FUMIKO KARIYA PACKED her bags months ago. Her granddaughter, Michiko, gave her a few pairs of coarse, warm stockings and some 99-cent stretch gloves to wear under her mittens if the rink in Nagano is too chilly, but Fumiko won't put them on now, even though mild Vancouver has turned unseasonably cold. Those, she says, are her Olympic clothes. Fumiko turns 82 on Feb. 15, the eve of the meeting between the Canadian and U.S. hockey teams at the Games. She says watching her grandson Paul in the Olympics will be the dream trip of her life and her last trip back to Japan.
This will be Paul's second trip there. In 1991 he played in Yokohama, in an international junior tournament. He remembers the rink was new, the food was good, the hockey was fun, but it was an obscure tournament played before scouts and crowds he could have counted himself. He returns next month as a rock star, a fourth-generation Canadian-Japanese playing in the sport's biggest showcase.
"Paul probably doesn't fully realize his importance to Japan," says Montreal Canadiens assistant coach Dave King, a three-time Canadian Olympic coach who is general manager of the Japanese team for the 1998 Games. "He's the most revered NHL player there. Sure, they like Wayne Gretzky and Raymond Bourque, but because of Paul's heritage, he's the guy the focus will be on. There's not a lot of hockey in Japan, but they know the game. The Japanese see themselves in Paul. He's 5'11", not 6'3". He's skilled and courageous. His presence in Nagano could motivate a lot of Japanese kids to play the sport.
"I don't know, but maybe Paul took something from the Japanese way of doing things, at least in the way he has planned his career. Most players see a goal, the NHL, and all they want to do is get there as quickly as they can. But Paul's whole career has been planned around long-term decisions. He wanted to go to the East Coast to play college hockey, to do some weight training there and get stronger, and he did. He wanted to play for the Canadian national team, and he has. Everything's been step-by-step, even in his contract decisions."
On Nov. 30, 10 days before Kariya signed the two-year, $14 million deal that ended his 32-game holdout with the Anaheim Mighty Ducks, Canada's Olympic general manager Bob Clarke announced the members of the team in a televised ceremony. As Kariya watched in his parents' family room in Vancouver, his heart beat a tattoo. Edmonton Oilers general manager Glen Sather, who's influential in league councils, had been saying that players not under NHL contract shouldn't be considered for the Olympic team, and Kariya, one of the five best players in the world, worried that Clarke might have the audacity to leave him home.
"My father played rugby [fly half in the 1960s] for Canada, and I always found it neat to represent my country," says Kariya, whose miss in a shootout with Sweden cost Canada the 1994 Olympic gold medal. "Besides, growing up I wasn't a big guy, but I could skate and had skills, so everyone was pointing me toward the international game. Not that I didn't want to play in the NHL. That's every kid's dream. But more important for me was the chance to represent Canada."
Why shouldn't he be honored to play for a country that shipped his grandparents to a detention camp in the woodlands of British Columbia?
THE CHECKS ARRIVED late in 1988. There was $21,000 for Paul's grandfather, Isamu; $21,000 for Fumiko; $21,000 for Paul's uncle Yasi; and $21,000 for Paul's father, Tetsuhiko, whom everyone calls T.K. Isamu and Fumiko and their son Yasi were uprooted from Vancouver in June 1942 and resettled in an internment camp in Greenwood, which is 180 miles east of Vancouver, hard by the U.S. border. Fourteen months later, on Aug. 6, 1943, T.K. was born in Greenwood. The Kariyas didn't really need the money, which was a token of apology from the Canadian government. Isamu, who died in 1995, owned a Vancouver dry-cleaning business that he and Fumiko operated for 20 years after returning from Greenwood, and then he had worked from '70 through '81 as a purchasing agent for the University of British Columbia. T.K., who has a master's from Oregon, was teaching at a high school, and he, wife Sharon and their five children were middle-class comfortable. The redress Canada paid to the approximately 14,000 surviving internees did nothing but open a small window to a distant, surreal period in their lives.
"It never was brought up at home," says Paul, 23. "I remember being at my grandmother's when the checks came. Really, that was the first time anybody had said much about it."
"My bachan"�the Japanese word for "grandmother," the name T.K.'s children call Fumiko�"never went into details about what it was like in the camp," says Michiko, 24, the eldest of Paul's siblings and the only member of the family he would allow SI to interview for this story. "Certainly we knew about the camps. We knew our father had been born there. But there was no bitterness on my grandparents' part. They looked at it as a mistake that Canadians had made collectively. They started fresh when they came back to Vancouver, but they were never bitter, never accusatory."
The internment of 23,000 Japanese-Canadians after the bombing of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, is a shameful chapter in Canada's history. (The U.S. impounded about 120,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II.) Although there was no bona fide military or security reason for displacing Japanese-Canadians�75% of whom either had been born in Canada, like Fumiko and Isamu, or were naturalized citizens�the government used its War Measures Act to designate them as "enemy aliens" and herd them beyond a protected zone that extended from the Pacific Ocean to 100 miles inland. Almost 4,000 were exiled to sugar beet farms in Alberta, Manitoba and Ontario. Most others were sent to six internment camps in the interior of British Columbia.
Isamu, who had to give up his job with a trading company in Vancouver because of the internment, worked for a short time on a road crew near Taft, B.C., for 25 cents an hour�less than half the 60 cents an hour Caucasian workers were being paid�before joining Fumiko and Yasi in Greenwood, a mining town whose heyday had come during the turn-of-the-century silver boom. With 10 other families, they settled into an abandoned hotel in 1942, just as the final whiff of a Japanese threat to the West Coast ended with the Battle of Midway. By the end of October, 1,177 Japanese-Canadians were being held in Greenwood.
No barbed wire ringed the internment camps. For Canada, the isolation and travel restrictions on "enemy aliens" were as effective as armed guards. The war ended in 1945, and the camps were shut by the end of the following year. Only the purgatory continued. The government had given Japanese-Canadians two choices: repatriate to war-ravaged Japan, a cruel irony and semantic impossibility considering they could hardly go home to a country that had never been theirs, or move east of the Rockies. Japanese-Canadians would not be allowed to return to the West Coast until 1949, the year they were given the right to vote.
Isamu, Fumiko and their sons remained in Greenwood until 1949, when they decided to take Canada up on its offer to send them to Mio, the fishing village in southern Japan that was the ancestral home of both their families. They had their inoculations and had shipped their clothes and other goods to Japan. They were scheduled to go on the last ship, but the Canadian government abruptly terminated the program. Their 10 boxes crossed the Pacific. They didn't. A vast ocean lay between the Kariya family and Japan in '49. So it has remained for almost 50 years.
T.K. AND SHARON Kariya provided their children with the most resolute of Canadian upbringings. They were nominally Japanese-Canadian in that the boys, Paul Tetsuhiko, Steven Tetsuo and Martin Tetsuya, were given English first names and Japanese middle names, while the girls' names, Michiko Joanna and Noriko Ann, were the reverse, but there were few other Japanese grace notes to their lives. Any Asian artifacts in their house were gifts. The cuisine was mostly standard Vancouver fare. When they were young, Michiko and Paul attended a Japanese language school a few days a week for three years, a concession to their bachan, but the language eluded them. The Kariya siblings, in the argot of the day, are "half-ers."
For the Kariya brothers the only thing that mattered was sports. Paul, who played lacrosse, rugby, tennis, basketball and almost anything else in which the score was kept, was so proficient a golfer that at 13 he almost quit hockey to concentrate on that sport. Steve, 20, is a hockey star at Maine, where Paul, as a freshman, won the Hobey Baker Award as the outstanding U.S. collegian in 1993. Martin, 16, plays Tier II junior hockey in Victoria, B.C. "The biggest thing with my parents was letting you find out who you are and then making sure you were happy about it," Paul says. "You weren't pushed. If you didn't want to learn Japanese, fine."
"One of the tough things for Paul is that the Japanese community wants him to be a part of it," Michiko says. "They want his involvement. The relevancy just isn't there for Paul. To associate with a group of people based only on heritage is a strange concept to Paul and me."
As Paul said one night last month in a Calgary steak house, "The past is history."
THE WAITERS COME and go, clearing the last of the plates. If they recognize Kariya, they don't let on, either because they are extraordinarily discreet or because he's a household name in Canada without being a household face. "It's weird, but most people think I look more [American] Indian than Japanese," he says. "My mom's of Scottish descent. But you don't hear, 'Paul Kariya's from Scotland.' I don't care, but it's all part of this business of sticking labels on people."
For Kariya, labels are things you sew on kids' underwear, not things you slap on people. He has detested labels since someone first called him too small. Really? For what? But because his truncated 1997-98 NHL season has left him fresher than his battle-nicked teammates and rivals; because his speed, hockey sense and wondrous timing are an ideal marriage with the larger 200'x100' international ice surface; because he will be playing in a country that considers him a long-lost son; and because representing Canada means so much to him, there's one label even Kariya will have difficulty dodging: most dangerous player in the Olympics.
"My dad taught me to be humble," Kariya says at the suggestion, heat rising in his soft voice for the only time this night. "From the beginning, we learned to respect other people. To walk softly. Not to talk about ourselves. Today, arrogance is everything, in all walks of life. Maybe this is going against the norm, but humility is what we learned."
The man who said, "The past is history," over the soup, seasoned his lemon chicken with the profundity, "You are who you are."
Yes, this is true. For Kariya. For everyone. As his bachan said about her time in the internment camp, "It can't be helped."
Source: Sportsillustrated