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Sayoko Hattori (left), Susan Michi Sirovyak, and Yayoi Negishi (right)
28 April 1997
Vancouver, BC

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Kiyoshi Shimizu

My mother did piecework and she learned the skills of Western dressmaking from a cousin who was a dressmaker with a shop that was flourishing on Granville Street in Vancouver. So she developed skills that enabled her to open up a dressmaking shop by 1933, about the end of that year.

My sister was a very skilled dressmaker. She took in all the dressmaking skills my mother was able to pass on to her. She was the mainstay when the shop started to flourish in Vancouver. So they ran that shop from 1933 until 1942. In 1938, they had made enough money for us to buy a house. My father tried to go back to work, but he really couldn't do the heavy work that he was used to and he had no skills to do anything else.

Throughout my high school years, I always worked in a dressmaker's shop. I did the finishing work: shorten the coats, put on the buttons and snaps, and that kind of stuff. I was always the finisher and then I would deliver people their stuff. We were all taught to make our own clothes. We couldn't afford to buy anything that was already made.

When I applied [to the Department of Social Work at the University of British Columbia], they told me that they couldn't take me because I was Japanese and they couldn't find a field placement for me. Well, that really shocked me, because I knew that the Japanese community needed a social worker just as any other community. It was so shocking that I just went home to think about it.

It happened to be the weekend that I met J.S. Woodsworth. J.S. Woodsworth was the founder of the Canadian Commonwealth Federation, the CCF, which became the NDP. He was a socialist. At this point in his life, he had been rejected by his party, because of his pacifist stand. I knew a great deal about him, because I belonged to the socialists' club at the university and even before that, in high school, I went around with a bunch of kids who were socialist. Along with those kids, I joined the CCF at the age of 16.

So when I unexpectedly met J.S. Woodsworth, he was staying with the [Anglican] minister's family and recovering from a stroke that he had in Vancouver. My mother was doing some work for the minister's daughter. I had to shorten her spring coat. I shortened it and delivered it. Mr. and Mrs. Woodsworth were staying in this home. It was the weekend the school had turned me down.

At first, I did not know who he was, but oh, that was the most exciting meeting of my life. Because, just talking to J.S. Woodsworth made me feel that just one person could make a difference and maybe it was worth thinking about what had happened to me and then going back to the school with some arguments to strengthen my admission to the Department of Social Work. Anyway, he wanted to ask me what was happening with the Japanese community and we spent maybe a couple of hours together. He made me think about what I might do to gain my admission to the department of social work.

What I did the following Monday ('cause I met him on a Saturday and had all day Sunday to think about it) was to go to the council of social agencies and talked to the Executive Director and tell her what had happened to me. She said, "Well let me see. Surely, there must be some way of getting you into that department. There's the TB Social Service. They take in a number of people of Japanese origin who have a great difficulty with the English language. Margaret Johnson is the project supervisor who would probably be happy to have a Japanese speaking student. You do speak Japanese, don't you?"

And then she said, "Well, Margaret Hart who is with the Vancouver YWCA has just taken on a Chinese Canadian worker on her staff and she probably would take you on as a student. Why don't you talk to those two Margarets?" And I did and both of them said that they would be happy to give me field work experience. So I lined it up and went back to the school and said, "I have my field work placements. Will you take me in as a student?" Well they couldn't refuse.

[When Japanese Canadians were forced to relocate during the war] I signed up with a woman in Forrest Hill, Ontario who wanted a maid. So I signed up in 1943 ... When I got to Toronto, the RCMP told me that the woman that I signed a contract with found somebody else and did not need me anymore.

They had a list of names of other families looking for a maid, but I did not know how to be a maid, so I told them that I had a Masters degree in social work and begged them to let me try finding my own work. It took me a month and in that month I did work with a finish dressmaker doing finishing work. She was sad to see me go. I said to my mother later that I put my dressmaking skills to good use. I survived that month, because of it.

From an interview with Kiyoshi Shimizu by Daien Ide, 1996