Nobuko Rena Nakayama says she still suffers from an identity crisis after being forced to move to Japan from Canada in 1946.

Now a resident of Tokyo, Nakayama, 93, says she is one of the nearly 4,000 Japanese-Canadians who were deported to Japan following World War II.

The third-generation Japanese descendant said she wants more people to understand how she and thousands of others suffered from the war.

LIFE CHANGED AFTER PEARL HARBOR ATTACK

Nakayama was born in Vancouver to Canadian-born parents whose family tree stems from Japan’s Kumamoto Prefecture.

Nakayama’s father worked for a lumber company and played for Vancouver Asahi, a baseball team of Japanese-Canadians.

The family’s affluent life was shattered on Dec. 7, 1941, when the former Japanese military bombed Pearl Harbor and attacked the British colony of Hong Kong.

Canada declared war on Japan. Many Canadian soldiers were killed in Hong Kong, which prompted a rise in anti-Japanese sentiment in the country.

Around 22,000 individuals of Japanese ancestry lived in Canada at the time. They were labeled “enemy aliens” and moved to inland areas of Canada during the war. Japanese-Canadians saw their property confiscated.

Nakayama’s father was taken away, and she wouldn’t see him for the next four years.

In 1942, Nakayama’s family was forcibly relocated to an internment camp in the Rocky Mountains, where they endured subzero winter temperatures in a house of single-layer boards.

The Canadian government in 1944 worked out a basic program on what to do with Japanese-Canadians when the war was over.

The ethnic Japanese were forced to choose between being moved east of the Rocky Mountains, on the opposite side from the Pacific, and being “repatriated” to Japan.

Nakayama’s family boarded a ship bound for Japan in June 1946. Nakayama was 13 at the time.

“I have no idea why my father and mother decided to do so,” she said.

She was one of the 3,964 Japanese-Canadians who headed for Japan under the program before it was rescinded in 1947.

‘REPATRIATED’ TO ALIEN COUNTRY

In Japan for the first time in her life, Nakayama lived in a dormitory for “repatriates” in Ibaraki Prefecture and began attending school.

She didn’t understand Japanese. On one occasion, she could copy only four characters from the blackboard before the class ended.

Upper-class students dressed her down because she didn’t bow and had a perm. Nakayama didn’t quite understand why they were angry at her.

She rebuked her mother day after day.

“Why did you take me here?” she asked her mother. “I want to be back in Canada.”

But that day never came during her childhood.

Nakayama graduated from the University of the Sacred Heart in Tokyo in 1956 and landed a job with the Far East branch of Pan American World Airways Inc., the now-defunct U.S. air carrier.

She found the job fun, and it allowed her to be herself.

“I spoke English from morning through night,” she said. “I thought I was ‘back’ where I belonged. I felt relaxed, and I was happy.”

Nakayama married a Japanese man and raised a son and a daughter.

She set a goal of bringing up “perfect” Japanese children. She attended a cooking class, where she learned how to boil fish with soy sauce and make sushi.

“I didn’t know which country I belonged to and where I had my roots,” Nakayama said. “I had no confidence in myself at all. I didn’t want my children to suffer from that sense.”

‘WAR SUFFERING NOT JUST ABOUT BOMBINGS’

In the Redress Agreement of 1988, the Canadian government acknowledged its treatment of Japanese-Canadians during World War II was unjust and decided to offer an apology and compensation.

Nakayama, who had always wished to return to Canada, tapped into the compensation money to buy an apartment in Vancouver, where she would spend the summer every year in the 2000s.

She liked Vancouver’s dry climate and her interactions with her cousins, but she missed Tokyo’s hustle and bustle whenever autumn neared. Even after her trial of 10 years, she still couldn’t decide which country to choose: Japan or Canada.

Canada, she feels, had deported her even though Ottawa used the word “repatriation.”

“At the time, Japan was no place for me to ‘return’ to,” she said.

As for Japan, Nakayama paid taxes to the country for decades, but she cannot vote because she chose Canadian citizenship for the convenience of her work.

Nakayama said she believes she could best be described as a “displaced Canadian.”

Nowadays in Japan, she sees people shouting “out with foreigners” slogans on TV. She said these scenes make her body stiffen.

“Oh, am I going to be deported again?” she said she thinks to herself.

The anti-immigration protests bring back memories of the discrimination she faced during the war.

“War suffering is not just about bombings,” she said, clenching her fists. “I want it to be known better that some suffer from war the way I did.”

LIMITED CIVIL RIGHTS

Masako Iino, former president of Tsuda University, explained why Canada went so far as to deport its citizens of Japanese descent.

“Elsewhere on the North American continent, Japanese-Americans were interned, and some of them lost their property, but the United States didn’t confiscate their property or deport them in the way that Canada did,” said Iino, author of the book “Nikkei Canada-jin no Rekishi” (A history of Japanese-Canadians).

She said the difference arose from the legal status of ethnic Japanese.

“U.S.-born Japanese-Americans of the second and third generations had complete civil rights under the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution,” the scholar said. “They also had voting rights. By contrast, second- and third-generation Japanese-Canadians had only limited civil rights.”