Bonds of a Prairie Hapa

I am honoured to be included by the Japanese Canadian National Museum (JCNM) to contribute to the multi-disciplinary group exhibition Kizuna taking place in the autumn of 2010. Since moving to Vancouver from Alberta in 2007, the Japanese cultural community has embraced and supported me – I hope that the original photographic work I am creating for this show will demonstrate my appreciation for this.

For many months I have been considering how I can most meaningfully express my connection to the Kizuna theme of this show (I understand that Kizuna is translated as “bond”, an in the context of this show, we are showing the bonds to our past). Tying my personal experience as a Sansei Japanese Canadian to this theme is something of a challenge because I am Hapa – I am half Japanese and half Caucasian in ancestry – and was raised primarily in the predominantly white culture of an Edmonton suburb known as Sherwood Park - I sometimes joke that my siblings and I were the only Asian kids I knew growing up – and we are only half. I have never been to Japan and my experience with the Japanese culture was limited to my family’s annual New Year’s visit to southern Alberta where my Dad grew up. I didn’t even like sushi (with the exception of Tako) until I was in university, even though my Dad has been offering it to me since I was a child. Despite this limited exposure, I have always felt an urge to learn more about the rich history of my Japanese roots.

Three years ago I moved to Vancouver where Asian cultures are far more plentiful. For the first time in my life I found myself in several situations in neighbourhoods and restaurants where white people are in the minority and Asians are not. There were opportunities abound to become involved in the Japanese community – and I did. I volunteered with the Powell Street Festival Society and now my parents enthusiastically do the same when they come to visit me in the summer. I found myself volunteering at the Japanese Language School where everyone was speaking Japanese (go figure!). I did some video work for the Nikkei Center and taught a photography workshop with as part of the Two Views exhibit at the JCNM. I met other Hapa, Sansei, Nisei, and did some grocery shopping at Fujiya. Many of my new friends in town had lived in Japan and speak the language fluently – and they are 100% Caucasian. In the past two and a half years I have been closer to immersion in my Japanese roots than I have ever been in my life.

So what bond can this Hapa with an all Canadian suburban prairie town upbringing offer to the Kizuna show? I think that Kizuna will challenge this photographer to find within his past the meaning of the word bond, the bond that is unique to his experience, but the bond which is the truth common for many in the diaspora of the Canadian Japanese. The truth is the beauty and the tragedy in the mixing of our blood and our cultures that happens as immigrant families become absorbed by the Canadian landscape.