Poet Roy Miki was a prominent activist in redress movement for Japanese Canadians

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The cruel circumstances of Roy Miki’s birth set his lifelong path.

Born to parents in forced internal exile, he spent more than a decade of his life fighting for compensation for fellow Japanese Canadians who had been torn from their homes, jobs and businesses during the Second World War.

Mr. Miki, who has died at 81, joined his older brother Arthur as leading voices of what became known as the redress movement.

Roy Miki’s deep academic knowledge of the English language informed the campaign to address the injustices faced by his family and more than 21,000 other people of Japanese ancestry.

The forced relocation from homes along the West Coast and the seizure of property left survivors grappling with language to express the sense of loss they felt, which was personal and emotional, as well as financial.

“We found that people had problematic relationships with their memories,” Mr. Miki told the Vancouver Sun in 2006. “The memories themselves were very vivid, but often locked into private territory.”

Seeking precision in language led the movement to adopt redress – a relief from distress, as well as compensation for a wrong – as a defining word.

“We had to ask, ‘What was the loss? Was it just material goods, or was there something else, less tangible, that had been lost?’”

In 1988, 46 years after the community had been uprooted and forced into relocation, Japanese Canadians won a formal apology from the federal government, as well as a settlement of its claim for compensation.

The movement’s successful campaign was revisited twice by Mr. Miki in the books Justice in Our Times: The Japanese Canadian Redress Settlement (1991), co-authored with Cassandra Kobayashi, and Redress: Inside the Japanese Canadian Call for Justice (2004).

Mr. Miki was an accomplished poet, essayist and editor. He taught Canadian and contemporary literature to a generation of students at Simon Fraser University in the Vancouver suburb of Burnaby.

“He modelled what it is to be a mentor, to be a radical and responsible political thinker, and to envision more when more seems impossible,” former student Wayde Compton, a University of Victoria assistant professor, wrote in tribute after Mr. Miki’s death.

A visionary known for supporting young writers, Mr. Miki was often described as a gentle soul known for his fierce advocacy.

His inheritance at birth was an innocent family’s disbelief at their treatment by authorities.

“My guess is that most Japanese Canadians could have lived with the internment of Japanese nationals,” he said in 1983. “What they would never be able to comprehend was the decision to uproot and intern all of them, Canadian-born.”

Roy Akira Miki was born to the former Shizuko Ooto and Kazuo Miki, a logger. Both parents had been born in British Columbia, his mother in Port Essington, a cannery town on the Skeena River about 30 kilometres southeast of Prince Rupert, and his father in Tynehead, today a neighbourhood in the Vancouver suburb of Surrey.

The Miki family lived in a modest, four-room, hand-built home on 14 acres owned by Shizuko’s father in Haney, now part of Maple Ridge. An orchard provided a bounty of apples, peaches and plums.

After Imperial Japan’s sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, the Canadian government declared Japanese Canadians to be “enemy aliens” under the War Measures Act, seizing property and forcibly removing people to the east. Kazuo Miki was given registration number 13914.

The Miki family, including a pregnant Shizuko and three children, were sent to a sugar beet farm in the Red River Valley south of Winnipeg at Ste. Agathe. By agreeing to handle backbreaking labour on the farm, the Mikis avoided the family breakups common in the internment camps of British Columbia. A fourth child, Roy, was born in a Winnipeg hospital on Oct. 10 during the 1942 harvest.

The first home Mr. Miki remembered from his boyhood was a ghetto for farmworkers in North Kildonan, outside Winnipeg.

“We lived in a little shack divided into three rooms,” he said in 1992 on the 50th anniversary of the forced removal. “My grandparents slept in one room, the kids were in one room and my parents slept in the living room-kitchen. Lots of people were crammed into those little houses.”

Even after the war had ended, Japanese Canadians were forbidden from living in the city. His parents walked an hour to the streetcar line to get to jobs in the city.

“Those were pretty rough days, especially for my mother. She worked at Dominion Tanners, a smelly, horrible, awful place.”

Years later, Mr. Miki remembered the toe-curling stench on his mother’s work clothes.

Even after seizing the family’s assets and preventing the elder Miki from continuing to work as a logger, debt collectors corresponded with the family through the federal government for overdue payments for doctor bills likely incurred during the birth of one of their children.

The family’s file, as compiled by the Landscapes of Injustice research project at the University of Victoria, details the many humiliations they faced in internal exile. The elder Mr. Miki desperately seeks to maintain a $1,000 life insurance policy though he is unable to pay the premiums. He is notified that his 1928 truck has been sold without his approval. Meanwhile, debt collectors seek to be reimbursed for medical fees as high as $125 (about $2,190 today) and as low as $3. He had been making payments up until forced from his job shortly after the Pearl Harbor attack.

After earning just $222 working on the 1943 harvest, the family had to accept relief to get through the winter. A welfare officer wrote the debt collector that “they have been one of our problem families since coming to this part of the country,” as though their dire straits reflected personal incompetence and not government cruelty.

“Throughout my childhood,” Mr. Miki told CBC Radio’s Shelagh Rogers in 2014, “my parents were always in fear of any letters that came from the government that were written in English with a lot of bureaucratic gobbledygook because it always meant something harmful to them.”

As they rebuilt their lives in Winnipeg in the 1950s, Roy Miki played Little League baseball even as he struggled with his identity, insisting he was Canadian, not Japanese, in response to the racist barbs he often heard.

Seeing the power language had over his parents, Mr. Miki decided to become a writer. He earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of Manitoba, a master’s at Simon Fraser University and a doctorate from the University of British Columbia, all in English.

The doctorate was threatened when, just eight weeks from his deadline, his manuscript was stolen from his westside Vancouver home. He suspected the thief sought not his insight on the poetry of William Carlos Williams but the expensive briefcase in which it rested. With his university teaching job also on the line, Mr. Miki managed to complete his thesis within an extended six-month deadline.

Mr. Miki’s writings explored questions of identity and citizenship from an anti-racist and Asian Canadian perspective.

In 1983, he founded a critical literary journal called Line, which later merged with West Coast Review to become West Coast Line.

He released six collections of poetry, including Surrender (2001), which won the Governor-General’s Award. His final collection, edited by Michael Barnholden, was Flow (2018), which also included the writer’s still photography, as well as photographic collages.

He edited several volumes of other writers, including Muriel Kitagawa, Roy K. Kiyooka and bpNichol. He also edited, with Smaro Kamboureli, Trans.Can.Lit.: Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature (2007).

His essays were gathered in the collections Broken Entries: Race, Subjectivity, Writing (1998) and In Flux: Transnational Shifts in Asian Canadian Writing (2011).

His annotated bibliography of the poet and novelist George Bowering, titled A Record of Writing (1989), won the Gabrielle-Roy Prize from the Association of Quebec and Canadian Literatures as the best work of Canadian literary criticism published in English.

After retiring from the university in 2007, he co-wrote two children’s books with his wife: Dolphin SOS, which won a BC Book Prize in 2015, and Peggy’s Impossible Tale, which won the Chocolate Lily Award for children’s books by British Columbia authors in 2023.

In 1994, Mr. Miki was one of the organizers of the controversial Writing Thru Race conference in Vancouver, which was criticized for offering workshops for Indigenous and racialized writers without the presence of White writers. After Reform party members of Parliament criticized the conference for being racist, the federal heritage minister withdrew $22,500 in funding. The shortfall was covered by the writer Pierre Berton and others.

Mr. Miki explained the workshops were designed so writers could network and share their internalized experiences of racism.

“The premise is that there is not equal access to public space,” Mr. Miki said. “We wanted to create a temporary space where people could develop strategies to move out into the mainstream.”

Among the many honours Mr. Miki received were being named to the Order of Canada (2006), as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (2007) and to the Order of B.C. (2009). In 2006, he was presented the Thakore Visiting Scholar Award, which honours those who have sought justice with a non-violent approach. The award, previously won by First Nations leader Ovide Mercredi and Burmese Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, was presented on Mohandas Gandhi’s birthday.

Vancouver publisher Rolf Maurer of New Star Books, which published Mr. Miki’s poetry collections There (2006) and Mannequin Rising (2011), noted on his death: “The work that Roy Miki did to make this a better place will continue to reverberate and influence long after his own leaving of it.”

Mr. Miki died on Oct. 5, five days before what would have been his 82nd birthday. He leaves his wife of 57 years, the former Slavia Knysh, as well as a son, Waylen Miki, and a daughter, Elisse Miki. He also leaves a grandson, as well as siblings Art Miki and Joan Jalmarson. He was predeceased by his brother Leslie Miki, who died in 2009, aged 71.

In 1988, the redress movement won payments of $21,000 for each of the estimated 13,000 survivors, including Mr. Miki’s mother. (“I’m so happy my children were fighting for it,” she told CBC’s The National.) The survivors and the community also received a formal apology in the House of Commons from prime minister Brian Mulroney.

Some, including Mr. Miki’s maternal grandfather with the bountiful orchard in Haney, never recovered from the trauma of being uprooted.

“My grandfather died from it,” Mr. Miki once told Steve Berry of the Vancouver Province. “He died a bitter man. He could never forgive. He lost the will to live and just withered away – but all was silence, no one ever really talked about it.”

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