Stone Voices: Wartime Writings of Japanese Canadian Issei

Keibo Oiwa
With a forward by Joy Kogawa


Awards: Winner, 1992 Canada-Japan Book Award

With the bombing of Pearl Harbour in December 1941, all persons of Japanese descent were declared 'enemy aliens.' Their assets were seized and most of the Japanese Canadian population was relocated or sent to internment camps. Stone Voices is a selection of memoirs, diaries, and letters written by four Issei, the first generation of Japanese to settle in Canada. "I devoured these stories in one hungry afternoon of reading...as I read, I ranged through discomfort, old sadness, nostalgia, admiration, tenderness, pride, and anger as I was taken back to look again with the help of these additional perspectives, into the secrets and intimacies of my childhood." - Joy Kogawa

History 1998

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"I devoured these stories in one hungry afternoon of reading...as I read, I ranged through discomfort, old sadness, nostalgia, admiration, tenderness, pride, and anger as I was taken back to look again with the help of these additional perspectives, into the secrets and intimacies of my childhood." -Joy Kogawa

Keibo Oiwa is a cultural anthropologist, author, environmentalist, and public speaker. He lived in North America for fifteen years and holds a ph.D. in Anthropology from Cornel University. The founder of the Sloth Club, Japan's leading "Slow Life" environmental group, he is in frequent demand for lecture and consultation throughout in Japan.
Out of print