The Cariboo has long been noted for the independent free-thinkers who call it home.
They are people of strong will who readily carve out their own niche in what can be a rugged life, yet they will not let a neighbour go wanting or allow the community struggle when it is in their power to help.
Of the residents of Canim Lake, there is none more “Cariboo” than Hisako Arai.
Hisako was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1938, followed by a brother, Hideo, who was born in 1941. Her father owned a good business in the city, and the family thrived, at least until the evening of March 9, 1945.
That night 334 B-29 bombers dropped incendiary devices amongst the wooden structures of the city, destroying one-quarter of it. The resulting firestorm claimed 100,000 lives and sent one million people in search of shelter, making the raid the single most destructive bomb attack in history.
With their home, business, and virtually all their possessions gone, the family moved to the outskirts of the city into the cow shed of a former employee. Hisako’s father died shortly thereafter, leaving her mother to scrabble for the family’s food and clothing.
“I know hunger,” Hisako says.
“It’s ingrained on my brain. We ate weeds from a river dyke. We grew up in hunger.”
These experiences imbued in her a steely will and a burning sense of social justice.
As the situation in Tokyo settled, her mother moved the family back into the city to find work. She poured all she had into Hisako’s schooling, determined her daughter have the best education she could manage.
Hisako went from lower school to the Tokyo Pharmacology University, but dropped out in 1961 after the second year, to marry her sweetheart who had just graduated in Applied Physics. Their first daughter was born in 1962, and a second in 1966.
The Vietnam War raged throughout those years. Japan was used as a major staging area by American forces whose effect on the society was dramatic. The difficulties of that period became the trigger for an activism that became a hallmark of Hisako’s life.
“I stood at the train station with my sign chanting ‘Yankee Go Home!’ I became so loud that I was ‘black-balled’ by them. That’s when I learned all the good Joan Baez songs,” she adds with a smile.
“After that, we protested the plans to build the first nuclear power plant in the country. I was certainly right about that”.
Her husband came to Canada in 1966 as part of an engineering team when his firm won a contract to construct the mill at Skookumchuck. One project led to another for the firm.
In 1968, the company brought their employees’ families to Canada, landing Hisako and the children in Cranbrook, giving her a first taste of British Columbia and its magnificent mountains.
With the last contract completed in 1969, the family moved back to Japan, but quickly missed the opportunities of Canada, she says.
“I did not want to leave in the first place. Japan is a man’s country. Canada is like a woman’s heaven.”
In 1970, they immigrated to Canada and she became a citizen in 1977.
To make extra money for the children, Hisako returned to school to retrain as a registered nurse. She started the two-year program at Douglas College in 1975, but failed the first year, struggling with the English language.
She took work as a nurse’s aid for a year to improve her English, returned to first year studies and passed, only to falter again in the second year. Undaunted, she went back to work as a licensed practical nurse, and with the determination learned from her mother, doubled her efforts to master English.
She re-entered the second year and achieved her goal, graduating as a registered nurse in 1982.
Hiking in mountains has always been a love for Hisako. She learned mountaineering skills as a teenager, cutting her teeth in the Japanese Alps where she found exhilaration in the high wild places.
Arriving in Canada, it seemed she had found mountain heaven. Tweedsmuir Park became a focus of her travels, and then the lonely parts of the Chilcotin’s Coastal Range.
From time to time, she visited author Chris Czajkowski at her high-alpine retreat on an unnamed lake, now dubbed Lake Chris. She sometimes cared for the guests while Chris was away, or went off on her own, trekking and camping in the high alpine with her pack-dog Molson.
Hisako’s home in Coquitlam seemed too far from that beloved wilderness country, so she and her husband searched for a more local base from which Hisako could operate. That led to the 1999 purchase of her lakeside property with its dramatic view over Canim Lake’s blue waters eastwards to the snow-capped Trophy Mountains.
The home served as a temporary base for cross-country skiing and backpacking trips until she retired from nursing and took up permanent residence in 2003.
As it happened, the local crusade to preserve the Forest Grove School from government cutbacks began in earnest just as Hisako settled in. Her instincts for social justice could not be denied.
She became heavily involved in the community’s effort, fund-raising, campaigning, and serving on the executive of the society organizing the fight. Once the school’s continued existence was ensured, she began to assist in the classroom, teaching speech arts among other subjects. That work continues to this day.
Along the way, there have been other crusades on behalf of others. She led a fight for better disability payments for injured nurses and, more recently, she raised money for women’s relief organizations after the 2011 Japanese tsunami.
People involved with Hisako through the fight for the school describe her as an “amazing woman” whose contribution to the preservation of the school was “outstanding and instrumental in keeping it going.”
Said another: “She has a very deep commitment to people and is tenacious in working for the children.”
As for Hisako, she just says: “I really love this community. People watch out for each other.”