While reading the article by the Globe and Mail about Harry Aoki, I was struck with how unfair the Canadian government and the Canadian people truly were towards Japanese Canadians.  One of the videos from the course outline I watched, however, showed empathy the instructors at UBC showed Japanese Canadian citizens that were being oppressed by their own government. It reminded me that it wasn’t everyone who was full of fear and hate at this time. This reminds me of an assignment in my English class called The Danger of a Single Story.

People make assumptions based on a single story of an individual, or group of people.  In this case, Japan attacked Pearl Harbour, this single story prompted the Canadian government and the Canadian people to fear the Japanese Canadian people, even though they were born largely in Canada.  Those who feared Japanese Canadians were the enemy must have known very little about Japanese Canadians and their culture except that the country their nationality was from attacked the naval base in Oahu.  Knowing only a single story about a person or race can help spread fear, hate, and racism. It is important to learn as much as you can about any given race or people before making assumptions.

Two of the videos in the required readings for this assignment I actually have and my Social Studies 10 class on Japanese Canadian studies. The one video I don’t have in my course: A Degree of Justice: Japanese Canadian Students of 1942 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8jGdYMmwfQ,  really struck me. UBC professors were willing to go out of their way to help Japanese Canadian students succeed in their classes. This action really resonated with me and made me think of things I do to help my students succeed. I find it’s a pretty delicate balance at times to go above and beyond for students and to balance that with a personal life. I’m finding that with a class of 200-plus students, one must really work efficiently when going above and beyond to help students succeed. Teachers can potentially lose themselves and sacrifice too much time and energy at the expense of their families and their personal time. That is not to say that we can’t make a difference and go that extra step to help students. Many things we can do as educators, such as reminders of due dates and frequent progress reports, help a lot in student success.  Being proactive and doing my best to identify potential pitfalls in my online courses go a long way to help make the course run more streamlined and help reduce the number of students that may struggle in a particular section.

                The reading of Chapter 20, reflections of a Japanese Canadian teacher experiencing ethnicity, sounded quite philosophical in nature. I found it interesting to see that Aoki didn’t seem to hold a lot of resentment from the racism that he experienced. He did say “as a Japanese Canadian, I occasionally felt my humanists crushed or disturbed.” (Pinar, n.d.) I can only imagine how difficult it was to take a philosophical attitude in the face of all the racism he faced during his time as a teacher. Towards the end of the article, Aoki discussed how we make assumptions about humanity and the world and then reflected on how he makes sense of it. He discussed as a Japanese Canadian, he’s had more stressors, which he called tensions, which help him to see the world in a particularly special way. He said, “For a Japanese Canadian like myself, I have alternate possibilities and making sense of my world.” (Pinar, n.d.)  Aoki pondered about how to make sense of the world; he thought there were three different ways that he could do this. The first one was in a non-dialectic way, meaning either as a Japanese Canadian or a Canadian citizen. He also thought of being a hybrid, trying to homogenize his Japanese and Western heritage together. And the final way of viewing the world that he strives to live by is instead of a monovision mentality to use what he describes as a double vision view, where he makes sense of the world through Japanese Canadian and Western mindsets.

                This reminds me that we all come from different places, not geographically but perhaps ethnically, and we’ve definitely been raised differently from each other. We’ve all had different experiences and that shape who we are and how we make sense of the world. We need to take the opportunity to take our different experiences and use them to do good in the world, to teach others how to make sense of the world, and to help our students shape who they are and how they view the world.

Pinar, W. (n.d.). Reflections of a Japanese Canadian Teacher Experiencing Ethnicity 1 (1979). In Reflections of a Japanese Canadian Teacher Experiencing Ethnicity 1 (1979) (1st Edition). https://www-taylorfrancis-com.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781410611390-26/reflections-japanese-canadian-teacher-experiencing-ethnicity-1-1979-william-pinar-rita-irwin?context=ubx&refId=1e2bc9ea-4a98-4967-a3ee-13a9223593f0