Obasan Study Guide

Joy Kogawa was born in Vancouver to Japanese immigrants. After the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, the Canadian government imprisoned thousands of Japanese Canadians, including Kogawa’s family, in internment camps in the country’s interior. After the war, Kogawa and her family relocated to Coaldale, Alberta. In the 1960s and 70s, Kogawa began to pursue a career as a poet. In 1981, she published Obasan, her first novel, which drew on her experiences during World War II. Obasan was a critical and commercial success; it was adapted into a children’s book and an opera, won the Books in Canada First Novel award and the Canadian Authors Association's Book of the Year, and in 1992 Kogawa published a sequel titled Itsuka. In 1986 she was made a member of the Order of Canada, and in 2006 she became a member of the Order of British Columbia. In 2010, the Japanese government awarded Kogawa the Order of the Rising Sun. Kogawa currently resides in Toronto.

Joy Kogawa based Obasan on her lived experiences as a Japanese Canadian during and after World War II. When Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, the anti-Asian racism already prevalent in Canada prompted fears to spread through the country of an imagined Japanese invasion. The Canadian government stripped Japanese Canadians of their rights, deemed them enemy aliens, and imprisoned them in internment camps or labor camps with inhumane conditions. Some families, like the Nakanes in Obasan, escaped the internment camps by working on beet farms in Alberta and Manitoba. The government of Canada seized the property of these displaced and imprisoned Japanese Canadians and did not return it after the war. When the war ended, Japanese Canadians were encouraged to move to Japan, and those who did not were forced to relocate to new homes away from the British Columbia coast. The government refused to apologize for or even address this injustice for decades after the war, and it was this culture of silence that Kogawa was responding to in her novel. In 1984, the National Association of Japanese Canadians (NAJC) began its campaign for redress, which demanded reparations from the government to its Japanese citizens. In 1988, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney yielded to the group’s demands, issuing a public apology and financial compensation for the affected communities.

Many authors who lived through internment have explored the topic in their works, though most of the prominent literature about Japanese internment was written by Japanese American authors rather than Japanese Canadians like Kogawa. Citizen 13360, by Miné Okubo, is a graphic memoir that details the author’s experiences in American internment camps and focuses on the everyday life of prisoners in the camps. Okubo published the book in 1946, shortly after the end of World War II, and like Obasan, it publicized silenced aspects of the Japanese experience during the war. Yoshiko Uchida’s 1971 novel Journey to Topaz introduced the reality of internment camps to its audience of young adults. Like Obasan, Journey to Topaz is a fictionalized account of Uchida’s own experiences as a child in an internment camp. When the Emperor was Divine, by Julie Otsuka, is another story of Japanese American internment that is similar to Obasan in its depiction of anti-Japanese racism after the formal end of internment. Other works about Japanese American internment include John Okada’s No-No Boy (1957) and Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston’s Farewell to Manzanar (1971).