Mark Sakamoto’s "Forgiveness: a Gift From My Grandparents"

It’s a violent world we live in, but Mark Sakamoto’s Forgiveness: A Gift From My Grandparents reminds one that things do change. Through result of the colonial exploitation of the Japanese-Canadian and Canadian POWs in the Second World War, this story helps shape the support of one's cultural identity for Mitsue and Ralph to develop the theme of forgiveness within the novel.

During the Second World War, Canada's 10th prime minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, made decisions from room 409-S in Ottawa's Parliament Buildings, known as "King's War Room.

" At that time Canada was eager to prove itself, writes Sakamoto, and so in 1941 the government sent 2,000 Canadian soldiers to Hong Kong, straight into the line of fire as "passing political opportunism swept military logic out the door." Two years later, though Japan's naval threat had waned, anti-Japanese vitriol reached its apex in Canada, and on the west coast in particular. In 1943, tens of thousands of Japanese-Canadians were forced to carry identification cards and were eventually sent to internment camps in the prairies to await evacuation.

Get quality help now

RhizMan

Verified writer

Proficient in: Biography

4.9 (247)

“ Rhizman is absolutely amazing at what he does . I highly recommend him if you need an assignment done ”

+84 relevant experts are online

Hire writer

Mitsue, her new husband Hideo, and their families were forced from their homes, stripped of growing businesses and carted off to live in squalor as indentured servants on a sugar beet farms in Alberta. Yosuke Oseki is an extremely skilled and talented fisherman, his daughter Mitsue — another grandparent of the subtitle — an equally talented seamstress. Unlike most Japanese families, the author informs us, Yosuke runs a democratic shop at home, with every voice listened to.

Meanwhile British Columbia politicians howl for the removal of the Japanese from the province. Pearl Harbor gives them the opportunity. Soon the Japanese are given notice to abandon their houses, pack what goods they can fit in a wooden box, and head by train for the farmlands of southern Alberta. There they spend the war working in the fields for scant wages.

In this war story, Canada isn't an innocent bystander or righteous do-gooder but actively complicit in the death and oppression of its own citizens, both white and Japanese. Sakamoto writes about forgiveness through the lens of Canada's political foibles, a noble sentiment coming from someone with close ties to a partisan agenda. But in doing so he resurrects the troubled past of this country at a time when the government (national, and municipal, in the case of Toronto) is being accused of being more brutal, restrictive and intolerant than any other point in recent memory. Ralph was captured in Hong Kong and spent five years living under brutal, near-death conditions as a POW in Japan. Through stories of starvation and suffering, outright racism and imprisonment, Sakamoto offers a distinct and dark vantage point to Canadian history – one that does away with any geopolitical binaries of good and evil. Spoiler alert: in spite of the hardship that Sakamoto writes of in vivid detail – deferring, generously, to lived memory over history books – his grandparents pull through. They emerge from the war, not necessarily unscathed, and raise families in Calgary and Medicine Hat, where Mark's parents would eventually meet.

Ralph MacLean survives his imprisonment, returns to Canada, raises a family, including a daughter, Diane MacLean. Mitsue’s son, Stanley Sakamoto (not the mean drunk), falls in love with and marries Diane. Two families, both victims of injustice, both with reasons to hate each other, are united by marriage. Ralph and Mitsue in particular take a shine to each other. “They had both discarded the past,” Sakamoto writes, “keeping only what they needed, leaving the rest behind. They did not compare hardships or measure injustices. They knew there was no merit to that.” What does have merit is forgiveness. “My grandparents bore witness to the worst in humanity,” Sakamoto writes. “Yet they managed to illuminate the finest in humanity. However did they manage that? Forgiveness is moving on. It is a daily act that looks forward. Forgiveness smiles.” Forgiveness is a personal journey but it also reminds us not to forget.