BURST
The long journey of Pte. Sentaro Omoto, a Japanese Canadian soldier who served in the First World War, was commemorated on Tuesday at Mountain View Cemetery, where his family gathered to pay their respects.
Omoto was laid to rest in the Fields of Honour, where thousands of other Canadian service members are buried.
“He has come home. He is among his friends. The family wanted him buried alongside his comrades,” said Debbie Jiang, a local historian who has made it her mission to document the stories of Japanese Canadian soldiers, many of whom, like Omoto, were ignored or forgotten after their service.
When the First World War broke out, 116 Japanese Canadians in B.C. organized to enlist in the Canadian Army, but had to travel to Alberta to do so after B.C. rejected them due to racist provincial policies and disenfranchisement.
“They wanted to enlist for political reasons. They wanted the right to vote,” said Jiang.
Omoto was gravely wounded at the Battle of Hill 70 on the Western Front in northern France in March 1917, and returned home to B.C. Although he was a war hero, he was also Japanese. There were no post-war military honours. Jiang struggled to even find a photo of him in uniform.
So she put out a call for photos of Japanese Canadian WWI soldiers in uniform on social media. That’s when she discovered someone else was looking, too: Omoto’s granddaughter, Cathy Uchida.
Uchida, 70, who grew up in Los Angeles, never knew her grandfather, and had only the barest information. He had come to Canada as a fisherman around 1900, served for Canada in the First World War. He married, but the family was split up following the forced relocation, dispossession and internment of the Japanese in Canada during the Second World War.
Half the family, her grandmother and the three eldest children, returned to Japan. Her grandfather, a proud veteran, stayed in Canada with the two youngest children.
“I knew my grandfather had been a WWI veteran, but I didn’t know the significance of the contributions of Japanese Canadian soldiers during the battle of Vimy Ridge, or Hill 70. It was always in the back of my head: what happened to these guys after the war?” said Uchida.
She knew Japanese Canadians had been placed in internment camps during the Second World War, but her mother, Omoto’s eldest daughter, “sanitized” the Canadian history, and glossed over the hardships, she said.
“Part of it was the Japanese notion of shoganai,” said Uchida. “It means something like don’t dwell on it, don’t get stuck on it and keep moving forward.”
Uchida wanted to know more, and began a documentary project on her family. When she saw Jiang’s call-out for photos on social media, she reached out.
In a book, written in Japanese, found at the Nikkei archives in Burnaby, Jiang finally found a picture.
Uchida was moved to tears by the photo. Now she had another quest: Where were her grandfather’s ashes?
Omoto had died in 1953 at Shaughnessy Military Hospital of lung cancer. Typically, when a veteran dies in Canada, they are given a military funeral. Instead of honours after his service, Omoto had faced persecution and shame. The same had happened in death, it seemed.
Uchida and Jiang learned that after the war, when Japanese Canadians were ordered to move east of the Rocky Mountains, or be repatriated to Japan, Omoto’s wife, Chiye, chose to go to Japan with her three older children, in order to find her eldest son, who had been stuck there since the outbreak of the war.
“He insisted as a Canadian war veteran, he wasn’t going anywhere,” said Jiang.
Uchida’s mother, like many bilingual exiles living in Japan, worked for occupation forces after the war, eventually moving to the United States.
During her research, Uchida discovered her grandfather’s ashes, along with those of her grandmother, were at the Vancouver Buddhist Temple.
“The minister said he had been there for years and no one had ever come to pay their respects,” said Uchida. The temple informed her they don’t keep ashes forever. Her Canadian relatives thought it might be best to “toss his ashes to the wind” somewhere.
“I thought, this isn’t right. My grandfather doesn’t deserve to be tossed to the wind,” said Uchida.
Jiang reached out to The Last Post fund, an organization that provides dignified funerals and burials for veterans, through Veterans Affairs Canada. But, Veterans Affairs Canada has a strict one-year policy for applications for burial after a veteran’s death. Omoto had died over 70 years before.
So they reached out to Ted Usher, president of Last Post Fund B.C.-Yukon branch, who asked whether it could use its funds, much of which is donated by veterans, to make arrangements.
“Branch members voted unanimously to purchase a plot and a grave marker,” said Usher. “Now the family has closure.”
“These guys were immigrants. They volunteered to serve. They were on the front lives. Some of them lost their lives. They came back to racism and discrimination. This story has to be remembered, and never forgotten,” said Uchida.
She surveyed the site in the Fields of Honour. Members of the Calgary Highlanders regiment were arriving, with bagpipes. Floral arrangements were set by the grave marker.
Pte. Sentaro Omoto was home at last.