Ruby Okamura | Article Virginia Quist | Photos

Reuniting with loved ones is a delightful and pleasurable experience . It is a time to share old memories and a time to create new ones .

Upon marrying my husband , Mas , in 1968 , I became an immediate member of the Okamura family , and thereby , the extended Hisaoka family . I have learned much about Japanese Canadian culture and have enjoyed interacting with the large and ever-growing Hisaoka clan . Here is the history of our fourteen family reunions since 1968 .

The Hisaoka family had its beginnings in 1912 in Victoria , B . C ., when Ichirohe Hisaoka met and married his picture bride , Kin Hirashima , who had arrived by ship from Japan . Ichirohe had arrived in Canada in 1907 to work in the coal mines . Due to poor working conditions and poor wages , he left to cut logs , and then to become a house boy , learning English and saving money to buy a farm .

The couple lived on Ichirohe ’ s farm in Mission City , B . C ., and raised a family of ten children . When the family was forced to leave Mission in 1942 , some of their children were already married . Their daughter Fujiko was married to Masaru Okamura , and had three sons by that time , with 13-month-old Mas the youngest of those .

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7 , 1941 , had a permanent impact on the Hisaoka family and the whole Japanese community in B . C . Some 23,000 men , women , and children were branded as disloyal , traitorous , and enemy aliens . They were sent to hastily built internment camps or old ghost towns in the interior . However , Bachan ( Grandmother Kin ) and Gichan ( Grandfather Ichirohe ) made another choice . They brought all the family members to work in the beet fields of southern Alberta so the family group would not be splintered .

Leaving behind decades of hard work on their farms and orchards and taking few personal possessions with them to southern Alberta , the families survived incredibly poor working and living conditions and major racial discrimination . Gichan worked to improve the situation for his family members and other Japanese people on the farms . After the war , in 1948 , Bachan and Gichan and the Okamura family made Lethbridge their permanent home .

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