Worldtown Hearsay :: A Sorry State
This feature article in the Canadian magazine, the Walrus broadly asks the question:
“Canada is becoming a world leader in official apologies. Do they benefit anyone but the people offering them up?”
Writer Mitch Miyagawa answers this question from the experience of someone whose family has received three government apologies, yet are still grappling with the true implications of what should be meaningful words. A strong and touching piece.
“The government of Canada gave my family our first apology, for the internment of Japanese Canadians during World War II, in 1988. I was seventeen, and I don’t remember any of it. I had other things to worry about. My mom had just left my dad, Bob Miyagawa. She’d cried and said sorry as my brother and I helped her load her furniture into the back of a borrowed pickup. Her departure had been coming for a while. At my dad’s retirement dinner the year before, his boss at the Alberta Forest Service had handed him a silver-plated pulaski, a stuffed Bertie the Fire Beaver, and a rocking chair. My mom, Carol — barely forty years old and chafing for new adventures — took one look at the rocking chair and knew the end was near.
Three months after she left, on September 22, Brian Mulroney rose to his feet in the House of Commons. The gallery was packed with Japanese Canadian seniors and community leaders, who stood as the prime minister began to speak. “The Government of Canada wrongfully incarcerated, seized the property, and disenfranchised thousands of citizens of Japanese ancestry,” he intoned. “Apologies are the only way we can cleanse the past.” When he finished, the gallery cheered, in a most un–Japanese Canadian defiance of parliamentary rules…”
The Walrus - December 2009 :: Read the entire story here
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