Grace Eiko Thomson speaks at the 10th Annual Vancouver Asahi Tribute Game in 2015. Ms. Thomson and her family were among 22,000 Japanese-Canadians forced into internment camps three months after the bombing of Pearl harbor in 1941 under the guise of protecting Canada from supposed Japanese turncoats.Kayla Isomura
Grace Eiko Thomson was eight years old when the federal government came for her Vancouver family, ordering them to leave their home of 12 years and move to an abandoned mine site 100 kilometres west of Lillooet, B.C.
Decades of simmering racism against Asian-Canadians had finally found an excuse for action in the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Ms. Thomson and her family – the youngest barely a month old when they had to move in 1942 – were among 22,000 Japanese-Canadians forced into internment camps three months after the bombing under the guise of protecting Canada from supposed Japanese turncoats.
The internment would forever change the lives of Ms. Thomson and her family. Still a child, she had to become the go-between in all communications between the government and her parents, who weren’t fluent in English. Her father, who used to wear a suit and spats to work as a fish buyer, would be relegated to menial jobs from that point on.
“I really feel that, of everything that happened, I am very sad for my father. After 1942, his life was totally destroyed,” Ms. Thomson told the Victoria Times Colonist in a 2019 series on those terrible years.
But the experience would also light a fire against unjust treatment in Ms. Thomson that burned brightly for virtually all of her adult life. Right up until her death from pancreatic cancer on July 11, the 90-year-old was being sought out by archivists and activists across Canada familiar with her deep knowledge of Japanese-Canadian history and powerful voice on behalf of people unfairly pushed into society’s margins.
“To witness an elder from my cultural community stand up and speak truth to power – that totally changed my relationship to my own cultural identity,” says Emiko Morita, executive director of Vancouver’s Powell Street Festival Society. “She has been such a role model to so many people.”
Eiko Nishikihama was the second of five children born to Torasaburo Nishikihama and wife Sawae Yamamoto on Oct. 15, 1933. (She would add the name Grace in her early teens, as a defence against racist comments and routine mispronunciations of her name that she endured in school.)
Grace Eiko Thomson authored her memoir in 2021, Chiru Sakura – Falling Cherry Blossoms: A Mother and Daughter’s Journey through Racism, Internment and Oppression. Her experience in internment led her to become a powerful voice on behalf of people unfairly pushed into society’s margins.Supplied
Her parents were first-generation Japanese immigrants with a home on Vancouver’s Powell Street, a neighbourhood where many other recently arrived Japanese-Canadian families had settled. Her father worked as a buyer for the Codfish Cooperative Society.
Their oldest child, Kikuko, was in Japan visiting her grandparents when the family was ordered to leave the coast. They wouldn’t see her again for 10 years. While the Nishikihamas were mostly able to sell their possessions before being sent to the old Minto Mines site, many Japanese-Canadians lost everything they had, all of it appropriated by government and sold to help pay for the costs of the internment.
Canada’s 40-plus camps began closing at the end of 1944, but families were still prohibited from returning to the coast. Ms. Thomson’s family moved east to Manitoba, where her father had worked for a time after emigrating from Japan in 1921.
His wife’s reaction to the rough barn in rural Manitoba where they first had to move is captured in Ms. Thomson’s 2021 memoir Chiru Sakura, which combined excerpts from her mother’s journaling with reflections from Ms. Thomson’s own life.
“Manure clinging on straw hung stuck to these walls,” wrote her mother. “A bare light bulb hung from the high ceiling. I stood in the middle of this barn, which was to be home to our family of six, and couldn’t hold back the tears.”
The family eventually made their way to Winnipeg, where Ms. Thomson graduated from high school and started work in an insurance office. In 1959, she married school teacher Alistair MacDonald Thomson, with both families supportive of the mixed-race marriage. The couple had two sons, Michael and David, and for a number of years lived a middle-class life in a Winnipeg neighbourhood where Michael recalls being one of the only Asian faces at school.
“As a mom, she had high expectations of us, just as her mother had of her. She expected us to work hard and to make some larger contribution as well,” says Michael Thomson. “My brother is a teacher in Japan and I’m a Superior Court judge here in Manitoba, so I think we took those words in.”
The boys were starting into their teen years when Ms. Thomson went back to school in the 1970s to get a bachelor of fine arts from the University of Manitoba, with further studies at the University of British Columbia. She grew increasingly uncomfortable with being an Asian woman in a “white” life, and the marriage ended in the early 1980s.
“I found myself living a life I had created for myself, that of a white woman in a white household, doing all those things I had heretofore only seen in white magazines,” wrote Ms. Thomson in her memoir. “Except I was not white, and never could be. In intermarrying, I was occupying the margins and the centre simultaneously, but I had not yet realized this.”
Her entry into the Canadian arts community took a decisive turn in 1983. An artist herself, she was invited to be an art advisor to the Inuit printmakers of the Sanavik Co-operative in Baker Lake, Nunavut, flying in a few times a year from Winnipeg. It was the beginning of an enduring connection between Ms. Thomson and Indigenous people, whose stories of colonization echoed the dispossession and injustice of her own experiences.
“Grace was able to see the pattern in what happened to people exposed to racism and discrimination,” says Andrea Geiger, a professor emerita in history at Simon Fraser University. “She was inclusive to her core, without ever losing that recognition that Asian Canadians had specific experiences of racism.”
The federal government’s 1988 apology to Japanese-Canadians who had endured internment brought $21,000 in compensation for each of the 13,000 survivors. Ms. Thomson used hers to acquire a master’s degree from England’s University of Leeds. She landed her first curatorial positions soon after, first at the University of Manitoba, then at the Little Gallery in Prince Albert, Sask.
But family matters pulled her back to Vancouver in 1994, where her parents had returned three decades earlier. Her aging mother was now a widow and needed help. Ms. Thomson took a position with the Burnaby Art Gallery, then became the founding curator of the new Japanese Canadian National Museum (later renamed the Nikkei National Museum and Cultural Centre) in 2000.
She would go on to become president of the National Association of Japanese Canadians in 2008.
Ms. Thomson’s friends remember her commitment to righting wrongs, and using her voice boldly wherever it was needed. “She was an activist not just for the Japanese-Canadian community, but for Indigenous people, the Downtown Eastside, Inuit artists,” says Daien Ide, research archivist for the Nikkei National Museum.
“She was one of a kind,” says long-time friend Judy Hanazawa. “She really went her own way.”
NAJC past president Lorene Oikawa says one of Ms. Thomson’s biggest passions was getting recognition for the Vancouver Asahi baseball team, active for 28 years in the 1900s until internment orders forced its end. The Japanese-Canadian team was renowned for the so-called “brain ball” that players employed to be able to compete against the physically stronger Caucasian teams of that era.
The Asahi Baseball Association was born in Vancouver in 2014 to honour the memory of the original team. Association vice-president Tomio Fukumura says “a conversation about Grace” will definitely be on the agenda in September at the team’s annual legacy game.
Ms. Thomson moved to Winnipeg last September to be closer to family, but kept her condo in Vancouver. Michael Thomson says she clearly spent a lot of her later years writing; he came upon a large cache of writing from both her and her mother while cleaning out the condo after her death. All works will be donated to the Nikkei National Museum.
“Grace has left an indelible mark,” says museum curator Sherri Kajiwara. “She was a feisty, outspoken woman, but always for a reason. She was very much my mentor. I hear that out of the mouths of so many people.”
Ms. Thomson leaves her sister Keiko, her two sons, five grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren.
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