Fumiko had no interest in being her mother's idea of a good nisei daughter. Instead, she saved the money she made working as a bookkeeper/clerk at a Chinese grocery store and enrolled in art school, first in Regina and then in Philadelphia, where she received a scholarship to the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts. When she returned to Canada she married Tod, a farm boy from the prairies who, like her, had aspirations of being an artist.
How do stories and history pass from one generation to another? What relevance do these stories have for people today, particularly young people? These are some of the questions that Lucy Komori and Connie Kadota had been asking themselves over the years.
I’m actually just in the midst of completing new masks for the show that came directly out of ideas we had while working together. The masks are massive and ‘monstrous’ as they are multiples of our faces conjoined together. I can’t wait to try them out with Shion in the studio
Many cenotaphs across Canada have omissions, errors or duplication. The process was far from perfect as mothers and wives mourned the loss of their loved ones. Lists of names were hastily compiled, neighbouring towns erred . . .
Fall has ceased to be totally charming, hasn’t it? By November the glowing leaves that turned the trees into incandescently lovely displays have now turned brown, crashed to earth and are sodden with the rain and trampled underfoot.
More than 4,000 Japanese Canadians likely spent some time during this period working in the sugar beet fields of Southern Alberta. For many, it was an indescribably traumatic experience.
In April 1942, Suzanne Hartmann’s mother, Kathy, was an eight-month-old baby when she and her family were torn from their home in Victoria, British Columbia and shipped across the Strait of Georgia to Hastings Park in Vancouver.
Canadian taiko was birthed in 1979 at the third annual Powell Street Festival, in Oppenheimer Park on Powell Street, home to a large prewar Japanese Canadian community.
A mere hour and a half from YVR by plane, it feels as if we are on a different planet. Much of that difference lies in the silence, or rather the quality of the silence. Apart from the sound of the boat engine, all sounds come from the natural world . . .
In a way it’s kinda ironic that I’m putting my face on the front of the mask, then hiding my real face behind it, but there’s something in that process that gives me control back of how I am “seen”. While growing up, I was constantly being asked, “where are you from?”
As President of the National Association of Japanese Canadians in 1988, Art Miki was one of the key architects of the Redress agreement with the Government of Canada . . .
Through the stories, not easily shared, they come to appreciate the underlying strength that their grandmother possesses, and the legacy of resilience in the face of injustice of that they have inherited.
