Diary of Mary Kobayashi

Mary Kobayashi lived through the Japanese Internment in Canada as a child. She documented her experiences in a diary published in 2012. Her diary began before her internment, with details about the mounting tension against Japanese Canadians in Vancouver. One incident she shared happened to her sister on public transit. A white woman accosted her for being Japanese, spewing about the “horrible things you people are doing in the war,” a shameful thing to say to a child. 

One by one, Mary’s family was taken away over months with no word about their whereabouts. When they received notice to go to camp, Mary, her sister, and their mother had no idea where they were going. No one else on the train knew either. 

Mary was one of the rare people who documented and published her internment experience. Her perspective as a child, wholly innocent of the threat assigned to her, tells us more about the racism in Canadian society than it does about any wrongdoing. 

Bibliography:

[1] Aihoshi, Susan. Torn Apart: The Internment Diary of Mary Kobayashi. Toronto: Scholastic Canada Ltd., 2012. https://archive.org/details/tornapartinternm0000susa.