For its 50th anniversary celebration, Vancouver’s premier celebration of Japanese Canadian culture is once again partnering with the Firehall Arts Centre. This year, Powell Street Festival will present 11 separate free events in the historic theatre at 280 East Cordova Street. Several of these shows are inspired by Japanese Canadian history.
One of the highlights is 千代 Chiyo: a Thousand Generations, which is at the Firehall Arts Centre at 4 p.m. on Saturday (August 1). Pianist Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa incorporates spoken word, memoir, poetry, family and institutional archives, and new music and images, which she created in collaboration with composer Keiko Devaux and visual artist SD Holman. Powell Street Festival points out on its website that this show is structured in fragments.
千代 Chiyo: a Thousand Generations is described as a “multi-disciplinary meditation on madness, suicide, and intergenerational healing in connection with the wartime incarceration of Japanese Canadians, through the lens of the Iwaasa family history”.
Iwaasa, a sansei Nikkei (third-generation Canadian), is an artist in residence at the Past Wrongs Future Choices project. Housed at the University of Victoria, it examines the history of how innocent Nikkei civilians were rounded up, incarcerated, and in some cases, deported during the Second World War. Past Wrongs Future Choices works with partners in other countries to tell this history together.
“I knew about the incarcerations and the displacements in the United States but I didn’t know that it had taken place in other places,” Iwaasa told Pancouver in 2022. “I mean it’s a ripple effect because in Brazil and Peru, a lot of that was in response to U.S. pressure. And in places like India and Malaysia, it was the British who could also put pressure on the governments there to contain, specifically, people of Japanese origin.”
Sharon Minemoto performs at Firehall
Another musical event addressing the wartime incarceration of Japanese Canadians is Goodbye Strawberry Hill. The Sharon Minemoto Quartet will perform compositions on her album of the same name, which reflect on her family’s experiences. It’s at the Firehall Arts Centre at 1 p.m. on Saturday (August 1).
Minemoto has been on the music faculty at Vancouver Community College since 2000. She also curates a weekly jazz series at La Fabrique St. George Winery.
“My dad’s mother took her children to meet their grandmother in Japan before Canada implemented the War Measures Act,” Minemoto states in the album notes on her Bandcamp page. “In their absence, my grandfather was interned in a camp in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan where he died.
“My grandmother and her children had no home, job, or father to return to in Canada,” the jazz singer continues. “They were stranded near Hiroshima and were present for the US’s atomic bomb attack. The music on this album tells my family’s stories, both joyful and sad, from WWII to present day.”
The Strawberry Hill neighbourhood in Surrey was home to many Japanese Canadian farming families prior to the Second World War. Susan Aihoshi published a heartbreaking account of what happened to them on the Discover Nikkei website in 2013.
NoriNori plays excerpts from 2025 album
Meanwhile, at 3:30 p.m. on Sunday (August 2), NoriNori Unravelling… will feature NoriNori performing on shamisen (a traditional three-stringed, fretless Japanese musical instrument) as she shares the story of her family’s internment. According to Powell Street Festival, this presentation will be mostly musical excerpts from her original album, NoriNori Unravelling, which was released last summer. NoriNori, a.k.a. Noriko K. Kobayashi, co-founded Onibana Taiko.
There will also be film screenings addressing Japanese Canadian history at the Firehall Arts Centre. For example, at 12:45 p.m. on Sunday, Powell Street Festival will screen queer Japanese Canadian filmmaker Tamiko Potts’s When the Blossoms Fade, which addresses the internment.
“Along this emotional journey, Tamiko partners with trauma therapist Natascha Lawrence, whose insights help illuminate the profound intergenerational effects of displacement and silence,” Powell Street Festival states on its website. “As Tamiko reconnects with a history long left unspoken, the film offers a moving portrait of what it takes to reclaim one’s roots — and to begin the work of transformation.”
Watch the trailer (above) for 1910: The Uncovering.
Avalanche tragedy documented
In addition, the festival will screen Chad Townsend’s 2025 documentary, 1910: The Uncovering. Written by Owen Akira Kato, it tells the story of a large B.C. avalanche that killed 58 railway workers, the majority of whom were Japanese. They were clearing the tracks from an earlier snowslide in Rogers Pass in 1910 when the tragedy occurred in the middle of the night.
Japanese-born Canadian ski guide and avalanche survivor Tomoaki “Tomo” Fujimura was the film’s concept developer, researcher, interviewee, cultural advisor, and translator. 1910: The Uncovering will be shown at 6 p.m. on Sunday.
There is also an event for those keen to learn more about the history of Powell Street Festival itself. Return to Paueru Gai: Panel Discussion will feature contributors to the new book, Return to Paueru Gai: Fifty Years of Vancouver’s Powell Street Festival. Editor Emiko Morita and essayists Izumi Sakamoto and Julia Aoki will each read short excerpts, followed by a panel discussion moderated by sansei neurodiverse educator and singer Kimiko Dorey. It will take place at the Firehall Arts Centre at 2:30 p.m. on Saturday.
The 50th annual Powell Street Festival will take place on August 1 and 2 in Oppenheimer Park and Paueru Gai (Powell Street area). Follow Pancouver on X @PancouverMedia and Bluesky @pancouver.bsky.social. Also find Pancouver on Instagram @PancouverMedia.
