Wednesday, July 24, 2024

Canadian Heroines: Muriel Kitagawa

By Terrie Todd

Born in Vancouver in 1912, Muriel Kitagawa was the eldest child of Tsuru and Asajiro Fujiwara, Japanese immigrants. Moving frequently, the family struggled to make ends meet despite her father working in a mill and her mother making dresses. When she was ten, the family split up for several years, reuniting in 1924.

Showing an aptitude for writing and always troubled by the racial discrimination around her, Muriel received encouragement from her English teacher to develop her writing around that theme. She graduated second-highest in New Westminster’s Duke of Connaught High School’s Class of 1929. From there, she was able to study one year at the University of British Columbia before financial problems made that no longer possible.

 

As part of the Nisei (second-generation or Canadian-born Japanese), Muriel’s writing talents became important in activism as she fought for the right to vote for herself and her peers. Many professions were restricted to voters, which led to economic discrimination.

In the early 1930s, Muriel wrote for The Young People (the journal of the Young People’s Society of the United Church), The New Age (an English-language newspaper founded by and for Nisei), and for The New Canadian paper.

In 1933, Muriel married Ed Kitagawa, a celebrity in the local Japanese Canadian community due to his fame with the Asahi baseball team. Professionally, Ed was in charge of Japanese Canadian clients at the Bank of Montreal. Between 1934 and 1942, four children were born. In 1940, the Kitagawas were able to purchase their own house in Vancouver, a significant achievement among their peers.

Muriel became president of the Japanese Canadian Unit of the Red Cross Society, withdrawing in 1941 because of a difficult pregnancy with twins. During that same pregnancy, Canada declared war on Japan following Japan’s surprise attacks on Pearl Harbor, Hong Kong and the Philippines. Suddenly, the Japanese Canadian community was thrown into turmoil. Muriel began documenting her experiences and observations in letters to her younger brother, Wes Fujiwara, a medical student in Toronto. The letters detailed concerns over her family’s arrangements, as well as the attempts of their broader community to organize and advocate for themselves after the government forced removal of Japanese Canadians from coastal British Columbia.

Rev. James Finlay, a connection of Wes’s, offered the Kitagawas board in his home, which helped the family relocate to Toronto and stay together when many of their peers were being sent to internment camps and farms. In 1943, the federal government began to sell Japanese Canadian-owned property, including the Kitagawas’ Vancouver home, without the consent of owners. When Japanese Canadians were finally allowed to return to BC in 1947, the Kitagawas had nothing to return to and remained in Toronto.

Muriel died in 1974, never knowing that her letters to her brother would be published in a book called This is My Own: Letters to Wes & Other Writings on Japanese Canadians, 1941-1948, or that her work would inspire the novel Obasan, or that it would play an integral part in the redress for Japanese Canadians in 1988. On the twentieth anniversary of that event in 2008, former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney quoted Muriel and said, “For her life, and the lives of other Japanese Canadians in wartime, Canada can be grateful.”

Sources:

100 Canadian Heroines: Famous and Forgotten Faces, by Merna Forster, Dundurn Press, 2004

The Canadian Encyclopedia

Photos courtesy Nikkei National Museum

Bitter war might be raging overseas, but Rose Onishi is on track to fulfill her lifelong goal of becoming a dazzling concert pianist. When forced by her own government to leave her beloved home to work on a sugar beet farm, Rose’s dream fades to match the black soil working its way into her calloused hands.

When Rusty Thorne joins the Canadian Army, he never imagines becoming a Japanese prisoner of war. Only his rare letters from home sustain him—especially the brilliant notes from his mother’s charming helper, which the girl signs simply as “Rose.”

Rose Among Thornes received the 2022 Debra Fieguth Social Justice Award as well as Best Cover Award from The Word Guild.

Terrie Todd’s novels are set mostly in Manitoba, Canada where she lives with her husband, Jon, in Portage la Prairie. They have three adult children and five grandsons. Her next novel, Even If We Cry, releases in December 2024.

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1 comment:

  1. Thank you for posting today. How sad that their property was seized and sold.

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