Laura Ishiguro, Nicole Yakashiro and Ayaka Yoshimizu
What can one racialized migrant woman’s life teach us about resistance and community-building in today’s context of rising conservatism, nationalism, and securitization? The open educational resource (OER) we’ve created centres on the life of Kiyo Tanaka-Goto, a Japanese woman who lived much of her adult life in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES), especially during the interwar and postwar years. Kiyo’s story speaks to our current moment, offering a powerful reminder that marginalized women have long resisted systemic violence and built community in the face of exclusion—and it invites us to rethink whose lives matter in our collective memory and in shaping our present and future. The OER includes a teaching and learning module that invites users to engage with archival materials related to Kiyo’s life, including her interviews and photographs of her belongings.
Kiyo was born in Japan in the 1890s and migrated to Canada in the 1910s as a “picture bride,” a woman who married a Japanese man in Canada based only on an exchange of photographs. Picture brides had a wide range of expectations and experiences. In Kiyo’s case, her marriage provided a way to move to North America in order to search for her father, who had migrated to San Francisco when she was four years old. She hoped to find him and bring him home to support her mother, who had been struggling to make ends meet. Although she was unable to find her father and never saw her mother again after leaving Japan, Kiyo built numerous kin and non-kin relationships far from her homeland over the course of her life. In addition, while many Japanese women of her time were expected to fulfill the ideal of a “good wife and wise mother”—to live a life of domesticity—Kiyo carved a radically different path in Canada.
After her arrival in British Columbia, she and her husband settled on Vancouver Island and Salt Spring Island, where they farmed and did domestic work. However, after only four years, Kiyo’s husband died, leaving her without family in Canada. She decided to move from Salt Spring Island to what is now known as Vancouver’s DTES, where she quickly became part of the vibrant, diverse, and interconnected neighbourhood, home to Indigenous peoples, new immigrants, and working-class communities.
Initially, she settled in Paureru Gai (the Powell Street area), which was the heart of the Japanese Canadian community in the city. There, she ran a restaurant with another Japanese family at Powell and Gore. She later leased a hotel at 35 W Hastings Street, operating it as a brothel from 1931 until 1942. Her brothel had a diverse clientele and employed women of many backgrounds—Japanese, Chinese, Black, French, German, and Italian.[1] Kiyo was a shrewd businesswoman who built relationships with neighbours and even local police. She used favours, family connections, and monthly bribes to keep her business running in a highly policed environment. She also ensured her workers were protected, installing escape routes and even keeping a German shepherd for safety.
During the forced internment of Japanese Canadians, Kiyo resisted. She initially tried to avoid arrest, hiding from police in the hotel. However, she was eventually arrested and imprisoned in Oakalla, Burnaby, BC before being sent to the internment camp in Greenwood. Yet, once again shrewdly drawing on her relationships to navigate the circumstances in which she found herself, she managed to find a way to return to the DTES in 1945—four years before Japanese Canadians were legally permitted to do so. She continued her life in Chinatown and East Vancouver until her death in 1982.
We rarely hear the stories of women like Kiyo—a woman of colour, mobile, criminalized, and transgressive. When such figures appear in the archives, it is usually through the eyes of police, courts, or moral reformers. But through interviews and the other traces Kiyo left behind, we get a different view that centres her own voice and perspective. Through her oral histories, we build a sense of a creative, charismatic, and complex Japanese Canadian woman who unapologetically explains her often-transgressive life. Sources about her time in Vancouver reveal how she navigated business ownership, sex work, and police corruption in this urban space. We also learn about how she built and contributed to a community, protecting and caring for others, as they cared for her. Through this, we gain insights into a DTES that was multilingual, intercultural, creative, and complex, like it is today.
In the broader context of Japanese Canadian history, Kiyo’s story also offers a rare glimpse of a Japanese Canadian woman’s resistance to internment, incarceration, and racism during the Second World War, as well as her everyday experiences in Greenwood.
In an era where (im)migrants, sex workers, and women of colour continue to face hostility and criminalization, Kiyo’s story resonates particularly powerfully. Her defiance against gendered and racial norms, her resistance to state violence, and her commitment to her chosen community remind us that history is not only made by the powerful—it is also shaped by ordinary people who lived extraordinary lives.
To learn more about Kiyo’s life, visit Sex and Migration in the Transpacific Underground, an open educational resource where you can access archival materials related to Kiyo’s life. You can listen to interviews she gave in Japanese to Maya Koizumi in 1972, read vignettes based on the interviews of her life story in both English and Japanese, and view photographs of her belongings preserved by Nikkei National Museum & Cultural Centre as part of Kiyo Goto Collection. The website also offers a teaching and learning module that instructors can use in undergraduate courses, or that students and community members can explore to critically engage with Kiyo’s archival materials. We hope this offers a unique and accessible resource for teaching and learning Japanese Canadian histories, as well as histories of sex work, marriage, migration, gender, class, and community in twentieth-century Canada. Simultaneously humanizing, expanding, and challenging prevailing narratives about Japanese Canadian and Canadian histories, Kiyo Tanaka-Goto has so much to teach us in our times.
Laura Ishiguro is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and director of Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies at the University of British Columbia. Nicole Yakashiro (she/her) is a PhD candidate in the History Department at the University of British Columbia. Ayaka Yoshimizu is an Associate Professor of Teaching in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia.
Notes
[1] Although our research on Kiyo reveals comparatively little about these other women’s perspectives, the Sex and Migration in the Transpacific Underground website also features other archival materials, including the two-part newspaper series “Exploration of Devil Caves” (1908-09, 1912), published in Japanese-language newspaper Tairiku Nippō, and an accompanying module developed by Ayaka Yoshimizu. These materials offer more insights into other migrant women from Japan involved in the sex trade in Canada in the early 20th century.Accessible resources
- Sex and Migration in the Transpacific Underground (an open educational resource, which includes the primary sources and teaching & learning module for Kiyo’s history): https://transpacificunderground.arts.ubc.ca/
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