Mary Kiyoshi Kiyooka and Roy Kiyooka by DAPHNE MARLATT
The astonishing sweep of "Mary" Kiyoshi Kiyooka's life-story is resonant with the painful displacement of immigration, intensified by Canada's shabby treatment of its Japanese citizens during World War 11. But also, and just as significantly, it is vivid with the Spirit of a woman endlessly curious about the vagaries of human existence and grounded, at the same time, in the Bushido code of ethics she learned as a child.
Growing up at the turn of the century in Tosa (Kochi City) , the favoured and feisty daughter of a well-educated samurai, Masaji Oe, who developed the Iai school of swordsmanship, she was expected to marry and perform the conventional roles of unquestioning wife and mother. Unconventional by character and training (she received much the same training as her father's male Kendo-students), she accepted the marriage arranged by her father and, in 1917, found herself sailing to the relatively uncivilized West Coast of Canada to join her emigrant husband. Even as she embraced this adventure, she could not then have anticipated selling vegetables to make ends meet for their large family in Depression-era Calgary, nor could she have imagined themselves being forced out of the city in 1942 to an abject plot of land in northern Alberta which had somehow to be farmed for the family to survive.
And yet this is not just the story of an extraordinary woman. As Mary herself keeps reminding us, she is an Issei, a first-generation Japanese immigrant to Canada. She is keenly aware of belonging to a scattered and now passing community, one that felt the brunt of hostilities against them as "Enemy Aliens." They are a generatioN of survivors, and she is proud of them, even as she elegizes the hardships they experienced.
Tosa, her "heart's true country," is both a prefecture
(Kochi-ken) in the south of the island of Shikoku, and a city (Kochi), the capital of its prefecture. Nudged by the Pacific Ocean at about thrity-three degrees latitude, Kochi 's climate is relatively balmy, its vegetation subtropical. Mary refers to it as Tosa because that was its name under the old feudal system. In fact, the city of Tosa grew up around the castle of the Yamanouchi clan, built in 1603. This is the clan that Mary's father served as a samurai. The Meiji period (1868-1912), the period Mary Kiyoshi Kiyooka was born into, saw the end of the feudal system with the restoration of the Emperor's power as centuries of control by the Shoguns (military commanders-in-chief of the feudal system) were abolished. This change of course brought upheaval as certain samurais, like Ryoma Sakamato, a Tosa hero, fought against the shogunate. Mary's link with this major historical moment reaches back through the vivid memories of her father, who was almost fifty when she was born in 1896. Even her early life was touched by war, the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5 which took the lives of many of Tosa's young men.
When she was first interviewed for this book, Mary Kiyooka was in her early nineties. She celebrated her 1 OOth birthday in 1996 with a big party in Edmonton and died a few months later. She outlived, by two and a half years, her son Roy Kiyooka, well-known in Canadian painting circles of the sixties and early seventies for his geometric abstract canvases, an artist who subsequently abandoned his painting career to make photography, writing, and music at the intersection of the Asian and Western cultural heritages he found himself living out. It was Roy, feeling the inadequacy of his own Japanese, who asked his friend, the translator Matsuki Masutani, to interview his mother at length in
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