Gambatte: Generations of Perseverance and Politics: A Memoir

By David Tsubouchi

”Gambatte” means do your best and never give up, and that spirit is at the heart of David Tsubouchi’s life story. This memoir of the former Ontario cabinet minister begins as his family strives for acceptance amid the imprisonment of Canadians of Japanese descent and the confiscation of their property, possessions, and businesses by the Mackenzie King Liberal government in 1941. Despite growing up on the outside looking in, Tsubouchi never felt disadvantaged because he had a good family and was taught to persevere. Gambatte outlines his unusual career path from actor to dedicated law school student/lumber yard worker to politician. Tsubouchi was the first person of Japanese descent elected in Canada as a municipal politician and, as an MPP, to serve as a cabinet minister. His story also reveals an insider’s perspective of Mike Harris’s “Common Sense Revolution.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781770903746

Book preview

PROLOGUE

February 24, 1942, marked the day that shattered the lives of the Tsubouchi and the Takahashi families, as well as the day that destroyed the lives of every man, woman and child of Japanese descent living in Canada. The shock waves from that day continued on through my generation and will not stop until the Japanese Canadians cease to exist as an ethnic group as they intermarry and become assimilated into Canadian society. On that infamous date, the Mackenzie King Liberal federal cabinet passed an order in council under the Defence of Canada Regulations of the War Measures Act. That order gave the federal government the right to intern all persons of Japanese racial origin.

In plain language, that meant that every person of Japanese descent — most of whom had been born in Canada — were put into prison camps. The conditions were deplorable. Women and children were forced to live in uninsulated shacks. Several families were crowded together with a single pot-belly stove to heat the entire shack. Most of these people were city people unused to such rough conditions. The lucky ones were allowed to do forced labour on beet farms in Alberta. Some men were put onto forced labour crews building roads. The real troublemakers, the community leaders, were sent to a POW camp just outside Marathon in northwest Ontario.

When they were forced from their homes, no one would tell them where they were going, how long would they be away or even if they would ever return. Most of them assumed incorrectly that one day they would be allowed to return to their homes and the government would act as trustees for their homes, businesses, cars and possessions.

In 1943, the Custodian of Enemy Alien Property sold everything that was left behind by the Japanese Canadians. The money that was realized from the sale of all their worldly goods was kept by the Canadian government and used to pay for the imprisonment of the Japanese Canadians.

Besides the general wrongdoing caused to the entire Japanese Canadian community, these events caused some very real tragedies in my family. My maternal grandfather, Chozo Takahashi, became the first Japanese Canadian to die as a direct result of the transportation. I believe that the illness that my mother contracted in the Lemon Creek internment camp led to her loss of a lung and her untimely and early death.

No Japanese Canadian was ever found guilty of any crime against Canada during the Second World War.

The full-scale incarceration caused several generations of Japanese Canadians to feel a real sense of alienation from their homeland of Canada and also from their identity and heritage. We didn’t fit in. Canadians did not view us as Canadians and we did not view ourselves as Japanese. We were told to fit in and assimilate. We spoke no Japanese at home and denied our own roots. We tried to be good Canadians, but we were standing on the outside with our noses pressed against the window.

My parents had never been to Japan. My parents were born in British Columbia, my father in Duncan and my mother in Vancouver. We never spoke Japanese at home because they didn’t want any of their children to have accents. We were to become Canadians. We needed to speak like Canadians, act like Canadians and, they hoped, be accepted as Canadians.

We were living contradictions. There were few visible minorities in Canada in the 1950s and 1960s, so as much as we were encouraged to assimilate, we were different.

As much as we had the veneer of being Canadians, inside our house there were many things that were not typically Canadian. We had bacon and eggs, and my mother would occasionally make spaghetti, but many of our meals would be considered exotic to our neighbours. We would eat chow mein for days. Mom would serve rice with the bacon and eggs. My mother’s attempts to cook her version of a Canadian meal were meals that I would have preferred to miss. We never ate hot dogs or Kraft Dinner. Our house even smelled different.

We went to the United Church, yet once a year we attended the Buddhist temple to show our respect for our grandfather.

Other than relatives, we had no Japanese Canadian friends.

Even growing up, I knew there was a connection to my past, but there was no way for me to express what it was. None of us can escape our past. We should celebrate and embrace it. The past is what makes us what we become, even if we are not aware of it.

Because of the attitude of my parents I adopted an attitude of optimism. I have always remembered my father saying that throughout his life and its challenges, he woke up every morning with one goal — to make life a little better for his family and himself. My mother, no matter how bad and desperate things got, always had an encouraging word and a hug.

There is a word in Japanese, gambatte, that literally means do your best. Culturally, it conveys a sense of love, like when a mother says it to her child before sending him off to school. Or it expresses a sharing of good fortune, as when someone is embarking on a new venture or trip. When the double disasters of the earthquake and tsunami devastated the Tohoku area of Japan in March 2011, people would say Gambatte. It symbolized hope and encouragement. It meant that the sun would rise again over Japan.

I was fortunate in that the feeling of gambatte was stronger in my life and my heart than my struggles with identity, but the struggles of my family have never been far from my mind and have inevitably shaped the course of my life.

CHAPTER ONE

The Tsubouchi Clan

My grandfather Hyakuzo Tsubouchi immigrated to Canada shortly after the turn of the last century. I remember my grandfather as large for a Japanese man of that time. He was about five feet, nine inches tall. He lived in Duncan, B.C., on Vancouver Island and worked in the bush as a lumberjack. My grandmother Ume Hisatsugu came to Canada just after the First World War. She added to the family income by cleaning the homes of wealthy white people. My grandparents Tsubouchi raised six children — my aunts Chizu, Nobu and Setsuko and my uncles Kenji and Eiji, and my dad, Kiyoshi. In the Tsubouchi household, my grandmother obviously had no difficulty producing children. She once jokingly said to me that she would jump onto the table, have the baby, jump off and get back to work.

My father’s middle name was Thomas. It was an acknowledgement by my grandparents that he was a Canadian. He was born on November 20, 1921. As in most large families, everyone had responsibilities. It was a humble household and everybody was expected to pull his or her weight.

My dad was the oldest male child and with that position carried more responsibility. Even as a boy, my dad reigned over his sisters. His brothers were much younger than the older sisters. In Japanese families the eldest son is held in great esteem; he will be the heir. This is significant even to a poor family. In Japan when a family had no male child, the family would arrange for a male from another family to be adopted so that the family name would continue. My aunts told me that when they were older, they all jumped when my father came home from work, and that he was an authority figure they obeyed. My Aunt Pat (Chizu) used to say, Kiyoshi will be home soon — is the rice on? That used to be the watchword. My father, on the other hand, said it was his three sisters who used to tell him what to do. As with most families, the truth is somewhere in between.

My father always took his responsibilities as the oldest son seriously and at an early age, during the Depression, tried to earn money to help out the family. My dad did any chore that he could get paid for. At the age of 11, he decided that the way to make money was to become a caddy at the local golf club.

Every morning he would put on his painter’s hat (he did not own a real golf cap), walk down to the golf club and line up with the other boys hoping to be chosen as a caddy. Every night he would return home disappointed.

Unfortunately my dad had two strikes against him. He was the smallest boy and he didn’t look as if he could even carry a golf bag. The second strike was that he was Japanese, and in British Columbia at that time, there was considerable prejudice against both the Japanese and Chinese, who were seen as cheap labourers taking jobs away from real Canadians.

If there was one trait that my father had, it was persistence. I think this hard-headedness is a trait that all of his children inherited. He had a determination to succeed no matter how long it took or how many times he was rejected. The next morning he would return again.

My father told me that this had gone on for almost the entire golf season.

It was difficult for my father because he had to endure rejection and bullying and name-calling from the older boys, but the hope that he might get a job and be paid five cents to caddy, an enormous amount of money to my father, kept him coming back.

Some of his enthusiasm had been eroded by the older boys calling him a dirty Jap and telling him to go back to Japan, but he was used to this by now. He had earned his place to wait for work as a caddy. He was so small that he usually got roughed up, but the older boys knew that he wouldn’t back down and finally gave up. The older boys also knew that my father would never get hired anyway.

One day my father thought he might get a chance to caddy because there was a tournament at the club, even though he had never been picked to caddy in any tournament before. It was special as well because my grandmother had been home that morning and had encouraged him.

All morning the golfers came over to the caddies to make their selection, and one by one, the other boys were selected. My father said that he tried to stand straight and puff up his chest to look as big as he could, but he was hopelessly small. His disappointment mounting, for the first time in his life he was considering giving up and going home. He then heard someone say, You over there with the painter’s hat. Do you want to caddy for me?

He couldn’t believe his ears. He was the only one who wore a painter’s hat. When he looked up he saw a big man who had a very distinguished air about him. Everyone seemed to be making a fuss over him.

The man said, Yes, you, the little Japanese fellow. Do you think you can handle my bag?

All my father could say was, Yes, sir!

He was quite surprised that the man had asked him to caddy. This was the greatest thing in the world to my father. It was his first job as a caddy. The only experience that my father had in golf was watching people play from afar. No Japanese family could afford to buy a set of golf clubs or to play, nor would they even be allowed to play at the golf and country clubs, which were almost all white-only. When my father told me this story, I was quite surprised to learn that he was even allowed to be on the golf course as a caddy.

My father knew nothing of how to play golf, and any golfer would know that. He had only his determination to carry the large bag. My father realized that the man had done himself no favour, but my father was a quick learner, and with the patience exercised by the man, my father figured out which club was used in each situation. When they finished the front nine, the golfers stopped to have lunch. The man gave my father 50 cents and told him to buy some lunch. This was the equivalent of a day’s wages for a man. It was more money than he had ever held in his hands.

My father ran home and gave the money to my grandmother, who made some rice balls for him to eat for lunch. My father then ran back and was waiting for the man when he finished his lunch.

The back nine went smoother as my father began to understand what he needed to do. When they had finished the round, the man gave my father a dollar and in front of everyone proclaimed loudly, The next time I come back to play, I want Tommy to be my caddy.

My father had no trouble after that getting a job as a caddy. It was only years later that my father discovered that the distinguished man was the Honourable John Hart, who was the member of the provincial legislature for Victoria and who later became the premier of British Columbia.

I learned two lessons from this story my father told me. There are a lot of doors that will be slammed in your face, but if you keep on knocking, one will eventually open. The second lesson was that no matter how important you are, remember your roots and who you are. My father was telling me to be true to myself.

A great passion was born that day for my father: golf. Until the day he died my father loved golfing. My father bought golf magazines, golf videos and, like most guys, golf gadgets. My father always had time for a game of golf and had a great short game. When he was 83, some days he could almost golf his age.

My father always said that he was shy, but wherever we went he somehow ended up talking to everybody. He was never in need of golfing partners. He used to golf at a public course in Markham, and I was always being surprised by complete strangers who would walk up to me in town just to tell me that they had been golfing with Tommy last week or last month or last year. There were a few times near the end of his life when my father joined us for a tournament. He couldn’t drive the ball very far anymore, but from 100 yards in, he was deadly accurate.

As a teenager, my father went to work in the bush as a lumberjack. My father used to say that he was five-foot-six, but if he was, then I am six feet tall. Working in the bush in those days was very dangerous. Maiming and death were not uncommon. There was no such thing as workplace safety laws. My father used to say that working in the bush toughened him up.

My father was wiry and strong and nothing seemed to frighten him. He was also very intelligent. He once said that he learned how to survive, play poker and smoke cigarettes when he worked in the bush. The smoking was a habit he carried on until I was about 12, when he quit cold turkey. I don’t recall ever seeing my father smoke in front of any of us but we knew that he did. If anyone went to our one bathroom in the morning after my father, we did so through a cloud of smoke.

My father told me he was introduced to smoking when he was eight years old. He and his friend managed to snitch a cigarette and matches from his friend’s father. They went to a farmer’s field and sat down, lit the cigarette with the match and started to smoke it. Unfortunately, their experiment ended fairly quickly when the match that the two boys used to light the cigarette set the farmer’s field on fire. Soon the fire department appeared on the scene.

My father and his friend had since got rid of the matches and the cigarette and were watching the firemen putting out the fire that they had started by accident. When the fire captain approached them to ask if they had seen anybody who might have caused the fire, the two boys blamed the school bully.

My father was a good athlete and played baseball and hockey. He passed on his love of sports to my brother and sister and me. When he was a young man, he was considered to be quite handsome by many of the girls in his community.

Like many working people, my father didn’t pay attention to politics unless politics imposed itself on his life. Those circumstances included when some level of government raised his taxes or told him that there was yet another thing that he couldn’t do. He would rather play golf or watch his precious Maple Leafs or Blue Jays or Argonauts on television.

It was only after I entered provincial politics that he started to pay attention and realized that many of the values in his own life were being espoused by Mike Harris. My father believed that he should take responsibility for his own life and that if he worked hard he should be rewarded and, most important, that the government should not waste his money.

My father, like almost every Japanese Canadian, lived a life that was affected by prejudice and unending challenges, and yet he lived with determination, optimism and courage.

He would talk occasionally of the courage and determination of his parents but not about his own. My father’s view — and mine — was that our own lack of money and status in our early lives was not so great an obstacle because we were both blessed by wonderful parents who did what they could to make life better for us and who did their best to not allow us to believe that we had very little. We had nothing, but we were not disadvantaged.

Although it was far from idyllic, my grandparents lived with the same beliefs as most Canadians, that hard, honest work would eventually reward a person. This philosophy carried them through establishing themselves in a new country, the Depression, the Japanese Canadian internment and starting all over again with nothing.

I don’t remember much about my father’s father, as he died in 1964, when I was 13 years old. My grandparents lived in Fort William, which eventually joined three other regions to form Thunder Bay, and we lived in Toronto. I saw my grandfather only when we went on one of my father’s maniacal non-stop road trips to Fort William. My mother did not drive in those days, and my father refused to stop, in part because he didn’t want to spend money for a motel room while en route, but mostly because he just wanted to get there faster.

My mother would pack food and we would eat while my father drove. I remember once when Lynne was two, Dan was six and I was 10, and Dan needed to urinate. When my mother urged my father to stop so Dan could go off somewhere in the woods, my father pointed out that he had brought a small plastic pot and let us know what its purpose was. The little pee pot served its purpose several times. My father, not wanting to stop, slowed down and emptied the contents of the pot out his window. It was only when we had other reasons for stopping that my father took mercy on us and reluctantly pulled over. Not surprisingly, we made good time.

When we reached Fort William we all could finally relax. Most times we stayed in Fort William with my Uncle Paul Oda and Aunt Sets and my cousins Mike, Noreen and Jay. Since Mike, or Mickey as I called him, was about my age and Dan was about the same age as Jay and Lynne was about the same age as Noreen, it was ideal.

The first place we would go after setting up with the Odas was to visit my Bachan (Grandmother) and Gichan (Grandfather) Tsubouchi. My grandfather was always a bit of a mystery to me. Even when we visited Fort William I didn’t see much of him. I remember him as a big friendly man who seemed to be ailing. I would visit him while he was lying in his bed, and he would give me these tiny Japanese puff pastries. Unfortunately he didn’t speak much English and I didn’t speak Japanese.

The only time I saw him on his feet was the time he visited us in Toronto when I was five years old and we visited Niagara Falls for the first time. He was quiet and kind and had large hands.

My grandmother Ume Tsubouchi was a whole different kettle of fish. They were a true example of opposites attracting. While my grandfather was quiet, if there was a stage to stand on, my grandmother would be on it. She had an opinion on everything.

Once when I was a little boy, walking on the street with her in Fort William, she muttered something in Japanese about a woman who walked by. I asked my mother what she had said, and my mother told me that my grandmother said that the woman had a face like a can of worms.

When the mini-series Shogun starring Richard Chamberlain was appearing on television, the local photographer had taken an ad that featured a photo of my grandmother. That was a great source of pride to her. It wasn’t long before the extended family knew of her fame.

My grandmother Ume Tsubouchi was a typical grandmother. She liked nothing better than to spoil her grandchildren. She never had any money to buy things but spoiled us instead through her cooking. Bachan was a great cook.

Despite the geographical distance between us, I had a chance to become very close to Bachan when I was 12. My mother had been hospitalized in the Weston Sanitarium for tuberculosis for a period of time for treatment, and Bachan came to take care of us. My brother, Dan, was eight and my sister, Lynne, was four.

As soon as Bachan walked in the door, everybody knew who the boss was. Even my father used to jump when Bachan told him to do anything. This came as a complete surprise to the three of us children. My father thought he was the undisputed boss of our family. I never understood how my grandmother, who was not even five feet tall, could tell my father what to do. As I got older I really understood the power of women in the Tsubouchi households past and present. I understood later that my mother was the real power behind the throne and had persuasive power over my father, just as my grandmother had over her family.

My father used to visit my mother every day after working from 5:30 in the morning to 6:30 at night at the dry cleaners. He would sit with her at the sanatorium. Often he would eat something with my mother, but when he came home and Bachan had prepared his dinner, he would have to eat it, hungry or not.

Bachan believed in feeding us great quantities of food and told us that it would make us grow and become stronger. One Saturday morning, when I got up I passed my brother as he was coming out of the kitchen.

You’re in big trouble, he said to me as he smirked.

What are you talking about? I asked him.

My brother, who was eight years old at the time, said, Bachan just made me breakfast and she made me four eggs and tons of toast. I had to eat it. But she’s making you pancakes.

Pancakes have always been my nemesis. While I enjoy pancakes, the ultimate number of pancakes that I am capable of eating is two. I was afraid that my grandmother, who had occasionally watched cartoons with my sister, had seen The Flintstones. I was hoping that she did not get any ideas about making a huge stack of pancakes from the show.

My greatest fears were realized as soon as I saw the stack of 10 pancakes sitting on my plate. I knew that this was going to be an undoable task, but my Bachan never understood that anyone might not be able to eat everything that she made. So I sat down and tried my best. Her pancakes were perfect — fluffy and round and made from scratch — but perfection does not necessarily offset the gag reaction after you have eaten five pancakes. Finally I just could not eat another pancake and told Bachan.

My Bachan never got mad at me but looked at me and asked me why I didn’t like her cooking. I sat down guiltily and ate one more before giving up completely.

In those days, we lived in Agincourt. My parents had scraped together every penny they could to pursue the Canadian dream and bought a very modest bungalow in a working-class neighbourhood at Finch and Kennedy in an area called Lynnwood Heights. When we first moved to Agincourt, Kennedy Road was an unfinished road in the middle of nowhere. Finch Avenue was a dirt road and ran through a marshy area that we called the Swamp. Bachan used to wander off in the early spring and pick fiddleheads and cook them as part of a meal. She also had a green thumb and made a small garden in the backyard to supplement the food budget.

Bachan was the ultimate recycler. She recycled not because she was a huge proponent of ecology but because she had survived the Depression and imprisonment in an internment camp. She understood what having absolutely nothing meant. Nothing went to waste. If Bachan made potatoes and there were leftovers, they were used for the next meal and if there were still leftovers they were used again until nothing was left. Every container and every elastic band had a use. When Bachan stayed with us on garbage collection days, there was only a small paper bag at the foot of our driveway, the size you might use to carry home a chocolate bar.

Bachan was also the ultimate judge and jury of all disputes. All of the Tsubouchi clan is very competitive at everything from contact sports to Scrabble. A few years later, Bachan was visiting when Dan and I were both in our teens. My brother was big as a teen. When he was 15 he towered over me at just over six feet tall. We were playing a game of Monopoly when typically we came to a dispute about some rule or another. It didn’t take long to escalate because at the time we both had short fuses. Soon we were grappling with each other and just as I was about to throw the first punch, Bachan walked into the room and looked at us. Instantly we both stopped dead in our tracks. Our Bachan never had to say anything. All she had to do was look at us and we knew what she meant. If the UN had drafted Bachan, we would have achieved world peace by now.

Elaine and I visited my Bachan together for the first time as a couple shortly after we were married. Bachan was very independent. She was in her late eighties but was as spry and alert as ever. She lived in her own apartment with its own entrance at my Aunt Nobu’s house in Thunder Bay. My aunt had told me that Bachan knew we were coming over for lunch and she had been up since 5:30 a.m. cooking.

When we arrived, her kitchen was full of Japanese food that she had been preparing for days. She had made many of my favourite dishes, including the bags that were officially known as inari sushi and manju, the Japanese pastry that was filled with sweet red bean paste. The aromas of the food filled her house and my mouth was watering the instant that we walked in the front door.

My Bachan did not speak much English and Elaine did not speak any Japanese, but Bachan took an instant liking to Elaine and somehow they seemed to be able to communicate with each other. Bachan led Elaine into her bedroom, where she had arranged photographs of her grandchildren. I had not seen the photographic display before. Bachan had devoted an entire wall to my photos. As the eldest male of the Tsubouchi line, I was clearly Bachan’s favourite.

In January 1992, the entire Tsubouchi family was going to converge on Thunder Bay to celebrate Bachan’s 100th birthday. Elaine and I had booked our plane tickets when we got the news that Bachan had passed away peacefully in her sleep, a few days short of her birthday, the ultimate milestone. Bachan had been independent, healthy and as bright as always up to her death. It was a crushing time in my life. Instead of gathering together to celebrate her life with her, we celebrated her life at her funeral. I was privileged to be asked to speak at her funeral. It was hard to believe that Bachan was gone.

CHAPTER TWO

The Takahashi Side

My maternal grandfather, Chozo Takahashi, was born in Japan on January 12, 1889. He immigrated to Canada in 1907. My grandmother was born in Japan as Suga Kishibe on January 19, 1899. In 1916, my grandfather went back to Japan to marry my grandmother and bring her back to Canada. They lived in Vancouver, British Columbia.

My mother, Fumiko Frances Takahashi, grew up in a large family. There were seven siblings in the Takahashi family: my aunts Kazuko, Kiyoko and Haruko, my mother, and my uncles Hideo, Akira and Toshio. Altogether they produced 19 children.

Fumiko was a quiet girl and