Ezra's Ghosts by Darcy Tamayose

Author:Darcy Tamayose
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NeWest Press
Published: 2022-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

In the early 1900s Kousuke crossed the Pacific as part of the Ryukyuan labour diaspora. There was great poverty, and in small geographies one can be displaced by dominant powers only so much before flight is necessary. Further back in time, the once-flourishing island kingdom had lost their sovereignty to Japan’s Satsuma warriors in 1609. Then there was the eventual annexation by Meiji Japan in 1879, accompanied by heightened efforts to assimilate, industrialize, and Westernize. A cyclical narrative as old as creation stories, mythology, and fairy tales. Then tetsu no bofu. The bloodiest campaign of the Second World War staged on the largest of the islands, Okinawa, where one of every four islanders died. Followed by American occupation, Indigenous land appropriation, and militarization — parasitic forevermore. In various diasporic waves many islanders migrated to places with a similar climate like Hawaii, Brazil, Peru, Argentina, and the Philippines. But in 1907 Kousuke Kana travelled from Yomitan all the way to Canada with little money and a small bag of island seeds and plant slips. After months on the ocean, the Monteagle docked first in San Francisco, where Kousuke saw so many different kinds of people. He soon came to realize that learning a new language was the least of his adaptation challenges — there were other things that mattered in this country, such as the colour of his skin and hair, his small stature, his facial features. The passenger ship carried on up the Pacific Northwest to Vancouver, Canada, where it met with anti-Asian race riots upon landing. He didn’t settle there as many from mainland Japan did; he carried on by train through the Rocky Mountains and beyond the foothills where there was work with the railroad, coal mines, and farming. It was a place where wheat fields blanketed the land, stretching long toward what must have been the end of the earth.

For several months he simply wandered through the prairie, destitute. Acclimation proved a long and lonely process for Kousuke. Smelling his new world. Hiding. Starving. Watching. Listening. He was a quiet boy who seemed to arouse suspicion and draw curious stares wherever he went. His eyes were large, amber, and elongated, his shoulders unusually broad. His skin was not white or black, and neither was it quite the tone of Blackfoot or Cree. A newer category of skin colour always posed a taxonomy problem — especially for immigration forms and the gradients of discriminatory practice to be doled out. Chinese. Japanese. Korean. Taiwanese. It didn’t matter that he was from the Ryukyu Islands. The hemispheric subtleties, longitudinal and latitudinal increment, not a concern here. All the same colour of categorization: yellow. What is your ethnicity? Asian. But even in the Japanese-Canadian subcultural community it was known that Kousuke was from those islands and therefore silently, quietly, categorized all by himself in an unmentionable subaltern class. The first and the only. He was a Ryukyuan.

There was little known about his background — or about the obscure island chain he

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