Selections from Archival and Special Collections:
George Tanaka led a life of landscape design and advocacy work for the rights of Japanese Canadians
Kathryn Harvey | Archivist
I held the pages down on the steering wheel and scanned the sheets as the edges flittered in the gusts. There it was in black and white—our short hard history. Beside each date were the ugly facts of the treatment given to Japanese Canadians, “Seizure and government sale of fishing boats. Suspension of fishing licenses. Relocation camps. Liquidation of property. Letter to General MacArthur. Bill 15. Deportation. Revocation of nationality.” Wherever the words “Japanese race” appeared, Aunt Emily had crossed them out and written “Canadian citizen.”
— Joy Kogawa, Obasan (1981)
Like poet and novelist Joy Kogawa, landscape architect George Tanaka was one of the 23,000 Japanese Canadians who had been forced to relocate farther inland from the west coast in the early 1940s.
Tanaka was born in Vancouver to Japanese parents in 1912. After graduating from the Vancouver Technical School in 1920, he began working with Nisei gardener Mr. Moritsugu and studied landscape architecture. American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who took inspiration from Japanese art, was particularly influential to the development of Tanaka’s aesthetic.
Skip to several decades later and, according to Roger Obata in Japanese Canadian Redress: The Toronto Story (2000), Tanaka was relocated to a sugar beet farm near Tilbury, Ont. The City of Toronto had an official policy against accepting any relocatees of Japanese ancestry, but after spending a summer on the farm Tanaka eventually obtained permission to move to Toronto.
According to Pierre Berton in a 1948 Maclean’s article, Tanaka explained that “that first day in Toronto, when I was able to walk around as I wished and go where I wanted without having to report to anybody or ask permission or get a permit for anything, I suddenly realized that liberty meant something. I felt like shouting out: ‘I’m free, I’m free!’ It’s a good word, freedom. You never really know what it means until you lose it.”
However, liberty is relative. As glorious as it may have felt to Tanaka to be rid of the intense restrictions of the farm, life as a Japanese Canadian in 1942 Toronto was a vastly different experience than life as a white Canadian due to the tremendous anti-Japanese racism.
So, in 1943, Obata, Muriel Kitagawa (Joy Kogawa’s aunt and inspiration for her character Aunt Emily), Tanaka, and others founded the Japanese Canadian Committee for Democracy (JCCD) to advocate for the rights of Japanese Canadians being persecuted by their own government and members of society who perceived them as enemies.
One of the JCCD’s most notable achievements was its 1947 survey which calculated the financial losses of Japanese Canadians as a result of the mass relocation, laying the groundwork for the apology and reparations made by the Mulroney government in 1988.
Tanaka’s early days in Toronto were filled with activist work — notably as executive director of the National Japanese Canadian Citizens Association (now called the National Association of Japanese Canadians) from 1947 to 1953. His home at 84 Gerrard St. East served as the de facto national headquarters.
Tanaka not only advocated for human rights and the promotion of Japanese culture, he also did what many relocatees had done and became an entrepreneur, establishing his own landscape architecture practice in 1955.
He quickly made a name for himself, winning two of the three top Canadian Society of Landscape Architects (CSLA) design awards in 1969, and became active in his new professional community. He served as vice-president of the Ontario Association of Landscape Architects from 1967-1970, secretary and member of CSLA’s Board of Governors from 1972-1974, and was elected a Fellow of the CSLA in 1975.
Unfortunately, he and his wife were killed in a motor vehicle accident in 1982, bringing his illustrious career to a premature end. In 1988, the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre in Toronto, which Tanaka helped found some 25 years before, honoured him with a special tribute and retrospective exhibition of his design projects.
Amongst his many clients over the years was the owner of Parkwood estate in Oshawa, Ont., Colonel Sam McLaughlin, original benefactor of the McLaughlin Library. Tanaka’s plans for a Japanese garden at Parkwood, which is now a National Historic Site of Canada, is included alongside over 100 other projects of Tanaka’s whose drawings and files are housed in the University of Guelph’s Archival and Special Collections.
A version of this article appeared in print in The Ontarion issue 190.5 on April 29, 2021.
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