Anyone watching the opening ceremonies would be forgiven for thinking that Canada is a nation of English-speaking, fiddle-playing white people who get along well with the First Nations minority and, oh yeah, have some happy Francophones in their midst as well. There were a fair number of comments following the ceremonies expressing disappointment that our country’s diversity wasn’t better represented. Hopefully, they said, this would be rectified in the closing ceremonies. Silly people.

On Wednesday January 27, schools in Salmon Arm, BC were closed so that students could attend the Olympic torch relay and cauldron lighting. To the delight of all, the final leg of the relay was run by popular former Salmon Arm teacher and principal Roy Sakaki, who took the torch from local curling Olympian Sandra Jenkins and lit the cauldron in front of City Hall after doing an impromptu dance on the stage.
The Sakaki family is well-known in Kamloops and the surrounding area. In 1949, Roy’s father Tetsuo Sam started …

In 2006, Arts Beatus presented an exhibit by doll artist Tomoka Ike based on The Tale of the Heike, an epic account of the struggle between the Taira and Minamoto clans for control of Japan at the end of the 12th century. This month, Ike returns to Arts Beatus with a much more down-to-earth exhibit. Conversations on the Street is inspired by people she has met, conversations she has overhead, and strangers she has spoken to on the streets of Vancouver, BC.
I spoke to Tomoka Ike by e-mail.
In Her Own …

TERIYAKI SHRIMP
1 lb. medium size shrimp
1 tsp. grated ginger
1/3 cup sugar
1/3 cup soy sauce
sesame seeds

The current exhibit of photographs by Ansel Adams and Leonard Frank at the Japanese Canadian National Museum raises intriguing questions. The juxtaposition of those two sets of images is a powerful statement about how the same type of event can be represented so differently, depending on what perspective one is taking. This is particularly relevant for me right now, because I am one of a group of researchers who has been looking for historical photographs to include in a computer software program that is designed to support reminiscence-based conversations for …

How Did Japanese Visitors and Viewers See Our Community?
Now that the Winter Olympics have come and gone, it all seems like a big blur – with an overall impression that Canada did well. Leaving the medal count and the rest of the big news to the mainstream media, I’ve strung together some comments and vignettes, heard personally or seen on the internet, about some cultural facets of the Games and about Vancouver, its setting. Of particular concern for us living in the cusp of Canadian and Japanese cultures must be …

On attending some of the free events and activities during the Olympics, I was pleased to see many displays of our diversity through featured foods, arts, and music around Vancouver. Many of the musical entertainers here during the Olympics satisfied my love of music and arts. I was also please to see that many of the fine multiethnic restaurants that we have here in Vancouver have done their utmost in appeasing the palettes of all of our guests.

Every edition of the Vancouver International Dance Festival has something for everybody, i.e., there is a wide variety of dance expression. But every VIDF also has works by artists who work outside of the focus of mainstream arts. These are the artists that are often the unknown treasures of our programming. In this year’s VIDF, there are two solo dancers, both accompanied by musicians, one from California and one from Denmark, that are well worth checking out. Kitt Johnson from Copenhagen, accompanied by Swedish composer/musician Sture Ericson explores the primordial …

Recently voted “Best Place to Whip up some Art” in the Georgia Straight reader’s poll, Blim is an independent  community-based art resource center that has been operating for the past seven years out of a small storefront on Main Street. The multi-use space is used for any number of creative activities including screen-printing, button making, drawing, knitting, local underground audio, film screenings, animation, video, dance, spoken word, visual art, creative workshops, and crafts, in fact, just about anything you can think of that fits into the independent, creative field.
Blim has …

Visual artist Kaori Kasai’s world is populated with whimsical creatures, large-eyed children, and androgynous characters. Her paintings and drawings create short vignettes dealing with friendship, alienation, emotional boundaries and our interactions with our physical environment.
As her own website says, “She creates her own world of eccentric creatures and personalities which bloom into the void: gigantic space dotted with tiny, intimate kinships and spirits bumping into one another, narrating signs of life across a dreamt universe.”
Born in Japan, she graduated from art school in Tokyo before leaving to explore the world. …