An elderly Japanese couple recently made a 12-day trip across Canada. Their tour of the Great White North received a fair degree of local media attention, but not as much as one might have expected, given that the couple were Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko – and they don’t choose their overseas destinations lightly.

The tone of the coverage was respectful, if at times a bit fawning, and was evenly divided between background information about the Emperor’s life and the history of the Imperial house on one hand, and the current state of Japanese-Canadian relations on the other.

The July 3-14 visit was the first to Canada by a reigning Japanese monarch, but it wasn’t the first time the Emperor had set foot in the country. In 1953, the then-Crown Prince traveled across Canada by train on his way to London for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II as the representative of his father, the late Showa Emperor. It was the first time he had been overseas.

Many Canadian media outlets drew attention to the strong ties that have developed between the Imperial house and Canada since then, most notably in the person of the late Prince Takamado (1954-2002), who studied at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, from 1978 until 1981. Takamado, who became known as the “Canadian prince,” met his future wife at a reception at the Canadian Embassy in Tokyo in 1984 and tragically died of heart failure at the same embassy in 2002 while playing squash with Canada’s then-ambassador.

In a thoughtful piece that appeared in The Vancouver Sun’s six-page July 4 special section devoted to the Imperial visit, Jonathan Manthorpe noted that despite the generally healthy state of Canadian-Japanese relations at the economic (Japan is Canada’s second-biggest trading partner after the United States), political and grassroots levels, the relationship is “still well short of its potential and needs far more public advocacy then it is getting.”

Manthorpe, who is a member of the Canada-Japan Forum (“a standing, non-governmental consultative body”), says that he and other members of the forum had long urged both countries’ governments to arrange an Imperial visit to Canada in order to strengthen ties between the two nations and to mark the 80th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Ottawa and Tokyo.

The Sun’s supplement also included stories describing the Emperor’s 1953 Canadian odyssey and the Imperial family’s history since then; how local Japanese-Canadians were “thrilled to welcome the royal family” (well, at least two of its members); and a piece focusing on the Emperor’s role as the “head of Shintoism,” in which readers were informed that during his visit to Canada’s westernmost province the Japanese monarch “will obviously be adopting a much less authoritarian position in relation to Shintoism than his 19th-century predecessors.” That must have come as a great relief to the good people of British Columbia.

One aspect of the visit that the local media seem to have missed was the significance of the selection of Canada for the Imperial couple’s first overseas trip since their jaunt to Singapore and Thailand in 2006.

“An Imperial trip abroad is a highly political and diplomatic act, or perceived so by the government and people of Japan,” noted Tsuyoshi Kawasaki, associate professor in the departments of political science and humanities at British Columbia’s Simon Fraser University, in an article featured on the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada’s Web site (www.asiapacific.ca/en/http/wwwasiapacificca/emperor-0).

“There are always several foreign invitations for an Imperial visit at any time,” Kawasaki wrote. “Canada was chosen this time. These points clearly indicate how important Canada is seen in the eyes of the government and people of Japan.”

In a story published in the July 16 edition of Canada’s de facto national newspaper, the Toronto-based Globe and Mail, Rod Mickleburgh wrote of the “affection and enthusiasm that greeted the royal couple every time they appeared in public on their historic 12-day Canadian visit.”

“The visit was also special for the West Coast’s increasingly vibrant Japanese-Canadian community that has rebuilt itself into a force after being almost wiped out by wartime internment,” wrote Mickleburgh. Canada’s shameful treatment of the 21,500-member Japanese-Canadian community (many were Canadian citizens; some had fought in the Canadian Expeditionary Force in World War I) saw them robbed of all their possessions and transported to camps deep in the interior of British Columbia, to sugar-beet projects on the Prairies or to a POW camp in Ontario. The subject came up in a July 14 press conference given by the Emperor’s press secretary, Sadaaki Numata, who said the Emperor was “aware” of it.

The Globe and Mail and the rest of the Canadian media gave the impression that the internment was the darkest patch in Japanese-Canadian relations, largely neglecting to mention (one exception was a July 9 editorial in the Winnipeg Free Press) the horrific fate of the 1,975 members of two Canadian Army regiments sent to Hong Kong in October 1941 to defend the then-British colony.

In the Battle of Hong Kong, which lasted from Dec. 8 until Dec. 24, 1941, 290 Canadian soldiers were killed, including several bayoneted to death in their beds in a makeshift hospital (nurses working in the hospital were also assaulted and murdered). An additional 264 Canadian soldiers died while prisoners of the Japanese due to the brutality meted out to them in conditions of forced labor and near-starvation. (The full story is available at http://wwii.ca/page42.html.)

While the Canadian government belatedly apologized for its treatment of Japanese-Canadians and offered them token monetary compensation, neither the Emperor nor the government of Japan has ever apologized for the way Canadian POWs were treated, as the Free Press noted.
A July 10 Canadian Press story reported on a call by the Vancouver-based Association for Learning and Preserving the History of WWII in Asia for Japan to do more to come to terms with its history of aggression.

“The current emperor mentioning an apology or expression of regret over the past war can, of course, influence the Japanese people or Japanese government’s behavior,” association spokesperson Satoko Norimatsu was quoted as saying.

On a happier note, a July 15 story in The Vancouver Sun described how the Empress was pleasantly surprised to meet a former classmate from her days as a student at Tokyo’s University of the Sacred Heart during the Imperial couple’s visit to the Vancouver Convention Center.

Eighty-year-old Miriam Vatts reminded the Empress that she had lent her some money one morning for streetcar fare because the then-Michiko Shoda had only a large banknote.

“Oh, did I ever pay you back?” the Empress reportedly replied to an amused Vatts. ❶