Obaasan’s Boots
by Janis Bridger and Lara Jean Okihiro
Second Story Press, 2023
ISBN 978-1-77260-348-4 (sc)
$12.95, 160 pp, ages 9 – 12
secondstorypress.ca
Two real-life cousins who are driven by social justice concerns have crafted a deeply moving novel that tells their family’s story during the Japanese Canadian internment of the 1940s. The work shifts back and forth over the decades via different narrators, as two cousins (ten-year-old Lou and twelve-year-old Charlotte) spend time with their grandmother in her Toronto home in the late twentieth century. The young girls seek to connect to their heritage by pressing their obaasan to teach them the meaning of important words they often hear and perhaps even bestow a proper Japanese first name. But they also learn much more about how over 20,000 “enemy aliens” from BC were first removed from coastal regions and then further dispersed across Canada at war’s end. Their belongings, including valuable boats and homes, were often either stolen or sold for fire sale prices and in 1946, some people found themselves deported to a war-ravaged Japan that they had never before set foot in. Bit by bit, via conversations around the kitchen table and in the backyard garden, Lou and Charlotte learn how even a later federal government apology and Redress Agreement in 1988 further divided some members of the Japanese Canadian community.
Classroom Connections: This book could be utilized in a cross-curricular manner (fulfilling both Language and Social Studies requirements, for example) since the internment and forced relocation are found in junior/intermediate provincial curriculums across Canada (for example, in Ontario it is in the Grade 6 Social Studies and Grade 10 Canadian History expectations, and in BC can be found in grades 4 – 7, 8, and 9 Social Studies and History, and grade 10 Law).
Review by George Sheppard.
This review is featured in Canadian Teacher Magazine’s Fall 2024 issue.
