bout de papier, Vol. 27, No. 3 (2013) — Autumn 2013 // Automne 2013, pp. 33–34
FINDING JAPAN: EARLY
CANADIAN ENCOUNTERS WITH
ASIA by Anne Park Shannon, Heritage
House Publishing Co. Ltd., 2012, 256 pp.,
$22.95 CDN.
Canada’s fascination with Japan, and Asia generally, seems to come back into fashion every generation or so. We are currently going through another of those surges of interest as a result of trade and diplomatic initiatives. A trade agreement with Japan is under negotiation; Canada and Japan are now negotiating partners within the Trans- Pacific Partnership; and there is frequent talk of LNG plants to ship Canadian gas west across the Pacific to Japan and other markets.
The trade and economic imperatives are clear enough, but a relationship is more than just the flow of goods and money. It is built on and sustained through personal connections, people-to-people linkages and individual lives committed to bridging cultures. These stories are the essence of Anne Park Shannon’s collection of vignettes on early Canadian connections westward across the Pacific.
Finding JAPAN covers a hundred years, beginning with the first documented contact by a Canadian, the Métis adventurer Ranald MacDonald who smuggled his way into Japan in 1848, and concluding with Canada’s scholar-diplomat, Herbert Norman, in the immediate post WWII era. The book is an intriguing, informative and well-illustrated overview of a cast of individual characters — rogues and heroes, scholars and diplomats, missionaries, naval officers, adventurers, educators, politicians, traders and business tycoons — drawn by the exotic world of Japan over a century of contact. As part of the narrative, we meet a host of Canadians and those with ties to Canada who played a multitude of roles in the opening up and modernization of Japan.
After Commodore Perry’s Black Ships forced open its ports in the mid-19th century, Japan had to come to grips with its future path. Would it fight change and try to cling to the closed and traditional ways of the past, despite the disrupting influence of the “foreign barbarians”, or would it embrace what the outside world had to offer and to reviewed by Hugh Stephens become as good, or better, than the foreigners? After the Meiji Restoration in 1868, the die was cast. In urban centres Japanese men adopted Victorian attire, Japanese ladies held tea parties in salons and the door was open for western education. Servants of the British Empire who had spent formative years in Canada helped train the Imperial Navy and build the port of Yokohama. Canadian missionaries hoped to save souls, but even if their converts were few, they helped lay the foundation for some of Japan’s most prestigious educational institutions.
Surprisingly for a supposed male-oriented society, some of the most adventurous and intrepid pioneers documented in Finding JAPAN, were women. There was the remarkable Martha Cartmell who opened her own girls’ school, with the help of Japanese benefactors, in 1884. There was Caroline Macdonald who went to Japan in 1904 and became a well-known prison reformer and labour activist. Agnes Wintemute Coates, a Methodist wife-cum-nutritionist resisted entreaties by her family to be repatriated from Japan during the Second World War, and died in Tokyo in 1943. Margaret Elizabeth Armstrong, who had operated a kindergarten, opted to stay after she retired in 1940 and became a Japanese citizen. She survived the firebombing by the USAF and became the official interpreter for her prefecture for the Occupation Forces after the war.
The stories are not simply about the esoteric and the eccentric; they also extend well into the mainstream of Canadian history, notably the origins of the Canadian Pacific Railway which was as much about the business and strategic imperative of a combined rail and ocean service to Japan and China as it was about Canadian nation building. Sir William Cornelius Van Horne, the energetic entrepreneur who became the railway’s president in 1888, turned to building traffic for the line once it reached tidewater on the Pacific. There was the attraction of the Rockies of course but better still, Vancouver was the gateway to the Orient. Van Horne, a notable collector of Japanese porcelains although he never visited there, publicized the CPR as “the New Highway to the East”, with the railway connecting in Vancouver to a new fleet of CPR steamers to take passengers in comfort to Japan and beyond. Finding JAPAN has several beautiful colour reproductions of fanciful travel posters designed to lure passengers from Europe, eastern Canada and the US to the exotic Orient…Japan, Burma, Siam…via the White Empress route.
Nor is the mounting of commercial exhibitions and the leading of trade missions to Asia a recent phenomenon. Early Canadian leaders, including Governor- General Earl Grey and Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier, saw Japan as a major market for Canadian wheat from the newly opening Canadian west. In 1903, the Canadian government sponsored a major pavilion at the Osaka Exhibition, featuring Canadian products as varied as apples and wood pulp, bicycles and pianos. And it wasn’t all about Canadian entrepreneurs trying to make their fortune in Japan. Business, then as now, went both ways. Tamura Shinkichi established a thriving business in the 1890s in BC, importing Japanese goods and exporting Canadian fish, wheat and flour to Japan. The company’s headquarters, the sturdy Tamura Building at the corner of Powell and Dunlevy in Vancouver, is now a historic landmark.
It is worth remembering that by the 1920s Japan was not only a military ally but an economic powerhouse in its own right and therefore treated somewhat differently from other Asian nations, notably China. While Canada imposed the infamous head tax on Chinese and ultimately used the blunt instrument of the Chinese Immigration Act to limit access by ethnic Chinese to Canada, Japanese immigration was handled through the more diplomatically palatable vehicle of a “Gentleman’s Agreement” reached in 1908, reinforced by a little known visit by the then Deputy Minister of Labour, a young William Lyon Mackenzie King, who went to Japan the following year — and fell under its spell.
No book on Canadians in Japan would be complete without coverage of the Canadian Legation to Japan, opened in 1929 as one of Canada’s first missions abroad, and Finding JAPAN does not disappoint. From Hugh Keenleyside’s advance mission, where he strove to distance himself from the smothering embrace of the British Embassy, to the arrival of the Canadian minister, Herbert Marler, who had the money and temerity to challenge the British ambassador in everything he did, Ms. Shannon takes us on a humorous journey through the saga of establishing Canada’s presence. Marler, a wealthy notary from Montreal and former cabinet minister in Mackenzie King’s government, was not an obvious choice. Although an anglophile, Marler was determined not be treated as a country cousin.
“His five and a half years in Tokyo were a saga of relentless determination to ensure he was never, ever, perceived as inferior to the British ambassador”. Ms. Shannon tells us that Sir John Tilley, the British ambassador, once ruefully remarked, “Herbert Marler makes me feel like a man who late in life finds that he is a twin”.
But while Marler may have been obsessed with protocol, he hada sharp eye for Canadian interests and the strategically located property on which today sits Marler House, the official residence, the Chancery and staff accommodation, is his legacy. The residence itself, built to Marler’s specifications in the early 1930s with his money (later grudgingly reimbursed by the Government), is one of the well-known jewels among Canada’s diplomatic holdings. Today, Canada’s embassy in Japan is one of its largest abroad.
The last chapters of Finding JAPAN deal with the end of the war, the liberation of Canadian prisoners in Japan, and the modern day monument in Onagawa Bay to Lt. Robert Hampton Gray, the last Canadian to win the Victoria Cross (posthumously) on August 9, the day before Japan’s surrender. The book closes with the sad story of Herbert Norman, hounded to his death by the McCarthyites, his scholarly work on Japan all but eclipsed. It is a fitting place to bring the story to a close for from the 1950s on, Japan was re-invented and the sometimes influential, sometimes quixotic quest of individual Canadians to shape Japan came largely to an end. Soon, however, Canadians rediscovered Japan all over again — as a post war market for raw materials and finished products, as a producer of increasingly higher quality consumer products, as a source of substantial investment, and as a home to a rich and deep culture. And they continue to rediscover.
The book is a fascinating insight on a little known era of Japanese-Canadian relations. It helps situate perceptions of Japan in Canada during the pre-W W2 period and foreshadows some of our current interests in Japan and the rest of Asia; fascination with an exotic culture, hope that rising markets can be a bonanza for Canadian exports, a desire on the part of adventurous individuals to plunge into anew world and make their way in it. Finding JAPAN is a not only valuable documentary of the early period of trans-Pacific contact and a well written and very entertaining read, but it reminds us that we owe much to those pioneers who helped shape our perceptions of Asia and who laid the foundations for the relationships that we seek to develop and deepen today.
Hugh Stephens is an Executive-in- Residence at the Asia Pacific Foundation, enjoying life in Victoria, BC. During his 28 years with DFAIT he served at six posts and as ADM for Policy and Communications. In 2001 he joined Time Warner as Senior VP for Public Policy (Asia Pacific) based in Hong Kong, retiring early this year.
View the original scanned pages →
Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 27, No. 3 (2013) — Autumn 2013 // Automne 2013, pp. 33–34. Read the rest of this issue →
