New Book: Obaasan’s Boots
My mom’s name always changes at some point after boarding the airplane in Vancouver, where the Fraser River meets the Pacific Ocean. We travel from the edge of the West Coast, over the great Rocky Mountains and sprawling golden fields of the Prairies, all the way to the shores of the Great Lakes. When we touch down in Toronto, she is Mary. – excerpt from Obaasan’s Boots
The opening paragraph in Obaasan’s Boots beautifully sets the scene for this story of family, dispossession, resilience, and ultimately reclamation, as two cousins brought up on opposite sides of the country learn the story of why the family was separated in the first place, and how Masumi became Mary and then back again.
When Charlotte and her mother Masumi visit Toronto one summer, Charlotte is able to reconnect with her cousin Lou. In the process of spending time with their Obaasan, helping tend her prized garden, they gradually learn the painful secret that underlies the family’s history. The cousins learn about prewar life on the west coast, a life that is upended after the bombing of Pearl Harbor when families were uprooted and forced off the coast, their properties and possessions confiscated and then disposed of without permission.
Through the stories, not easily shared, they come to appreciate the underlying strength that their grandmother possesses, and the legacy of resilience in the face of injustice of that they have inherited. They begin to understand the complicated narrative that underpins their lives, how their family members’ identities have been shaped by racism, and that history is not simply about the past.
I talked to Lara and Janis via email.
Left – right: Lara, Grandma, Janis
Bulletin Interview: Janis Bridger and Lara Jean Okihiro
You two are cousins, the characters in the books are cousins. I’m guessing that elements of the book are based on the two of you and your families. How much of your own experiences are woven into the story?
Lara The book is totally based on us and our families. I was really lucky because, of all of us cousins, I lived close to and saw Grandma and Grandpa very often. I picked up a lot of their stories growing up, even interviewing them for elementary school projects, though I didn’t realize at the time that their stories were about such a significant historical event, about their internment. Later on, when I learned about the Japanese Canadian experience, I interviewed Grandma more formally and these interviews and notes are the basis of the grandmother character in Obaasan’s Boots, so much so that the book includes direct quotes from her. The cousins, Charlotte and Lou, are also based on our experiences, which was really weird to write. In my academic work and dissertation, I included my family’s internment experiences and my feelings in more subtle ways. But it felt too open and even self-involved to focus only on our story. At first, I thought “why does our story deserve attention over all the others?” As far as the girls go, they are great because they ask questions about phones and what the restrictions would be like for them now, pushing the narrative of the grandmother’s experience in ways that make more sense for a younger and contemporary audience. And then there’s the ways that writing the girls also called up a lot of unexpected memories and feelings about overhearing stories and not understanding them and about inheriting traumatic pasts of racism, especially as mixed kids. At least for Lou, this also meant being kind of afraid to ask questions because in your DNA you somehow already know the answers are going to be unimaginably painful and hurtful to your already complex kid world.
Janis When the book was released, I definitely felt exposed and vulnerable, because so much was written from our own experiences and true stories about our family were shared.
How did this book come to be? Has it been fermenting in the background for a while, or did the idea just pop into someone’s head one day?
Janis After Grandma passed away in 2019, Lara and I discussed writing a picture book about the Japanese Canadian internment, but it took a couple of years to actually create a manuscript to send out into the world. When Second Story Press contacted us, they asked us to expand our story into a children’s novel. The transition from picture book to novel was a complete shift and it took us a while to figure out how to proceed. One morning I woke up and wrote the entire first chapter in one sitting and it felt right. We eventually decided that having two cousins and the grandma tell their stories was our way of sharing such a complex history and the impact it had on later generations.
Lara For me, doing something about Grandma’s experience had been in my mind for a while. I actually thought, after joining the film club in university, and after touring the internment camps and travelling to Japan with Grandma in the 90s and 2000s, that I would make a film about her. She was such a strong yet gentle woman with such a fascinating and varied life. I miss her so much. I know many of us do. Anyhow, when Gran passed away, we wanted to honour her. I remember that after the eulogy I gave for Gran, some close family friends – Sid Ikeda and Hana Ohata – said I should write my words down and publish them. Janis really pushed me here. Her work being with younger children, she thought we should make a children’s picture book about Grandma. Like with any writing project, it was a lot of hard work getting all Grandma’s stories down into a cohesive narrative, but when the publisher said they liked the idea but wanted a novel, I rather relished the final process. It was a ton more work, especially as we wanted to be as true to the history and to Grandma and the family as possible. But novels are what I study and teach, and I loved having the space to fill out details and breathe life into the characters and the time period. I loved creating resonances through the dream of travelling to Japan one day or through water imagery, for example. Some of it came so alive at times that I even had tears in my eyes while writing scenes.
How did you go about settling on who wrote which sections or did you write it all together? In other words, what was your collaborative writing process?
Lara Because the book took shape over several versions – a picture book and then two different drafts of the novel – we had a lot of opportunity to shape the book in different ways. The first part was just getting Grandma’s stories down for the picture book. And then there was a lot of writing on our own and writing together thanks to video conference calls and cloud-sharing documents.
Janis We wrote the book collaboratively, but each of us told the story of one of the cousins. So sometimes we wrote on our own, but we also created, edited, read, and reread everything together. We are very fortunate to have had the technology to allow us to work together in real time, me being in Vancouver and Lara in Toronto.
Lara It was sometimes a very hard process to collaborate, even just logistically with time differences, but it was also a beautiful process because we got to be in each other’s lives and chat much more often than we ever did before. It really brought us together.
Is there anything that you learned through the process of writing this book that surprised you?
Lara There are so many things I learned that surprised me in writing this book! I mean, you always learn through writing because of the way it focuses you on a topic and makes you explain details clearly, but writing something with the weight of being for and about Grandma and the Japanese Canadian community, and the way it called up issues about my own inheritance and relations to Grandma and others, was really special.
Janis What surprised me was how emotional the process would be, but also how cathartic reading our completed story ended up being. Even though we read and reread the manuscript over and over again, it was only during our final reading that I cried. I think that everything that I held within since childhood and the grief of losing Grandma came flooding out.
Lara Though I’ve written about the internment before, it was the living details that surprised me. For example, in interviewing uncle Isi, I got a fuller sense of just how close the Nakazawa family, Grandma’s family, was, which made me realize how heartbreaking it must have been to be forced apart. And I’ve always found the government’s mechanical, heartless bureaucracy that so ruined people’s lives shocking. But this time it was seeing it in terms of my family, and how their lives and things – the birth of my father at the same time the community was being uprooted, the home they prepared for him, even their wedding dresses, heirlooms, and bedroom suits – didn’t matter to the state and its officials. I also learned there’s so much we still don’t know about the internment. Most history sources tell us that men as young as 18 were separated from their families and set to work camps, but Grandpa had written a letter with other men in the New Westminster community in May 1942 that says boys as young as 16 were forced to road camps. That’s just nuts! And it’s not in the history books. It makes you wonder whatever happened to those boys, like the “young Mr. Ohta” who appears in Grandpa’s letter. On another very personal note, I learned that, unlike the stories I remember Grandpa telling about how he had somehow got more money for his house than other people did, it turns out Grandpa didn’t get any more money for his house and that “Sutherland” wasn’t a friend but an agent for the Commissioner. I’m still trying to process this discrepancy, but it makes me think about how unreliable memory can be and how sometimes we need to change the past in our minds’ eyes because otherwise it’s just too painful.
Janis, you’re one of the team of BC teachers who are working as part of the Japanese Canadian Legacies Education initiative to create an online resource for teachers focussed on Japanese Canadian history. What has that process been like for you?
Janis Members of the team and our advisory committee are so knowledgeable, passionate, involved with the community, and have shared so many resources. I am so grateful to be collaborating with the team, as working on this project feels like a natural extension of my past couple of years researching, collaborating, and writing Obaasan’s Boots with Lara. It has been exciting to figure out connections between families, including my own, and other Japanese Canadian people I read about while researching for our book.
Involvement with this project has also had a personal impact on me. This project has nurtured a sense of community and belonging that I think that I was missing growing up. Although my mom took me to the Powell Street Festival a few times, I felt very disconnected from my Japanese Canadian heritage. I think that disconnection was largely because my family had been scattered across the country, separated geographically. My experience with the Japanese Canadian community and culture was exclusive to my visits with my family in Toronto. I guess that goes to show that learning is never done, so now I am taking the bits and pieces of my family’s Japanese Canadian culture, and the new things I’m learning are puzzle pieces that are helping develop a clearer understanding of my own identity.
Within JC Legacies there’s a Family Sharing & Healing fund that supports families in healing the intergenerational trauma of government actions of the 1940s through family projects, such as gathering the family history through various means, including making books. Is there anything you would say to families who might be thinking about taking advantage of this fund and delving into their families’ histories?
Lara Definitely go for it! If there’s one thing I really hope Obaasan’s Boots does is inspire people to tell their own stories and for others, the younger generations, to listen to them. That way, many more stories that deserve to be out there are told and heard. I can’t tell you how many times people outside of the Japanese Canadian community, have told me they had no idea the Canadian government forced people from their homes and into camps and then sold all their belongings, leaving them destitute and living under restrictions well after the end of the war. If we can all shine a bit more light on this history, and don’t take our family stories for granted, then I think we can keep the lessons of our elders alive. But it’s not just the Japanese Canadian history that I hope is told and heard. I hope people are inspired to tell and ask about all kinds of diverse and difficult histories. That way, we can think harder about what it means to be Canadian, and maybe even work harder to be better citizens for a better future.
Janis I would say, “What are you waiting for?” Time with our loved ones and family is precious and sadly, our time together is finite. Take the time to connect with your family. Listen to and learn your family’s stories. The Family Sharing and Healing fund is a beautiful opportunity to bring generations together and do just that.
I listened, but I wish, in hindsight, that I had asked more questions. There are so many things that I didn’t know and may never learn. Lara and I are so fortunate to have reconnected with Grandma’s 99-year-old brother, Isi, who shared so many stories and memories with us. And we look forward to gathering and spending more precious time together.
