Born in Vancouver in 1912, Muriel Kitagawa was the eldest child of Tsuru and Asajiro Fujiwara, Japanese immigrants. Moving frequently, the family struggled to make ends meet despite her father working in a mill and her mother making dresses. When Muriel was ten, the family split for several years, reuniting in 1924.
Showing an aptitude for writing and always troubled by the racial discrimination around her, Muriel received encouragement from her English teacher to develop her writing around that theme. She graduated second highest in New Westminster’s Duke of Connaught High School’s Class of 1929. From there, she studied one year at the University of British Columbia before financial problems made enrollment no longer possible.
As part of the Nisei (second-generation or Canadian-born Japanese), Muriel’s writing talents became important in activism as she fought for the right to vote for herself and her peers. Many professions were open only to voters, which led to economic discrimination.
In the early 1930s, Muriel wrote for The Young People (the journal of the Young People’s Society of the United Church), The New Age (an English-language newspaper founded by and for Nisei), and for The New Canadian paper.
In 1933, Muriel married Ed Kitagawa, a celebrity in the local Japanese Canadian community due to his fame with the Asahi baseball team. Professionally, Ed served Japanese Canadian clients at the Bank of Montreal. Between 1934 and 1942, four children were born. In 1940, the Kitagawas purchased their own house in Vancouver, a significant achievement among their peers.
Muriel became president of the Japanese Canadian Unit of the Red Cross Society, withdrawing in 1941 because of a difficult pregnancy with twins. During that same pregnancy, Canada declared war on Japan following Japan’s surprise attacks on Pearl Harbor, Hong Kong, and the Philippines. All of this threw the Japanese Canadian community into turmoil. Muriel began documenting her experiences and observations in letters to her younger brother, Wes Fujiwara, a medical student in Toronto. The letters detailed concerns over her family’s arrangements, as well as the attempts of their broader community to organize and advocate for themselves after the government forced removal of Japanese Canadians from coastal British Columbia.
Rev. James Finlay, a connection of Wes’s, offered the Kitagawas board in his home, which helped the family relocate to Toronto and stay together while the federal government sent many of their peers to internment camps and farms. In 1943, the government began to sell Japanese Canadian-owned property, including the Kitagawas’ Vancouver home, without the consent of owners. When Japanese Canadians were finally allowed to return to BC in 1947, the Kitagawas had nothing to return to and remained in Toronto.
Muriel Kitigawa died in 1974, never knowing that her letters to her brother would be published in a book called This is My Own: Letters to Wes & Other Writings on Japanese Canadians, 1941-1948, or that her work would inspire the novel Obasan by Joy Kogawa, or that these books would play an integral role in the redress for Japanese Canadians in 1988. On the twentieth anniversary of that event in 2008, the late former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney quoted Muriel and said, “For her life, and the lives of other Japanese Canadians in wartime, Canada can be grateful.”
Muriel Kitigawa
Have you ever been tempted to exploit another human for your own benefit? An immigrant, a child, a person with fewer resources than you? Jesus made it clear that he despises injustice. Ask him to open your eyes to it and be swift to overturn wrongs. Don’t wait.
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