Kato’s Boy: A Story of Japanese Canadians During WWII
Shigeo Antoine Kato was Canadian with conditions– a citizen with strings attached.
Shigeo Antoine Kato was Canadian with conditions– a citizen with strings attached.
By Yukiko Takahashi-Lai, YCW Archives Intern
The Archives of North Vancouver are in an ongoing dialogue with racialised and oppressed communities in pursuit of continuous decolonisation. For the month of January, we at the Archives of North Vancouver have been focusing on the production of a Nikkei History Research Guide as a companion to our Black History Guide. As research began, the timeline of the Kato family became a project of personal interest. Seeking clarification on some photographs, I was able to make contact with a living descendant of Shigeo Kato, the first Nikkei in the Canadian Army of WWII.
During the Second World War (1939-1945), the country of Japan aligned itself with the Axis powers, Germany and Italy. Of the opposing Allied powers, Great Britain rallied countries in the Commonwealth to battle, including Canada. However, in the Canadian government’s fervour to strengthen itself as an ally to Great Britain (and later to the United States), politicians found themselves sifting through the population looking for those who could be a threat to national security. Because of Japan’s alliance with the Axis powers, Canadians of Japanese descent, also known as “Nikkei”, became enemies of the state. Many had families that had been in Canada for generations, had English as a first language, and had never seen Japan. Despite their position as established community members, the Canadian government stated that those with Japanese heritage were guilty by fault of ethnicity.
Beginning in 1942, racist policies were enacted that stole the property, livelihoods, and safety of 21,000 Japanese Canadians. Members of the community who had lived their whole lives along the coast of B.C. were uprooted, dispossessed, and dehumanised, either sent to internment camps or work camps closer to the interior. After the war ended, the Canadian government coerced Japanese Canadians into either permanently moving inland (away from the coast) or being deported to Japan. In August of 1945, those who refused to leave their homes were said to have agreed to “voluntary repatriation”. The order was given that 10,000 Japanese Canadians be “repatriated” to Japan. These racist laws and procedures targeting those of Japanese descent were not fully removed until 1949.
Tosaku Kato and his wife Nakako (née Iwasaki) left Japan in 1900, travelling from Hawaii to Seattle, eventually settling in Vancouver. Together, they had many children, Shigeo Antoine (1901), Kazuo Joe (1910), Yoshiye Mary (1912), Akira Rex (1918), and George (1921). Tosaku was a prominent figure in the North Vancouver logging industry, as a contract boss for many Nikkei who were recruited as labourers for lumber mills. His nickname was “The Commission Boss” as he ran two or three camps in North Vancouver and took a commission of 25 cents for every “cord” of shingle bolts (sections of logs used to make roof tiles) amounting to almost $9 per cord in today’s money. In the late 1920s, he went bankrupt as a result of a crash in the shingle market. From that point on, he worked as a general labourer to sustain his family until his children were able to join the workforce.
Tosaku and Nakako’s eldest son, Shigeo Antoine, was one of the few Japanese Canadians allowed to serve in the Canadian Army during the Second World War. Though he was initially rejected without stated reason (most likely due to his race), his case was eventually approved by the Department of National Defense on July 26th of 1941, making him the first Nikkei in the Canadian Army of WWII. Growing up around loggers and lumber mills, Shigeo was a valuable addition to the Canadian Forestry Corps, and was deployed overseas to harvest lumber for the war effort. Left in Canada during his deployment were his wife, Elizabeth Ellen (née Crowther), and his two children, Robert and Marion.
Shigeo’s hard work was recognised when he was picked up by British Intelligence and employed as a translator and interrogator in Burma due to his ability to speak Japanese. However, while he served, his family was displaced from Vancouver. His parents and youngest brother George were interned in New Denver in separate camps. Kazuo Joe and Akira Rex were sent to Toronto as they were single men– Kazuo eventually followed in Shigeo’s footsteps and joined the Canadian infantry. Yoshiye Mary was interned in both Slocan and Revelstoke.
Shigeo’s children, due to their white mother, were able to avoid internment, though they faced intense discrimination. In 1944, Elizabeth Ellen, Shigeo’s wife, decided to change their surname to “Cato” in an attempt to pass off herself and the children as Italian. This attempt to protect their children was largely ineffective, and their son, Robert, was sent to Steveston for his safety. Shigeo and Elizabeth Ellen divorced in 1946 when he was still deployed. He married again, to Dora Annie Wilkinson, a war bride he had met while working for British Intelligence. They settled in Port Moody.
Post-war, Shigeo and his brother, Kaz, were coerced into signing a fifty year agreement of silence, refusing to talk about their experiences under the Canadian military. To his own granddaughter, Shigeo explained he had worked too hard to ensure that his family could be Canadians, and as such, they needed to live like Canadians. He never spoke Japanese again. He would not allow his family to learn Japanese. Shigeo eventually ended up at Shaughnessy Hospital with the onset of dementia, dying in his sleep on January 14, 1981. He did not live to see the formal redress and apology of Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney in 1988.
Shigeo Kato, a soldier, lived in a Canada that would not protect him or his family. While he was awarded medals for his service to the country, his family was forced to live in bare shacks, robbed of their belongings and freedoms. From his childhood growing up in North Vancouver lumber yards, to his death at Shaughnessy Hospital, he lived his life in service to a community and country that dehumanised him and his family. Shigeo Kato, a father, a grandfather, and a great-grandfather, left behind a legacy of Japanese Canadians who defined Canadian identity by their own terms– in freedom that he was denied. It is significant to note that despite Kato’s contributions to Canada, he was still humiliated by a hypocritical government that accepted his labour of his body, but not the heart of his personhood. In order to determine the future of Canadian redress, it is therefore necessary to understand how Japanese Canadians and their families were permanently affected by racist policies. In this, the Canadian government continues to work in reconciliation with multiple communities recovering from state violence.
Today, Shigeo Kato’s grandchildren live in New Westminster, Nanaimo, and Duncan. His direct descendants still hold the legal last name “Cato”, a remnant of the war. One of his granddaughters works to preserve his story, collaborating with the Nikkei National Museum & Cultural Centre and the Japanese Canadian Legacies Society. I was enormously privileged to consult her for this article.
References
McRae, Matthew. 2017. “Japanese Canadian Internment and the Struggle for Redress.” Canadian Museum for Human Rights. May 19, 2017. https://humanrights.ca/story/japanese-canadian-internment-and-struggle-redress.
Robinson, Greg, and Andrew McIntosh. 2017. “Internment of Japanese Canadians.” The Canadian Encyclopedia. February 15, 2017. https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/internment-of-japanese-canadians.
Sunahara, Ann G. 1981. The Politics of Racism: The Uprooting of Japanese Canadians During the Second World War. Toronto: Lorimer.
Vancouver Sun. 1941. “Shigeo Kato Gets a Uniform: Only Japanese in the Army,” August 30, 1941.
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