Novelist distraught by father’s dark past
Joy Kogawa did not attend church’s apology to the many victims he sexually abused
Canadian novelist Joy Kogawa is having trouble coping with the increasing awareness that her late father, a well-known Anglican priest, was a serial abuser of young boys, says the author’s friend.
“She (Kogawa) can’t deal with it. She’s very emotional and she keeps saying, ‘The bullet that is aimed at my father is hitting me.’ It’s making her physically ill,” Mary Kitagawa, a longtime friend of the author of Obasan and The Rain Ascends, said in an interview Monday.
Kitagawa spoke after a Vancouver ceremony in which she formally accepted the public apology offered by two Anglican bishops for the “immoral sexual behaviour” of Kogawa’s father, Canon Gordon Nakayama, who abused many boys during his time as a priest, which ended in 1994, less than a year before he died at age 94.
Nakayama confessed in December 1994, to “sexual bad behaviour … to many people” in a letter to Anglican officials, but he never gave any details.
The male survivors of Nakayama’s abuse, which took place over more than 50 years, have never gone to the police or spoken publicly. But some have spoken to friends and family.
For her part, Kogawa once took a fictional approach to describing her once-beloved dad’s history of sexual abuse in her 1995 novel, The Rain Ascends.
The publisher said the book “tells the story of a woman — the loyal, devoted daughter of an eminent and popular minister of the Church — who discovers
“She (Kogawa) can’t deal with it. She’s very emotional and she keeps saying, ‘The bullet that is aimed at my father is hitting me. ’It’s making her physically ill.
MARY KITAGAWA
FRIEND OF JOY KOGAWA
in middle age that the elderly father she adores has abused small boys throughout his life.”
Kitagawa, speaking on behalf of her author friend — who did not attend Monday’s Anglican Church apology but was said to have supported it — said Kogawa has in recent years been “very adamant” about telling the entire truth about her family, who were sent to internment camps during the Second World War.
As well as being an author and poet, Kogawa has been a leader of the movement to have Canadian officials apologize and provide compensation for interning Japanese Canadians after Japan’s surprise air attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in 1941.
In the ceremony attended by roughly 60 people at the Vancouver Japanese Language School, Vancouver-area Bishop Melissa Skelton and Calgary Bishop Greg Kerr-Wilson read a statement apologizing for the priest, who served in Metro Vancouver, Calgary, the Kootenays and other parts of Canada and the world.
“We deeply regret this apology was not delivered to the Japanese-Canadian community at the time of Mr. Nakayama’s confession” to Calgary’s church officials, the bishops said in their joint apology, which included a commitment to listen to and reconcile with survivors, some of whom were not of Japanese descent.
During the ceremony, Kitagawa said she knows more than half a dozen of Nakayama’s now elderly or deceased victims, none of whom have ever publicly revealed what happened when they were children. Despite hiding their “hideous secrets,” Kitagawa said many have lived successful lives.
However, Kitagawa said one of the survivors was so angry that he maintained it would be best to “burn to the ground” Vancouver’s historic Joy Kogawa House, where the family lived before their internment. “He believes by burning it the evil in the house would be extinguished.”
After the apology ceremony, Kerr-Wilson said in an interview the Anglican Church of Canada would now immediately notify police if a priest admitted sexually abusing young people.
But, 20 years ago, Kerr-Wilson said, Anglican officials were shocked by the sexual confession offered by the aging, well-liked priest who was renowned among the small Japanese populations of B.C. and Alberta.
“His letter of confession was also very short on details,” Kerr-Wilson said, explaining that it was unclear what Nakayama meant when he admitted to “sexual bad behaviour.”