Hide Hyodo Shimizu
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Hide Hyodo Shimizu CM (1908–1999) was a Japanese-Canadian educator and activist. She was an advocate for Japanese-Canadian rights and enfranchisement, and during World War II she established and operated schools for Japanese-Canadian children in internment camps. Shimizu was later awarded the Order of Canada for her work.[1]
Hide Hyodo (later Shimizu) was born in 1908 to Hideichi and Toshi Hyodo in Vancouver, British Columbia.[2][3][4] Her parents, Hideichi and Toshi Hyodo, had emigrated from Uwajima, Japan, and Hide was the first of their eight children.[2]
Shimizu studied at the University of British Columbia for a year, but transferred to a teacher's training school after tuition fees became too high.[3] In 1926, Shimizu became one of the first Nisei (second-generation Japanese-Canadians) to earn a teacher's certificate.[2] She began teaching a grade 1 class of Japanese-Canadian students at Lord Byng School in Steveston, B.C., a task she found challenging at first, because the students were fluent in Japanese – a language that Shimizu herself didn't know.[3] She continued to teach at the school until 1942.[2]
Advocacy
Enfranchisement
In 1936, when the Elections and Franchise Acts Committee in the House of Commons was debating whether or not to extend voting rights to Asian immigrants and their descendants, Shimizu was asked by the Japanese Canadian Citizens League to join a small delegation travelling to Ottawa. Shimizu and her three companions each gave a short presentation to the committee in support of enfranchisement. The committee did not end the franchise ban, however, and the delegation returned home disappointed.[2]
World War II
In 1941, the Canadian government began requiring all Japanese-Canadians older than 16 to register with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and Shimizu's parents were forced to give up their land and house.[2]
When Japanese-Canadian families were moved into detention camps, their children were pulled out of school. In response, Shimizu recruited 120 Japanese teachers – many of them young high-school graduates or students themselves – and proceeded to train them in preparing and delivering school assignments. Working under the supervision of the British Columbia Securities Commission, Shimizu established a system of schools for approximately 3,000 Japanese-Canadian children within the internment camps, sending her newly-trained teachers to all the different camp locations.[2] The schools operated out of small shacks that held only 20 students, and they used discarded textbooks donated by the Vancouver School Board.[5] Shimizu visited the camps herself every month, commuting between Steveston and Vancouver, even as she was obliged to keep to a strict 9 pm curfew every night.[2]