Description
Book SynopsisA Japanese Canadian participated in the government's destruction of his own community. How should he be remembered?
Trade Review"This extremely valuable memoir offers a thought-provoking new perspective on the logics of dispossession, and the complex questions it raises are sure to animate public debate for many years to come. The memoir and accompanying essays should be essential reading for scholars of Canadian history." Sean Mills, University of Toronto, and author of A Place in the Sun: Haiti, Haitians, and the Remaking of Quebec
"In Witness to Loss, one finds a full portrait of the events of the war years ... [the book] leaves one with the urge to walk the streets of pre-Second World War Vancouver where the Japanese-Canadian community was well established: Powell Street, East Cordova Street, Alexander Street and Hastings Street." Canadian Jewish News
"Kimura's 100-page memoir is an enigmatic text, in part because his reasons for writing it are debatable. Did he write to inspire pride – as he says, to let younger Japanese Canadians know his generation quietly resisted? Or does he write to absolve himself of the sense he betrayed his people? ... It is in [the] details that he reveals the sleight of hand by which a discussion of insurance policies, for example, morphs into the federal government's forced sale of Japanese Canadians' fishing vessels at below-market prices. Evil can indeed be banal." The Globe and Mail
"Editors Jordan Stanger-Ross and Pamela Sugiman present the memoir-in-translation of Kishizo Kimura… His was an internal struggle, a careful negotiation with institutional racism, grounded in his belief that his "obedience" was an act of quiet advocacy fo
"Witness to Loss is an insider's view of the unfortunate experiences of the Canadian Japanese during World War II; the commentaries are a reminder that history, like beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder. It would inspire a lively seminar debate on
