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Episode 10 - A Game with No Players
50 Plays4 months ago
Japan is well-known for being a place where many talented baseball players have come from. Prior to World War II, a team in Vancouver named the "Asahi" would bring a unique flavour of the game wherein instead of brawn they'd use brains.
However, due to the racist and unnecessary actions of the Canadian government during Second World War, these players alongside other Japanese-Canadians would find themselves subjected to mistreatment and interned in camps until the conclusion of the war, with further discrimination following suit.
This is unfortunately not a light-hearted episode.
This episode's news:
https://atlantic.ctvnews.ca/more/here-s-what-happens-to-rejected-halifax-bridge-coins-1.6969473
Heritage Minute:
https://www.historicacanada.ca/productions/minutes/vancouver-asahi
Sleeping Tigers by the NFB:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxBWg4zxTkQ
We now have a Patreon!
https://patreon.com/shawiniganmoments
Shawinigan Moments is written and recorded on the unceded territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Stó:lō (Stolo), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) first nations in what is otherwise called Vancouver.
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Transcript
Escalator Mishaps and Innovations
00:00:00
Speaker
Actually, staying on Escalator, I have seen someone fall down in Escalator. Yeah, it's painful to watch. I was like, this is back when I was living in Edmonton. I was at whatever the U of A's underground station is because there's another station at U of A. I was waiting for a train and this guy all of a sudden rolls down the Escalator and I'm like, I can't think of anything more painful than that.
00:00:23
Speaker
like I have a friend who has fallen up an escalator and that cut open her knee and like she had to get stitches and all that and like I think falling down the escalator is like you know possibly gonna kill you if you go hard enough. Yeah. Escalators suck. I kind of hate them like it's they they do terrify me to a certain extent and also for they're so efficient. They're so efficient but they're not stairs when they're broken because they're unsafe when they're broken. Yeah which is why we should have an all walk in an all stand escalator.
00:00:53
Speaker
Sure. Not legit. This is the one time, this is the one time listeners where you're going to hear Tamarack advocating for just one more lane. Imagine you just replaced roads of escalators. It might actually work better in some ways, but
00:01:15
Speaker
Like, I mean, Counterpoint, moving people via personal individual passenger cars is about the worst way to transport people. Eh, just one more lane. We just need one more lane. It's fine.
00:01:27
Speaker
Yeah, but like legit, having basically the express all just walk up or walk down escalator in the middle with a passing lane, like the wide ones, and then having a narrow just stand here, it's too narrow so you can't pass anyone.
00:01:46
Speaker
escalator where everybody's just standing single file is the best case scenario for like moving a shit ton of people like those awful escalators to never work at the bay downtown yes those ones at the bay downtown are fucking amazing at their job because you can't pass anyone on them yeah but they're never working half the time anyway so you're not gonna pass anybody because they're just gonna walk up the stairs
00:02:10
Speaker
Well, that's because the bay is run by a company that is a large- It's a real estate company. Yeah, it's a large retailer that does not want- No, no, it's not a retailer. It's a real estate company that does sometimes retail. Yeah, I was going to describe it more along the lines of it's a retail company that wants nothing more than to not do any retail.
Podcast Introduction and Sports Highlights
00:02:34
Speaker
Yeah, fair enough. Shall we start the show? Sure. Okay.
00:02:44
Speaker
What's up, sports fans? It's ya Envy! What's up, sports fans? It's your Envy Tamarack here for our thrilling conclusion of our baseball trilogy. I'm Tamarack, my pronouns are they them or it it.
00:03:02
Speaker
My name is Heather and my pronouns are she or they, and I do not consent. This is, look, look, eventually we're going to have an audience large enough that they're going to need a collective noun. And if you do not stop me, it's going to be sports fans, despite the fact that we're out of sports episodes. We're not out of sports episodes. We have several sports episodes to do in the future. The basketball episode is barely a sport at that point. Yeah. What about the hockey one? We have a hockey one as well. Uh, that's true.
00:03:32
Speaker
And there's probably another one that I'm forgetting. Like, who knows? Like, we're not going to have any, don't we have an Olympics one? Oh, shit. Yeah. I think we have a few Olympics ones. Yeah. We have one on the CFL we got to do. That's actually the most recent one. So that's probably why we haven't really noticed it. Technically, we could do Terry Fox and that's not a sport. He was running.
00:03:54
Speaker
Yeah, I guess that Terry Fox, interestingly, puts into question my next claim, which is this is probably going to be our darkest sports episode. Yeah, this is the one that's going to be quite.
00:04:09
Speaker
Upsetting for an until we find another one to talk about that's gonna be quite upsetting So in the light of that, yes I have I have borrowing from another podcast that we both listen to I have prepared a list of dubious animal facts Both dubious because they're just from a frickin internet listicle before AI so it's not machine-generated They are additionally dubious animal facts because one of them I just made up
00:04:40
Speaker
You're going to make me figure out if it's bullshit. Yes. Uh, but first we have a segment on this podcast where we do the news.
Unique Tolling Systems in Halifax
00:04:49
Speaker
So let's do the news. All right, Tamara, for me. Yeah. So have you ever been Halifax?
00:05:00
Speaker
I have not been to Halifax. You haven't had the pleasure of being to Halifax. I'm sorry. It's actually a really nice place. Honestly, the Blue Nose episode kind of made me want to go. Well, maybe you should take a vacation out there. I highly recommend it. Halifax is probably one of my favorite Canadian cities that I have not spent enough time in. The waterfront looks so gorgeous. It is. That's actually what I want to be talking about here, sort of.
00:05:29
Speaker
The I've gone there a couple times for business when I was a consultant and I haven't gone back since and I've been on and off and wanting to just take a vacation to Nova Scotia in general. You know, just go out and see like PEI and New Brunswick while I'm at it. PEI and New Brunswick alongside Newfoundland are the only provinces I have never set footed. I've just flown over New Brunswick, but I've never managed to set foot in it.
00:05:57
Speaker
This is from from CTV just yesterday, believe it or not. Usually we're a couple of weeks behind on the news. And there is a bridge that goes across the Halifax Harbor that you still throw coins into. What? Yeah. So.
00:06:14
Speaker
So this is a bridge that goes from Halifax to Dartmouth. And when you cross the bridge, you have to pay a toll. This toll has been there for as long as the bridge has been in existence. And all there is, is there's a bucket, you throw your coins into it and you drive off, right? Yeah. And generally speaking, they prefer if you use what they call the MAC pass. Mm-hmm.
00:06:37
Speaker
And the Mac pass is just, you know, a little thing says, yeah, you can cross this bridge and you just get billed every month. We used to have something like that here. It was called the trio. Yes. For the, for the new, for the new less architecturally interesting, uh, port man bridge.
00:06:53
Speaker
The bridge that goes across Halifax Harbor is, you know, it's a bridge. There's nothing fancy to be said about it. It's just a standard suspension bridge. What's that? Oh, it's a suspension bridge. It's a suspension bridge. This is the bridge that gets you across Halifax Harbor. And in this, what they have collected are coins that have been, you know, dropped in the buckets and, you know, always legitimate legal tender.
00:07:20
Speaker
Well, that's actually the issue because there's a lot of interesting coins. As quoted by someone in the article, there are coins from Vanatu, which is an island in South Pacific, Australia and New Zealand. Every country in Central America is represented. Every country except Paraguay in South America is represented. And then it gets worse. When is a coin from Yugoslavia? Oh, hell yeah. One was a dream lives.
00:07:51
Speaker
Yeah, the global currency from Yugoslavia. One was a East Berlin coin that was minted before World War II, so probably has some questionable things on it. No, I approve of that. I think if you are in possession of any Reichmarks, the correct thing to do is throw them into a fucking bucket.
00:08:16
Speaker
to cross a bridge. I would not want to have a Reichmark from the 1930s personally. Throw it in a bucket to cross a bridge.
Travel Tips to Halifax
00:08:27
Speaker
Fantastic use for it. Because I assume these are going to get melted down or some shit. The other thing I was going to mention is a Russian ruble that was minted before World War I.
00:08:38
Speaker
Oh, wow. That would be something I would love to have on my hands. And these are coins not collected since the bridge's conception. These are coins from the past 25 years.
00:08:52
Speaker
So there are 3.3 million crossings every year with 20% paying by cash. And once a coin is tossed into the basket, the system is able to identify 36 approved types of coins. The rest are rejected. And I'm like, wait, so you accept non Canadian money because there are only so many coins in Canada. There's like, they don't take pennies.
00:09:18
Speaker
So, and they probably don't take Nick. Well, okay. So let's ignore the penny. So nickel dime. There's technically a 50 cent piece, although you would never see it out in the wild. Generally a dollar coin and a $2 coin. Like, are you accepting American money? I feel like taking a trip out to Halifax on August 4th, they're going to have some of these coins visible for the public to see. Unfortunately, I will not be able to go because I will be flying off a couple of days after that to go across to the ocean.
00:09:47
Speaker
Nor will I see the previous episode where I dropped a map of what it actually takes to cross the country. It takes nine hours to fly to Halifax from Vancouver. There are direct flights and it makes it a little bit shorter, but I always like explaining this to Europeans especially. It takes as long to fly to St. John, Newfoundland as it does to fly to London. It's roughly about the same time. Yeah.
00:10:16
Speaker
But nobody flies direct from Vancouver to St. John's. So you're not going to be taking the same amount of time. It's probably gonna be more like nine hours. It takes nine hours because of the connection in Toronto or whatever to get to Halifax.
00:10:31
Speaker
I just want to note they're having all this trouble with with rejected coins. So they only take the they don't take pennies, nickels, the five cent piece or the 10 cent piece. Although the 10 cent piece is so light that a lot of like automated coin machines in Canada just don't take them. The guy that they interview in it and I don't I don't think this is going to make a clip if we clip it into the episode. But they interview a guy from their from their toll booth who
00:10:58
Speaker
straight up says, yeah, we get a lot of inquiries about just having like debit or tap. It's not something we're looking into. And it's like, well, your coin problems gonna keep happening then.
00:11:12
Speaker
Like, what is wrong with you?
Animal Fact or Fiction? Challenge
00:11:16
Speaker
That's the news. So today, I have for you a tale about how a sport, a church, and a still pretty good park, all things considered, fostered a thriving community that took the full power of the federal government and an intentional atrocity to destroy. So a day ending in Y. This one's something else. No, that's not good.
00:11:41
Speaker
I just want to note a thing. Most listeners are going to be aware of the horrific state of anti-Black racism in the United States, and we're probably able to infer during last episode a lot of the challenges faced by the Robinsons when they were in Montreal. There is a long history of anti-Asian racism in Canada.
00:12:05
Speaker
particularly in British Columbia, which doesn't get a lot of the spotlight, both outside of Canada where we maple wash the ever-loving bejesus out of our national image, and within Canada where our education system kind of just carries water for genuinely evil actions done by our government and
00:12:28
Speaker
the way in which like the mistreatment of people who were important contributors to like the province, to our culture, to our industry, like how they were just openly mistreated and it was not only permitted, it was actively sanctioned. So yeah, we're gonna talk about that. This is going to be a mildly heavy episode, which is why I prepared to the dubious animal facts.
00:12:58
Speaker
I look forward to figuring out which one is bullshit. Without further ado, roll the clip. We were born in Canada. We spoke English. On the streets, we weren't welcome. But on the field, we were the assassin. Vancouver's champions.
00:13:25
Speaker
So today we're talking about the Vancouver Asahi, who are now my favorite baseball team, and it will be a long road to get to why. But first, let's talk about the absolute state of British Columbia for immigrants from China and Japan in the late 1800s. Ah, during a time when lots of them were dying building the railroad. Yeah, this is why I start off today's episode talking about the Chinese head tax.
00:13:55
Speaker
Ah, yes, a highly successful endeavor.
00:13:59
Speaker
Well, OK, so I think a thing that we're we're basically going to walk over how I got radicalized as an anarchist. And this is going to start with in 1885, the Chinese head tax was was instituted, which was basically in addition to immigration quotas, which were very strict, a $50 fee
00:14:25
Speaker
I can't get the 2024 loonies equivalent because Bank of Canada inflation data does not go back that far but a $50 fee which was several thousand dollars was instituted on every Chinese immigrant entering into Canada and this was pushed for
00:14:43
Speaker
heavily by BC industry as well as the government of British Columbia at the time. The year is interesting because 1885 is also the year where we just got done throwing
History of Chinese Immigration to Canada
00:14:55
Speaker
a bunch of Chinese immigrants into the meat grinder to go and build this fucking country. They were instrumental in the construction of the railway, which was
00:15:05
Speaker
in itself instrumental in the integration of British Columbia into Canada as a whole. Without that railway, it's kind of dubious whether or not British Columbia would have joined Canada. Well, just to put the context of how important that railway was to
00:15:25
Speaker
British Columbia joining Confederation was that it was a condition of British Columbia becoming part of the project. And one of the things that was coming up was during the construction of the railway, it was delayed enough that there was sable rattling coming from Victoria in terms of whether or not British Columbia should, you know,
00:15:52
Speaker
consider alternatives rather than be part of the country. And this, of course, did not happen. But many kilometers upon kilometers upon kilometers, kilometers of the Pacific, the Canadian Pacific Railway, much of it through cutting through the Rockies and the Fraser Canyon in particular, came at the expense of many Chinese persons lives.
00:16:17
Speaker
Yes, to paraphrase a rail head that I volunteered with maintaining trestles in the Kettle Valley Railway, the rails were made of wood and steel and ballast, but they were primarily made of the blood of Chinese immigrants. They would be subjected to horrific work camps
00:16:44
Speaker
um as in like the camps that they stayed in while they were out laying rail and just horrifically dangerous conditions blasting their way through the un- the unyielding and uncaring Rocky Mountains and later the Cascades. And for their efforts they were heavily discriminated against because
00:17:08
Speaker
Not only to add insult to injury, by 1900 the head tax doubled to $100. A 1902 royal commission on Chinese and Japanese immigration considered the head tax inadequate.
00:17:26
Speaker
Reasoning, among other things, that these Chinese are non-assimilative and have no intention of settled citizenship are in moral, social, and sanitary status below the most inferior standard of Western life.
00:17:41
Speaker
Yeah, one of the things that we can kind of reference back in episode three, when we were talking about the Ever-Ero, I made reference to Victoria's Chinatown, which itself is quite storied and something I know better than Vancouver's Chinatown for whatever stupid reason.
00:18:00
Speaker
And Chinatowns exist primarily because that was really the only place where persons of Chinese descent were allowed to have private property ownership, like the land was deeded by the cities. Yes.
00:18:17
Speaker
have Chinese persons inhabit, or, you know, set up business or both, I guess, the existence of gates at Chinatowns are rooted in so much controversy. And it's something at some point I would love to talk about when we have an opportunity. But the existence of Chinatowns
00:18:40
Speaker
are really rooted in this particular problem. They existed well before the 1885 head tax I must add, but there's a reason why they exist. Specifically, they existed for one of two reasons, usually both. One, safety in numbers. The climate around them, it wasn't safe to just have your community dispersed
00:19:04
Speaker
around being, and we will see this exactly, this play out in a moment, it was one for safety, two, they cropped up in land where the white majority would permit them to settle. Some cases it was only one of the two reasons, but typically it was both where
00:19:27
Speaker
they would be excluded from large portions of the land by the white majority and basically coalesce on one of those little exclaves. We'll get into also the fraught nature of Japantown in Vancouver in a moment, but this is also the reason why Chinatown is primarily along the Pender Corridor.
00:19:52
Speaker
And Japantown is just a little bit to the north along Powell Street. This is not accidental. This was just the only place they were allowed to live in the shadow of the Slaughterhouse District.
00:20:06
Speaker
And just to add to that, and something you'll see playing out today is much of the problems facing Vancouver in terms of unhoused persons and that sort of thing. They all congregate around the Chinatown area and that is by design, it is very easy to overlook this fact but
00:20:27
Speaker
it continues to this day even though the same shit that was happening at this point in history and then as we go further into the story isn't playing out now it doesn't mean that there's still like there's not echoes of it today yeah one of the things that annoys me about typically people on the like right-wing urbanists who want to talk about revitalizing chinatown and that they failed to mention is that revitalizing it to what the slum that it originally was
00:20:59
Speaker
This is kind of always what it was. It was a dumping ground for undesirable people. And until you address the underlying law, the underlying policy that leads to that, you're going to continue to have it exist in the state that it is.
00:21:19
Speaker
Yeah, so that's the Commission's take on Chinese immigrants and just a skimming of the title of the Royal Commission. They don't have much better things to say about Japanese Canadians, because again, much like in Chinatown, Japantown, or Little Tokyo, as they called it, was not
00:21:42
Speaker
the best place to live. They had to make do with a very small tract of land and not a lot of spending power. So the result of this commission for Chinese Canadians would be that the head techs would be raised to $500, which is well over 10 grand today. And again, this is for having the temerity to want to want to immigrate to Canada and help build this province, which
00:22:12
Speaker
fundamentally they did, you need to fork over 10 grand just for the privilege of being here, which European settlers, immigrants from the United States would not be subjected to. This was just because they were from China. Just to push this point a little further, what year was this? This is 1902. 1912. 12 years later would be the Komagata Maru incident. Oh, yes.
00:22:43
Speaker
So this shit was going on for decades. Yes, this is point one where I'm going to put my crosshairs firmly on middle and high school social studies and history education.
00:23:03
Speaker
We carry way too much fucking water. There's sort of this notion of it was racist doing racism that was bad. It's like this was state policy. This was top to bottom.
00:23:19
Speaker
the culture and the legal framework of the land at that time. And it's fucking disgusting. It was disgusting now as it was today. In 1923, there would be a very double edged relief for immigration from China as the head tax was repealed and replaced with an all out ban on anyone immigrating from China.
00:23:44
Speaker
Who was Prime Minister then? You don't want to know. I think I know the answer. It's William Lyon, Mackenzie King. This is where I'm going to activate my trap card and reveal the second King shit, JPEG, which is... Jesus Christ.
00:24:05
Speaker
Yeah, I make a lot of jokes about William William Mackenzie King because, again, he is our longest serving prime minister. But it should be made clear. I do know how much of a piece of shit he is or was rather. The thing is, he might actually be one of the least problematic prime ministers. And that's deeply unfortunate because it's a fucking low bar. And it goes really sharply downhill from there. So on top of the head tacks,
00:24:33
Speaker
Immigration had strict quotas to turn our attention to Japanese immigrants. 400 Japanese immigrants were allowed to settle per year between 1907 and 1928. And from 1928 until 1940, only 150 per year were allowed. So this community grew out of an absolute drip feed. And after 1940, just immigration from Japan was banned entirely.
00:25:02
Speaker
and would not be allowed again until way after the war, which we will get to. We still actually have immigration quotas to this day that serve the same purpose, but we've
00:25:19
Speaker
adjusted them to be less overtly racist, though their goal is still the same. We require certain things like English or French speaking level, academic accreditation requirements for having your education, because we typically only allow in educated or skilled migrants, except on temporary work visas. It gets stupider because of the way the provincial governments all have different
00:25:46
Speaker
Like interprovincially, you can have it, you know, your education go back and forth. So if you get, like, let's say you get your professional engineering done in British Columbia and you move off to Alberta, that generally will transfer over. I believe there might be a certification you still have to do, but you, you know, you're already a professional engineer, so they'll accept you in some capacity. Maybe you just might have to get a license. That's about it. But if you are, say, like my ex-spouse's parents, one of them was a,
00:26:15
Speaker
Well, they would call themselves a chemist, but we would refer to them as a pharmacist. Well, despite the fact that the only thing I can say that's different about medicine and where they were from and medicine here is that over there, acetaminophen was called paracetamol. And they were the ones who had dispensed it out. So I would say they had a way more strict operation than we do. And yet they never had the opportunity to work as their actual profession here because they just wouldn't transfer.
00:26:45
Speaker
Yes, but what I'm referring to specifically is just how immigration can be denied. You can't migrate as a skilled migrant if your education is not recognized here. And we're really choosy about whose accreditations we recognize, especially if you're a physician.
00:27:05
Speaker
Yes, which is not or a nurse, which also has never been the source of any kind of problems. Yep. So we we take it we require skilled migrants, but also we refuse in certain cases for a very discernible pattern, refuse to recognize certain accreditations from various countries for kind of obvious reasons. And again, the the like language linguistic requirements are intentionally a filter
00:27:34
Speaker
this is what they were originated in. I don't think it's a reasonable debate that these are somehow colorblind. They aren't. They're just in that guise. But yeah, we still have immigration quotas. We have a certain number that we allow in, and we attach these requirements to basically maintain that system all the way back from the 1920s.
Japanese-Canadian Pre-War Challenges
00:27:58
Speaker
In addition to barely tolerating
00:28:01
Speaker
their entry and existence once they were here, Japanese Canadians would not be granted the vote until 1948. Despite their heavy participation in both commercial fishing and logging, they would routinely have their licenses denied, particularly during the Great Depression, or would be revoked after the fact. So they would be issued their license and it would just be revoked halfway through harvesting season for no other reason other than the fact that
00:28:31
Speaker
They were not white. This was explicitly in the name of preserving white domination economically and for no other reason. Only eight years after women were given the vote in Quebec.
00:28:45
Speaker
Yes, the thing that strikes me about this period of time is how the pursuit of white dominance, particularly through the Great Depression, was explicit. They weren't hiding it. This isn't some like secret, you need a secret decoder ring for. They were very overt about what they were doing and why. And to cap off our little tour through context, I want to talk briefly about the 1907 Chinatown riot, which is
00:29:14
Speaker
Really going to which is the last thing I want you to like keep in the back of your mind So Chinatown and Japantown are very close together Japan towns just to the north or was which we'll get into but on September 7th 1907 a rally was organized Heading to the then City Hall on Hastings and Main Street, which is right next to Chinatown and Japantown and
00:29:40
Speaker
This rally turned kind of immediately into a riot and then a pogrom where the mob would go ransacking, smashing windows, and looting businesses.
00:29:56
Speaker
businesses and homes all the way through Chinatown. Thankfully, residents of Japantown were able to quickly mobilize. They had a good number of veterans of the recent Russo-Japanese War who were able to arm themselves and defend their neighborhood, but Chinatown was absolutely devastated.
00:30:13
Speaker
And on the YouTubes, I'll include some photos of the aftermath. It's horrific. And disgracefully, local labor organizations were front and center of this misadventure. So there was no class solidarity to be had here, even from radical labor.
00:30:32
Speaker
And this wasn't the only time this happened either, not- Yeah, yes. Contact's over. Let's talk baseball. Largely due to exclusionary housing that drove all of the enclave towns as we discussed in North American cities, Vancouver and Victoria started steadily developing vibrant Japan towns, and Chinatown as well. Of interest today is the former Japan town along Powell Street East.
00:30:58
Speaker
and why, you'll still find the Japanese Hall and Language School, but you won't find any Japanese Canadians there. It's the same with Steveson out in Richmond, where the same thing's going to happen, or rather, we're going to discuss what led to Steveson becoming that way, I should say. In this area,
00:31:17
Speaker
And to this day, there were three key pieces of social infrastructure that were absolute godsends. There was the Powell Street Grounds, current day Oppenheimer Park, not named for that Oppenheimer, it's named for Vancouver's second mayor David Oppenheimer, the Japanese Methodist Mission, and later in 1906, the Japanese Language School, a place where they could
00:31:39
Speaker
maintain some sort of social cohesion and maintain their language in a way that a lot of immigrant families just lost through only having the vector of their parents and extended family to maintain linguistic skill happen to my family.
00:31:55
Speaker
So they had some good stuff. They had the building blocks of a lot of social programs because they had both the crossing of a good public space, Oppenheimer Park, very large park, unfortunately for a large portion of its history in my lifetime, the site of a tent city because of our failed housing policies. But it's still, I would say, a tier park. It's just missing a diamond.
00:32:24
Speaker
It is missing a baseball diamond. There's any critique I have over this park? Yeah, its absence is palpable because there was one there at this time.
00:32:38
Speaker
There's, you have a local church, you have a local language school slash community center. Like they had a lot of good infrastructure and this would kind of form a lot of social like programs and a lot of sporting clubs, including the Vancouver Asahi, which means morning sun TIL. I knew it meant something from the beer, but now I understand what the label means. I actually liked the beer a lot. It's a nice refreshing beer to drink.
00:33:06
Speaker
Yeah, I'm not sure if I prefer it to Sapporo. Both are quite tasty, but Asahi is real tasty. I've had a lot of Japanese beer. If you like Dutch beer, you'll like Japanese beer because that's where they got a lot of their beer knowledge from. I never made that connection, but you're kind of right.
00:33:23
Speaker
Yeah, it was one of those things that I learned about, and I was like, oh, that kind of explains a few things. In 1914, local businessman Matsujiro Miyasaki, who would act as coach, would form the Asahi as a rec team, mostly playing kind of whatever matches they could against local longshoremen and firefighters.
00:33:44
Speaker
You're actually pronouncing that name fairly on the nose. Like I did study Japanese for three years in university and that was pretty on the nose there. Osmosis from having a roommate who was learning Japanese while she was staying on my couch. Oh yeah, I know your friend. Yes.
00:34:01
Speaker
I love her dearly. And they would continue to play as a rec team kind of informally. I didn't see anything about them being involved in any of the local leagues. But in 1918, another prominent Japanese immigrant team, Vancouver Nippon, folded, which brought a large number of youth and amateur league players
00:34:25
Speaker
to the Asahi. With these new players, the team would start actively cultivating and training and become a more proper sport organization, though still an amateur sport organization, and would see them entering that year into the Vancouver International League.
00:34:41
Speaker
It's kind of funny that they're called the Vancouver Nippon because Nippon is just a way of saying Japan. Yes. Because Vancouver's a local baseball team who, weirdly enough, I'm going to be singing play tonight. They're called the Vancouver Canadians. So like Vancouver Nippon, Vancouver Canadians, same theming.
00:34:59
Speaker
Yeah, the interesting thing about Asahi meaning morning sun is because like Nihon can also mean like the origin of the sun like it's kind of that's what that's what that Japan yes
00:35:14
Speaker
Yes, these team names were not the same but very close, which I like to think had something to do with that migration in specific from one team to another. Getting their start as a rec team against longshoremen and loggers was actually fairly salient. You can see the problem kind of immediately from file footage and early photographs. There is a height
00:35:39
Speaker
and build disparity between them which set them up for the cultivation of unique strategies and unique strategies we would get because in 1922 they hired Harry Miyasaki
00:35:55
Speaker
who's actually a relative of one of my middle school math teachers. They hired this guy, who was a former player of their team, who helped them win the 1919 championship in the Vancouver International League as team manager. And he would develop a strategy that was called Brain Ball, though this is most definitely not the name that they used for it. I think
00:36:20
Speaker
think the media came up with this one. But I can't really confirm that. It's just stated on the Canadian Encyclopedia. But there is no way this is what they called it. Another thing that I kind of didn't really dig into very much in the last episode is this was 1920s baseball was the era of sluggers.
00:36:43
Speaker
Just going back because I want to say this here because I just thought about it. I think the word for brain in Japanese is like no and like I know. And so because the word for ball is Boru, it'd be no Boru like no ball. The other word that I've heard this described as a smart ball as well.
00:37:03
Speaker
So I'm not I'm not really sure how how much this was a fabrication of English speaking media. I was sort of just making a play on the words because I was just kind of thinking it'd be funny to call it no ball. We're not going to play at the ball. We're just we're going to do something else almost.
00:37:18
Speaker
Obviously. You're not wrong and we'll get into that. So this is the era of big hitters like home runs, giving people in the stands concussions, deep outfield play, which would continue basically until we pick up again in the last episode with Jackie Robinson.
00:37:41
Speaker
becoming the king of base-dealing. These longshoremen and loggers in these wreck and amateur leagues were basically hitting the ever-loving pejesus out of the ball and sending it out into the next neighborhood. This was not going to work super well for the Asahi, so they invented an interesting set of strategies. The crux of brainball.
00:38:06
Speaker
is a complicated set of signals and ways of disguising messages between runners on base and the batter.
00:38:16
Speaker
The idea is make heavy use of bunting and infield play as well as walks to get to first base, steal bases aggressively, and don't give them back to the colonizers. And the most important thing with all of this is keeping the batter and runners in the loop with each other on what the play was going to be surreptitiously. Okay, that's pretty not unusual for this day and age.
00:38:43
Speaker
But this was unheard of, particularly, and we'll get to some testimonials on what this was like playing, but this was unthinkable at the time, particularly playing so much on the infield. Making the pitcher actually work at this point in time was not a thing that they would do.
00:39:07
Speaker
For this to have any chance of working, they would have to drill, drill, and drill some more. I could do a rundown of their training method, but I instead would like to quote former player Miki Mayakawa from the NFB Productions Sleeping Tigers, which I highly recommend. It's so good. Referencing one of his fellows' teammates saying he could bunt with a chopstick.
00:39:31
Speaker
That's impressive. Another interviewee, a white player this time by the name of Al Moser claimed they could bunt like a fellow shooting snooker, like a pool player. Okay, so I'll put it this way. Bunting is hard.
00:39:48
Speaker
I don't like it personally when I play softball. You're totally permitted to bunt in the league. You can do some really evil shit with bunting though, what I've seen. Like there's some people who'll go up to bat and they'll look like they're prepared to bunt. And so the pitcher will throw in a way that expecting a bunt to happen. And then at the very last split second, the batter will just change position and we'll just swing for it, which is,
00:40:14
Speaker
uh terrifying because uh if the if they hit it just right they'll like totally like demolish the pitcher so it's kind of discouraged from doing thing you're kind of discouraged from doing that
00:40:27
Speaker
Yes, they were adopting this bunting strategy whilst also adopting a means of basically disguising from the pitcher that they were going to bunt and having all the runners set up to steal or to know where the bunt was going because they did this with precision.
00:40:50
Speaker
And they would sacrifice batters who would get out just to advance base position. And this was their strat. Their strat was incredibly deep infield play, which is fucking amazing if you watch the file footage. Again, Sleeping Tigers.
00:41:10
Speaker
incredible film. I will gush about it at the end. At this time, there was a truly staggering number of baseball leagues and organizations in Vancouver and the surrounding area. So as I said, 1918, 1919, they kind of got a little bit serious, joined the Vancouver International League. And after a single season in the Vancouver City League, they would enter into the Vancouver Terminal League.
00:41:36
Speaker
which is where this brain ball would be cultivated. Because in 1921, they play their first season, 22, Harry Miyazaki is added as team manager. And this would result in 1926, they would take the league. This would be their second league victory in the Vancouver Terminal League this time. And in what would be a bit of a pattern, they would take that victory to another league and they played a few years in the Vancouver Senior League, but wouldn't find a lot of success.
00:42:03
Speaker
partially due to hostile umpiring and partially just due to more serious players you had ex-professional players in the league as well this this wasn't their jam in 1930 they would return to the vancouver terminal league and would win in 1930 1932 and 1933 kings yes these guys were fucking good in 1936 they would have a brief two-year run in the vancouver commercial league
00:42:33
Speaker
and would finally end things off in the Vancouver Barard League from 1937 to 1941, after which, we'll get to that. Yeah, I'm just noticing the names, like Terminal, Commercial, and Barard. It's, were they playing at parks that were on these particular streets? Like, I can't think of a park that was on Terminal. I can't think of a diamond. Actually, there is a diamond on Commercial that I play at, and then Barard, well, I can't think of a single park that would have had a
00:43:02
Speaker
diamond on there. I don't think the arsenal was there or as large so possibly on those grounds. Yeah and also like I said in the Bonnie Baker episode you just kind of need flat land and those areas do have some flat land. And also were substantially less built up at the time. That's very true considering some of the footage I've worked with on some smaller projects where First Avenue which is what terminal becomes goes along what
00:43:32
Speaker
was once farmland and marshland and all that sort of thing. Same with False Creek was just a swamp. If I had to guess, probably where the Home Depot was, or just to the north of Pacific Central Station. Yeah, if that's assuming that's what it was. But yeah, that makes sense. If I had to guess, or they might have played closer to Strathcona.
00:43:55
Speaker
Yeah that's that's actually fair because like technically Vancouver around this time I want to say but not for long ended at 16th Avenue. It's almost difficult if you've seen Vancouver today to imagine now you know how I feel in general but it's almost difficult to imagine how much of a backwater
00:44:15
Speaker
It was until after the war. I've stated before that Western Canada is very much a post-war invention, and nowhere is that more true than Vancouver. While they enjoyed some great success in the Vancouver Terminal League, their real success was playing abroad.
00:44:37
Speaker
first organized in 1928 was the Pacific Northwest Japanese Baseball Championship, which was a competition between 11 Japanese Canadian and Japanese American clubs, they would take their brain ball to a league where they would not or to a championship where they would not have the physical disadvantage that necessitated this strategy. And they would win five years in a row from 1937 through to 1941, where afterwards,
00:45:05
Speaker
So we'll put a pin in that.
00:45:09
Speaker
I see a couple of those in the script here. Yeah, that's a cursed date for a lot of reasons. In September of 1921, a selection of players from the Asahi and other clubs from around the Pacific Northwest would form the Asahi All-Stars and Tour Japan, playing a bunch of exhibition games against Japanese teams. And in May of 1935, the Tokyo Giants, now the Yomiuri Giants,
00:45:36
Speaker
would play a series with the Asahi at Con Jones Park, now Callister Park, to return the little exhibition. Where is Callister Park located? It's on the east, or it's in East Van.
00:45:51
Speaker
Oh, it's, um, across from, um, you've probably played there from Hastings park. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. Cause I, yeah, it's right by Pacific Coliseum, which I also called out because that's fucking cursed for reasons we'll get into. Yeah. You're going to hear, you're going to hear me talk about something momentarily.
00:46:12
Speaker
Yes, I have been pretty good about being under an hour. This is not going to be one of those episodes. As we went over earlier, shit was bad for them off the field. But on the field wasn't much better, especially after the implementation of Brain Ball, while much positively was said about them in local papers, that still didn't stop the likes of the Vancouver Sun and Daily Province.
00:46:40
Speaker
from appending racial epithets, straight up slurs, slander and fear-mongering to their coverage of the Asahi and the Japanese-Canadian community as a whole. Today, of course, these are both well-respected right-wing rags, so honestly, not much has changed there.
00:46:58
Speaker
It's really funny. They have the same ownership. A lot of people don't really understand why. And it used to be that the Vancouver Sun was the paper you would get in the morning. And when you would take the interurban or street car back home in the evening, the Vancouver Province or sorry, the daily province would be handed out. And the Vancouver Sun is a broad sheet. And then the province is a tabloid and that is on purpose.
00:47:23
Speaker
Yes. Now they are both just post media websites. It's more fucking national post. And honestly, their current editorial staff would probably approve of their historical coverage of the SI. And that's fucking disgusts me.
00:47:38
Speaker
But post-media as a whole disgusts me. While there was the occasional invite to an otherwise whites-only team extended to the odd Asahi player, any semblance of seeing them as equals was not on the table. White supremacy, as we discussed, was enshrined both in culture, as much as it was in law at this time, and explicitly so. Oh, the good old days that all these boomers like to go on about on Facebook.
00:48:07
Speaker
Actually half the time they're fucking AI bots anyway. Yeah. Uh, here it was homegrown white supremacy and this shit still runs through particularly the interior of our province. Cool beans.
00:48:23
Speaker
Yeah. So let's get to 1941. Things would take a turn for the worse, somehow spectacularly, after December 7th, 1941, where attacks by the Imperial Japanese Navy on Pearl Harbor and Hong Kong, the attack on Hong Kong,
00:48:40
Speaker
being the having a small number of Canadian forces there as a colonial garrison would be our justification for the declaration
Japanese-Canadian Internment Camps
00:48:49
Speaker
of war. But those attacks would be turned into just 12 weeks later on February 24, 1942, using the power of the War Measures Act.
00:49:00
Speaker
an ordering council to remove all persons. It actually applied to all persons who were suspected of aiding and abetting potential enemies, but the effect was all persons of Japanese descent from within 160 kilometers of the Pacific coast.
00:49:17
Speaker
From that area one thing to add so the tech on Hong Kong I think was the day after Pearl Harbor. Yes, and there is a heritage minute about Hong Kong and the attack on Canadian forces I guess is best way we'll describe it there and we'll probably end up to end up talking about this So this is something we will return to at some point Yeah summary of my thoughts shouldn't have been there
00:49:48
Speaker
I say probably, I say will, but you know what I mean. Yeah, shouldn't have been there both for the Imperial Japanese Navy and Army as well as the Canadian forces. This would begin the process of Japanese internment.
00:50:04
Speaker
The order would go into effect at around 22,000 Japanese Canadians, over 75% of which were Canadian citizens, most of which born here would be taken from their homes. 8,000 such people would be detained in Hastings Park.
00:50:22
Speaker
in the fucking barns used to house livestock. I need I need to interject on this one because this one pisses me off. So last year, I took a friend of mine who was visiting from Texas to the peony and I haven't been to the peony.
00:50:39
Speaker
probably since I was a kid. And just, I live here, right? I don't really feel inclined to go to the PME. It's just a thing, right? Like I've gone to Playline a million times and that's something I will go to on a whim. But the PME itself is, for most of my life, up until maybe recently, hasn't really interested me.
00:51:00
Speaker
And so, you know, we went and wandered around and we found ourselves looking at the, I guess the agri-fair is what you call it. And, you know, you walk around and you see all these, you know, these animals that are being, you know, used for livestock purposes. So we're talking, you know, for meat, for milk, you know, for textiles, right?
00:51:23
Speaker
And it smells. It's disgusting. And the thing is, it's a barn. It's what it is. It has animals. They don't poop in toilets like us humans do, or at least we don't train them to. And they don't eat in the best conditions. It's a dirty, messy area. And as I was wandering around this place, I increasingly realized what I was walking in
00:51:48
Speaker
and, you know, quickly grabbed my phone. I just wanted to see if I was correct about something. And the building that I was walking in showed, you know, these Japanese persons being holed up in this place that you're supposed to have a fun time in. And I can see the fucking windows that I was staring at in this photo. And it's just distressing to know that a lot of the structures that were used for housing these persons who just were fucking born Japanese. That's their only crime.
00:52:17
Speaker
And it was in a disgusting it was a pig pen. Yes. And it's just so upsetting. And this is not the only place that I've been by that has been used for this. Like we're going to talk about this in a moment here, but like just go and drive out to Hope Slide and go past a little bit, a little bit past East West.
00:52:39
Speaker
you know, towards Manning. And you'll go past this little town that's in Happy Valley. The name's escaping me. And the buildings that were used to house the Japanese persons are still there. There's a sign to at least acknowledge that this was the case. But this shit still exists. These buildings are still up and they're still being used today for for fun things. But there's a fucking cloud over these places. Yeah.
00:53:08
Speaker
I'll get into my thoughts on that in a moment, but I just want to iterate what the conditions of this were. These folks were mostly Canadian citizens. I want to correct you on calling them Japanese persons. These were just our neighbours.
00:53:32
Speaker
they were taken and only permitted to take what they could carry from their houses. Tellingly, many Asahi players would elect to take their jerseys, catching gloves, baseballs, and bats with them, but they would be sent to the peony grounds in these fucking large wooden barns used for housing animals.
00:53:56
Speaker
At that time, sometimes used to house animals for feeding into the slaughterhouses that were being used at the time in what is now Gastown. And they'd be loaded onto trains to send to small or completely dead ghost towns in the Kootenays.
00:54:13
Speaker
or further abroad to the prairies with little regard for preserving familial or community ties, and many of them would be subjected to coerced or outright forced labor in building the very shacks that they would spend the war living in. They would be forced into farm work or other manual labor, all under close guard.
00:54:32
Speaker
These are called the Japanese internment camps, but I'm going to call them for what they were. They're concentration camps. When you walk through the P&E grounds, you are walking through a fun animal agri-fair, being housed in what is essentially like one of the Nazi labor camps.
00:54:51
Speaker
there is no difference. And it's disingenuous to pretend that there was a difference. And I added an extra little note here, eat a bag of dicks Sinclair Lewis, it did fucking happen here. It's, it's really telling to say like, the difference in terms of how we treated prisoners of war from the European theater, there's an excellent example of
00:55:15
Speaker
um german soldiers who were captured and then were interned here in uh north america specifically um i'm thinking of a prison that was in i want to say in toronto um where they would take a lot of these um german soldiers and would house them but here's the thing they were allowed to roam free in some cases it was much to the chagrin of certain higher up officials but
00:55:44
Speaker
They were treated with a lot more dignity and respect, despite the fact that they were the ones who were just as much committing the atrocities that we were.
00:55:54
Speaker
Yes, also German POWs who were sent to the south of the United States remarked openly how they had way more rights there to roam freely and just exist in public space than Black Americans in the same era, because this was an era of segregation. And what a fucking trip that must have been for a racist ass Nazi to show up to
00:56:18
Speaker
their liberating democratic United States and find that their racial policies were well implemented there, just with a different target. One thing I want to add as a little bit of personal history, at this time, my family were recent German immigrants.
00:56:38
Speaker
And at no point were we ever subjected to internment. This was just about the Japanese Canadian population. I should I should add that I haven't mentioned in this episode is that a portion of my family is Japanese. And I don't think I mentioned this to you. So sorry for dropping that bomb on you. They did. No, that's new.
00:57:01
Speaker
I don't know much about my cousin's grandmother all that well, but she's of the age that if she had come at the right time, she would have been part of that internment.
00:57:13
Speaker
Hello, this is Heather in post-production. I had a conversation with my cousin a couple weeks ago about whether or not his family was affected by the internment of Japanese Canadians. This is an oversight on my part because his family is divorced from my family, although he's still my cousin by blood and all this. He's still my cousin. Why am I talking about here?
00:57:35
Speaker
The point being is a lot of conversations about his family have been rather muted for most of my life. Most of the time I just hear about stuff going on with him and his immediate family, him and his husband had a kid recently.
00:57:52
Speaker
The short answer to this little statement that I made here about whether or not my cousin's grandmother was interned is, unfortunately, yes, she was. But unfortunately, she did pass away quite some time ago. However, her son is working on a project around the internment of Japanese Canadians.
00:58:10
Speaker
And at some point when I have an opportunity I will speak to my cousin's dad, I guess my uncle of sorts, and perhaps in the future we'll revisit this topic and provide some details about what it was like for his mother to be interned in a camp. Anyway, this is a failure on my part prior to the episode to do some a little bit of investigation.
00:58:35
Speaker
But as we were doing the recording it just popped into my head and went oh fuck So this is something I'm gonna try and not do in the future But I wanted to make certain that this was mentioned at least for you all to understand that You know, I made a mistake here and I'm gonna try and do better in the future. So sorry about that Heather
00:58:56
Speaker
Yeah, famous folks who were being held was also an environmentalist. David Suzuki, as a young lad, was kept in, I want to say the slogan camp. One of my middle school math teachers was the child of, he wasn't born during a tournament, but he was the child of one of the Asahi players who was interned there while being held prisoner.
00:59:26
Speaker
in their own country.
00:59:28
Speaker
by their own government, they would face absolutely squalid conditions. These people are being shoved wherever they would fit. They're being stored in old barns. They're being forced to construct shanty towns where they would then spend the next half decade. While this was all happening, while they're being filtered into these barns and squalid conditions, another Ordering Council created a commission to sell off the remaining property of the citizens, whatever they couldn't carry with them.
00:59:57
Speaker
Oh, but old civil forfeiture. This wasn't civil forfeiture. This was just outright fucking theft. Isn't that what civil forfeiture is half the time?
01:00:08
Speaker
No, because for no other reason than pure dispossession, they seized all assets remaining of any property, personal effects, even businesses, farmland from everyone who was sent to these concentration camps and sold it off at absurdly low prices. Worse yet is what they would use this money for.
01:00:33
Speaker
they would use it to essentially charge the detained citizens for the cost of detaining them. And while some were able to withdraw some small amounts of money from the sale of all their shit, realistically this money went to running the concentration camps where they were held.
01:00:53
Speaker
and like everything was sold. And this would continue from 1941 all the way to 1945, where with the end of the war in sight, another Order in Council was issued by Mackenzie King.
01:01:12
Speaker
giving the interred Canadians two options. Resettle east of the Rockies or be repatriated to Japan. And the fucking temerity of this, especially for Mackenzie King, who had as much of a claim to being a natural born Canadian as many of these folks he was giving this
01:01:33
Speaker
absolute fucking unthinkably evil choice too. Don't look into Mackenzie King's family lineage.
01:01:43
Speaker
Like, to say to people who had lived here- Or rather, do look. Yeah. To say to people who have lived here for generations that they're going to be repatriated to a country they've never fucking been to, and nor have their fucking parents been to, is just disgusting. Again. Savor the unique atmosphere. The Granville Island public market. This is, this is, ugh. This is the shit that radicalized me. Yeah, no kidding.
01:02:12
Speaker
Two, just because he wasn't done being a piece of shit, some 10,000 of these Canadian citizens refused resettlement, demanding to return to their homes in British Columbia. They would be met with another order in council stating that refusal of resettlement east of the Rockies meant choosing repatriation by default. There would
01:02:36
Speaker
Finally, in 1946, come some pushback, mostly by Japanese Canadians who lived on the East Coast who weren't subject to internment. But it would take this pushback going all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada, where finally Mackenzie King would back down from this forced repatriation,
01:03:00
Speaker
but not before some 4,000 Canadian citizens were deported to Japan, again, a country most of them had never fucking been to. It's really upsetting to know that this still technically happens today. Some examples will include kids who were brought here when they were four, never got Canadian citizenship, find themselves in trouble, you know, for crimes that maybe they shouldn't have committed, but
01:03:28
Speaker
Because of the way, especially under the Harper government, wanted things to be, there had been cases where people were stripped of their permanent residency and then just deported, you know, like, because they did something at the age of 19. And despite having been here since the age of four, they're now going back to whatever home country that, you know, the government decided they need to go back to.
01:03:50
Speaker
And the Harper government especially turned a lot of people into second-class citizens when they introduced a number of laws. In particular, they affect me. So like, because I'm a dual national between Canada and Ireland, I could find myself in a heap of trouble if it was decided that the crime I did was egregious enough to, upon my release from prison, I could just be deported to Ireland. There are worse places I could go, but you know, and it is a,
01:04:18
Speaker
relatively well-developed country, in some ways more developed than here I could make an argument for. But it's harder for somebody who's from a country that, you know, would have the label, for better or for worse, Third World. And let's not use that label, I should say, but, you know, that should kind of drive the point home about the conditions that some people may have to face if they're deported.
01:04:41
Speaker
Yeah, I mean the third world refers to Like you had the first world which was basically nada the second world which was the con like communist aligned states ie the good guys And the third world being like unaligned nations. I think it does still have some use today Particularly because the political connotation of it is still very much a reality But I I prefer imperial core and imperial periphery while we remain in this uh, this
01:05:09
Speaker
unipolar world, which is changing. I just want to add like the fucking gall of a settler colonial government to decide someone who has lived here no longer deserves the right to live here is just fucking incredible. And I do not mean this in a good way. Like again, the temerity of this all.
01:05:36
Speaker
Yeah, despite backing down eventually, nearly half of those who refused resettlement were deported to Japan. And Japanese Canadians would be restricted from living along the West Coast, again where most of them settled originally, until April of 1949. For no good fucking reason. For literally no fucking reason, although all of this was for no fucking reason, which I have a whole rant about later on.
01:06:04
Speaker
Through the 1950s, there would be some efforts to recover property and possessions seized by the government illegally. The Byrd Commission would recommend a payment of $1,222,929, or roughly $16 million in today's dollars.
01:06:22
Speaker
But that would only cover some 2,400 claims of the over 20,000 Canadians displaced by this horrific policy. So not even close. Barely 10% of the folks who were displaced got anything out of it. Probably because a lot of them were forcibly deported to a country they weren't from. Was that nowhere? Was that $1.2 million per person?
01:06:51
Speaker
No. That was the entire budget of the $20,000 and divide that. That's a pitiful amount. For 2,400 claims, because most of them saw fuck and all. Yeah, like if everybody, if all of them got the $16 million that it would be today, you know, they would only get like a what, two Xboxes or something.
01:07:11
Speaker
as one podcaster would put it. It's a single Xbox. Yeah, it's not even Xboxing. Obviously, having nowhere in Vancouver to return to and until 1949, so three years after they were released from internment,
01:07:28
Speaker
it being illegal for them to return, the Asahi would not reform, not in Vancouver at least, and would disperse to join or form new teams and clubs across the country. A reunion for the team was held, but it was held in Toronto in 1972. And in 2003, the Asahi were inducted into the Canadian baseball of fame.
01:07:51
Speaker
And the Toronto Blue Jays hosted its surviving members during an evening of appreciation. In 2005, because we are always classy here, the BC Sports Hall of Fame finally deigned to recognize the Asahi. And on August 26, 2008, the Asahi were recognized as a national historic event by the federal government, the body responsible for their dissolution. Which, yes, it's good that they are recognized, but also fuck you all.
01:08:19
Speaker
every single one of you. Their legacy now lives on in the Asahi Baseball Association, formerly the Canadian Nikkei Youth Baseball Club from 2014 to 20. Nikkei, sorry. I default to German pronunciation sometimes, I'm sorry. That's a very strange way to pronounce it.
01:08:41
Speaker
I knew how it's pronounced. This is the first Japanese word I've fucked up this entire podcast. You've done good. You all should be proud. Their legacy now lives on in the Asahi Baseball Association, which hosts youth training sessions and organizes baseball tours to Japan for young players. And lastly, none of the ministers, including the prime minister, ever saw any consequences legally or electorally for perpetrating this heinous crime against our own people.
01:09:10
Speaker
our own fucking neighbors. Of course not. And now we get to the portion where this is where Tam was radicalized during social studies of all places. This was an absolute travesty perpetrated by our government against our own people, our neighbors, our fellow Canadians. And what frustrates me of how it is taught
01:09:32
Speaker
as, much like the Red River Rebellion, it's framed as being a bad thing, sure, but a necessary evil. And I want to address that, because this is the only argument that is proposed as a way to whitewash this misadventure in Canadian history.
01:09:50
Speaker
By December of 1941, the Japanese Empire was facing inevitable defeat in its misadventure in China. They had tanks they couldn't replace, burning fuel they didn't have, manned by, and supported by people and pilots they couldn't spare needing equipment they didn't have.
01:10:06
Speaker
To remedy this, they moved to take territory in Indonesia and the Pacific to secure resources to turn the war around, thus adding to the mix a bunch of troops they didn't have needing to go to islands with equipment they didn't have on ships they couldn't spare to maintain garrisons and launch attacks they couldn't hope to support. While Pearl Harbor was sure a bold strike,
01:10:26
Speaker
I want to talk about a more exemplary example of the state of the Japanese war in the Pacific, the Aleutian Islands Campaign. Ah, the one-sided war.
01:10:39
Speaker
Yes, for context, this was the invasion of a chain of islands off the coast of Alaska, sort of halfway between Sakhalin and Alaska, the Alaskan mainland, which was meant to prevent them from being used by the Americans as a launching point for an invasion, which was unlikely, on the North Islands, or to launch long-range bombers, much more likely, and to disrupt shipping between the US and Canada and the Soviet Union. They would accomplish none of these goals.
01:11:09
Speaker
No, they were fighting nobody. It's somehow worse. They would take and hold the islands off the backs of there being no garrison to defend them, and would hold them for a year, which was the time it took for a counterattack to be finally mustered of a joint Canadian and American forces to evict them.
01:11:32
Speaker
they would abandon Kiska entirely, one of the Aleutian Islands that they held, and would leave the troops on the other major island, Atu, to fend for themselves and basically just die. Which again, these were troops that they didn't have. Which also means that in the case of Kiska, the Japanese lost an unopposed landing. They lost to no one. Yeah, like I said, it was the war with nobody.
01:12:02
Speaker
Yes, in Atu they did sort of fight in the sense that the Japanese garrison left behind was given no opportunity to retreat because the Japanese navy simply couldn't spare the resources to actually extract them.
01:12:18
Speaker
The Aleutian Islands campaign happened at the same time as the Battle of Midway. The Battle of Midway was not the turning point, the war was already over. And while the Americans and Australians were fighting the Imperial Japanese Navy and Imperial Japanese Army, the Japanese Empire's primary opponent was the crushing inevitability of defeat, with the Americans being a distant second adversary. My point isn't to re-litigate the war in the Pacific.
01:12:45
Speaker
It's to simply state that if every single one of those 20,000 Canadians, including the women and children that they sent to those concentration camps, was in fact an elite Japanese sleeper agent, it wouldn't have made a fucking lick of difference at the end of the Pacific War. There was no justification for what was done to these people, our people.
01:13:06
Speaker
One of the reasons why I started this podcast wasn't just because Tamarack and I had way too many conversations at the bar with too many pints of beer and discussing all sorts of things. They can confirm this. We talked a lot about things.
01:13:28
Speaker
But it's also because I definitely prefer to have some level of the truth out. And the reason why I say some level is because we are first of all, we're both white. So let's get that out of the way. And despite the fact that we're queer, you know, we do have certain privileges that are afforded to us. And despite that, we still want to make certain that, you know, we are telling
01:13:50
Speaker
the whole story. These heritage minutes are important, I should say. They should be conversation starters, but they should not be the only source of information you have. We'll probably touch base on this when it comes to basketball.
01:14:05
Speaker
But there's a lot of misinformation that has developed as a result of these heritage minutes.
Correcting Historical Misinformation
01:14:13
Speaker
And we're celebrating a baseball team here, or at least attempting to. But there's an aspect of it that's incredibly upsetting. And we will repeat these things in history if we don't talk about these things out in the open. There's too many people out there who have a soapbox.
01:14:35
Speaker
are getting it wrong, whether intentionally or not. And like my my on-ramp to this and kind of what got me on board was in much the same way that the simplification, the emissions of the Heritage Minutes, which are very understandable, lead to misinformation. I think that frustrates me and particularly around this and the Red River Rebellion,
01:14:59
Speaker
those same simplifications and same errors crop up through our actual public education on these things. We failed to mention what was really happening, or in particular with the Japanese internment camps, the socials education carries water for what was an
01:15:22
Speaker
like completely unjustifiable atrocity committed against our own citizens and like there are plenty of examples like that where we gloss over the crimes of our colonial roots and you see how the ramifications of this play out to this day with just the utter ignorance about the residential school system about the Japanese internment camps and the the conditions surrounding them
01:15:51
Speaker
Uh, in, in the popular culture. And if through this podcast, we can do anything to change that, even the slightest bit, I would consider this project worthwhile. So what did we learn? That we managed to get through this whole episode without you giving me a single animal fact, because I think I'm impressed.
01:16:14
Speaker
What was the bullshit one so I can at least have that out in the open? No, because I'm going to save it. Fuck. No, what we learned is that despite the fact that, you know, we were engaging in a war or rather one of the largest anti-fascist rallies, as Tamarack would put it. Yes. It didn't mean that. Incredible amounts of antifa going on up there. Exactly. It also means that but it didn't mean that we weren't engaging in some level of fascism back at home.
01:16:45
Speaker
Yes, this is an especially salient thing I think for us as queer folks to, as the rhetoric around us and like intensifies and as fascism starts to rise, this is a potential future for us. And we can see the justifications through what was done to these folks. They were othered and then made a threat.
01:17:12
Speaker
in a way that was not real in the slightest and that was used to justify all sorts of horrific treatment. But the real thing I learned, because I learned something in this, is I stumbled upon a 2002 documentary produced by the National Film Board
01:17:33
Speaker
called Sleeping Tigers, the Asahi baseball story. And I watched it actually just yesterday, which radically changed the tone of this script, actually. And most importantly, for me, seeing the parts where they just had the former players, these old timers in their 70s and 80s, or I guess 80s and 90s at that point, just gathered around a table. It seemed like it was between interviews, they had just finished a meal.
01:18:01
Speaker
And they're just sitting around the table shooting the breeze about baseball, talking a little bit about their strategies in brainball. That's actually the segment where one of the quotes that I use came from. And honestly, this kind of turned me around about the game. I don't think I'm a baseball hater anymore. Thank God you like a sport that I like and how I can talk to you and explain baseball in depth. And does that mean you're going to come and watch me play softball or do you hate softball?
01:18:29
Speaker
I think I might've been turned around on this sport. All right, I have a tournament next week. You're coming out to my games. Sure. I'll bring my film camera. We'll take photos. Yeah, like, God, these people have been through so fucking much. Just sat around a table talking about a sport they love. It's fucking beautiful. Go watch it right now. I'll link it in the description. It's on YouTube. They didn't even fucking turn on ads. Like, go for it.
01:18:58
Speaker
Yeah, that's one thing about Leila Yang. There's a lot of good films on the NFB. You can get access to the NFB on YouTube. And then you can also just get them at the library. They're usually accessible that way, too. I think at some point we're going to talk about the NFB. I really would like to do an episode around some of the really cool stuff that's come out of it, because the NFB has been a part of my life growing up. And I do think it's worth considering for an episode.
01:19:24
Speaker
Yes, the NFB and Knowledge Network are the power couple that drove a lot of- Well, there's TVO as well. Well, drove a lot of my childhood in specific. Yeah, for those of you elsewhere in Canada who don't know what the Knowledge Network is, if you're in Ontario, it's similar to TVO. Oh, yeah, because it is literally based here. I do know somebody who works there. Yeah, Knowledge Network has their offices, I think, in Burnaby or something.
01:19:51
Speaker
We have a Patreon now, patreon.com slash Shewinigan Moments. We also have a mailbag, mailbag at ShewiniganMoments.ca. Christ, what are the other bits? We need to like pre-record this. No, we don't. You just have to sort of get used to doing it because I usually have it already prepared well before I say it.
01:20:12
Speaker
See this is why, see I did the intro so well because I actually like put it in the script. I just need to like write out the blurb. What is the blurb? Yeah well one of the things I'll say is since we're mentioning the Patreon and we are working on two episodes for it already. In fact by the time this episode comes out, which I believe will be the beginning of September,
01:20:37
Speaker
Yes. We will have our first bonus episode already recorded and probably the week after we'll have it out and it'll be on Canadian content. It'll be on video and arcade top 10. Or when speedrunning was on television. Exactly. I've been working on this for about a month now because what we want to do with our bonus episodes is just make them
01:21:05
Speaker
a little bit more fun. We don't need to have depressing animal or sorry depressing animal facts, happy animal facts ready to go for these episodes. We want to make certain that if you do subscribe to our Patreon that there's some content in there that is just shit that you know Tamarac and I want to talk about.
Upcoming Patreon Exclusives
01:21:26
Speaker
For our first bonus episode we're bringing out a friend of mine for it and I'm super excited about that. I'll be recording that while
01:21:32
Speaker
still recovering from jet lag hopefully mostly recovered by then but as part of that trip to the UK I'm also working on something for bonus episode which will come immediately afterward and you might you might be able to figure this out if you if you listen to the last episode the hints go listen to the last episode you may figure out what what we might end up talking about
01:21:55
Speaker
Yeah, the next numerical episode is going to be our bonus episode. But what's our next regular episode going to be? On the free feed or whatever we want to call it. Yeah. The next episode is going to be on why I hate the scene plus card. Oh, I know exactly what the gag image is going to be for this. I have a scene card that I cut in half.
01:22:25
Speaker
I have a scene card and every time I go to the grocery store, they ask for it. I don't bother because like, I don't fucking care. I am excited for how that is related to the actual topic because I have no fucking idea. Wait, you haven't. Oh, you need to look at the spreadsheet. Editing Heather, please cut this out. But La Rousseau is the topic.
01:22:49
Speaker
We'll see if I don't edit this out. Coast to coast, but the other coast. I have no, what's the link? I'll tell you after we're done recording.
01:23:00
Speaker
No, don't. Leave me in suspense. No, no, anyway. Alright, yes, that was an episode. Thank you all for listening. YouTubes are caught up and probably will continue to be caught up again unless I fall off on Final Fantasy XIV again. Hopefully not this time. Don't play Final Fantasy XIV. Play it! It's good. It's fun. It is the most fun you're going to have with any MMO.
01:23:27
Speaker
No, play mahjong. Everybody should learn how to play mahjong. Oh wait, that's in fucking FF14. That is in FF14. Play mahjong. The mahjong players are really fucking good though, so stay on the team. Camera, is this a podcast? This is a podcast, yes. Okay, bye everybody. Bye everyone.