History and Trauma: Fictional Representations of Japanese-Canadian Children in Internment during World War II

Abstract

This thesis investigates the traumatic internment experiences of Japanese-Canadian children during World War II in Canadian fictional writings. After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, many Canadian-born children of Japanese origin, together with their families, began to endure deeper racial prejudice and discrimination than what they had suffered in the past in Canada. Concentrating on the treatment of these children during World War II, this thesis examines the trauma these children have suffered as represented in three adults’ novels, Joy Kogawa’s Obasan (1981), Kerri Sakamoto’s The Electrical Field (1998), and Frances Itani’s Requiem (2011), and two children’s books, Shizuye Takashima’s A Child in Prison Camp (1971) and Kogawa’s Naomi’s Road (2005). These five texts give a fictional representation of personal as well as family histories during World War II with their focus on children’s traumatic experiences. The nature of these texts is a combination of fiction and facts. These fictional documents, so to speak, complement or even revise the one-dimensional official record of this segment of history by telling the stories that had been ignored for so long in the official history of Canada. This research considers both the content and the form through which Japanese Canadian children’s traumatic internment experiences are represented in the five texts aforementioned. The analysis and discussion in this thesis focus on children’s psychological trauma during the internment and their cultural trauma after the internment, as well as their coping mechanisms, that is, how they deal with racism, psychological trauma, and cultural trauma at different life stages. Meanwhile, the narrative form that holds the content is also examined, where the skilful use of narrative techniques in presenting children’s psychological and cultural trauma in both adults’ and children’s books is identified and analyzed.