Justice in Our Time: The Japanese Canadian Redress Settlement

Description

From 1942 to 1949, a group of innocent Canadians were uprooted from their homes and businesses on the west coast, dispossessed, and forced to disperse across Canada, merely on the basis of their Japanese ancestry. Some 4,000 were even exiled to wartorn Japan. These injustices remained unresolved for nearly forty years. Then in the 1970s, a handful of Japanese Canadians began a movement to seek redress for these wrongs, through a negotiated settlement with the Government of Canada. What began as the dream of a few became a national movement that captured the attention of the entire Canadian public by the mid-1980s. The Redress Settlement signed on September 22, 1988 by the National Association of Japanese Canadians (NAJC) and the Prime Minister of Canada was hailed as a major victory for human rights. The substantial Redress Settlement negotiated by the National Association of Japanese Canadians offered: Individual compensation to Japanese Canadians directly affected by the injustices A community fund to assist in rebuilding the community that was destroyed pPrdons for those wrongfully convicted under the War Measures Act The offer of citizenship to those exiled and to their descendants The establishment of a Canadian Race Relations Foundation to combat racism Justice in Our Time celebrates Japanese Canadian redress. From the historic injustices, through the redress movement, to the final events leading up to the settlement day on September 22, 1988 the dramatic story of redress is told through a rich interweaving of commentary, photographs, quotations, and historic documents.

Roy Miki Roy Miki is a writer, poet, and critic who has taught and written about the work of bpNichol for many years. He was the editor of Pacific Windows: Collected Poems of Roy K. Kiyooka which won the 1997 Poetry Award from the Association of Asian American Studies. His major bibliographic study, A Record of Writing: An Annotated and Illustrated Bibliography of George Bowering, won the Gabriel Roy award from the Association for Canadian and Quebec Literatures as the best book on Canadian Literature for 1991. Miki is also the editor of This Is My Own: Letters to Wes and Other Writings on Japanese Canadians (1985); Tracing the Paths: Reading' Writing The Martyrology (1988); co-editor with Cassandra Kobayashi of Justice In Our Time: The Japanese Canadian Redress Settlement, and Meanwhile: The Critical Writings of bpNichol. Cassandra Kobayashi Cassandra Kobayashi helped shape the grass-roots community movement in Vancouver to seek redress for the forced removal, internment, and abrogation of the rights of Canadians of Japanese ancestry. She served on the national Redress Committee that negotiated the historic 1988 settlement with the Government of Canada. The struggle for redress is documented in her book, Justice in Our Time: The Japanese Canadian Redress Settlement, co-authored with Roy Miki.

"A powerful and moving testament to the successful efforts of the NAJC." -- Globe & Mail