Saving the Joy Kogawa Home as a Heritage and Writers' Centre

[awagner]

Dear Friends,

I have become heavily involved with trying to preserve Joy Kogawa's family home, featured in Obasan, from which she and her family were forcibly removed under the War Measures Act in 1942.
Please see the Joy Kogawa Homestead website
http://kogawa.homestead.com for background information and photographs. A statement of aims of the Kogawa Homestead Committee follows below for your reference.

The Kogawa family home in Vancouver was sold today. The new owner wants to renovate the house and rent it out. There is little to prevent the home from being protected from demolition down the road unless Vancouver City Council designates the house as historic and compensates the owner for such heritage protection designation, which would reduce its resale value.  

Terry Brunette, the City Heritage Planner, is presenting the case for preserving the Kogawa house as a cultural heritage centre to the Vancouver Heritage Commission at 1 pm on Monday. The hope is that with a strong show of support, the City of Vancouver can assist with the purchase of the Kogawa house on an interim basis. 

As per my message to Terry Brunette below, I am making a personal commitment to help make Joy's lifelong dream come true. 
I invite you to join me as you are able. Together, these pledges of support may convince the Vancouver Heritage Commission and Vancouver City Council that there is sufficient public support to preserve the home. Please email your pledges to Terry Brunette at
terry_brunette at city.vancouver.bc.ca and copy the mayor Larry Campbell at larry_campbell at city.vancouver.bc.ca and councillors
Jim Green jim_green at city.vancouver.bc.ca and Ellen Woodsworth
ellen_woodsworth at city.vancouver.bc.ca

Tax deductible receipts will be available through the Vancouver Heritage Foundation and the Vancouver Foundation. Both have offered their services to process such receipts. I believe that together we can really make this happen. 

Best wishes, 

Anton Wagner
Secretary, Joy Kogawa
Homestead Organizing Committee
416-863 1209

----- Original Message ----- 
From: awagner 
To: Terry Brunette 
Cc: larry_campbell at city.vancouver.bc.ca ; jim_green at city.vancouver.bc.ca ; ellen_woodsworth at city.vancouver.bc.ca 
Sent: Friday, November 14, 2003 8:34 PM
Subject: Financial Commitment to Saving Joy Kogawa Home


Terry Brunette
City Heritage Planner
City of Vancouver
604-871 6467

Dear Terry,

Thank you for presenting the case for preserving the Joy Kogawa family home in Vancouver as a heritage and cultural centre to the Vancouver Heritage Commission on Monday.

I strongly support this drive to preserve the Kogawa homestead and hereby personally commit $1,500 towards this cultural heritage preservation effort.

Sincerely,

Anton Wagner
Anton Wagner Productions 
201 Sherbourne St. Suite 2306
Toronto, Ontario M5A 3X2
416-863 1209


THE JOY KOGAWA HOMESTEAD COMMITTEE

Aims and Objectives:

The aim of the Joy Kogawa Homestead Committee is to prevent the destruction of the  Kogawa family home at 1450 West Sixty-fourth Avenue in Marpole, Vancouver, between Granville and Cartier Streets, and to have the house designated as a historic site and converted into a cultural centre. 

Joy and her brother Timothy Nakayama and their parents moved from Kitsilano to the Marpole house in the mid-1930s. In 1942, under the War Measures Act, the federal government seized the family home as well as the property of 21,000 other Japanese-Canadians. Along with thousands of others, Joy's family was forcibly evacuated by the Canadian government and interned in the silver-mining "ghost town" of Slocan City deep in the mountain forests of the Kootenays. The government's "Custodian of Enemy Alien Property" auctioned off the homes, farms, fishing boats and other property of Japanese-Canadians seized during the Second World War at rock bottom prices. At the conclusion of the War in August of 1945, thousands of Japanese-Canadians were deported to Japan. Joy's family was uprooted again and relocated further from the coast--"East of the Rockies"--to Coaldale, Alberta, where they lived among the Japanese-Canadian sugar beet workers. Restrictions on travel for Japanese-Canadians were not lifted until 1949.

The loss of the Kogawa home, and the suffering caused by the forced evacuation and internment of Japanese-Canadians is movingly told in Joy Kogawa's classic Canadian novel Obasan and its adaptation for younger readers, Naomi's Road. In her second novel, Itsuka, Joy Kogawa chronicled the struggle by Japanese-Canadians to win government compensation for their loss of property, disenfranchisement, detention, restriction of movement and loss of their democratic rights. Joy's Obasan, and her own active participation in this redress movement with the National Association of Japanese Canadians, were instrumental in winning government compensation in 1988.

The small house confiscated from Joy Kogawa's family in 1942 has miraculously survived but is now up for sale and may be razed by a new buyer wishing to build a larger house on the property. Joy's childhood home in Vancouver could be what the Anne Frank House is in Amsterdam. It could provide educational background to its visitors as well as being a reminder of a time in history that we want to ensure is never repeated. History is fragile and always in danger of being rewritten or forgotten. In preserving the Kogawa home, we can teach future generations about the suffering perpetrated by our society in dispossessing and disenfranchising vulnerable minorities. As Joy's brother, the Rev. Timothy Nakayama has written, "Can the house where we once lived now become a place to learn about freedom and human rights? Our experiences as people of Japanese ancestry in North and South America need to be known so that these tragedies may not be repeated."
       
The availability of the Kogawa home provides a wonderful opportunity for the city of Vancouver, the province of British Columbia, and the federal government to take immediate action to ensure that this house will be preserved as a historic site for all Canadians. If this one home, out of all those taken away from Japanese-Canadians during the dark period of internment, could be returned to all the people of Canada, the act would be symbolic and powerful indeed. 

Joy Kogawa's home should be recognized as a heritage site so that it can provide a strong symbol of what so many families lost. It is a lesson about the insidiousness of racism, a lesson that Canadians must face in the light of day so that our vision of a harmonious multi-cultural society has a chance to be fulfilled. 

What an extraordinary gift it would be to the people of Canada and to visitors from around the world to have the house that Joy Kogawa lived in before her family was sent to the camps in World War II restored as an historic site. School children could visit this site and learn more about our country's history and the dark side of that history. Adults, too, who may have forgotten what happened to the Japanese-Canadians at this time, could hear the story again and be reminded of how vulnerable our freedom is, how easily it can be taken away, how carefully, how tenaciously we need to care for it. And all of us, including foreign visitors, could see first hand one of the great strengths of our democracy--in the fearless witness to the truth, however dark that truth may be.

The significance of the Kogawa home in Canadian history and literature makes it essential that the government designate the house as a historic site for all Canadians. For hundreds of moving public expressions for the need to save the Kogawa home, please visit the Joy Kogawa Homestead website http://kogawa.homestead.com


 
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