Robert Okazaki: A Japanese Canadian Prisoner of War in His Own Country

This booklet tells a Canadian story, collected by Manzanar National Historic Site.

Before the war

• His parents, Nobutaro Okazaki and Natsu Koyama, came from Okayama Prefecture. Nobutaro emigrated to Victoria, British Columbia, at 19, working as a houseboy to learn English, then became a contractor at a coal mine in Cumberland on Vancouver Island.
• Robert was born in Cumberland in 1917, his brother Masatoshi in 1920. When the mine closed they farmed strawberries and vegetables in Surrey; Robert later worked at a logging camp in Port Alice.

Protest

After Pearl Harbor, the mill laid off its Japanese workers. In Vancouver, the Canadian military was rounding up men of Japanese ancestry, leaving wives, mothers and children without support.

• Robert helped organize the Nisei Mass Evacuation Group, asking to be moved in family groups, as in the United States. The British Columbia Security Commission refused to meet them.
• They sat in the rain outside the Vancouver Immigration Building, where 40 community leaders were held, facing soldiers with bayonets. His brother arrived by taxi with boxes of onigiri.
• At dark the soldiers let them inside — "where we became POWs in our own country."
• After days of silence they rioted, smashing window bars and furniture. Soldiers fired into the windows and threw tear gas; they got no food for three days, and never met an official.

Petawawa and Angler

A five-day train ride under guard took them to POW Camp 33 at Petawawa. Robert became Prisoner of War 1444. "I haven't committed any crime!"

• The camp had ten-foot fences and guard towers, with separate sections for 600 German and Italian POWs and the Japanese Canadians.
• They played baseball with a found ball and scrap-lumber bat, and grew vegetables between the fences.
• On July 1, at 1:30 a.m., tower guards fired into their sleeping quarters. They protested this breach of the Geneva Convention by refusing roll call. An armed squad surrounded them; Robert wondered if he would die at 25, shot by fellow Canadians, before their leaders forced a truce.
• Mail was strictly censored: four postcards a month of seven lines each — no complaints, no war, no politics.

In late July they were moved to the larger POW Camp 101 at Angler, again housed with German and Italian POWs.

• Summers were blistering; one winter it fell below −60 degrees, and they still had to work, coming back with frostbitten fingers and faces. The worst job was unloading coal; some men were released to logging camps at $50 a month.
• They organized baseball, kendo, judo, a band and a running club. Charities sent money — enough for 3,000 bottles of beer one New Year's Eve — and families in other camps sent cigarettes, cookies, candy and soap.
• In February 1946, everyone of Japanese ancestry 16 or older had to sign a form choosing whether to stay in Canada or go to Japan — six months after the war had ended.

He was released on April 29, 1946, with $11 for nearly five years' confinement. The removal, he said, destroyed Japanese Canadian society beyond rebuilding.

After

• He and Mas worked in a steel foundry in London, Ontario, then went to Toronto, where racism kept him from work.
• He gambled in Chinatown and for two years slept in the basement of city hall or on the street — but never begged or stole. Then he resolved to straighten out: he became a cook, then a carpenter, delighting in what he could build.
• He married Jean, also Japanese Canadian, with $100 borrowed from her — she liked to say she bought him for $100.

The years at Angler stayed with him, but looking at his two sons, he said, he was proud to be Canadian.

Japanese Canadians in World War II

Unlike the United States, where families were generally kept together, Canada at first separated families, and it seized and sold Japanese Canadians' land and belongings to pay for their confinement.

Sources

Based on "Robert Katsumasa Okazaki," one of the ID booklets of Manzanar National Historic Site, National Park Service, written by park rangers with the people profiled and their families; the booklet's first-person account is retold here, with short quotations. The booklet closes with "Wind and Dust," a poem written at Manzanar in 1943 by George Nishimura, age 16, which is not reproduced. For more on the ten camps, see the Park Service's "War Relocation Centers."