Rookie MLA Naomi Yamamoto has been named the new Minster of State for Intergovernmental Relations, only a short time after becoming the first Japanese Canadian to be elected MLA in British Columbia.
Yamamoto’s election-night victory came on the 60th anniversary of Japanese Canadians first getting the right to vote in BC. Her father, Masanobu Yamamoto, a nisei who was not given the right to vote until he was 22, was on hand to see her victory speech.
Yamamoto’s parents were both sent from Vancouver to internment camps in the Kootenays—her mother to …

The GVJCCA will once again be participating in the Powell Street Festival on August 1 and 2, 2009 at its temporary location this year at Woodland Park, located at 700 Woodland Drive, Vancouver, just off Commercial Drive. The GVJCCA through The Bulletin will again provide the program guide to everyone attending the festival.

It is quite selfish of me, but I would rather not say a “formal goodbye” to those who live on forever in my memory. They were —and are—all wonderful praiseworthy people each in his/her own way. By not bidding them farewell, I’m sort of asking these people to live on, to “stay alive,” if that makes any sense.

Recording a family history is a great hobby, it is a very social activity and it is fun. It draws family members together; it gives you things to talk about, to ask about and to wonder about. It makes your family closer and stronger and the interest spans generations.

The military at that time made lots of errors and delays in their warnings. Because the weather was good that day, I lay on top of an air raid shelter and slept. However, when I looked up at the sky, I saw enemy aircraft nearby with bombs failing out from underneath them.

I have come to understand that for myself, oral history has an immediacy and intimacy that third-person histories and biographies often fail to capture. So even though I failed at the time to appreciate the rich history that surrounded me as I was growing up in the Strathcona neighbourhood, I am still able to access the stories that were captured by those who had more foresight than I did.

When I met Oyama Seishin, head of the Canada Association of Okinawa my first night in Naha this April, he told me he wanted me to meet an elder, a Mr. Roy Oshiro. A field trip to explore the origins of Ryukyuan emigration to Canada had brought me to Okinawa and the idea of meeting an Okinawan Canadian elder was intriguing.
Mr. Oyama, whose own father emigrated to Canada in 1917, turned out to be a fountain of wisdom. Not only had he been actively promoting Okinawa-Canada relations for many years, …

Susanne Tabata sits on the back deck of her South Vancouver home looking at the ten DVDs stacked in front of her on the table. As she flips through them, she sighs as if suddenly remembering the process that brought them into being. The DVDs form a set titled Ohanashi – The Story of Our Elders. Filmed by Tabata over a three-week period and produced by the Japanese Canadian National Museum, Ohanashi collects the memories of ten Nikkei elders, all spanning the pre-war, internment and post-war years.
A long-time film maker …