One day, when we were only a week away from shooting and deep into construction, a friend of ours from Sunshine Valley came into the workshop with a Japanese Canadian woman and her son and grandson. She had been interned in Tashme when she was between 12 – 16 years old. They were just visiting, and had no idea we were making a film on the internment. We took her to the set to show her what we had built and once she stepped out of the car, she started to cry. Can you imagine going back there 65 years later and walking down a roadway reconstruction of Tashme?

It is not fair to say what I experienced in Japan is the same as what new Canadian immigrants must feel. We have a much stronger immigrant culture, one with a goal of emphasizing multiculturalism and embracing newcomers. Even those of us who were born in Canada still claim ties to the nations of our ancestors, as Neil Bissoondath points out. Anyone who can trace their lineage will call themselves half-Swedish or one-quarter French. Only those who trace their ancestry back to the earliest settlers will, at a loss, despairingly say, “I’m just Canadian.”

It’s said that in ancient Japan, the size of a village was…

Growing up in Port Moody BC in the early eighties, Joji Kumagai wasn't particularly interested in his Japanese heritage. The son of Tatsuya and Akiko Kumagai, he saw himself as a typical Canadian kid—playing sports and hanging with his friends. After graduating from Port Moody Senior Secondary School he attended Simon Fraser University, where he majored in ecology with a minor in toxicology. In the summer of 2001 Kumagai travelled to Japan where he was able to get to know many relatives for first time, including his maternal grandmother, to whom he grew attached.