In late summer 1916, Ryoichi Kobayashi gave up his job as an “automobile driver” in Vancouver and followed the Alberta-bound flow of Japanese-Canadian men wanting to enlist in the Canadian Army. He’d just turned 25 and had been in Canada for eight years. But like others before him, Kobayashi was rejected as a volunteer when he applied in British Columbia. Here, only Caucasians were being accepted even though earlier that year, more than 150 Japanese-Canadians had paid for their own initial training in Steveston and Vancouver only to be told that B.C. recruiters weren’t interested in admitting Asians. Alberta recruiters had no such qualms. And that suited men like Kobayashi just fine because they believed fighting for Canada would be a step toward earning full rights of citizenship including the right to vote. Like most who volunteered, these men had no idea what lay ahead. As Kobayashi told a Vancouver Sun reporter nearly 50 years later, after the fear of the first battle, the food was so terrible and the trenches so cold that he often wondered whether it would be better to die. The first Japanese volunteers enlisted with the 13th Canadian Mounted Rifles in Medicine Hat. By June 1916, 42 of them were on their way to Europe where they eventually joined the 50th Battalion. Japanese-Canadian volunteers fought in Canadian regiments involved in all of the war’s biggest battles — the Battle of the Somme, Vimy Ridge, Hill 70, Ypres, Passendaele, Amiens, Scarpe, Drocourt Queant, Canal du Nord, Cambrai and Valenciennes. By war’s end, of the 222 who had enlisted, 54 had been killed, 92 were wounded and 11 had received Military Medals for bravery. Sainosuke Kubota — like Kobayashi — was determined to fight. A member of the Satsuma warrior clan, he had been working as a cook at a small hotel on Mayne Island since immigrating in 1907. He was 24 when he used the last of his savings to buy a train ticket to Calgary where he arrived in July 1916. “There was a recruitment office and soldiers on the street,” Kubota wrote in 1957 essay submitted to a contest sponsored by the Japanese-Canadian Citizens Association. After confirming to the officer that he was a naturalized citizen, Kubota “hurriedly” signed the registration papers. “A soldier took me to a nearby restaurant where I got quite full eating stew.” With his belly full, Kubota was taken to Sarcee Camp where tents “spread like waves as far as the eye could see” and were divided by wide avenues. After being pronounced fit, issued a uniform and assigned to a tent where he was bunked with “six white soldiers,” he wrote, “I was finally in the army. I was really jubilant.” The feeling didn’t last. The next morning, rather than starting training, Kubota was waiting tables in the officers mess. Inadvertently, he’d signed on to the Army Service Corps. His war seemed destined to be spent serving meals and cleaning tables. He was devastated, but his bunkmates congratulated him on his luck. “I wanted to call them bastards, but I kept my mouth shut.”

But he found a way out a few weeks later. He approached one of the officers of a fighting unit and begged for a transfer. During his first week in the new unit, he and an officer were dispatched to collect a couple of other Japanese-Canadians from a Calgary recruiting office. A few weeks later, Kobuta and two officers went to British Columbia to recruit more of them. When the 14th Platoon left for Europe that fall, there were 42 Japanese-Canadians and Kubota was a corporal. By the time the unit finally reached the front, members fell into the routine of two weeks of fighting followed by rest periods at the rear. “The awareness that we had survived two weeks longer enabled us to enjoy our hot food, coffee, beer and especially the letters from home,” he later wrote. “(But) the Japanese Canadian casualties began to rise. I felt somehow responsible but reconciled myself to the idea that somehow God knew our destiny.” That destiny for Kobayashi, Kubota and many others included the Battle of Vimy Ridge, a three-day ordeal that began on April 9, 1917, and is widely considered to be a defining moment for Canada. “At 2 a.m., our artillery commenced its bombardment and at 3 a.m., our infantry began to advance,” Kobuta wrote. “Since the start of the Vimy general offensive, we had not slept for three solid days and night and all of us were in desperate need of sleep and water. By then the Corps was reduced by a half with many Japanese-Canadian casualties.” More than 7,000 Canadians died and 3,598 Canadians were wounded including Kobayashi, who was shot in the left arm. Kobayashi was sent to Ramsgate Hospital in England where he was wounded again during an air raid attack before being sent back to Canada and honourably discharged on May 17, 1918. Meantime, Kobuta and his unit carried on. When the Japanese-Canadian contingent dwindled to 20, it was bolstered by the arrival of 18 more Japanese-Canadians from the Alberta-based 192nd Corps. By early 1918, some of those men were conscripts because so many volunteers had been killed that the government had made military service mandatory with no exceptions. The Canadian forces continued their advance south and by August, Kobuta and his platoon could see the towers of the famous, medieval cathedral in Reims. They were called in to reinforce British forces involved in heavy fighting. Kobuta divided the Japanese-Canadians into two squads, taking command of one of them. It was a terrible fight, followed by a retreat. Five Japanese-Canadian soldiers died and their bodies were piled in hastily dug trenches as the heavy bombardment continued into the night. Another seven were seriously wounded. By dawn, Kubota had been wounded as well. Kobuta later wrote that he deeply regretted the hectic general retreat because it meant “there was no chance to have a parting word with my comrades.” Two months in an English hospital followed by six more in a Canadian hospital and Kobuta was then on the list to go back. Only this time, it was to Siberia to fight alongside the Japanese.

During his physical exam, Kubota wrote that he asked the doctor, “Check my backside ... (A)fter close inspection, concluded by a robust slap on the rump, he declared: ‘Oh, no good.’ “It was a bad case of hemorrhoids. I had escaped going to Siberia.” On Nov. 11, Kobuta wept for joy in Calgary as peace was declared. And he wept for the men who he’d recruited who would never make it home. During the next couple of years, Kubota forged a new life in Calgary and took a quick trip to Japan, returning with a bride. He wrote that they encountered very little prejudice there and he was even allowed to vote in the provincial as well as federal election. But things hadn’t changed much in British Columbia, where Kobayashi had returned to settle. The B.C. government reduced the number of fishing licences to “other than white residents” in 1919. Veterans were exempt, but they once again felt the sting of exclusion. By 1920, the Japanese community in Vancouver had raised enough money to build a cenotaph in Stanley Park commemorating the Japanese-Canadians who had fought and died during the war. The monument with its “eternal” flame was unveiled on the third anniversary of the start of the Battle of Vimy Ridge. But a few weeks later, public outrage forced Premier John Oliver to withdraw his motion to extend the vote to Japanese-Canadian veterans. By 1926, the veterans had established their own branch of the Canadian Legion — Branch #9. Through it and with the help of other veterans, they continued to lobby for the vote. The battle was won April 1, 1931. Legion president Masumi Matsui and secretary-treasurer Kobuta witnessed the vote in the legislature. The motion passed by a vote of 19 to 18. Back at the cenotaph to celebrate, Kubota read a poem he’d written to the 20 men he’d recruited and who were buried somewhere in France. “Although you are gone you are not dead Surely the setting sun will rise again for you Your heroic spirit will live in our hearts We take the torch from your hand to fight and carry on.” The hard-won gain of the veterans was short-lived. It was extinguished along with the cenotaph’s eternal flame in the days that followed Japan’s Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor. During the next few years, the veterans were among 22,000 Japanese-Canadians forced into internment camps. After the war, Kobayashi had worked as a taxi driver, a fisherman after the war, gone to Japan briefly and returned with a bride. When the federal government ordered people of Japanese ancestry to leave the coast, the Kobayashis were at 2072 Dundas Street in Vancouver and stubbornly resisted, citing his war service. But he relented in the fall of 1942 because of the discrimination his five children were subjected to by their peers, according to an account published in the Japanese Canadian Bulletin. The Kobayashis were among the last Japanese to leave Vancouver and were sent to the Tashme internment camp, where Ryoichi and Masako had two more children.