YACHIRO o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2007-12-10 published
Priest from Japan ministered to displaced Japanese Canadians
He arrived in Canada for a three-year posting and stayed 26 years.
'He was kind of a reverse missionary. He would write his Sunday
sermons in between periods of Hockey Night in Canada'
By Ron CSILLAG,
Special to The Globe and Mail, Page S10
Toronto -- Upon their arrival in Canada in 1953, Paul Ken
IMAI,
his wife and two children constituted five per cent of all immigrants
from Japan that year. In the decade after the Second World War,
just 409 Japanese émigrés were permitted to come to this country.
Racial hysteria kept all but a trickle of Japanese out of Canada
until 1967, when the government introduced the point system,
which judges potential newcomers primarily on their labour market
skills and adaptability to Canada, rather than racial or ethnic
backgrounds.
A particularly dark chapter in Canadian history began in late
1941. Just weeks after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor and its
invasion the following day of Hong Kong, which led to the death
or capture of 2,000 Canadian troops, Canada invoked the War Measures
Act and declared Japanese Canadians to be enemy aliens.
In British Columbia, where most of them lived, it meant that
22,000 persons of Japanese origin, including Canadian citizens,
were uprooted. The evacuees were relocated to B.C.'s Interior,
scattered about or placed in internment or work camps. They lost
everything. Their homes, fishing boats, businesses and personal
items were taken or destroyed by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
Their land was set aside for returning veterans.
Four months after the war ended, Ottawa made Japanese Canadians
an offer: Be dispersed or return to Japan. About 4,000 people
went back to Japan (voluntarily, the government insisted). About
9,000 settled in Ontario.
That's where Rev.
IMAI, an American-trained Anglican priest,
found a community still recovering, trying to make a life in
the country that had treated them so miserably. Not many of them
were Christian, fewer still were Anglican, but those who were
encountered a gentle, compassionate man who would be a calming
influence in their lives.
"They were uprooted. They wanted to go home but were not allowed,"
remembered Grace, his soft-spoken wife of 60 years. It was a
community still in shock. Her husband "visited people and listened
to them. That was a very good thing for them, to talk about it,"
she went on. "But maybe he couldn't do as much as he wanted."
Though small in number, Mr.
IMAI helped solidify Japanese Anglicans
in Toronto, Hamilton, London, St. Catharines and Montreal. As
a parish priest, he conducted hundreds of baptisms and weddings,
and held Bible classes in Japanese. It was supposed to be a three-year
posting; it lasted for 26 years.
A much-loved pastor, priest and teacher who combined Japanese
serenity with Christian saintliness, Mr.
IMAI represented a distinct
minority. In Japan, where European missionaries were not as successful
as elsewhere in the Orient, fewer than one per cent of the population
is Christian. Japanese tend to borrow freely and without conflict
from Buddhism and Shinto, the indigenous religion of Japan, sometimes
with Christian holidays and traditions thrown in. Mr.
IMAI studied
and was conversant in Shin (Japanese) Buddhism, Zen and Shinto,
but never considered those as alternatives to his beloved church.
He was born of samurai ancestry in Manchuria, then under Japanese
control. His father was a wealthy railroad magnate and devout
Anglican who wrapped his new son in white and offered him to
God's service. He named him Ken, which means "offering" in Japanese.
Mr. IMAI attended Saint Paul's University in Tokyo and studied
at the General Theological Seminary in New York from 1938 to
1940. He was ordained to the priesthood at Christ Church Cathedral
in the city of Sendai.
His family concedes the only gaps in his biography occur during
the war years. He never spoke about them. He felt that as a Christian,
he could not support war, and delivered an anti-war sermon from
the pulpit in the city of Akita around 1941, only to notice a
man in the back row of the sanctuary leave right after it was
over. It turned out that the stranger was a member of Japan's
secret police, and Mr.
IMAI was drafted into the Japanese army
right away.
He served in the dangerous position of scout, and saw front-line
action in the Philippines and New Guinea, where he was captured
by U.S. troops. Japanese soldiers had standing orders to kill
themselves with a poison pill upon capture, but Mr.
IMAI and
a group of others didn't have their suicide pills, so they asked
to be shot in the chest. The Americans declined.
Imprisoned in New Guinea, Mr.
IMAI was soon shipped to a prisoner
of war camp in near the town of Cowra in Australia. Located about
300 kilometres west of Sydney, N.S.W., the facility was home
to some 4,000 Axis inmates. A guard from New York befriended
the young priest and even presented him with a cake on his birthday.
Hunger was the PoW's constant companion, and they wondered what
the crocodiles in nearby streams tasted like.
The Cowra camp became famous when on August 5, 1944, more than
500 Japanese PoWs escaped, or died in the attempt. At the sound
a bugle, hundreds of PoWs charged the wire yelling "Banzai."
The authorities had earlier been tipped off about a planned breakout
and purposely rearmed the guards by replacing their rifles with
machine guns. The gunners mowed down scores of prisoners before
being overwhelmed by sheer numbers, and two were killed. In all,
about 350 PoWs got away but by all accounts few of them expected
to get very far. Some killed themselves, had it done for them
by a comrade or were shot avoiding recapture. Within 10 days,
all 230 survivors had been rounded up. For his part, Mr.
IMAI
did not make it back to Japan until 1946.
He took a job as chaplain at a girls' school in Tokyo. Six years
later, he was called by the Missionary Society of the Church
of England to minister to Japanese-Anglicans in the Toronto area,
then the second-largest such community outside Japan (the first
was in Los Angeles). At the same time, he was awarded a scholarship
to take a master's degree in theology at the University of Toronto's
Trinity College.
"He was kind of a reverse missionary," his son, Shin, said. "He
loved this country. He would write his Sunday sermons in between
periods of Hockey Night in Canada." It was a peripatetic congregation
in those days, more recently settling at St. Andrew Japanese
Congregation, located in St. David's Anglican Church on Donlands
Avenue.
"There was a lot of emphasis on education," recalled Shin
IMAI.
"They really pounded that into us. My parents always said, and
this is fairly common among immigrants, that you have to be -
no insult to anybody - better than white people in order to be
treated the same as white people."
Mr. IMAI maintained a resolute silence about his war experiences.
But there were times at night, his son says, when his father
awoke screaming.
He was appointed an honorary canon of Saint_James Cathedral in
Toronto. Two years later, he and others translated Anglicanism's
central text, the Book of Common Prayer, into Japanese. In her
will, Shizuko
MORITSUGU, the woman who handwrote the edition's
kanji script, specified that a copy be placed in her coffin.
Mr. IMAI retired as parish priest in 1978. For the next five
years, he served as a chaplain at a Japanese school in England,
then as dean of King Alfred's College in Winchester, Wessex.
Back in Toronto, he taught Japanese Bible classes for 11 years,
before Parkinson's disease sidelined him in 1997. As far as his
family knows, he voiced no opinion on the same-sex controversy
now tearing apart the global Anglican communion.
Rev. John WILTON, the
IMAIs' own priest, said he encountered
"holy ground" whenever he visited Mr.
IMAI.
Mr.
WILTON summons
a scene that is sad yet dignified. Deaf, wracked by Parkinson's,
and with most of his English gone, Mr.
IMAI could do little else
in his final days but make the sign of the cross.
Paul Ken IMAI was born in Manchuria on November 10, 1911, and
died in Toronto on November 27, 2007. He was 96. He leaves his
wife Grace
YACHIRO, children Shin, Margaret and Rei, and seven
grandchildren.
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YACK o@ca.on.middlesex_county.london.london_free_press 2007-09-22 published
'Medical condition' may have caused death
By Free Press Staff, Sat., September 22, 2007
A Brigden woman who died five days after a single-vehicle crash
left her with what appeared to be minor injuries, may have had
a medical condition, police said.
Lambton County Ontario Provincial Police were waiting for autopsy
results for Gloria
YACKS yesterday. The 67-year-old woman was
travelling north on Marthaville Road near Bentpath Line September 14
when she lost control of her vehicle, which went through a ditch
and ended up in a field. She went to hospital complaining of
head and back pain, police said.
YACK died September 19 in hospital.
"Now there is an indication that maybe she had a pre-existing
medical condition that led to the crash in the first place,"
said Lambton Ontario Provincial Police Const. John Reurink.
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YACKS o@ca.on.middlesex_county.london.london_free_press 2007-09-22 published
'Medical condition' may have caused death
By Free Press Staff, Sat., September 22, 2007
A Brigden woman who died five days after a single-vehicle crash
left her with what appeared to be minor injuries, may have had
a medical condition, police said.
Lambton County Ontario Provincial Police were waiting for autopsy
results for Gloria
YACKS yesterday. The 67-year-old woman was
travelling north on Marthaville Road near Bentpath Line September 14
when she lost control of her vehicle, which went through a ditch
and ended up in a field. She went to hospital complaining of
head and back pain, police said.
YACK died September 19 in hospital.
"Now there is an indication that maybe she had a pre-existing
medical condition that led to the crash in the first place,"
said Lambton Ontario Provincial Police Const. John Reurink.
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