This weekend, the 49th annual Powell Street Festival will bring a smorgasbord of culture to the Paueru Gai district. This area along Powell and Alexander streets was the centre of a thriving Japanese Canadian community prior to the Second World War. But after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the Canadian government incarcerated 22,000 Japanese Canadians, seizing their possessions and forbidding them from returning to the Pacific coast until 1949.
In 1977, members of the community launched the Powell Street Festival to celebrate Japanese Canadian arts and culture and strengthen connections with Downtown Eastside residents. The organizers anchored the event in Oppenheimer Park, which was once home to the community’s legendary Vancouver Asahi baseball team.
Pancouver has already reported that this year’s event will feature eight local taiko troupes. Here are five other cultural highlights, which are all free to attend.
Landscapes of Home
This 2024 historical documentary reveals how growing intolerance in the Second World War displaced two men who went on to become doctors. One of them, Henry Rysuke Shibata, speaks for himself; Michael Kramer takes on the role of Stuart Cooper Robinson, who died in 2011.
Shibata was born in Vancouver and was shipped with his family to an internment camp in the Slocan Valley. After the war, his parents brought him to Japan, where they settled in Hiroshima. The war-ravaged country was in horrible shape, with food in short supply. Shibata later became a surgical oncologist and returned to Canada in 1961.
Meanwhile, Robinson was a Canadian born in Nagoya, Japan, but his family fled in 1938 because his father feared being arrested as a foreign national. By that time, Japan had already invaded China. In 1944, Robinson graduated with a medical degree from the University of Toronto. Alice Il Shin directed Landscapes of Home and shares a writing credit with her company’s producer, Eiko Kawabe Brown. The 55-minute documentary will be screened at 4 p.m. on Saturday (August 2) at the Firehall Arts Centre.
Big Print
The Creative Cultural Collaborations Society is collaborating with the Powell Street Society Festival to engage in large-scale printmaking by using a steamroller as the press. Seven artists will participate who are either Japanese Canadian or have Indigenous heritage: Eri Ishii, Tomoyo Ihaya, Lynda Nakashima, Larissa Healey, Xwalacktun, John Spence, and Manual Axel Strain. It will take place all day Saturday (August 2) and Sunday (August 3) on Alexander Street, east of Jackson Avenue.
The Gate of Memory: Poems by Descendants of Nikkei Wartime Incarceration
If poetry is your thing, you’ll want to head over to the Firehall Arts Centre at 11:45 a.m. on Sunday (August 3). It will be the site of live poetry readings from The Gate of Memory: Poems by Descendants of Nikkei Wartime Incarceration. Brynn Saito and Brandon Shimoda edited this anthology, which was published this year by Haymarket Books. It features 66 poets of Japanese American, Japanese Canadian, Okinawan American, Okinawan Canadian, Japanese Hawaiian, Alaska Native, mixed race Nikkei, and Japanese descent.
Japanese Canadian contributors include Laura Fukumoto, Erica Hiroko Isomura, Angela Marian May, Carolyn Nakagawa, Mona Oikawa, Michael Prior, Leanne Toshiko Simpson, Terry Watada, and Anne Watanabe.
Japanese Canadian Hastings Park Detainee Memorial and Interpretive Centre Open House
Hastings Park was the site of the first concentration camp for many Japanese Canadians who were incarcerated during the Second World War. Referred to at the time as the “Clearing Station”, it was located in the Livestock Building, where there were no bathrooms. Instead, these prisoners endured bunk beds only one metre apart, rows of animal stalls, and limited showers.
“They were sprayed or sprinkled with DDT, a new pesticide of unknown toxicity, like animals in a laboratory,” the Powell Street Festival Society states on its website.
As part of this year’s festival, there will be an open house from 1 to 4 p.m. on Sunday (August 3) in the northeast corner of the Livestock Building at Hastings Park. There, visitors can to view a future Japanese Canadian Hastings Park Detainee Memorial and Interpretive Centre.
Kokoro Dance
Kokoro Dance co-artistic director Barbara Bourget and associate artistic director Salomé Nieto will perform Blood and Tears at 6 p.m. on Sunday (August 3) in Oppenheimer Park. Directed by Kokoro Dance co-artistic director Jay Hirabayashi, this collaboratively choreographed work features music by Michael Stearns. “Taking its name from the Japanese word kokoro – meaning heart, soul, and spirit and inspired by the Japanese avantgarde dance form known as butoh, Kokoro Dance has presented over one thousand performances across Canada, in the United States, South America, Mexico, Europe, and Japan,” the Powell Street Festival website states.
The Powell Street Festival will take place on Saturday (August 2) and Sunday (August 3) in the Paueru Gai district of Vancouver. For more information, visit the website. Follow Pancouver on Instagram @PancouverMedia and on Bluesky @pancouver.
