Letters to my Grandchildren Read online

  LETTERS TO MY GRANDCHILDREN

  DAVID

  LETTERS TO MY GRANDCHILDREN

  SUZUKI

  A NewSouth book

  Published in Australia and New Zealand by

  University of New South Wales Press Ltd

  University of New South Wales

  Sydney NSW 2052

  AUSTRALIA

  www.unswpress.com.au

  Letters to my Grandchildren © David Suzuki, 2015

  First published by Greystone Books Ltd.

  343 Railway Street, Suite 201, Vancouver, B.C. V64 1A4, Canada

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Author: Suzuki, David

  Title: Letters to My Grandchildren

  ISBN: 9781742234472 (paperback)

  ISBN: 9781742242101 (epub and mobi)

  ISBN: 9781742247427 (ePDF)

  Subjects: Suzuki, David T., 1936 – Correspondence

  Geneticists – Canada – Correspondence

  Dewey Number: 816.6

  Design Nayeli Jimenez

  Cover Jessica Sullivan and Nayeli Jimenez

  Thank you, Joane and Tara.

  I could not have done what I did without you,

  and our children have been my greatest joy.

  CONTENTS

  Note to the Reader

  one

  In Search of Roots

  two

  Racism

  three

  Forgotten Lessons from the Great Depression

  four

  Why Do Sports Matter?

  five

  Motivation and Values

  six

  My Life in Media

  seven

  Fame and Heroes

  eight

  Biophilia

  nine

  The State of the World

  ten

  Barriers to Change

  eleven

  Grassroots Change

  twelve

  Aging and Death

  thirteen

  Tamo

  fourteen

  Midori

  fifteen

  Jonathan

  sixteen

  Ganhlaans

  seventeen

  Tiisaan

  eighteen

  Ryo

  nineteen

  Final Words

  Notes

  NOTE TO THE READER

  WHEN TAMIKO, MY eldest child, was born, I was overwhelmed with joy at the arrival of another person whom I loved more than my own life. Each of my children has been a wonderful gift who has enriched my life and helped create the person I am today.

  I thought fatherhood was the greatest experience of my life—until grandchildren arrived. You see, even in the most wonderful parent–child relationship, there are times when one of us is so pissed off at the other that we scream, fight, pout, or walk off in a huff. Not so with grandchildren. They don’t usually live with us, so we don’t see each other’s faults or have strong disagreements. Grandchildren are pure love; they think we are flawless, and they see us as a constant source of encouragement and support. And when they are young, we feel no guilt about spoiling them (isn’t that our job?) and then returning them to Mom and Dad to handle the repercussions.

  It took me a while to embrace the notion, but over the past several years I have been introducing myself as an elder. In First Nations societies, elders fill a critical role as the keepers of history, tradition, practical knowledge, and wisdom, and so they are treated with great respect and love. Until recently, under the delusion that I’m still young, I tried to deny that I am an elder. But now I realize that this is the most important period in my life, and in accepting that I’m an elder, I am overwhelmed by the responsibility that this brings. I am obligated to speak the truth now that I am no longer beholden to employers or others who hold some kind of power over me. I have to think about the world that my generation and the boom-ers who followed are bequeathing to our grandchildren. I am so grateful for the opportunities I’ve had in my life and I’ve learned a lot from my mistakes and a few successes, and those lessons should be passed on.

  Now that I have entered the last part of my life—what I call the “death zone”—I know that death is inevitable and that I could die at any moment. There is nothing morbid in my thoughts; any elder who doesn’t think about death is avoiding some serious issues. And those who think that science is somehow going to “solve” the problem of death or at least stave it off by many more decades are living under a terrible illusion. As a scientist, I know how easy it is to get caught up in the excitement of new discoveries and speculate about all kinds of wonderful possibilities. Remember Richard Nixon’s “war on cancer” or George H.W. Bush’s “war on drugs”? Immense amounts of money and effort have been expended to solve these problems, but they are still with us. And I am a biologist, so I understand that aging and death are essential for life and for evolution to occur, especially as conditions are changing so rapidly and require resilience and adaptation. The challenge is not to extend our species’ lifespan or to “conquer” death but to ensure that everyone has opportunities to live full and meaningful lives.

  Since my grandparents spoke only Japanese and I spoke only English, when I was growing up I was never able to communicate with them beyond superficial greetings and simple exchanges. My mother’s parents were so disillusioned with Canada after we lost our rights and were incarcerated during the war that they chose to return to Japan after the war ended. They were on one of the first boats to leave Vancouver and were deposited in the devastation of Hiroshima. Both of my grandparents were dead within a year, so even if I had been able to talk to them as a boy, I wouldn’t have had a chance when I was older.

  My father’s parents chose to stay in Canada after the war and ended up in London, Ontario. The growing extended Suzuki family would gather for dinner at our grandparents’ farm on weekends, but, like me, my sisters and cousins couldn’t speak Japanese, so we ate at a separate table, where we could chatter away in English. When I had my own family after my grandparents had died, I regretted that I never got to ask them what had motivated them to leave Japan, what it was like when they arrived in Canada, and why they never returned to Japan.

  I believe that we learn best by doing, and it has been wonderful to be able to spend time hanging out with my grandchildren. But as I get older, a lot of what I could do in the past—backpacking, skiing, kayaking, even fishing—has become more difficult, and over the years I have reluctantly done these things less often or given them up. More and more, time with my grandchildren has been spent watching, listening, and talking but not doing.

  Remembering my unanswered questions for my grandparents, I have often wondered what I would want to say to my grandchildren before I die. I don’t want them to have unanswered questions that they wish they had asked. And so the idea of this book was born. I had hoped that writing it would be like talking to them—not a lecture or a straightforward talk, but a kind of loose stream of ideas where one thought might trigger another on a completely different topic and then loop back again. So I began to write as if I was having a conversation—albeit a one-way conversation—with my grandchildren. But their ages extend from twenty-four years to less than a year old, one of the consequences of having two sets of children who range in age from fifty-five to thirty-two.

  My original opening line was to be “These words are coming to you from my
grave”—the idea being that the book would be written as if I were on my death bed, to be read when all the kids had grown up. But that didn’t work because I couldn’t imagine what they would each be like as an adult or what the state of the world would be by then, and besides, I’m writing with my full faculties (or at least I think so, though others might disagree). So I’ve focused on writing about the experiences and thoughts and ideas that I hope my grandchildren will be interested in and will find useful when they have grown up but that will also let them know what made their grandpa tick and why I chose to do what I did. I have left out two big parts of my life— science and the David Suzuki Foundation—which I have covered extensively in two autobiographies.

  This book is not a comprehensive overview of my thoughts and priorities—hell, those are sprinkled throughout the books I’ve already written. These are just some of the things that I hope my grandchildren may find interesting and relevant to their lives. I also hope the book will be read by far more than my own family; I have written it with a current adult audience in mind. And I hope that in reading about my priorities, choices, and motivations, you, the readers, may reflect on your own lives and what matters most for you to pass on.

  For you, elders—please step up to the plate. This is the most important time of our lives.

  {one}

  IN SEARCH OF ROOTS

  MY DARLING GRANDCHILDREN,

  I write to you—Tamo, Midori, and Jonathan—as adults, and to you—Ganhi, Tiis, and Ryo—as the older children or young adults you will be when you read this letter. First, though, thank you for sharing your lives with me; it has been a delight to watch each of you since you were a baby and to bear witness to the miracle that every life is. You have been such a joy and have brought so much happiness (and a headache or two) into my life. Thank you, thank you for the privilege of being Grandpa or Bompa to you.

  Even though three of you—Tamo, Midori, and Jonathan—were born in the 1990s, you will spend most of your lives in the twenty-first century. And of course, Ganhi, Tiis, and Ryo, your entire lives will be spent in the twenty-first century. The stories from my life that I will recount here will seem like the stuff of history books to you because what is my living memory you know only through books, movies, and videos.

  A few years ago, Nana and I visited Japan, and while we were in Yokohama, we visited the last ship (Hikawa Maru) to regularly make the trip from Japan to North America. Launched in 1929, it crossed the Pacific from Yokohama to Seattle and carried 75 first-class, 70 tourist-class, and 186 third-class passengers. It’s now a museum, and we were fascinated as we walked through it. Each class was on a separate floor and had its own kitchen. First-class passengers travelled in luxury on the top level, with art deco furnishings, lace curtains, and mahogany woodwork. Third-class passengers were confined to the bowels of the hold—deep below the other passengers and next to the immense engines driving the vessel—where it was hot, noisy, and smelly. The royal family had made a trip in that ship, where they occupied the sumptuous top floor. Char-lie Chaplin crossed the ocean in the ship as well.

  My grandparents had come over much earlier, between 1904 and 1908, and I am sure they travelled in a far less hospitable ship and under worse conditions. They were poor and spent years in Canada paying back the cost of the trip. I imagine they came on a tramp steamer, a cargo ship that took at least three weeks to make the crossing. How tough it must have been, crammed into a tiny space, under heavy seas, with no opportunity to go on deck and breathe fresh air! And remember, there were no television sets, movies, radios, or telephones. Visiting the Hikawa Maru filled me with admiration for my grandparents’ willingness to take a chance and immigrate to Canada. It must have been a harrowing trip, and they must have felt they were leaving Japan forever.

  My father’s parents never did make a trip, or even a phone call, back to Japan. After being kept in camps during World War ii, my mother’s parents decided to leave Canada. They were dropped off in Hiroshima, which had been flattened by the first atomic bomb ever dropped over a city. I can only imagine the suffering of the terribly injured survivors, who had radiation burns and other damage that had never been encountered before, and who needed medical help, food, and shelter. All of Japan had been hammered by war, but Hiroshima was in a category by itself. Not surprisingly, my elderly grandparents both died less than a year after their return.

  Why would my grandparents—your great-great-grandparents—leave a country that was their home for an unknown future in Canada? Like desperate people today fleeing Vietnam, Haiti, or Cuba and crossing treacherous bodies of water to get to new lands, my father’s parents were driven by poverty so severe that it was worth it to them to take that risk.

  Japan was in the throes of shedding its feudal class system of shoguns, samurai, farmers, craftspeople, and merchants to follow a Western industrial path. Grandpa Suzuki apprenticed as a carpenter when he was a teenager and became a superb boatbuilder in Canada. Suzuki boats had an excellent reputation, and I hear there is a Suzuki-built boat still in use on Vancouver Island. Grandpa Nakamura was a disenfranchised samurai—a member of Japan’s warrior aristocracy—and never did hold down a job. Grandma Nakamura was a nurse, and she was revered for treating people during the horrendous epidemic of Spanish flu in 1918. My mother’s most important hope was to be reunited with her mother after she died.

  When my grandparents arrived in Vancouver, it was a resource town built on mining, fishing, and logging and drew people from all over the world. It was a rough-and-tumble place, where racist assumptions about people of colour were embedded in the culture. After all, when Europeans first arrived in North America, they claimed to have “discovered” it, despite the hundreds of thousands of people living in rich and varied cultures all across the continent. Because the indigenous people were completely alien to the incoming Europeans, they were dismissed as “primitive.”

  The newcomers were focused on finding wealth and had little interest in the indigenous people, flora, and fauna except as resources. They regarded indigenous people as savages who were impediments to exploitation and so should be eliminated or be forced to adopt European ways. This attitude continued through the twentieth century, when indigenous children were sent to residential schools and their languages and traditional ways were officially banned. Asians and blacks, too, were considered different and assumed to be inferior and so were not given the right to vote or, in many parts of the province of British Columbia, to own property. They were also prohibited from entering certain professions, such as medicine and pharmacy. That was British Columbia and much of Canada in the early twentieth century.

  Each of you is a quarter Japanese, so I hope you find your Asian heritage of interest. My knowledge of Japanese history is pretty minimal, but I have been intrigued by the way the country was brought into the global community. For over two and a half centuries (1603–1868), Japan had deliberately isolated itself from the rest of the world, rebuffing attempts to open its ports for foreign traffic and trade. This was called the Edo, or Tokugawa, period, when Japan was under the rule of the Tokugawa family. The ruling class was kept in power by the samurai class, trained fighters who made up about 5 percent of the population. Below the samurai was the peasant class, 80 percent of the people. As in every civilization throughout time, it was these people who grew food who enabled other kinds of activities to evolve. Below the peasants were the craftspeople, and below them were the merchants, who sold what the craftspeople made. There was also a class called Eta, or burakumin, who were referred to as “untouchables.” They were considered contaminated because they disposed of dead people, butchered animals, or worked with animal skins. In modern Japan, class distinctions are supposed to be gone, but burakumin still suffer tremendous discrimination.

  Under the Tokugawas, Japanese culture flourished and the economy grew during a long period of relative peace and isolation. Today we hear over and over how globalization of economies is critical to our future prosperity, but the h
istory of the Edo period offers a different lesson. (And for the past twenty years, Japan’s economy has been flat. We keep hearing that a failure to keep the economy growing will be a disaster, but Japan disproves that notion.)

  In 1853, U.S. commodore Matthew Perry and four heavily armed “black ships” steamed into Edo (Tokyo) Bay, demonstrating the advanced military technology of steamships and cannons and demanding access to Japanese harbours. The following year a treaty was signed that ended Japan’s isolation from the rest of the world and prepared the way for the 1868 Meiji Restoration, under Emperor Meiji, a period that combined Western technological advances with traditional Eastern values. Iron smelters, shipyards, and spinning mills sprang up as Japan became industrialized and built up its military power. The samurai no longer had a position as a class in a nation on the way to Western-style industrial development.

  The rapid change made by the Japanese after Perry shows that dramatic social and economic transformation is possible in a short time. In the 1930s Japan veered into militarism and ended up in a world war that it lost in 1945. But again, forced by military defeat and devastation of the country, Japan rose from that terrible time to become an economic giant within a few decades. Today we are told that changing from fossil fuels to renewable energy will not only destroy the economy but also throw us back into the Dark Ages. I don’t believe it. If we can pull together as a society, as Japan has done, all kinds of changes are possible.

  And thanks to Commodore Perry, you are all here. Grandpa Nakamura was born at a time when there was no longer a place for him as a samurai, and the end of Japan’s global isolation meant all of my grandparents had the chance to move to Canada.