The Art of Lillian Michiko Blakey, OSA

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The Art
of
Lillian Michiko Blakey, OSA

SERIES 2: THE ALBERTA SERIES
In 1942, following the attack upon the American naval base at Pearl Harbour, all people of Japanese descent living in British Columbia were forced by the Canadian government to leave their homes and possessions behind, and were evacuated either to the interior of B.C., or to work on farms in Alberta. Citizens and non-citizens, those born in Canada and those born in Japan, grandparents, parents and children,- all suffered the same fate. My family chose to go to Alberta in order to stay together. My parents worked in the sugar-beet fields
I was born in Alberta towards the end of the war with Japan. This series of paintings is my personal tribute to the courage and tenacity of my parents and the Canadian families of Japanese ancestry who endured the indignity and shame of this calamitous experience.

They Came To Take Away The Nancy

Watercolour

16" x 22"
SOLD - Private Collection

After Pearl Harbour, my grandfather lost everything ... his boat, his tackle, his livelihood. Government agents just came and confiscated everything. This was the precursor of the forced removal of all Japanese Canadians from their homes to internment camps and prairie farms.

My grandfather was never the same after this. How must he have felt? The Canadian government had taken his livelihood, his pride, his life. He believed that Canada did not want him, even though he had been a good citizen. After the war was over, Aunt Eunice’s husband, who was a Japanese national, took his family back to war-torn Japan. My grandfather, grandmother and Aunt Rosie soon followed them   My parents refused to go with them because they believed that life here, as hard as it was, would be better than life in Japan. We never saw my grandfather again. He died in Japan. I believe he died of a broken heart.

Shikata ga nai
("It Can't Be Helped")

Watercolour

16" x 22"
SOLD - Private Collection

My family was one of the first to leave Vancouver. Here, at the train station, my Aunt Eunice says goodbye to a friend, while my mom and her younger sister, Rosie, stand at her side with her children. She does not know when she will ever see her friend again.   It is a forced parting, but the Japanese-Canadian people leave with dignity and without a single incident. “Shikata ga nai” was a phrase commonly voiced by them.

Building Our House

Watercolour

16" x 22"

My father could do anything. Orphaned at seven, when his mother died in the Great Flu epidemic of 1918, he grew up with Japanese men in a railroad gang. He left school in Grade 5 and had to teach himself to read and write in both English and Japanese (Katekana, the scholarly form of Japanese calligraphy). In his youth, he worked in logging camps in B.C. for twenty-five cents a day and became a “topper”, the man who climbed to the top of the giant Douglas fir trees and cut off the tops. This was the most dangerous job, for in those days, the topper had no straps to hold him when the tree swung violently as the top fell off.

After the Evacuation, he and my mother married in Alberta and worked for five different farms. They could not leave Alberta until 1950, five years after the war had ended. At the Scheid farm, the government provided lumber so that Japanese workers could build homes. My father knew nothing about building houses, so my mother read to him out of a building manual as he constructed a two-room house. He finished the house between “thinning” the beets in early summer and “topping”them when they were pulled out of the ground.

Winter, 1942

Watercolour

16" x 22"
SOLD - Private Collection

My family’s first Alberta winter was almost unbearable, with temperatures often dropping to –40F degrees . The housing was minimal, meant only for itinerant summer labourers. Six adults and two children shared one cramped room, which was used for cooking, sleeping, bathing and washing clothes.

In this painting, my mother looks across the barren ice of the prairies, thinking of the warm home they had left behind in Vancouver, and wondering what the future will bring.

Winter, 1942

Acrylic on canvas

36" x 48"

My family’s first Alberta winter was almost unbearable, with temperatures often dropping to –40F degrees . The housing was minimal, meant only for itinerant summer labourers. Six adults and two children shared one cramped room, which was used for cooking, sleeping, bathing and washing clothes.

In this painting, my mother looks across the barren ice of the prairies, thinking of the warm home they had left behind in Vancouver, and wondering what the future will bring.

Grandmother

Watercolour

16" x 22"
SOLD - Private Collection

My grandmother hated Alberta. The landscape was flat and desolate. A stark contrast with the grandiose mountains of British Columbia and the ocean. And life was so hard! She became very depressed and would sit for hours on the coal, which was piled up against the house, staring westward, towards the mountains, towards the ocean. Her daughters would plead with her to come in, but often she did not even hear them.

Years before, Grandmother had been a mail-order bride and came from Japan, at the age of nineteen, to marry a man she did not know. She had given her life to be a Canadian. It must have been a devastating experience to her to have her freedom taken away so violently.

Alberta, 1951

acrylic on board
30" x 48"

This painting is my own memory of the sugar beet fields of Alberta, where my family toiled endlessly from dawn until dusk. I see myself, hiding behind my mama doll. My clean white dress contrasts sharply with this life of toil, and is a reminder of the city life my parents had to leave. The barbed wire fence creates a barrier through which I view the world silently.

Alberta, 1951

Watercolour

16" x 22"
SOLD - Private Collection

This painting is my memory of the sugar beet fields of Alberta, where my family toiled endlessly from dawn until dusk. I see myself, hiding behind my mama doll. My clean white dress contrasts sharply with this life of toil, and is a reminder of the city life my parents had to leave. The barbed wire fence creates a barrier through which I view the world silently.

Our Children, Our Future

Watercolour

16" x 22"
SOLD - Private Collection

In the spring of 1943, my aunt invited Roy Hisashi Yano, a good family friend and a bachelor, to join them in Alberta. He married my mother in December, 1943. Even though the conditions were difficult, my parents decided to have children, who were their hope for the future. I was born in 1945 and my sister, Marian Kiyoko, in 1946.

In this painting, the hopefulness and the innocence of the child is clearly evident, but the comforting arms of the mother are not totally reassuring. The adult world impinges on the child’s world.

Triptych: Issei, Nissei, Sansei
(First Generation, Second Generation, Third Generation)

watercolour
7"x 22"
SOLD - Private Collection

The last painting in the Alberta Series is a triptych, showing three generations of our family.

Issei ( the first generation) shows my grandmother, Maki Teramoto, and my grandfather, Nitaro Hamaguchi, in their wedding portrait in 1913. Grandfather came to Canada in 1900 and received his citizenship in 1907. Grandmother, his mail order bride, arrived in 1913 at the age of nineteen.

Nissei (the second generation) shows my mother, Lillie Reiko Hamaguchi, and my father, Roy Hisashi Yano, in their wedding portrait on December 4, 1943. They were both born in British Columbia. When the war broke out, my father was sent to a bush camp at Griffin Lake, but he managed to join the Hamaguchi family in Alberta to work on the beet farms. They had two daughters; I was the eldest, followed by my sister, Marion. My mother lost a third child, a boy.

Sansei (the third generation) shows me at nineteen. I grew up largely denying my Japanese heritage, because my parents never talked about their wartime experiences. After ten hard years in the beet fields of Alberta, they had finally saved enough money to move to Toronto. My father’s choice was deliberate; he did not want to live in a Japanese community, because he believed that assimilation was the only way to overcome racist attitudes towards Japanese Canadians.

When I was nineteen, I was selected to be a model for the first Toyota cars to be brought to Canada. I had mixed feelings over this experience. On the one hand, I was proud to have been chosen for this occasion. On the other hand, I was embarrassed to be wearing anything Japanese, and particularly wearing a costume which was a westernized version of a kimono, with gold lame pants and gold, high heeled shoes. I overheard an elderly Japanese woman voice her disgust in Japanese When I heard that remark, I was further ashamed to be offending my culture.

In this painting, I am shown dressed in the costume, in front of a woodblock print by Kaoru Kawano, which depicts a sad young girl behind a red mask with a happy face. I am familiar with the concept of masks in my own experience. I have felt the pull between white culture and my inherited Japanese culture. It has taken me most of my life to find out who I am. What I have learned is that we are all defined by our connections to those who have gone before us. Each member of my family is an integral part of me and I embrace all of my heritage with pride.

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