Across these pages, Tatsuo emphasizes-and, surely, were any of us able to safely visit him today, he would emphasize to us now-the importance of human rights. Originally published in esteemed community publications including The Bulletin / Geppo, as well as Nikkei Images, Nikkei Voice, and KAIHO / 会報 (the newsletter of the Greater Vancouver Japanese Immigrants’ Association (JIA), of which Tatsuo was a founding member), or else presented at local, national, and international conferences, the writings in this book keenly reflect concerns that are both unique to and important beyond the Japanese Canadian community. Included here are community and academic articles, speeches, reports, workshops, histories, anecdotes, petitions, letters, and interviews. Further, as a collection of selected writings, this book functions as a sort of archive, in which we hear Tatsuo’s voice differently, by turns personal, political, and scholarly. Organized into three sections named in the book’s title, Migration, Displacement, and Redress presents Tatsuo’s writings according to theme rather than chronology. Like Tatsuo himself, these writings are gentle, but they are also a call, a question: How can we do better? Here is a book in which we might see ourselves-including those of us who arrived in Canada after World War II, as Tatsuo himself did-but in which, in seeing ourselves, we are asked to come to terms with our mistakes, our forgetfulness, our fears. What is perhaps less obvious, however, is that this book is a testament to how much we, as a community, have missed: when we call ourselves the “Japanese Canadian” community, so emphasizing our Canadianness, who is left out? When we long for a lost home, even envision its return, particularly in Paueru-gai (the Powell Street neighbourhood), in Vancouver’s present-day Downtown Eastside, whose displacement might we be risking? And when we advocate for redress, as we recently have been (with the Province of British Columbia and the City of Vancouver), what injustices remain untended? Tatsuo’s book asks these questions, sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly, from a place of love, care, and desire for justice for all. Indeed, it nearly goes without saying that this book is a testament to Tatsuo’s long-standing scholarly and activist work in and beyond the Japanese Canadian community. As a Gosei scholar-activist myself, Tatsuo’s decades-long work quite literally made possible much of the work to which I and, I know, many others, are now dedicated. It is an opportunity not only to re-read passages from Tatsuo’s many brilliant writings, but to re-think, as a community, what these writings mean to us.

Tatsuo Kage’s Migration, Displacement, and Redress: A Japanese Canadian Perspective is an opportunity.

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