Susannes Folksong-Notizen
[1987:] Alle in Kalifornien lebenden Japaner kamen [nach Pearl Harbour] in Internierungslager. [...] Vor allem tat mir Peggy [Yoshida] schrecklich leid. Sie fühlte sich als Amerikanerin und empfand es als demütigend, in ein Lager gesteckt zu werden. Man hatte die Japaner gezwungen, ihren gesamten Besitz zu verkaufen, und sie wurden nach Manzanar mitten in der kalifornischen Wüste 'umgesiedelt'. Überfüllte Busse brachten sie dorthin, wo leere Holzbaracken, die man eiligst in dem heißen, unfruchtbaren Sand errichtet hatte, auf sie warteten. Ein halbes Jahr später schickte mir Peggy Fotos von dem Lager. Mit Fleiß und Geschick hatten die Japaner es in einen blühenden Garten verwandelt. (Salka Viertel, Das unbelehrbare Herz 272f.)
[1993:] About the movement of Japanese Canadians into internment camps at the beginning of the Second World War. [...] It is being argued by some writers that it is never appropriate for a writer (or a songwriter) to speak in the voice of someone of a different gender or cultural group. Keelaghan sees this stand as a potential threat to freedom of voice and creativity, but he concedes that it did cause him to write some of these songs in a different way. "I wouldn't have written Kiri's Piano the way I wrote it if it wasn't for that debate. I would have taken the easy way out, and I would have written it from Kiri's point of view, and glossed it over with, 'Oh, I'm so hard done by because I'm a Japanese person who ...' when in fact that's not what they feel at all. Largely what that generation feels is shame, which I can't understand. I could have written about that and I would have sounded like a white guy singing about Japanese problems. Writing about it from the point of view of a white guy who is actually the bad guy is fine, but I am also not an RCMP officer, and I wasn't alive during the Second World War. Does that mean I can't write about it or I can only write about how I felt hearing the story? [...]
It's hard to imagine what it must have been like for innocent immigrants to have been stripped of their belongings and herded into internment camps, the domestic North American version of P.O.W. camps. Hard to imagine, too, an immigrant's internal loyalty conflict and the struggle to maintain one's dignity in the face of impossible prejudice." (Ken Hunt, Sing Out 38/2)
[1996:] Kiri is the grandmother of the husband of a friend of my sister's. She still plays the piano beautifully, and she's almost a hundred years old. Before the war she used to have a white upright. During the Second World War many Canadians of Japanese descent living on the west coast were interned in labour camps in places like my home, South Alberta. Most of them were fishermen, and very good fishermen. They were dispossessed of everything they owned, and made to do things like weed sweet beet. Many of them never went back to the west coast. (Intro James Keelaghan)
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