A Happy New Year—Akemashite omedet? gozaimasu—to you all. Like many readers, I was lucky enough to be able to share moments of joy with family and friends in a few get-togethers through Christmas into the New Year (o-sh?gatsu). As usual, the final week of the old year flew by in a flash. As soon as the hectic pre-Christmas shopping days and Christmas passed, or so it seemed, we were already ushering in the year 2008.
Hi everyone! It seems that we lose special people in our community each year. This past month, on December 8, our Nikkei community lost...
January 4, 2008. I’m editing a story on Roy Kiyooka while watching Michael de Courcy’s short film Voice: Roy Kiyooka on his website www.michaeldecourcy.com. Today is the 14th anniversary of Roy’s death, and there he is on my computer monitor, unmistakably himself and very much in context—at the Western Front for his 66th birthday/retirement party surrounded by friends: Takeo, Linda, Minoru, Paul Gibbons, Themba Tana, Jim Munro, Rhoda and Trudy . . . His face, his mannerisms, his voice are so familiar, it’s almost painful to watch.
HAPPY NEW YEAR! My best wishes go out to all of you at the beginning of this New Year. May you be all blessed...
The North American Association of Asian Professionals (“NAAAP”) – Vancouver Venture (www.naaap.bc.ca) hosted its first annual Spotlight on Leadership Celebration on October 25, 2007....
In the new book, Nikkei Fishermen on the BC coast: Their Biographies and Photographs, a “date deceased” incorrectly appeared in Fujio Frank Egami’s biography....
I read in the December ’07 Bulletin that the redevelopment of Oppenheimer Park will commemorate the Japanese Canadian history of that park. It seems...
Kiyooka represented and still embodies an idea of art making in which the main focus and value stay with the making, the process of making beautiful things; the perspective being on the process itself and not so much on the final object. When creative energy manifests itself as such a force, beyond disciplines and aesthetic definitions, that energy needs and wants to be taken care, to continue to inspire people so that we can feed our hopes that self expression as a sellable item will be eventually substituted by creative energy as an agent of change. Kiyooka was also aware of the power of sound, sound making as a social-dialogical process, an improvised collaboration among creative minds and souls: the value of difference as a patrimony to share.
Giorgio Magnanensi
When Roy Kiyooka died suddenly and unexpectedly in February 1994, he left behind a legacy of creativity fuelled by a lifelong passion for making art, in all its various guises. Born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan in 1926, he grew up in Calgary, Alberta, where he began his studies at the Provincial Institute of Technology and Art (now the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology and Art). Over the course of his career, he was known as a painter, photographer, musician, film-maker, poet and teacher. He taught at several universities during his career, retiring from the University of British Columbia in 1991.
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