Ology of Apology

This is a memorial made to facilitate the remembrance of the thousands of Japanese Canadians who were interned during WWII.

That opening sentence probably raises a few question for you and while I am unable to know what you are actually thinking, an educated guess will probably do. Firstly, you may have read the intro, seen the image, and thought something along the lines of why a memorial?” or “why Japanese internment?” You might also be wondering “How exactly does that symbolize Japanese internment” or “it’s a bit small for a memorial, is it not?”. There’s even a chance you wondered “What’s Japanese internment?”. ¹

Well, If this post goes the way I’ve planned, all of your questions should be answered in due time, so let’s start right at the top of the list with the Why. So, why are we making memorials? Well, first let’s talk about what a memorial even is.

We spent a lot of time figuring this out, by looking at examples of famous memorials, identifying common elements, and even making some basic memorials on a serious time crunch.² Now, what did we actually learn about memorials from that? To make a long story short A memorial is (memorial definition) .

Why we made memorials at all becomes a bit more clear with the project’s driving question:³

How can we keep an apology alive so the wrongs of the past are remembered—and not repeated—today?

This project was all about memorials, and acknowledging past wrongs. In short we looked at case studies, did research and then designed and built a prototype memorial to a past historic event.⁴

Let’s start, as all good things do, with the study. As I mentioned before, we would be looking at past injustices, specifically those that happened in BC.

Since that doesn’t necessarily narrow it down a lot, the three we looked at were the Chinese head tax, the komagata maru, and Japanese internment.

The head tax was a fee that had to be payed by any Chinese immigrant that wished to enter Canada between 1885 to 1923. It’s main purpose was to limit immigration from China, with the fee becoming as high as $500 per person.

Next, the Komagata Maru was a ship carrying hundreds of south asian immigrants, aiming to challenge the continuous passage act that effectively banned them from immigrating to Canada. When they arrived in Vancouver harbour, they were not allowed to enter Canada, and were sent back to India after a two month standoff.⁵

Now for Japanese internment, which was my focus for this project.

At this point we were put into groups⁶ where we would be designing our actual memorials. This would be a challenge, as we would have to know all about our topic to design an effective memorial without being disrespectful. As part of our research, we created Smart Brevity⁷ notes on our topics. For my part, this mostly consisted of as much research as possible to distill out the key details. Here’s what I came up with, if you’d like to reap the knowledge:

Now for Japanese internment, which was my focus for this project.

With research complete, we could get together and start planning. Despite spending a bit of time stuck, we came up with the concept of doing something with a cherry blossom tree to symbolize Japanese Canadians. From there we started to come up with more symbols. We thought of barbed wire to represent the past trauma and hardship of internment. We also were told about Japanese fishing balls, which we used to represent Japanese Canadian property being seized, and them being forced away from their homes.

Our final design consisted of a tree, the trunk wrapped with barbed wire and fishing balls hanging from it’s branches. We decided the hypothetical “real” memorial would be a metal sculpture, so we started to design a memorial around that.

I 3d modelled a tree that Adam was able to 3d print, which served as the base for our leaves. The trunk ended up being too small, so Adam made one out of clay. After adding on the fishing balls ( made of marbles ) and barbed wire ( made of wire ) we hit it with a healthy coat of spraypaint, and we were done!

We presented our memorials to the other half of the class, and things went pretty smoothly. We had created memorial explainers, which outlined the symbolism for our memorial, which made presenting very easy.

With presenting done, the last step was to display our memorials for the world to see ( the world being Seycove ). We put all our memorial explainers on one page, made a qr code, and put them in the display case ( ours is in the centre )

With that, the project was officially done. Although there’s not much a single fictional memorial can do to heal the wrongs of the past, this project has at least educated me on them, and maybe you learned soemthing too. If you want to read our explainers, here they are: https://finn.craft.me/internment.

That’s all for this post, So long for now.