Forgiveness

Forgiveness: A Gift from My Grandparents is a memoir by Mark Sakamoto that traces the parallel wartime experiences of his two grandparents: one a Canadian soldier imprisoned by the Japanese, the other a Japanese Canadian forcibly uprooted by her own government. The book explores how their capacity for forgiveness made his family, and his own life, possible.

The memoir opens with a present-day discovery. After the death of Mark's paternal grandfather, Hideo Sakamoto, Mark's grandmother Mitsue finds relics in her basement: a Pacific Star war medal belonging to Mark's maternal grandfather, Ralph MacLean, and a cassette tape of Mark's late mother Diane's voice, recorded during a pregnancy in Fiji. These objects crystallize the paradox at the center of Mark's life: The people who tried to kill Ralph during the war looked like Mitsue, like Hideo, and like Mark himself. Yet Mitsue and Ralph shared a deep mutual respect.

Sakamoto recounts his grandparents' lives, beginning with Ralph MacLean, who grew up on the Magdalen Islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Ralph's father, Stanley, was a violent man who beat his children; his mother, Susan, whom Ralph called "Dearest Mother," raised eight children in grinding poverty. After his brother-in-law was killed in a Royal Air Force crash over England, Ralph tried to enlist in the Navy to avenge the death but was turned away. He returned to the islands, where he and his best friend, Deighton Aitken, spent months restless and idle until recruiters arrived for the Royal Rifles of Canada in August 1940. Both enlisted, with a recruiting officer altering Ralph's birthdate to make him eligible for overseas deployment.

In parallel, Sakamoto introduces his paternal grandmother, Mitsue Oseki, the eldest daughter of Yosuke and Tomi Oseki, Japanese immigrants who settled in Celtic, a Vancouver neighborhood. Yosuke prospered as a fisherman, and the family lived modestly in a cannery row house. Mitsue navigated two worlds: the tight-knit Japanese community and English-speaking schools, where she was often the only Japanese student. Tragedy struck when her best friend died of tuberculosis and her eldest brother died of an unknown illness. Mitsue found solace teaching Sunday school and later fell in love with Hideo Sakamoto, a gentle man who worked at a paper mill. In the spring of 1941, the government ordered all Japanese Canadians to carry registration cards with photographs and fingerprints. Hideo asked Yosuke for Mitsue's hand and received his blessing.

On December 7, 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, setting both grandparents' fates in motion. Ralph, stationed with the Royal Rifles in Hong Kong, faced an invasion force of fifty thousand Japanese troops against fourteen thousand defenders with no air support and heavy weapons mistakenly shipped to the Philippines. Over seventeen brutal days, Ralph fought across Hong Kong Island, fired a Bren gun, a light machine gun, at a strafing Japanese Zero to save his squad, and watched friends die around him. On Christmas Day, pinned on a cliff ledge after an ambush and armed only with a knife, he offered a grim "Merry Christmas" (84) to his injured companion.

In Vancouver, the attack triggered the systematic persecution of Japanese Canadians. Despite the Canadian military, the RCMP, and the Navy all confirming there was no security justification, anti-Japanese politicians pushed for total removal. The government seized over a thousand Japanese-owned fishing boats and began forced evacuations. Over twenty-one thousand Japanese Canadians were uprooted without a single reported act of treason. Mitsue and Hideo accelerated their wedding, marrying with RCMP guards checking registration cards at the church door.

Captured after Hong Kong's fall, Ralph was bound with barbed wire and marched to a series of prison camps. At North Point Camp, he reunited with Deighton amid nightmarish conditions: bedbugs, mouldy rice, and men dying daily of dysentery and diphtheria. When both fell critically ill, Ralph pleaded with a doctor for evacuation. Both were placed on a medical transport, but the guards closed the tailgate before Deighton could board. Ralph reached for his friend's hand; the truck hit a bump, and Deighton slipped from his grasp. Deighton died that night. Ralph, blinded by diphtheria, spent three weeks in total darkness at Bowen Road Military Hospital before his sight gradually returned.

In the summer of 1943, Ralph was shipped to Japan as a slave laborer aboard the SS Morningstar, crammed with over a hundred men into a lightless cargo hull for a fourteen-day voyage. At a camp in Niigata, he served under Commandant Tetsutaro Kato, a cruel officer who left prisoners to die in freezing weather. Ralph survived largely because a fellow prisoner, Henry Marsolais, shared food from his own rations every night for three months.

Mitsue's ordeal differed in nature but paralleled Ralph's in hardship. The Sakamoto and Oseki families were transported by train to southern Alberta's sugar beet farms. Mitsue's family was given a converted chicken coop with dirt floors and no insulation. They labored in extreme heat, paid by beet weight. Hideo's mother, Wari, weakened by the conditions, died of heart failure at forty-nine. Mitsue worked through two pregnancies, returning to the fields days after giving birth. When the Celtic community centre burned down, destroying their stored possessions, Mitsue's parents consoled her: Their dignity could not be burned.

After the war, neither grandparent found easy relief. When American B-29 bombers appeared over Niigata, Ralph found a Bible in a supply barrel. At the train station, the defeated Commandant Kato gave Ralph his pipe and rank stripes and bowed deeply. Ralph remembered a passage from Mark 11:25 about forgiveness, nodded, and boarded the train without speaking. He returned to Canada haunted by night terrors and relied on that scriptural principle to slowly recover. Meanwhile, the Canadian government offered Japanese Canadians a choice: move east of the Rockies or face deportation to Japan. Over four thousand were deported before the orders were repealed. The Japanese Property Claims Commission sent Hideo's father, Hanpei, a cheque for $25.65 for belongings the family valued at $818. Mitsue and Hideo settled in Medicine Hat, Alberta, where the local headline read: "FIRST JAP FAMILY MOVES TO THE HAT" (161).

A generation later, Ralph's daughter Diane and Mitsue's son Stanley met at a high school dance in 1967. Ralph never raised the issue of Stan's Japanese heritage. In 1968, Mitsue hosted Ralph and his wife, Phyllis, for dinner. Sakamoto calls this the most important dinner of his life: His existence depended on these two sides coming together. Mark's childhood was initially happy, but his parents' marriage dissolved. His mother remarried a younger man named Stephen, who brought violence into the household. Diane developed an alcohol addiction and sank into poverty, eventually living in the windowless basement of a hotel. Mark became nomadic, splitting nights among his mother's place, his grandmother's house, and his father's home.

While Mark studied law in Halifax, Diane's health collapsed. In 2001, Mark and his brother Daniel rushed home. Their father Stan's card at the hospital bedside read: "The boys are on their way" (225). Mark felt Diane's final breath on his cheek. He sank into depression until his girlfriend, Jade, asked if he still loved her. She reminded him of what he was made of, and he credited his grandparents' resilience with showing him a way forward.

Years later, working in Ottawa in the Leader of the Opposition's office, Sakamoto sat in the room that once served as Prime Minister Mackenzie King's wartime office, where decisions were made both to send Ralph to Hong Kong and to intern Japanese Canadians. He realized that without those decisions, his parents would never have met. When his daughter, Miya Mitsue, was born, the fear that he might abandon those he loved finally lifted. Sakamoto returns to Medicine Hat with Diane's ashes, scatters them between two evergreen trees flanking a bench in Central Park, and smiles. The memoir closes with a letter to his grandparents, thanking them for their bravery and pledging to lead a loving and honorable life in their example.