My mother Fumiko was born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan on April 16, 1929. She was the eldest child of George Chohei Endo and Tomie Endo, formerly of Miyagi-ken, near Sendai, in the Tohoku region of Japan. Living so far from the coast, Fumiko had almost no connections with other Japanese Canadians except for a few, like Tommy Shoyama, whom she knew as a teenager. Her first real exposure to other nisei came when the government set up a postwar dispersal centre in a former RCAF training facility on the outskirts of Moose Jaw for JCs moving east.
Fumiko had no interest in being her mother’s idea of a good nisei daughter. Instead, she saved the money she made working as a bookkeeper/clerk at a Chinese grocery store and enrolled in art school, first in Regina and then in Philadelphia, where she received a scholarship to the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts. When she returned to Canada she married Tod, a farm boy from the prairies who, like her, had aspirations of being an artist.
Tod and Fumiko built and operated a fishing camp in Lac La Ronge in northern Saskatchewan, before travelling to Europe where they lived in several countries before settling in London, where Fumiko gave birth to me and then my sister Rachel. The family moved back to Canada in 1962, first to Montreal – where our brother Rafael was born – then Toronto, and finally Vancouver, at the urging of their good friend and fellow artist Roy Kiyooka, who was also from Moose Jaw.
In Vancouver, Fumiko, now in her mid-forties, found herself, by accident really, rubbing shoulders with the west coast Japanese Canadian community. Living in a housing co-op in the Strathcona neighbourhood, artists and activists like Takeo Yamashiro and Tamio Wakayama were her new neighbours. It was, she said years later, like coming home.
In the mid-seventies, she heard that the Japanese Canadian Centennial Project was looking for a bookkeeper, and just like that she found herself embedded in the JC community, getting to know people like Roy Miki, Randy Enomoto, Linda Uyehara Hoffman and Michiko Sakata – sansei and shin-ijusha for the most part. From there she became involved in Tonari Gumi, and then the Redress movement.
Fumiko was among a group of activists who took over the Japanese Canadian Citizens’ Association in a bloodless coup at the 1984 AGM. She and a handful of others took over editorship of the JCCA’s monthly publication, The Bulletin, with Fumiko eventually becoming Managing Editor, a job she passed on to me in 1993. With a keen interest in food and cooking, Fumiko started the Community Kitchen column in The Bulletin, which quickly became a favourite among readers and carries on today, now under the able direction of mother/daughter team Alice Bradley and Lea Ault.
Following health issues in the late nineties, Tod and Fumiko moved to Nelson, where they settled into a quieter way of life, living with Rachel and her family. When Tod passed away in 2008, Fumiko stayed with Rachel for another year until deteriorating health required more extended care. Fumiko passed away in Nelson, BC on December 21, 2011, the winter solstice.
Fumiko never did become a good nisei daughter. Instead she became a mentor to a generation of younger JCs. To this day I run into people, women mostly, who tell me of the support they received from my mother as young women trying to figure out what it meant to be Japanese Canadian in a post-war community that was wrestling with its own complicated history and narratives.
I see now that she was offering the support and guidance that she herself never had growing up. She must have seen in these young women a rebelliousness that she herself embodied, a determination to think for themselves in a world that loves to pigeon-hole people, particularly women.
Interviewing Patti Ayukawa for JC Legacies this month, I learned a new phrase: Okage sama de, a humble expression that acknowledges that one’s well-being or success is not simply of one’s own doing, but is instead made possible through the help, support, or kindness of others – including people, ancestors, or even divine forces. On this Mother’s Day, the phrase resonates with me at the deepest level.
Happy Mother’s Day, mama. Okage sama de.
