Description
Sixty stunning duotone photographs by Wakayama, documenting the history of the Powell Street Festival, are interwoven here with the voices of some eighty people involved with the Festival – people of Japanese descent and many other ethnic backgrounds.
The Festival is an annual Vancouver event celebrating the history and culture of Japanese people in Canada. In the early years of the century, Vancouver’s Little Tokyo was a thriving neighbourhood, home to the Nikkei (Japanese Canadian) community. Then, in the 1940s, the community was interned, dispossessed and dîspersed, and Little Tokyo gave way to Vancouver’s urban poor.
Japanese Canadians began to revive their Vancouver community after 1949, and in 1977 a group of volunteers organized the Powell Street Festival, a celebration of the history and culture of the Japanese in Canada. Today the annual Festival is still a strong focus for the community – a powerful symbol of cultural self-determination.
By Tamio Wakayama