ABSTRACT
In a moving essay about her personal experience with the Japanese language, Ayukawa Michiko, a Japanese Canadian, relates how love and pride in the native language used by her immigrant parents transformed into a curse after the trauma of 1940s wartime removal and incarceration. 1 Competence in her once beloved childhood language deteriorated and eventually she rejected the language altogether as symbolic of a stigmatized identity. As an adult, her disfluency causes her great shame and mortification. On one occasion she reports on a conversation she had with Mrs. T of the Japanese Embassy, who had inquired about the health of Ayukawa’s baby daughter:
I hesitantly replied in my “lost” Japanese that she was fine but did cause quite a commotion when she was hungry. The exact words I used now escape me, but whatever I said caused Mrs. T to laugh derisively at my “quaint” Japanese. Then and there I vowed that I would never try to speak Japanese to any native Japanese anymore! And this vow was kept for years. 2
