"Margaret" Miho Steinberg (nee Tanaka) - Japanese-Canadian Stories from Japan

• Miho Tanaka with her mother and three brothers (Peter, Edward, and Arthur) in Tashme, B.C., August, 1946.

I was born on February 21, 1934 and lived at 215 Princess Avenue in Vancouver. I went to Strathcona Elementary School up to the second grade. That was when the war started and Japanese couldn’t go to the public schools anymore. I said to my mother, “Mama, I’ve got to go to school!” So my mother looked around and found this Catholic school that she enrolled us in.I started going to this school right away, but by October or November, we were already in New Denver, so I must have gone there for only a month or so, but to me, it seemed as though I went there for a longer time.

The first day, the teacher at that school (a nun), asked me, “So what’s your Christian name?” I guess she couldn’t imagine anyone without one.I didn’t have a Christian name, but I thought if I said that, they wouldn’t let me in the school, so I said I would come back with one the next day.I went home and told my mother I needed an English name.I used to be a big fan of Princess Margaret Rose of England.I thought she was smarter and prettier than her sister and she was around the same age, maybe a bit older. So I said I would be “Margaret Rose”. My mother said “Chotto nagai ne?” (It’s a little long, isn’t it?), so I said, O.K. I’ll chop off the second half and be “Margaret” from now on. So I named myself.The next day I sent to school and told the sister that my name was Margaret Miho Tanaka, and the nun said, “I knew you had a name, you just had to ask your mother because you didn’t use it.”

We were in New Denver during the war. My uncle (Toyozo Miyanishi, my mother’s older brother,) was one of the men who were sent to these camps to build houses, so he had the first house as you go into “The Orchard” (the section of New Denver set aside for Japanese-Canadian internees) kept for his wife and our family.We wanted to relocate with my father but the authorities said to my father, “You guys go first,” and my father refused, saying, “My wife has a bad back and I have to carry her luggage.” They said, “O.K., we have a place for you.”

He was taken to jail, I suppose, and a few days later, my mother woke me up very early in the morning, saying, “Miho, you come with me, I’m going to see Papa.” So we went to the Immigration building, not far from our home; I think it was near the Alexander Japanese School.Mama said, “Look up at the third floor, third window from the right and Papa will come out there.”And sure enough, someone came to the barred window waving, and it was Papa.I was going to yell out, but Mama said just wave. And my mother started doing this waving and signaling with her arms.A few days later Mama said, “Papa is going away so we are going to the railroad station to see him off.”

We got all dressed up in our new coats and Mam took a double bed sheet.The train started off at the Vancouver CPR station and before the train started to go really fast, it was going chug-chug-chug; that was when I saw my father in the train, waving. My mother and aunt just threw up the sheet so he saw us, and we said good-bye that way. That was the last I saw of my father until after the war. We found out later that he was sent first to Petawawa, as we got a letter from there and later on, he went to Internment Camp 101 in Angler, Ontario.

Throughout the 4 years of the war, my mother made us write a diary every night and every morning, we got up at 6 o’clock, winter or summer, and we recopied the diary, all 3 of us (my youngest brother was still a baby then). Mama would then send the diaries to the internment camp.I think she was able to do that because we didn’t have to pay for the postage – you just put P.O.W. Camp 101 on the envelop and the letter got sent.

So father had tons of letters and later on, when he had is Japanese “kori” (a wicker trunk) full of them (we wrote large letters when we were children) my father started to copy those diaries, word by word, even the mistakes, in tiny letters, in this book.In 1968, ten years after he died, we found the copied letters in a very thick notebook covered with a brown paper, in a trunk that we had left with a close friend of ours in the village.When we opened the trunk, besides the copy of our letters (diaries), we found my “Hina ningyo” (girls’ day dolls) and other things from the old times.I got those diaries printed on the word processor 14 years ago, but they aren’t interesting at all.I wasn’t that happy about having to write every single day in Japanese, and things didn’t seem to interesting to me the next morning in the early hours. However, my brother used those diary entries in a public lecture he gave one time.My mother was a Japanese-language teacher and she was teaching at home around the kitchen table, so people would come to our house to learn Japanese.I was learning English at school, but at home it was all Japanese.

My father was the oldest of 6 children, the “chonan” (eldest son). As an old-fashioned good man, he had to go back to Japan after the war.If he found out his parents were alive, he was going to take care of them.I thought that was all right, but he said that even if they were dead, it was up to him to take over the family duties, and I could not understand that.I thought, why would you go back to a war-torn country, when you don’t know if your parents are alive or not, you have 4 kids of your own, and you don’t have any income.Even at the age of 12, I thought that was the silliest thing.I didn’t say a word to my parents, but I thought that all my life. And when we went back, I thought, “See, I knew it was going to be like this; I knew I wasn’t going to like Japan.”

The first day at the repatriation centre, when I saw our dinner, my heart sank. They brought a bucket full of something that looked like water after you washed out a dirty mop in it and they ladled it out.One bucket was allotted for 20 people.

I could speak Japanese, but the Japanese that I knew wasn’t of much use to us at that time in Japan because they were all speaking Shiga-ken “hogen” (dialect) and people would react to what I would say by saying, “Era so ni shiteru!” (You sound so self-important), “ijiwaru” (mean), or “kitsui” (unkind). I would say, “Gakko e ikimasho,” or “Gakko e iko,” (let’s go to school) but learned that I should say, “Yoshiko-chan, gakko e ikinaharenkaina” (same meaning with different expressions and different intonation). Everything I did or said was wrong.My experience in Japan at first was not very good.

After we had been in Japan for 5 or 6 years, soft ice cream came out in Kyoto. So one day my father took me to Kyoto to treat me to the ice cream.Imagine, traveling over 3 hours for ice cream!I think it was just me, because my brothers don’t remember going.God, that ice cream was good!And normally I don’t like sweets.

Yes, the Japanese-Canadians who were of school age probably had the hardest time coming back to Japan.We had to change to a completely different style of life, unlike the older ones, who got work on the US army bases, English-speaking positions.I really, really wanted to speak and hear English.Our home was surrounded by rice fields and a highway ran through our area.When the American soldiers came along, the other kids would say, “Haro, haro, haro”, but I said “Hi!” and hearing this, they would stop and I would enjoy the opportunity of speaking English with them.

We first came to Japan in August, 1946. In September I was put into grade 5 at Ohara Elementary School when I had already finished grade 6 in Canada. For the third semester, they said I could go up to grade 6; then they thought about putting me into the first year of high school, but the new co-educational junior high school system was coming in, and they thought I would be better off if I started in the new system, so I was held back one semester.I did one semester of grade 5, one semester of grade 6 and then went into the junior high school.In those days elementary classes were divided into boys’ classes and girls’ classes and I remember one girl crying when she found out we were going to be together.She was scared to be with the boys, even though she knew them.I thought it was very odd.There were 13 small villages whose kids went to the same school. In the winter time when the snow was deep, kids in the same village would line up with a sixth grader at the beginning of the line, the younger kids in the middle and the fifth graders at the end, so the children could walk to school and not get lose.Within the same age group, the boys always came before the girls.

The area where we were living was called Sakata-gun, Ohara-mura (village) in Shiga-ken. This was in the countryside and the closest cities were Hikone and Nagahama. After junior high school, I went to Nagahama Kita High School in Nahahama and then went on to Kyoto Women’s University.

I have 3 younger brothers, Fumitoshi “Peter”, Fuminori “Edward,” and Fumimasa “Arthur.” From the village where we lived, we could go to either Nagahama or Hikone for high school.Because I went to Nagahama, Peter went to Hikone and because Peter went to Hikone, the next brother Eddy went to Nagahama because by that time I was in college and my youngest brother went to Hikone.

My brother Peter was aiming to go to college but he was not successful. He was planning to go to prep school (“yobiko”) in Tokyo. We had a distant relative who owned a tailor shop called Yamagataya in Ginza and they were selling suits. They agreed to hire Peter and found that his English was useful in dealing with the GI customers on leave from the Korean War. He was so busy working, he didn’t have time to study and lost his chance to go to university.Ten years later, I said, “Peter, it’s about time to get moving” and got him to go to the University of Hawaii, since I was teaching there.He was already 29 by the time he started college.We all thought he should go to university since he was the heir to our family. After Hawaii, he went on to the University of Michigan where he got his PhD. and then he returned to work in Hawaii, where he still lives today.

I graduated from university in 1957 and I went to Toronto to live with my uncle Toyozo’s family. My mother lost her father when she was 14 so her older brother, who grew up in Vancouver, was like her father.I think it was this uncle who got my mother married to my father.My uncle had saved up some money for his son to go to university, but the son was working for a big insurance company and didn’t want to go, so he gave the money to me.I did work for an insurance company, Canada Life, for about 2 years.I found out that if you studied and passed a series of tests, you got a raise in your pay, so I took 2 or 3 tests.When I told the company I was going to quit working to go to university, they were surprised because they thought I was serious about working in the insurance field.

I went to the Universit of Michigan and did graduate studies (1962) and then went to teach at the University of Hawaii and taught there for 20 years.I came back to Japan in 1982 and taught at Nagoya Gakuin University until I retired 5 years ago.They had asked me to stay on to take student groups to Canada or the U.S. every summer.They wanted me to do 3 more years, but another professor who was up for retirement didn’t want to retire and used me as an example.So I had to leave after one term of the three years.

Now I do volunteer teaching once a week at the university and I teach English to a girl who is going to Canada in a few months.I swim and do aerobics twice a week.

What made you come back to Japan?

My former husband I got a job in Japan for 2 years. And he didn’t want to go back to Hawaii.He liked Japan so much.I had misgivings about teaching English at a Japanese university because the university system doesn’t allow you to teach languages the way I believe is the best, but in all other respects, I’m glad I came back to Japan.

Are you more comfortable in English or Japanese?

I don’t know.

Then what language do you dream in?

I don’t know. Maybe English. And when I find myself talking to myself Japanese, that’s when I really think I’m Japanese. “Do sho ka na?” I say.

Do you feel more Japanese or Canadian?

God, I don’t know.I’m a little out of the Japanese system, but I find that I’m not all that “in” when I go back to Canada nowadays. So I am really out of both.I do too much, I say too much, I think too much in Japan, but I don’t do enough of that in Canada.When I go back to Canada, and meet my old friends, they say things like, “What’s wrong with you? Gee, you’ve gotten so quiet. You used to talk me.” So I don’t know where I am.

But Nobuko, if you say we all have that, I’m normal then. I was starting to think I was a bit abnormal. Shouldn’t a person be comfortable 100% in one culture or another?

I agree: we have 2 countries, but we don’t have a country we can call our own. You always find something lacking on the other side. I go to Canada in the summer because of the Japanese summers. The reason for this is because all these 20-some years I’ve been taking student to America I never experienced Japanese summers until I retired.All of a sudden I found out Japanese summers are absolutely impossible.Even a dry, far-out place like Regina, where I have a brother, is more comfortable than Japan.

When my brother Eddy finished college in Japan, I brought him to Toronto where I was living then.He got a job in a life insurance company in Toronto.The company moved to Regina, so he moved with the company.

My youngest brother stayed in Japan; he works with Japanese literature.Our father died when Arthur was in college and my mother was in Japan, so I guess he felt he couldn’t leave her. He worked at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto and how he’s in Okayama. He just retired from Shujitsu University there.

My brother Peter stayed at the University of Hawaii and became the Dean of the Summer Session. He retired this year too.This year was the 50^th memorial year for my father, so we all got together for a service in Kyoto.

• “Margaret” Miho Steinberg (nee Tanaka), 2010 (Japanese-Canadian Stories from Japan, Compiled by Nobuko Nakayama and Jean Maeda, Tokyo 2011). pp. 68-75.