a journal of japanese canadian community, history + culture
a journal of japanese canadian community, history + culture
One Sunday morning last fall, in the before-times, our daughter and her husband invited the whole family to join them for an authentic Japanese breakfast on east Hastings Street. When Amy and I visited Japan back in 2018, one of…
Unlike many Japanese Canadians, I have no ties to the prewar BC community, no extended family – no cousins, second cousins uncles, aunts – to situate me in the rich, sprawling, intertwined history of those who laid the foundation for…
How you identify culturally is almost an internal dialogue with yourself. But an eye-opener for me while making All Our Father’s Relations was how invested the Canadian government was in telling the Grant siblings what their identity was. In 1920,…
Behind the bar at the Odd Society on Powell Street, Mia Glanz wields a pair of cocktail shakers like oversized maracas, the ice creating a pleasing racket that drowns out the rain outside. Half a dozen customers sit at tables…
Visitors to the second floor of the Nikkei Centre in Burnaby will be familiar with a sculpture hanging over an opening in the floor. The 2007 piece by Vancouver artist Judy Nakagawa is titled GONE and calls to mind dozens…
In 2015, the BC Government launched a pilot program to identify places of historic significance to Chinese Canadians, resultng in the addition of 21 provincially recognized places in to the BC Register of Historic Places, the official provincial list of…
When Linda Ohama arrived in Onomichi on Children’s Day in May, 1999, camera crew in tow, she was looking for footage for her film, Obaachan’s Garden. What she found went much deeper. Onomichi quickly became her second home, a place…
When Winnipeg’s Fubuki Daiko celebrated its twentieth anniversary last year, it marked a major milestone as one of North America’s few professional taiko groups. Formed in 1995, Fubuki can trace its origins to the San Francisco Taiko Dojo (SFTD) and…
It was once known as the Powell Street Grounds, later changed to Oppenheimer Park, after Vancouver’s second mayor, David Oppenheimer. Depending on what website you’re looking at, it was opened in 1898 or 1902. From the latter part of the…
When I was young I had little or no interest in Japanese (or Japanese Canadian) history or culture. I knew my mum was Japanese, or at least her parents were – they spoke very little English. But my mother spoke…