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- General
- CBC
From a Moose Jaw railway worker to a cafe owner to a suspected spy: this man's family never knew the truth
Social Sharing Robbi Kane still remembers visiting her father Philip Kane's high school in Washington State in the 1990s, and cracking open a yearbook to find his name. "All of a sudden, I'm looking through the yearbook and I see this guy that looks like my uncle and my dad, and it said 'Philip Nakane,'" said Kane. "I was just shocked." She wondered if 'Nakane' was an Indigenous name, as she knew her father came from Canada and had the dark hair and dark eyes that she inherited. Then she recalled the shape of her eyes, which once compelled her young daughter to ask, "Mommy, you have Asian eyes, don't you?" That was how, in her 40s, Kane discovered she was part Japanese and her last name was derived from Nakane. It was a discovery that set her on a path to learn more about her paternal grandfather — a Japanese man who settled in Saskatchewan, but whose family would end up distancing themselves from his radical actions and, at the same time, hiding their own Japanese heritage. From Japan to the prairies Naka Nakane was born in Kitsuki, Japan, in the 1870s to a former samurai family, before immigrating to Canada around 1903. He moved to Moose Jaw to work for the Canadian Pacific Railway and eventually married an English woman. The couple had five children there, including Kane's father, Philip, born in 1916. After becoming a naturalized Canadian, Nakane worked his way from manager of the CPR's lunchroom to the proprietor of his own restaurant and hotel. It wasn't always an easy road for him as an Asian business owner, as Saskatchewan — fearing "Oriental" monopolization and corruption — banned Asians from employing Caucasian females in 1912. That law was part of a series of Canadian labour laws that targeted people of Asian heritage. Linda Yip is a genealogist who's studied anti-Asian labour laws and the Chinese-Canadian experience in Western Canada. Newspapers from that time period made it clear that some white business owners were concerned about competition from non-white business owners, but she said concerns about interracial marriage were also at play. "Society at the time was very concerned about Asian men and white women; they wanted to keep these two groups apart to keep any relationships from developing." She said some would end up leaving Saskatchewan and Canada for America, which did not have policies as controlling over Asian peoples at the time. Nakane left as well. After successfully lobbying to exempt Japanese employers from Saskatchewan's "White Women's Labour Law," he decided to take his business skills and activism to America, relocating with his wife and children in 1921 to Tacoma, Wash. For about five years in the 1920s, the family thrived in Tacoma with Nakane working at a life insurance company. Then suddenly, around 1926, Nakane vanished, leaving five children without a father and his family with massive debt reportedly accrued by gambling and embezzlement. His wife Anne had to find work as a hotel maid. Kane's father Philip would have been about 10 when his father left. He never saw him again. His children would agree to keep their Japanese father a secret. "There was a pact between the kids to never tell anybody," Kane said. "Nobody knew." Uncovering the truth The internet was still in its infancy when Kane first learned the truth about her heritage and began to search about her renegade Japanese grandpa. She managed to find some information, which other researchers helped her piece together. After disappearing for several years, Nakane emerged more than 3,000 kilometres away in Detroit, Mich., as a "retired Japanese Army major" named Satokata Takahashi. He preached for dark-skinned empowerment using what he described as the strongest "coloured" nation of Japan as a guide. Nakane capitalized on Japan's rising power to promise people of colour, notably African Americans in Detroit, that if they joined forces with Japan, they would rise above white oppression. He would gain roughly 10,000 supporters of colour before getting deported to Japan in 1934. Still, he found his way back to his adopted home, Canada, to continue campaigning for "Japan's divine mission" of non-white liberation. In 1939, Nakane illegally re-entered America and was sentenced to three years in prison. While he was serving his time, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, bringing America into the Second World War and Japanese Americans under fire. Though due for release in February 1942, Nakane was intercepted by the FBI and held as an "enemy alien." He would go on to be interned along with 140,000 other people of Japanese descent living in North America, and was not released until a year after the war ended and seven years after his original sentencing. Nakane denied being a Japanese spy, but his mysterious post-Tacoma and pre-Detroit years, frequent travel, exorbitant wealth, Japanese Army title and government contacts — as well as his connections to an ultra-nationalist Japanese espionage group — did not support his claim. The U.S. government concluded he was "beyond doubt a Japanese agent." A wife's sacrifices Nakane's wife, Anne, evidently kept her husband's activities from their kids. She filed for divorce, claimed to be a widow, left Washington for California, and anglicized 'Nakane' as 'Kane' so that the family could live as white Americans and escape internment. Kane still doesn't feel like she knows Nakane. When he died in Detroit on March 2, 1954, she was a California preschooler unaware of his existence. Unable to judge him as a grandfather or on the basis of his activities as Maj. Takahashi, she can judge him only by his children. "I could tell from him that he'd been carrying [this trauma]," she said of her father, whose own father had left him and who'd spent years, along with his siblings, hiding his Japanese roots. "He was an angry person, and now I was finally getting an idea where this anger came from." "I realized how much shame they all had." Kane's father never wanted her to dig into their family history, getting angry when she would raise the topic. But now, having learned more about his upbringing, she said she has a little more compassion and understanding of his emotional tumult. "I thought he was just angry, but I see how much fear he had now, you know … he was fearful of his life," she said. Yip said for her part, she's not surprised that some families have only discovered their Asian roots in more recent years. Their Asian ancestors wanted to free themselves from discrimination and be treated like everyone else around them, she said, adding that this is understandable to her. "If our ancestors desperately wanted to assimilate and forget the past, who could blame them?" The hotel and restaurant Nakane ran no longer exist in Moose Jaw. But he and his wife left one part of their family history in this province, having buried one child there. An unmarked grave of Eric Masuni Nakane is all that remains of a singular figure and his singular time in a singular Saskatchewan city.
The Guardian
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Six great reads: the folly of the Cybertruck, six conversations we need to have – and a gentleman crook
The Cybertruck answers a question no one in the auto industry even thought to ask: what if there was a truck that a Chechen warlord couldn't possibly pass up – a bulletproof, bioweapons-resistant, road rage-inducing street tank that's illegal to drive in most of the world? With the backlash against Elon Musk's Tesla still in full flow around the world, Andrew Lawrence took a deep look at its most unique creation, which was launched as a purported 'Doomsday chariot' and is now the butt of thousands of memes. Read more First published in 1982, Ishiguro's A Pale View of Hills is a charged family story that connects England with Japan and the present with the past. The story lightly excavates the Nobel-winning author's family history and his own hybrid identity as a child of Nagasaki, transplanted to the UK at the age of five. Ahead of a new film version, Ishiguro spoke to Xan Brooks about the complexities of blended heritage and his great love of cinema. Read more In polarising times, when technology has too often made us even more isolated, opportunities for meaningful conversation can go unnoticed. But what are we really missing? What do we forgo when we don't take the chance to talk? And which conversations matter most? Here, experts told Deborah Linton the six conversations we should be having with one other, but aren't. Read more 'I'm engulfed in charcoal smoke. Through the fog I spy a countertop laden with slabs of raw meat – a leg of lamb here, a tomahawk steak there. And presiding over two enormous kamado grills is Tom Kerridge, 6ft 3in tall and with a meat cleaver in one hand and a butcher's saw in the other.'Michelin-starred chef Kerridge prides himself on his 'socialist' business empire. But the hospitality trade is struggling – and so are his staff. What would he change if he had the power? Tim Jonze headed to Marlow, Buckinghamshire, the base of Kerridge's gastro-empire to find out. Read more In 1929, Edgar Feuchtwanger was five years old and living with his family in Munich when Adolf Hitler moved into a flat opposite. At first, his parents thought they were safe hiding in plain sight – until they weren't … Astrid Probst met the 100-year-old Feuchtwanger, perhaps the last living person to have met Hitler, at his home in England to share his story of living next to one of history's great monsters. Read more With his brilliant mind and impeccable credentials, it's little wonder that wealthy clients trusted him with their fortunes. Then they started to get suspicious … this brilliant long read by Hettie O'Brien follows an extraordinary story of trust and financial crime that left a handful of clients millions of pounds out of pocket. Read more
