A bleak and frigid winter had left the clapboard homes with an inch or two of ice buildup on the interior walls.

Life was restricted by regulations—Canada’s War Measures Act had seen to that as everyone in the makeshift community had been branded “Enemy Aliens.”

Most of their possessions had been appropriated and sold for a pittance. Four years of internment lay ahead.

That was the life of Japanese-Canadians during the Second World War—an experience Tsawwassen film director Brendan Uegama will be starting to shoot in October for an independent short film called Henry’s Glasses.

But rather than position the movie as a government-bashing vehicle Uegama, 29, intends to elevate the tone and focus on the triumph of the human spirit that is held aloft by the power of imagination.

“I’ve always been attracted to films where people use their imagination to get themselves out of hard areas or times,” says Uegama. “Films like Pan’s Labyrinth or the Wizard of Oz where it’s about the power of imagination. And I believe that by combining those two it kind of led to Henry’s Glasses.”

The film, which is expected to be released early next year, follows the plight of eight-year-old Henry who is gifted a pair of glasses from his grandfather while living in an internment camp in Tashme, located in the Sunshine Valley near Hope. The glasses are said to possess the magical ability to see a brighter day beyond the run down barns and shacks of the camp. After Henry’s grandfather passes away he befriends another elderly man, Mr. Yamamoto, made cynical by the forced detention. Using the glasses, Henry attempts to help Mr. Yamamoto see beyond camp life.

Hitting close to home

While the story asks the viewer to suspend their belief and enter a world created through imagination, the foundation of the Japanese-Canadian experience has roots that strike close to home for Uegama.

His father, Walter, was just four-years-old when he and his family were told to pack up all their belongings and be prepared to be relocated.

“My parents had a business at 4th and MacDonald, it was a dry cleaning business in Vancouver,” says Walter. “We had a car and camera equipment—my dad had a hobby of taking pictures. And everything, basically, was taken away.”

The family was sent to Hasting Park race course where they were detained in tents for a number of weeks, then sent on to Greenwood in south central B.C. near Grand Forks.

It was an old ghost town left over after the mining days. It would be home for the Uegamas and many other families for the next four years.

“My dad was very literate in English. He wrote and spoke English very well, even with a little bit of an accent because he learned the language from a bunch of Englishmen, which was kind of funny,” Walter says.”My father had come from Japan in 1905 and he didn’t migrate to places where there were clusters of Japanese.

“Dad had served in the First World War with the Canadian army overseas in Europe . . . So, he was not very happy with the situation as you might well imagine,” he adds.

The family of six was combined with another family of eight to live in a small house. Later, due to the military service record of Walter’s father, they eventually got a home of their own.

Through all the indignation Walter says his father never complained.

“He was angry, yes. But he spoke very little and kept very much to himself,” Walter says.

For himself, the young Walter never fully realized the gravity of internment life. The impact was much more significant for his older sisters.

“My best buddy was a Caucasian kid. But we couldn’t go to school together. The Catholics set up a school for the internees, an order of nuns called the Sisters of the Atonement. And they taught from grades one to about Grade 9, but none of the university transfer programs,” Walter says. “So, the older kids, like my sisters who were eight and nine years older and very bright girls, surely if we had stayed here and not gone to the camps would have gone on to university. All they could learn was what they got access to and that was secretarial, stenographic programs.”

Living history

It’s those types of accounts Brendan Uegama hopes to bring to the screen with Henry’s Glasses, which is the first project out of three he is planning to produce.

To help fully tell the story of the Japanese-Canadian internment experience he plans on making a documentary called the Rising Sun that includes interviews with remaining survivors, and then a feature length movie—Blossoms on foreign soil—to complete the story.

“All those films, the inspiration came from learning about my family’s and Japanese-Canadian history,” Brendan says. “The more I learned about it, the more I wanted to write and talk about it, explore it.”

Driving the film projects forward is the advancement of time and a need to preserve and showcase a period in Canadian history.

“Basically we’re looking for funding to help preserve part of B.C.’s and Canada’s history,” says Nicole Leier, the film’s producer. “And that’s one of the things this film is really about. A lot of the people who were interned are getting older and we are at a point where we could lose this history.”

“It’s a very time sensitive issue because of the age of those interned that within the next 10 or 20 years there’s not really going to be anyone left to talk about it who actually experienced it,” adds Brendan. “And from that point on we’ll be learning about it from old archival footage or books, which is great. But we want to preserve as much as we can through the voices of the former internees.”

Brendan, a graduate of South Delta Secondary, remembers from his time in school that Japanese-Canadian internment was covered fleetingly. That’s something he also hopes to correct with his vision for three films.

“New Denver is the only place, I think, that has a museum about the internment where you can see the artifacts and the homes,” Brendan says. “But everywhere else you go to, Greenwood or Tashme or Lemon Creek, there’s really nothing left. You would never guess anything happened there.”

“One thing I think is really good is that Brendan can use the film to give to the schools so it’s part of the history in schools,” says Brendan’s mother Carol-Anne.

A brighter outlook

The effects of internment lasted beyond the war years for many Japanese-Canadians.

Government restrictions forbid all internees from returning to coastal communities—those within 100 miles of the coastline—for a period of three years following the conclusion of hostilities.

That kind of lingering distrust could have made it easy for Brendan to produce a story line full of angst.

But that was not the goal.

“Mr. Yamamoto is in his seventies and Henry is an eight-year-old kid. I kind of related the Japanese experience of that time through both characters in different ways,” he says. “So I kind of placed everything that the Japanese went through coming to Canada with their hopes and dreams in Henry and everything that happened like the internment and the struggle they went through I put into Mr. Yamamoto.

“I looked at this young child who through his imagination could be free of his limitations, use these glasses and see them for what his grandfather said they were which was limitless possibilities because he’s a child and hasn’t been conditioned through 70 years of negativity.”

Father Walter adds the tale is more about a young boy whose grandfather instilled a feeling of strength, belief and hope to make sure his grandson maintained that.

“And there’s a metaphor for this in Henry’s Glasses that allows him to see this magical world,” Walter says.

“I’ve always wanted to educate people about this dark period in history without bringing out the hard feelings,” adds Brendan.

- By Philip Raphael

editor@southdeltaleader.com