Free to feast

Recently, I wandered into the Vancouver Art Gallery to see the work of Tamio Wakayama, a Japanese-Canadian photojournalist. He was born in 1941 in New Westminster, B.C., and died in 2018 in Vancouver.

Shortly after his birth, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and Wakayama’s family was forcibly moved into an internment camp. According to the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, the RCMP maintained that the Japanese Canadian population “posed no threat and opposed taking any punitive action against them.” The federal government didn’t listen. Almost 12,000 people were interned.

As an adult, Wakayama photographed the civil rights era in Mississippi. He arrived in Birmingham in September 1963, the day a bomb killed four young Black girls in the basement of a church.

As I looked through his Mississippi photos, I realized that he often framed people behind a clearly marked boundary of some kind: a long, flat dirt road; a “do not enter” sign; quilts hung on a line; a cross with FREEDOM written on it in white paint; door frames; long shadows; a barbed wire fence; even a wood stove.

Festivals in Chatham

Wakayama’s childhood wasn’t an easy one. After the internment camps closed, the Wakayama family made their way east to Chatham, Ontario. “I can still picture my father standing on the front lawn of our new home, carefully counting out hundred-dollar bills into the hand of our kindly Mormon neighbour, who had bravely gone against the prevailing winds by selling to a Japanese,” Wakayama writes in his unpublished memoir. Chatham, at the time, was run-down and underserved. Those years were the hardest: “We, the Nisei (second-generation Japanese Canadians), felt the most betrayed, for we were Canadian-born, and running the gauntlet of state-sanctioned racism . . . [Chatham] was to leave permanent scars on our young psyches.”

Over the years, the “rampant hostility” of Chatham faded, according to Wakayama, and the Nikkei (Japanese) community “began to reassert their cultural life.” They did so through the festivals of keirokai (where delicious food and “raucous skits” and traditional Japanese drama honour elders) and the end-of-year Shogatsu: “the most intense and protracted celebration in my parents’ homeland.”

Powell Street Festival

The mention of festivals caught my eye. I’m reading Sanctuary by Marina Warner, a cultural historian who writes about the right to movement. In the book, she tracks a shift in the definition of sanctuary, a protection that was historically given by spiritual leaders in respect for human life, regardless of whether it was deserved. Now, sanctuary is a right granted by state authorities on the basis of whether or not the runaway deserves to be protected.

Warner says that one historic form of sanctuary still lingering in western society today is festivals – carnivals (think Mardi Gras): “a mass assembly in a public space that is free to enter and move around in, united in a common cause for celebration – or supplication or placation – can act as a powerful catalyst to the making of sanctuary.”

In the 1970s, Wakayama returned to the West Coast and began researching the Nikkei experience. His activism and documentation helped the Redress Movement and also helped shape the Powell Street Festival (PSF), for which he served as the official photographer for almost twenty years. 2026 is the festival’s fiftieth year, making it one of Canada’s longest-running arts festivals.

The website welcomes the downtown Eastside communities of Vancouver to participate: “PSF celebrates the history of Japanese Canadians in the area through an event similar to the festivals, or matsuri, of Japan. In the spirit of the neighbourhood, PSF has something for everyone.”

Standing with

Everywhere Wakayama went – even Mississippi – he photographed dances and costumes and impossibly large dishes of food and people falling over with laughter.

That makes the exception more chilling: in Wakayama’s photos of the pacifist Doukhobor community in Brilliant, B.C., there is no feast, only a single table with a solitary loaf of bread and a glass of water surrounded by empty, rough pews. In Wakayama’s pictures, elderly Doukhobors look translucent, like they’re about to melt away.

Wakayama explained: “During the war years, the Doukhobors – who were the only outside people who would have anything to do with us – came by the camps to surreptitiously hand us produce from their orchards and gardens.” Later, the internment camps were used “to hold Doukhobor children who were taken away to attend regular schools.”

The news cycle hasn’t been particularly easy to absorb lately; real people are hurt in irreversible ways every day. To prepare for writing this editorial, I asked people what forgiveness looks like when brought to the news cycle. I don’t have an answer yet, and I’m not even confident it’s the right question to ask. Today, a university chaplain told me she doesn’t focus on who she’s opposed to in the world, but on celebrating the people she stands with.

It sounds like something Wakayama discovered, something we could all discover in our streets and cities. We can extend freedom of movement by standing with each other – even in something as small as joining a street festival and celebrating a culture that is new to you.

“Perhaps love was at the root of all my work,” Wakayama wrote, “whether it was the sense of wonder and oneness I felt with the wisdom in the face of an old woman beaming at me from her porch on a Mississippi plantation or the deep religiosity etched in the hoary face of a Doukhobor man sitting on a pew in the brilliant hall.”