Pragmatism, Ethics and Aesthetics in the Narratives of the Japanese-Canadian Displacement

Pragmatic, ethical and aesthetic purposes are simultaneously combined in the narratives depicting the decreed mass removal of Japanese Canadians from their Pacific Coast homes during World War II. When dealing with this extremely painful travel experience, Canadian writers of Japanese ancestry have adopted a pragmatist approach that stresses—rather than contradicts—reciprocally reinforcing ethical and aesthetic values. By emphasizing the elements of beauty, pleasure and harmony that are essential in any artistic creation, such authors have both enhanced moral reflection on the part of their audience and strengthened the practical efficacy of their factually grounded works of fiction. All these writers are keen on providing accurate representations of a traumatic journey they were involved in, either directly or through the memoirs of the members of their families who were forced to undertake it. In their writings there are recurrent descriptions of evacuees standing on railway platforms while being insulted and threatened by vociferous crowds. These migrants generally remain silent after boarding CPR trains with their remaining possessions crammed into the single suitcase that each person is allowed to carry as luggage on the trip eastwards. But as Japanese-Canadian novelists have narrated the same events from various perspectives and focused on different aspects of their ordeal, their accounts are far from being uniform. Their literary texts are marked by the categories of genre, gender, and ethnicity, as well as by the personal attitudes of each individual author. The characters portrayed express a wide range of feelings: hope, patience, calmness, serenity, resignation, fear, shame, distress, bitterness, and anger. They invariably miss the ocean, which they mentally connect with their past freedom, and some of them manage to soothe their emotional wounds when the landscape of the prairies brings them memories of their beloved sea. Some of these displaced people find comfort in the magnificent scenery that is ...