A Fortuitous Connection

When I first started this blog a year and a half ago, I was just experimenting with another form of writing....  I had no idea it was going to lead me to an invaluable source for my new novel.  As I've mentioned before, I’m currently writing an historical novel partly inspired by my great grandfather, Dr. Kozo Shimotakahara’s life as a doctor at a Japanese-Canadian internment camp during the Second World War.  But never did it occur to me that someone with a connection to Kozo would stumble across one of my blog posts and contact me to send me this photograph of my great grandparents taken on their wedding day.

Over the past month, I’ve learned a lot about Kozo’s life from my new online friend, Todd.  Todd came across my blog when he did a Google search on Kozo Shimotakahara’s name – not knowing exactly who the man was.  He’d become intrigued by Kozo upon noticing his signature upon his great grandmother’s and her cousin’s death certificates, so he gathered that Kozo had been a Vancouver doctor before the war.  When he found the above wedding picture in his parents' possession, he figured that the Shimotakaharas might have been old friends of his great grandparents from the old days of Japantown.  It seems that when Kozo first arrived in Canada he stayed at a Japanese Christian Missionary in Victoria, BC, where Todd's great grandfather was a preacher.  The original photo was mottled with dirt and dust specks, so Todd skillfully photoshopped it (thanks Todd!)

As we discussed in our flurry of emails, Kozo and his wife Shin don’t look terribly happy on their wedding day.  Perhaps this is simply due to the limitations of photographic technology at the time: the poser had to remain perfectly still and hold the same expression for a long time, which could be cumbersome.  But I can’t help but read a certain hardness in both their faces – their stone-chiseled lips send chills down my spine.  Clearly, these are two incredibly willful people, as one might expect of a Christian missionary (Shin was one of the first in Japan) and a pioneering doctor (Kozo was the first Japanese-Canadian doctor and also a highly religious man).

Despite all the mythologizing in my family, discrepancies and lacunae about their lives abound.  My grandmother, who was our family historian, used to write hortatory essays based on the stories Kozo had told her.  According to her, Kozo left Kagoshima-ken, Japan at age fourteen  with a mere 5 yen, which his mother had earned by selling eggs, and immigrated to Vancouver where he worked as a houseboy and enrolled in elementary school to learn his ABCs.  Later, he went on to graduate from University of Chicago medical school.  I could never understand how Kozo became a doctor just like that.  Yet Todd has discovered a more textured narrative through some fascinating genealogical research.  He has sent me a border crossing record, photocopied from Vancouver Public Library, stating in the registrar’s slanted, slightly smudged writing that Kozo entered the United States on September 24, 1911, to attend Valparaiso University in Indiana.  He had $50 on him and was 5 feet, 2 inches tall.  A bit of online research reveals that Valparaiso was a Methodist, no frills institute of higher learning that did not have a med school.  So I wonder if Kozo enrolled there and then proceeded to University of Chicago, or whether his journey took a more circuitous route?  And why did he never tell anyone in our family about this interlude in his life?  Although I may never know for certain, these periods of struggle and self-formation when he was a young man tease at my imagination and after a while he ceases to feel like my ancestor – he becomes a character alive in my head.