From a Moose Jaw railway worker to a cafe owner to a suspected spy: this man's family never knew the truth

Robbi Kane still remembers visiting her father Philip Kane's high school in Washington State in the 1990s, and cracking open a yearbook to find his name. 

"All of a sudden, I'm looking through the yearbook and I see this guy that looks like my uncle and my dad, and it said 'Philip Nakane,'" said Kane. "I was just shocked." 

She wondered if 'Nakane' was an Indigenous name, as she knew her father came from Canada and had the dark hair and dark eyes that she inherited. 

Then she recalled the shape of her eyes, which once compelled her young daughter to ask, "Mommy, you have Asian eyes, don't you?"

That was how, in her 40s, Kane discovered she was part Japanese and her last name was derived from Nakane. It was a discovery that set her on a path to learn more about her paternal grandfather — a Japanese man who settled in Saskatchewan, but whose family would end up distancing themselves from his radical actions and, at the same time, hiding their own Japanese heritage.

Naka Nakane was born in Kitsuki, Japan, in the 1870s to a former samurai family, before immigrating to Canada around 1903. He moved to Moose Jaw to work for the Canadian Pacific Railway and eventually married an English woman. The couple had five children there, including Kane's father, Philip, born in 1916.

After becoming a naturalized Canadian, Nakane worked his way from manager of the CPR's lunchroom to the proprietor of his own restaurant and hotel.

It wasn't always an easy road for him as an Asian business owner, as Saskatchewan — fearing "Oriental" monopolization and corruption — banned Asians from employing Caucasian females in 1912.

That law was part of a series of Canadian labour laws that targeted people of Asian heritage. 

Linda Yip is a genealogist who's studied anti-Asian labour laws and the Chinese-Canadian experience in Western Canada.

Newspapers from that time period made it clear that some white business owners were concerned about competition from non-white business owners, but she said concerns about interracial marriage were also at play. 

"Society at the time was very concerned about Asian men and white women; they wanted to keep these two groups apart to keep any relationships from developing." 

She said some would end up leaving Saskatchewan and Canada for America, which did not have policies as controlling over Asian peoples at the time. 

Nakane left as well. After successfully lobbying to exempt Japanese employers from Saskatchewan's "White Women's Labour Law," he decided to take his business skills and activism to America, relocating with his wife and children in 1921 to Tacoma, Wash.