'Legacy of silence': Award-winning play brings stories of Japanese internment to Montreal stage

Montreal-based actor and writer Julie Tamiko Manning was fascinated by the stories of Japanese Canadians who were interned in B.C. during the Second World War. This curiosity was fuelled by her family's history and brought to life The Tashme Project: The Living Archives.

Manning's mother was born in Tashme, the largest of these camps, and her uncles and aunts were interned there as well.

She claims that "legacy of silence" pervaded any discussions about what happened inside the camp. 

"In general, in Japanese Canadian families, it was never something that was spoken about," she told CBC Radio's All in a Weekend.

"I think it was a very shameful experience for them to have everything taken away, being imprisoned because of their race."

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Habour in December 1941, Japanese Canadians were removed from the B.C. coast and sent to internment camps.

The Canadian government confiscated their property and sold everything at auction to cover the cost of internment. Once they were released four years later, they were ordered to disperse.

Almost a decade ago, Manning teamed up with fellow theatre artist Matt Miwa, who is also half Japanese, to start work on what is now The Tashme Project.

The play, running at the Centaur Theatre from Nov. 15 to 24, started its life as a series of interviews conducted with intergenerational survivors of internment.

"We have over 100 hours of interviews," she said.

The two interviewed Japanese people across Canada and from all walks of life, asking them to share their stories from this painful period.

"We just knew that there was this huge subject that was not talked about and if we really wanted to know about it, we would have to break down some barriers and ask," Miwa said.

And there were certainly barriers.

The two creators of the show recall they had to do a lot of convincing to get people to open up and allow their stories to be shared with a wider audience.

The play is a piece of verbatim theatre, meaning that it's text is based entirely on the transcript of those real interviews.

Miwa, whose grandfather was interned at Tashme, said the stories they unearthed were equal parts comic and dark. 

At first, they began by performing readings of the testimony, but over time the project morphed into a play with Miwa and Manning performing all the parts themselves.

"We love performing it, the stories are just so rich," said Miwa. "They have a very particular language and a particular sense of humour. It's great to be able to connect with it and portray it."

Although the Canadian government apologized for internment and officered financial compensation to survivors in the 1990s, Manning says the reverberations are still felt in the community today. 

"So many things were lost," she said. "The identity and pride, pride in your culture, and language, people stopped getting their kids to go to Japanese school after the war."

The Tashme Project is being showcased across Canada and its creators hope the performance will both educate and heal.

"They recognize their voices onstage and their stories have been validated," Manning said.