As Gordon said in 1988, “I never look at my case as just my own, or just as a Japanese-American case. It is an American case, with principles that affect the fundamental human rights of all Americans.”

This  month we say goodbye to Gordon Hirabayashi, who passed away on January 2nd in Edmonton at the age of 93 after a long struggle with Alzheimer’s. I met Gordon only once, briefly. It was back in the late eighties, and I was travelling through Edmonton with Kokoro Dance, a dance company co-founded by Gordon’s son Jay. Fittingly, at the time we were touring Rage, a butoh/taiko collaboration based on the Internment and inspired in part by Gordon’s experience during the war.

We are fortunate to have a preponderance of quiet heroes in our community. Gordon was one such hero.

Last month we lost another one of those quiet heroes (although she would have scoffed at the description), and I lost both a mother and a mentor, when Fumiko Greenaway passed away in Nelson, BC, at the age of 82, on December 21.
In the mid-seventies, having lived in Europe and in central Canada, our family moved into a little housing co-op on Union Street in Strathcona, a move that would have an enormous impact on all of our lives. It was here, blocks away from the historic home of the Japanese Canadian community, that Fumiko rediscovered her Japanese roots. She would spend the next several decades immersed in the Nikkei community, working mostly behind the scenes, happy to stay out of the spotlight.

Fumiko had a way about her that earned people’s trust and respect and over the years she built up an incredible network of friends and acquaintances. She was able to maintain a non-partisan stance, refusing to be drawn into the politics of a sometimes-fractious community, preferring instead to move things forward wherever possible. It was a position that served her well.

When she and my father Tod left for Nelson in the late nineties she was missed by many on the west coast. Those who knew her will not be surprised to hear that she quickly became a favourite at the care home where she spent the last few years of her life.

As I write this, a cup I brought back for her from Japan sits by my computer. It’s a simple white cup with her name on it in black type—FUMIKO. For the past two years it sat in a glass case outside her room at the care home. It’s a simple reminder of her that is somewhat bittersweet in that she never made it to Japan herself, even after the Redress settlement gave her the funds to make the trip. It was, I think, one of her few regrets in life.

A celebration of Fumiko’s life will be held in February, a chance for her friends and family to share memories of her and smile. Look for details in the February Bulletin.

Reflecting on the lives of Gordon and Fumiko, and others who have passed away this holiday season, I am reminded again of the importance of family and of community. As someone wrote in reference to Gordon’s passing, “we carry our parents with us wherever we go.” Comforting words indeed in a cold season.

I’d like to wish all our readers the very best for the coming year. May the Year of the Dragon bring you peace, health and happiness.

The decision by the University of British Columbia’s Senate Tributes Committee to grant honourary degrees to former students who were unable to complete their degrees, while largely symbolic, is important in that it ties off a loose end left by the wartime injustices that saw Canadian citizens stripped of their rights seventy years ago. What makes initiatives like this all the more urgent is that those directly affected by the wartime displacement are getting fewer by the year. At the September 18 Asahi Tribute game held at Oppenheimer Park, two of the three remaining Asahi players were in attendance. Within a few weeks of the game, one of them, Jim Fukui, was gone—a poignant reminder that our links to the past are more and more tenuous and all the more precious for it.

My phone interview with the forward-thinking Dr. Nori Nishio reminded me that the nisei are a special breed unto themselves—a generation that had to make the best of challenging times. How many of us can imagine taking a sitting Prime Minister, let alone a Prince, fly fishing?

Dr. Gordon Hirabayashi is another case in point—a nisei who not only refused to bow down in the face of injustice, but later fought to clear his name, and won. He has now had a human rights award created in his name.

In this issue we spotlight two books that have long been unavailable but have now deservedly been reprinted. The first, My Sixty Years in Canada, was written by the late Dr. M. Miyazaki. It’s a remarkable recounting of life as seen through the eyes of a country doctor, through the war years and beyond.

The second book, Opening Doors in Vancouver’s East End: Strathcona, has a personal connection for me. My father, Tod Greenaway, took many of the photographs in the book and as his darkroom technician at the time, I made the original prints. I was too young at the time to fully recognize or appreciate the immense scope and value of the book that collected interviews with 45 Strathcona residents, including a half dozen Japanese Canadians. What is fascinating from a Nikkei perspective is to see the stories of the Japanese Canadians within the greater context of the neighbourhood and to be reminded that the prewar Japanese community did not live within a sealed vacuum, but were in fact part of a larger community. To read their stories side by side with those of Italian, Jewish, Black, Chinese, Polish, British and other residents is to remember that times were tough all over in the prewar years, at least for those on the “wrong side” of the tracks and that an indomitable spirit ran through the entire downtown eastside community.

I was pleased to see this valuable resource reprinted by Harbour Publishing as a Vancouver 125 Legacy Book.

Online Edition
For those of you who prefer to get their community news online, the Bulletin website has undergone a makeover in the past month and is now more user-friendly (and just plain usable). In addition to a new interface, we will be posting stories as we receive them, rather than having to wait until the print edition goes to press. This way we are able to share breaking news more quickly and keep our readers better informed. It also allows us to share our stories with the world at large in a way that was unimaginable not that long ago. Check us out at jccabulletin-geppo.ca. And feel free to leave comments!

Gift Idea
The Bulletin has been an indelible part of the west coast (and beyond) Nikkei experience since 1958, not long after Japanese Canadians began returning to the coast. Over the years the community has undergone significant changes and The Bulletin has changed along with it. We strive to serve as a link between generations and to keep our widely dispersed community informed. It is a never-ending but gratifying challenge.
This holiday season, why not give the gift of a JCCA membership to someone in your family who does not get their own copy of The Bulletin delivered to their door each month? As a not-for-profit publication, we rely on memberships/subscriptions along with your generous donations and advertising revenue to keep publishing in the face of challenging economic times. Each paid membership/subscription goes towards funding the activities of the JCCA and the publication costs of The Bulletin. A membership/subscription form can be found HERE.

On behalf of the small but mighty staff at The Bulletin I’d like to wish each and every one of our readers the very best for the holiday season and the New Year. A special thank you must go to our dedicated volunteers who show up every month filled with good cheer, regardless of the season, to prepare The Bulletin for mailing and to our loyal advertisers who help keep us going through thick and thin. May the year of the dragon bring you health, happiness and prosperity.

half circle of faces
hands in pockets, cenotaph
stands at attention

scattering of red
poppies, laid gently to rest
on a bed of stone

What I’m reminded of, reading Kirsten’s description of her time studying the internment experience is how much the actual landscape and geography of the BC interior impacted those who lived through those profoundly life-altering years. When she talks about the terrain of memory, she is not speaking simply in metaphors, but of a very real place, where memories are stored, embedded in the landscape, in the trees and rivers and mountains.
As we move further and further away from the events of the 1940s—the events that so permanently altered our collective trajectory—it is important that we not lose our connection to the hills and fields that played host to a community in exile.

There are efforts afoot to keep the memories of that time and place alive. Over the next year or so we will be following and reporting on some of those efforts in these pages. I hope you will follow along with us, and perhaps contribute some of your own memories.

I would like to congratulate the recipients of the inaugural Nikkei Place Community Awards, feted this past weekend at the Nikkei Centre. As we’ve illustrated so often in these pages, our community is filled with quiet heroes, people who work long and hard hours for the greater good, often with little or no acknowledgment, and it is good to see them receive credit where credit is due. We are all the better for their efforts and unrelenting dedication.

The other day a brand new reusable lunch bag appeared on our kitchen counter. Despite the fact that it’s an attractive  piece of minimalist architecture, I balked a bit at the $25 price tag still attached to it until someone pointed out that our daughter had been using her old lunch bag every day for the past four years and it not only smelled bad it was a serious health risk.

Looking at the bag sitting there all shiny and expectant brought home the fact that Labour Day is just around the corner and long months of packed lunches and packed schedules are looming once again. Our two daughters are looking forward to the coming school year for the most part, as is my wife, an educator with the Surrey School District. Still, there are mixed feelings about the end of summer.

In a household where three of the four of us have an entire two months off, summers are a time of relaxed mornings and too-late nights, of weekend festivals, fishing trips and campfires. While I myself am chained to my computer much of the summer, my timetable is much looser and there’s a sense of energy and busyness around the house that’s lacking during the school year when I have my home office to myself. This year our older daughter got her first summer job, a rite of passage signifying that the path to adulthood is that much shorter than it was last time this year. The red “L” on the back of our car is about to give way to a green “N”, and that too is a marker of no small significance.

Our younger daughter spent part of the summer volunteering at an outdoor camp and she too is blossoming before our eyes, gaining confidence and independence with every passing day. This fall she is enrolled in an outdoor leadership training course, something that will add to not only her resume, but her range of abilities.

Watching our daughters grow and come into their own, and to see the children of friends take their own steps into adulthood—even talking to the JCCA summer students at the office—I feel a sense of hope and optimism that is hard to find when scouring the news. In some ways it is a harder world that they are stepping out into, with fewer jobs and higher expenses than when I left home. On the other hand they have access to more information and broader experiences, largely through the internet, but also through a great mingling of cultures and world views that is a result of a more diverse society.

This month’s community profile looks at Naomi Yamamoto, the Liberal MLA for North Vancouver-Lonsdale. As Minister for Advanced Education, she has a great responsibility—overseeing the colleges and universities that we give our children over to in the hopes that they will given the tools to navigate not just the job market but the world that they are inheriting. Shrinking budgets and financial turmoil in the world markets mean leaner times and hard decisions for government—we can only hope that the future, our children’s future, is not sacrificed in the name of fiscal restraint.

Happy New (school) Year to all our readers!

The Festival arose directly out of the 1977 Japanese Canadian Centennial, marking the arrival of the first Japanese Canadian immigrant, Manzo Nagano. It was the first time that the younger generation of Japanese Canadians, the children of those that suffered the indignities of the Internment, began to come to terms with their shared heritage and to start asking questions about their history. It was this process of questioning, of stirring the pot, that set the stage for the Centennial, the Redress movement and, ultimately the rebirth of the Japanese Canadian community.

That first Powell Street Festival was a statement—it said, “We are here. We have been here for a hundred years. You tried to get rid of us with your orders-in-council and your racist policies, but we prevailed.”

The Festival was a reclamation of not only history, but of place. Oppenheimer Park, once known as Powell Grounds, sits at the heart of what was once a thriving community of shops and services, a place where people worked and played and raised families. They cheered on the Asahi baseball team, finding in sport a level playing field that was denied them elsewhere. Most of all they struggled to gain acceptance in a society that was for the most part closed to them.

Ultimately that acceptance was gained by working hard, by not sticking out, by dispersing across the country like scattered seeds.

By holding a festival, a uniquely Canadian version of a Japanese matsuri, on the old Powell Grounds, the community found its roots again—and the roots proved to be far stronger than anyone could have imagined.
35 years later, the Powell Street Festival is the longest running “ethnic” festival in the Greater Vancouver area, perhaps in all of Canada. Indeed, it is one of the longest running festivals period. Like the Nikkei pioneers who put down roots here, the Festival has persevered in the face of many challenges. Year after year it returns to an area that has been written off more than once and for one weekend banners fly, the smell of shoyu and salmon wafts down the street, hapa children frolic on the very spot where their great-grandparents once played and the beat of the taiko resonates off the old buildings, as if to say, “welcome home.”

As a child, my family moved often, never staying in one place, or even one city, for long, so I never developed that same sense of place. My parents were living in London, England when my sister and I were born; we moved back to Canada when I was three. My first vague memories are of Montreal in the winter, my first vivid memories are of Toronto in the summer—one was very cold, the other very hot. We moved to Vancouver when I was ten—the same year the Vancouver Canucks joined the NHL. My father’s friend Roy Kiyooka was living here and convinced my folks that it was a great place to live. So we packed up a U-Haul trailer and made the trek west.

We lived in several different rental houses before settling in the Strathcona neighbourhood, becoming founding members of Chinatown’s first housing co-op. It was here, a few blocks from Powell Street, that my family found a real home. My parents soon took an active role our new community, joining the fight to stop the freeway from destroying Vancouver’s oldest neighbourhood.

A number of Japanese and Japanese Canadian families took up residence in the small co-op and my mother, Fumiko, began to reconnect with her Japanese roots, getting involved in numerous community initiatives like the Dream of Riches exhibit and book project and the Japanese Canadian Centennial celebrations.

I came of age in the area, roaming the streets and back alleys of Strathcona—it was place rich in character and history. Even when I left home I stayed in the vicinity for many years—doing my shopping in Chinatown and Powell Street, at Benny’s Italian Market and further west at the Woodwards department store.

It was on Powell Street that I was introduced to my dormant Nikkei heritage through people like Takeo Yamashiro, Rick Shiomi and Linda Hoffman who welcomed me into the community with open arms. I joined my first band at the Tonari Gumi coffeehouse on Cordova. I saw my first taiko group at the Powell Street Festival and subsequently helped found what would be Canada’s first taiko group—Katari Taiko. Roy Kiyooka bought me my first donburi at Aki’s on Powell Street. My favourite chicken karaage was served at the Fuji Restaurant right next to the Sunrise Market and I was heartbroken when it left the area; in fact, to this day I’m searching for its equal to no avail. In those days, Powell Street was still home to a number of Nikkei-owned businesses. Tonari Gumi  was open for business, served its senior clientele from its storefront office just steps away from the old Powell Grounds.

When I began editing The Bulletin in the fall of 1993, the JCCA was still on Powell Street, although we relocated to East Broadway soon afterwards, the area in steep decline.

Like the fertile fishing grounds that Nikkei fishermen plied up and down the coast, Powell Street as the centre of the Vancouver Nikkei community is but a fading memory, its glory days remembered by fewer and fewer. The closest any of us come now to reliving those days is attending the Powell Street Festival once a year, when the air is once more filled with the scents and sounds of the matsuri, Canadian-style. Taiko drums pound out their furious rhythms and tako-yaki beckons hungry throngs.

With the Powell Street Festival just around the corner, a beautiful new exhibit at the Japanese Canadian National Museum allows us to rediscover Powell Street in its pre-war glory. Monogatari, Tales of Powell Street (1920 – 1941) captures, through artifacts, photographs and stories a Powell Street that most of us can only imagine. It’s well worth a visit.

Where we live in Port Moody there is a sizeable Asian population—mostly Korean and Chinese—with many living in the Westwood Plateau area. Our kids’ high school is fairly mixed—although they tell me the Asian students outnumber the non-Asian students perhaps two to one.

Given the high rate of intermarriage within the Canadian Nikkei community and my own experiences growing up, I have always taken it as a given that cultural blending is not only healthy but commonplace—and I assumed it would be the same within the school population. I brought up the subject with Emiko one day while we were driving to field hockey practice (did I mention we live in the suburbs?), asking if the Asian and non-Asian kids all got along together. I was surprised when she told me that essentially the Asian students sit at one group of tables in the common area and the non-Asian kids sit at another group of tables. And where do you sit? I asked. With this Asians, she replied, as if it the obvious choice.

I’m not sure what surprised me more, that she had to choose where to sit, or that she chose to sit with the Asian kids. After all, she is only a quarter Asian herself. Well, she explained, most of her friends are Asian. Hmmmm. Interesting.

We were on our way to pick up Sarah, a member of Emi’s field hockey team. Sarah is non-Asian. Still surprised by what I had just learned, I asked Sarah to confirm the racial divide at the school. Oh sure, she said, that’s the way it is. As if it was the most natural thing in the world.

The most natural thing in the world . . .

There are times when the dynamic of the Canadian Nikkei community seems to embody that same principle: a divide between the English-speaking—those who can trace their roots back to the pre-war issei, and the Japanese-speaking, or shinijusha—those who have arrived more recently.

To be sure, there are those who straddle the two worlds comfortably, generally those who are proficient in both languages, but for the most part there is a gulf that sometimes appears unbridgeable. It is a gulf that is born of the inability to communicate effectively and a world-view that is markedly different, based on the country of one’s birth.

In the seven or so weeks since the 9.0 earthquake and resulting tsunami battered the Tohoku region of Japan, that gulf has narrowed as both communities have come together in their shared concern for Japan, a country facing its greatest crisis since World War Two. Working together, sometimes hand in hand, Nikkei of all backgrounds have forged a bond that has been strengthened by a shared experience and a shared goal—to not only raise funds for the victims of the earthquake and tsunami, but to show a level of care and compassion that is felt across the Pacific Ocean.

Over the past seven weeks, as I have gathered stories for The Bulletin and helped put together the Ganbare Japan! concert, there is one thing I have heard over and over: the gratitude of the Japanese-born to those Canadians, Nikkei and non-Nikkei alike, who have shown so much compassion and put so much of themselves into the relief efforts, whether through donations of money or time , or both.

Sometimes it takes a tragedy to draw people together and if these new-found bonds can remain strong then we will all be the better for it.

May is Asian Heritage Month in Canada check out the explorAsian website at vahms.org for a list of events around the Metro Vancouver area.

New-media coverage of the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami on March 11 has been unprecedented, with people around the world able to watch the horrific events unfolding almost in real time on cell phones, laptops and desktop computers.

I was watching a hockey game on TV when the announcer mentioned between plays that he sent his sympathies out to the victims of the Japanese earthquake. What earthquake? I rushed to my computer and was able to see the first reports of the tragedy. Over the ensuing days, I, like many others, followed the worsening situation in Japan on an almost minute-by-minute basis.

More than our ability to view what is going on across the globe, though, what has changed is our ability to interact with each other globally, to respond to events as they unfold. Within minutes of the news breaking, people were facebooking, texting, skyping; the blog-o-sphere was alive with chatter. Some were searching for news of loved ones and friends in the affected areas, others were looking for solace among far-flung friends, still others just needed to express “their fear and their love,” as film maker Linda Ohama so eloquently put it.

Jenny Yasumi Uechi, in a Facebook posting, captured the feelings of many when she wrote, “For the people in northeastern Japan who lost their homes and loved ones in the quake, I have no words or prayers adequate to ease their pain. Only donations so that they can recover as fast as possible. You’re not alone.”

Many of us followed various stories over the internet, like that of Lorne Spry, a Richmond resident who has been living in Japan for the past sixteen years, teaching English in Sendai. An e-mail he had sent to friends describing the aftermath of the disaster began making the rounds “Nevertheless,” he wrote, “no complaints. The shattered cities, the loss of life and colossal destruction are humbling. One man said to me today in his twangy Oz, ‘It seemed so strange the other day . . . it was so sunny, and there were children playing in the park and people talking in the street, yet a few kilometres away there was all this death!’”

It is telling that the blog posting that was forwarded to me most frequently following the earthquake was one titled A Letter from Sendai by Anne Thomas, blogging for Ode Magazine. In her blog posts she shows a side to the tragedy that is often missed amid the scenes of devastation: “During the day we help each other clean up the mess in our homes. People sit in their cars, looking at news on their navigation screens, or line up to get drinking water when a source is open. If someone has water running in their home, they put out a sign so people can come to fill up their jugs and buckets.

“It’s utterly amazingly that where I am there has been no looting, no pushing in lines. People leave their front door open, as it is safer when an earthquake strikes. People keep saying, ‘Oh, this is how it used to be in the old days when everyone helped one another.’”

While the scope of the crisis is yet to be quantified, it is clear that the loss of lives, of livelihoods and infrastructure will be staggering. It is now that the Japanese people put into practice the term ganbare “to adhere to something with tenacity.” It is what they do.