– Masumi Mitsui was president of a Japanese-Canadian legion branch.


In late summer 1916, Ryoichi Kobayashi gave up his job as an “automobile driver” in Vancouver and followed the Alberta-bound flow of Japanese-Canadian men wanting to enlist in the Canadian Army. He’d just turned 25 and had been in Canada for eight years.
But like others before him, Kobayashi was rejected as a volunteer when he applied in British Columbia.
His grandson, David, says this was because they didn’t want to owe them the right to vote. Only Caucasians were being accepted even though earlier that year; more than 150 Japanese-Canadians had paid for their own initial training in Steveston and Vancouver to later be told that B.C. recruiters weren’t interested in admitting Asians.

Alberta recruiters had no such qualms. And that suited men like Kobayashi just fine because they believed fighting for Canada would be a step toward earning full citizenship including the right to vote. Like most who volunteered, these men had no idea what lay ahead. As Kobayashi told Postmedia News nearly 50 years later, after the fear of the first battle, the food was so terrible and the trenches so cold that he often wondered whether it would be better to die. The first Japanese volunteers enlisted with the 13^th Canadian Mounted Rifles in Medicine Hat.

By June 1916, 42 of them were on their way to Europe where they were eventually joined by the 50^th Battalion.
Japanese-Canadian volunteers fought in Canadian regiments involved in all of the war’s biggest battles – the Battle of the Somme, Vimy Ridge, Hill 70, Ypres, Passendaele, Amiens, Scarpe, Drocourt, Queant, Canal du Nord, Cambrai and Valenciennes. By war’s end, the 222 who has enlisted, 54 had been killed, 92 were wounded and 11 had received military medals for bravery.
Masumi Mitsui and Sainosuke Kubota – like Kobayashi – were determined to fight.

Mitsui came to Canada in 1908, and travelled to Calgary to enlist in 1916. Mitsui, the grandson of a samurai, wanted to show his patriotism to Canada. He hoped this would prove his loyalty and earn him the vote. He spoke only a little English, but better than most Japanese soldiers so he was put in charge of the Japanese men in the 10^th Battalion, called The Fighting Tenth.


– Sainosuke Kubota in 1939, on occasion of the visit of the Queen and King of England on May 29.
 

Kubota, a member of the Satsuma warrior clan, he had been working as a cook at a small hotel on Mayne Island, B.C., since immigrating in 1907. He was 24 when he used the last of his savings to buy a train ticket to Calgary where he arrived in July 1916.
“There was a recruitment office and soldiers on the street,” Kubota wrote in a 1957 essay submitted to a contest sponsored by the Japanese Canadian Citizen’s Association.   After confirming to the officer that he was a naturalized citizen, Kubota “hurriedly” sighed the registration papers. Kubota was taken to Sarcee Camp where tents “spread like waves as far as the eye could see” and were divided by wide avenues. After being pronounced fit, issued a uniform and assigned a tent, where he was bunked with “six white soldiers” he wrote, “I was finally in the army. I was really jubilant.”

The feeling didn’t last.

The next morning, rather than starting in training, Kubota was waiting tables in the officers’ mess. Inadvertently, he’s signed on to the Army Service Corps. A few weeks later he approached one of the officers of a fighting unit and begged for a transfer. During his first week in the new unit, he and an officer were dispatched to collect a couple of other Japanese-Canadians from a Calgary recruiting office. Kubota and two officers then went to British Columbia to recruit more of them.
When the 14^th Platoon left for Europe that fall, there were 42 Japanese-Canadians and Kubota was a corporal.
By the time the unit finally reached the front, members fell into the routine of two weeks of fighting followed by rest periods at the rear. “The awareness that we had survived two weeks longer enabled us to enjoy our hot food, coffee, beer, and especially the letters from home,” he later wrote. “(But) the Japanese-Canadian casualties began to rise. I felt somehow responsible but reconciled myself to the idea that somehow God knew our destiny.”

That destiny for Kobayashi, Mitsui, Kubota and many others included the Battle of Vimy Ridge, a three day ordeal that began on April 9, 1917, and is widely considered to be a defining moment for Canada.
“At 2 a.m., our artillery commenced its bombardment and at 3 a.m., or infantry began to advance,” Kubota wrote. “Since the start of the Vimy general offensive, we had not slept for three solid days and night and all of us were in desperate need of sleep and water: by then the Corps was reduced by half with many Japanese-Canadian casualties.”
More than 7,000 Canadians died and 3,598 were wounded including Kobayashi, who was shot in the left arm.
Kobayshi was sent to Ramsgate Hospital in England where he was wounded again during an air attack before being sent back to Canada and honourably discharged on May 17, 1918.
  
In June 1917, after the Canadians had taken Vimy Ridge, British commander Douglas Haig wanted the Canadians to capture nearby Lens to relieve some pressure on Passchendaele, which was already mired in mud. Canadian commander Arthur Currie suggested a different tactic — take this hill just north of town and own the commanding view of the fortified coal mining community, the enemy trenches and the nearby villages. Hill 70 — a place that is nowadays better known for being a traffic circle near a mall was important in war — easy to see when you’re standing at the top and looking around at the industrial outskirts of the city.

“The Germans were aware that something was happening: too many troops were in the area, too many ammunition stockpiles, too many guns,” Tim Cook writes in At the Sharp End.  “German intelligence had already determined that the troops opposite them were the Canadians, who had long been identified as an elite shock force that ‘the British Higher Command always employed for the most difficult and costly fighting.’ ” On Aug. 15, 1917, the Canadians sent artillery and liquid fire into the German lines and overran their positions. The fighting was intense — grenades lobbed back and forth, gas, artillery.


– Masumi Mitsui as a young soldier.


This is where Masumi Mitsui won Canada’s Medal of Bravery for recovering a Lewis machine-gun and getting it back into action against the enemy in the Battle of Hill 70. The Canadians had limited supplies and endured 21 counterattacks. The capture of the hill “marked one of the great victories of the British expeditionary force’s 1917 campaign on the western front” reads a plaque north of the hill, near an airfield. The casualties: 25,000 Germans, 9,000 Canadians - Mitsui’s comrades had died for this hill, he had risked his life for it. Mitsui had begun as a private and ended the war as a sergeant.
  
In the meantime, Kubota and his unit carried on. When the Japanese-Canadian contingent dwindled to 20, it was bolstered by the arrival of 18 more Japanese-Canadians from the Alberta-based 192^nd Corps. By early 1918, some of those men were conscripts because so many volunteers had been killed that the government had made military service mandatory with no exceptions. The Canadian Forces continued their advance south and by August, Kubota and his platoon could see the towers of the famous, medieval cathedral in Reims.  They were called in to reinforce British forces involved in heavy fighting. Kubota divided the Japanese-Canadians into two squads, taking command of one of them. It was a terrible fight, followed by a retreat. Five Japanese-Canadian soldiers had died and their bodies were piled in hastily dug trenches as the heavy bombardment continued into the night. Another seven were seriously wounded. By dawn, Kubota had been wounded as well.

Two months in an English hospital followed by six more in a Canadian hospital and Kubota was on the list to go back.
Only this time, it was to Siberia to fight alongside the Japanese. During his physical exam, Kubota wrote that he asked the doctor, “check my backside… after close inspection, concluded by a robust slap on the rump, he declared: Oh, no good.”

“It was a bad case of hemorrhoids.I had escaped going to Siberia.”

On Nov. 11, Kubota wept for joy in Calgary as peace was declared. And he wept for the men who he’d recruited who would never make it home. During the next couple of years, Kubota forged a new life in Calgary and took a quick trip to Japan, returning with a bride. He wrote that they encountered very little prejudice there and he was even allowed to vote in the provincial, as well as federal, election.  But things hadn’t changed much in British Columbia, where Kobayashi had returned to settle.

The B.C. government reduced the number of fishing licenses to “other than white residents” in 1919. Veterans were exempt, but they once again felt the sting of exclusion. By 1920, the Japanese community in Vancouver had raised enough money to build a cenotaph in Stanley Park commemorating the Japanese-Canadians who had fought and died during the war. The monument with its “eternal” flame was unveiled on the third anniversary of the start of the Battle of Vimy Ridge. But a few weeks later, public outrage forced Premier John Oliver to withdraw his motion to extend the vote to Japanese-Canadian veterans.

By 1926, the veterans had established their own branch of the Canadian Legion – Branch No.9. Through it, and with the help of other veterans, they continued to lobby for the vote. The battle was won April 1, 1931. Legion president Masumi Mitsui and secretary-treasurer Kubota witness the vote in the legislature. The motion passed by a vote of 19 to 18. Back at the cenotaph to celebrate, Kubota read a poem he’d written to the 20 men he’d recruited and who were buried somewhere in France. The hard-won gain of the veterans was short-lived.

It was extinguished along with the cenotaph’s eternal flame in the days that followed Japan’s Dec. 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.
During the next few years, the veterans were among 22,000 Japanese-Canadians forced into internment camps. When he was forced to register for the internment camps, Mitsui protested by throwing his medals on the registration desk and asking, “What good are these?” He had gone from Canadian war hero to enemy alien in 25 years.  When he returned from the internment camps, his farm had been sold, his family’s belongings stolen, save for a samurai sword his son, George, had buried.  The family moved to Hamilton, where every Remembrance Day Mitsui wore his old uniform, beret and medals, and stayed home. 

  
– A studio portrait of Ryochi Kobayashi in military uniform; Vancouver, BC in 1916.


After WWI, Kobayashi had worked as a taxi-driver and fisherman, gone to Japan briefly and returned with a bride. When the federal government ordered people of Japanese ancestry to leave the coast, the Kobayashi’s stubbornly resisted, citing his was service. But, he relented in the fall of 1942 because of the discrimination his five children were subjected to by their peers, according to an account published in the Japanese Canadian Bulletin. The Kobayashis were among the last Japanese to leave Vancouver and were sent to the Tashme internment camp, where Ryoichi and Masako had two more children. When the Second World War ended, they were given a choice – move east of the Rockies or be “repatriated” to Japan.

The Kobayshi chose Japan.

In May 1946, they and their seven Canadian-born children were among the first of the 3,964 “repatriates” to leave Canada. They went to Ryoichi’s birthplace, Hiroshima, which only a few months earlier had been devastated by a nuclear bomb. It’s not clear how they survived the next few years. But in 1952, at the start of the Korean War, Ryoichi and his four sons applied to serve in the Canadian Armed Forces. Ryoichi was rejected because of his age, but his sons were among the nearly 40 repatriated Japanese-Canadians who were accepted.

By 1955, their son Yukata had been posted to Western command in Edmonton and two years later, the rest of the family returned to Canada. Ryoichi applied for his citizenship and was rejected by the presiding judge because of his poor English. Yukata, who has accompanied his father, challenged the decision. Pointing to the insignia pinned on his father’s lapel, Yukata explained that his father was a Canadian veteran of the First World War.

The judge relented.

Ryoichi Kobayashi, Sainosuke Kubota, Masumi Mitsui and Kiyoki Iizuka were profiled in the Vancouver Sun before Remembrance Day in 1965. They were described as the only four surviving Japanese-Canadian veterans. Twelve years later, Kubota and his wife flew from Toronto to Vancouver to hand over the Japanese Canadian Citizens Association the legion banners, honour rolls and photos from the First World War that he’d kept safe during the internment.

He died the following year at age 88. Ryoichi Kobayashi died in 1979. He, too, was 88 and is buried in the veterans’ plot at Vancouver’s Mountain View Cemetery. Masumi Mitsui passed in 1987 in Hamilton at the ripe old age of 100. 

Their stories and those of their comrades endure in the archives of the Nikkei National Museum in Burnaby, B.C., which is a legacy for the long-standing fight by Japanese-Canadians who sought redress for the internment.


– Determined to Fight, Regina Leader Post - September 13, 2014 (G2, G4); Walking the Western Front,