthless piece of paper. 

And many, many people, they took all their savings and as proud as Japanese people are, they took all their savings and sold everything that they could. And by now by the 20th, 30th year, some of the people were just, living on what we call in Canada “relief,” which is like SSI, welfare. And when they got this, especially our older parents, they were doing housework. 

But when they got that 21,000, they went to Japan because now they were at the age of like 60, 65. And then it was just to see that I thought it was well worth it. The younger people, they just bought another car or something like that. For the older people, I think it was really a blessing. 

The American reparations bill is signed in ‘88. When was the Canadian one?

So it had to be signed it like ‘86 or something. Because I know we got our checks before.

The first checks in the United States didn't come out until 1990.

Then another 200 people died. You know, so they should have paid the people, once the law’s enacted. They should have paid those people that were alive at the time. 

How would it have worked, you think? Could the government have paid for people who passed away?

I mean, since the law was enacted, I know a lot of Issei people were like 82 or something like that, they were just holding on day by day. That would be the only thing they could leave their children. And then they died. So they couldn't even leave that, you know. 

So what makes the Japanese or the Japanese Americans reluctant to receive or accept apology or reparations money from the government?

Well, I think it was fear of discrimination. You know, they felt that at that time that they were accepted, but we were not fully accepted even at that. Or even many of the Japanese people didn't even want to say they're Buddhists for being for fear of being discriminated. But my father always used to say, “If they ask you, you always tell them that you're Buddhist.” He says, “You don't have to worry.” But even as I grew up, all my friends that were Buddhist said no, they're not Buddhist.

It's self-preservation. 

So I could understand now, I mean, later on. But I used to be surprised because people would never – so when all of my friends and even myself got married, we didn't get married under the Buddhist religion. We got married in the Christian church. Because most of our people, our friends were Caucasian and so forth. 

You had to deny your own beliefs. For the appearance.

Right, right. That, I think, was really that the entire reason. So I really think that the Issei people were more forceful. But that's like my father. You know, he would stand up and they would decide to build the Buddhist church and they'd go around collecting money and then build the church, the beautiful church on top of the hill and stuff like that.

And maybe the Nisei were more focused on being accepted by the Caucasian community.

Being more Canadian than anything else, you know.

For you personally, did you get an apology letter in Canada from the President?

No, no, from the Prime Minister. In Canada, there was only 28,000 of us, and there's not a million or anything like that was 28,000 people that were evacuated.

And how many of those were alive?

I would say, maybe about 24,000. I think. I'm not sure.

Do most Canadians nowadays know about this? Is it in the history books?

Oh yes, the Canadians are aware. And I think their children are more aware

So your parents didn't get the reparation checks.

They didn't get it because they passed on. I think it was about $18,000. It became $18,000 American. The irony of it all is like my son was born in Windsor, Ontario. My husband and I were married at the end in 1946. And my son was born in 1947, which they did not release us to go back to British Columbia or come to the United States. Oh, they didn't even allow me to come to the United States. So this is the reason why my young son got a check for 21,000. 

Wow. 

But my daughter, who was born 1949 here in California, did not get it. And by that time we came to Oakland and we opened a fruit stand in the market. We ran the fruit and vegetable section. You know, self employed like that.

Are you satisfied with what the Canadian government did for the Japanese Canadians? Are you satisfied with what the American government did for the Japanese Americans?

Well, I would say as a whole, the recognition that we get is really funny. Like I used to play poker with a group of girls. And one day, this gal pipes up – there's two other Japanese girls playing poker. And this one girl goes, “You guys got $20,000.” And I was waiting for the American girls to say something and not one of them did. And I jumped up and I said, “Hey, I don't ever want you to talk in that tone of voice with a lousy $20,000.” I said, “One of you people want to go into a internment camp or concentration camp for $5,000 a year?” And boy, did she ever shut up. So you didn't realize how much that is, when you start breaking it down per year. Per dollar. Per day. Per hour. I said, “Hey, and how would you like to be snatched out of your home and put in the bunk bed with straw,” you know.

Well, if you had to tell the young people of now one message, what would it be?

I would say especially the young third, fourth, fifth generation Japanese kids, or even if they've got any part of [Japanese] they should learn about their heritage what their fore fathers and mothers went through. I have made it a special effort to teach my grandchildren about our lives and what it was like. Otherwise they would never, never know. They're living in such luxury that they don't even know.

Interview conducted by Grace Megumi Fleming. JAMsj thanks Grace for allowing the museum to archive and share these oral histories