[ESSAY] “Return Trips: A Japanese Canadian Writer Revisits Her Family Past at Vancouver’s Powell Street Festival” by Leslie Shimotakahara
All things Leslie Shimotakahara in Cha.
ARRIVAL
I think of the internment camps where my Japanese Canadian grandparents spent the Second World War.
When I get into a taxi at Vancouver International Airport, what I’m most aware of at first are the mountains at the periphery of my vision. As the road unspools, I feel they’re watching me from a distance. Being from Toronto, I’m not used to hilly shapes pouring across the late-afternoon sky like spilled ink. I think of the internment camps where my Japanese Canadian grandparents spent the Second World War, an eight-hour drive inland, where the Rocky Mountains formed a natural barrier, rendering unnecessary the barbed wire that surrounded such camps in the United States.
There’s a scene in the novel I’m currently writing in which the main character takes a taxi along this very route. It’s the 1980s. A woman in her late forties, she’s returning for the first time to the childhood hometown that she and her family had to leave because of the internment. So, as my taxi crosses a waterway and then drives through streets that become progressively more upscale, until manicured hedges form high walls that block all view of the houses, I’m thinking about how the character in my novel would perceive such scenes.
This short trip over the first weekend in August is partly intended as research for my novel, which remains at an embryonic stage. The other, more pressing reason I’m in Vancouver is the Powell Street Festival, whose fiftieth anniversary is this year. At this arts and culture festival, held in the neighbourhood that was once the hub of the Japanese Canadian community before the war, I’m scheduled to read from my recently published fourth novel, The Breakwater, which was inspired by my first trip to British Columbia in 1990, when I was twelve.
At the outset of that summer holiday with my family, I was under the impression that it was meant to be a last glance backwards at lost hometowns for my grandparents, who hadn’t been back to BC since the internment. As it turned out, however, my grandfather had a more specific aim in mind. There was a burdensome secret he was finally ready to reveal to our family. He had a black-sheep brother who’d been committed to Essondale Asylum and had remained there throughout the internment and beyond. After the asylum closed, this relative had been left to languish in BC’s mental-health system, where he remained. Having tracked down his whereabouts, my grandfather now wished for us to visit him. My memory of the fraught reunion I witnessed between those two elderly men offered the kernel from which The Breakwater slowly grew in the ensuing decades.
While researching the novel, I discovered that my grandfather and his rebellious brother once played baseball as boys at the very park at the centre of the Powell Street Festival grounds. Considering that their rivalry over baseball weaves into the novel’s plot and key themes, it seems especially fitting that I’m going to be reading there this weekend.
The House on Graveley Street
Many of the houses have the look of enchanted cottages, painted in whimsical colours.
By the time I’ve checked into my hotel, it’s almost dinnertime. I decide to explore the neighbourhood around Commercial Drive, where my grandmother’s family lived before the war. After eating at a casual bistro, I stroll past the indie cafés with colourful awnings and eclectic ethnic shops. Commercial Drive has an appealing bohemian vibe. Lots of pedestrians are out and about enjoying the mild weather. I head towards Graveley Street, my late grandmother’s old street. During our trip in 1990, she brought us here. I’m struck yet again by how pleasant this street is, the massive trees forming a lush canopy over the pavement. Many of the houses have the look of enchanted cottages, painted in whimsical colours, and their gardens are filled with waist-high flowers. A man on his front porch plays a harmonica, while an older Asian man stands in his garden in his pyjamas in the twilight, watering potted plants.
My grandmother’s former house is one of the largest on the block. A wide Edwardian, with a generous porch and bay windows. A charming balcony off the garret. The paint on its façade is impeccably maintained. I think about what a feat it would have been back then for a Japanese Canadian family to own this house. Thanks to the success of my great-grandparents’ two businesses, a thriving restaurant and a bakery, they were able to move with their children into this middle-class, predominantly white neighbourhood.
I wonder how the protagonist of my novel-in-progress would experience such a moment, returning to her long-lost childhood home. A hush comes over my stomach. A feeling of smallness and sadness. Of standing outside. Meanwhile, the current owners’ conversation emanates through the screen windows onto the pavement. Their voices sound laden with their own problems, and I become aware that my presence is an intrusion on their privacy. I hurry away.
That night, I have a turbulent dream that seems to be vaguely about my grandmother’s old house. But upon waking, the images fade so quickly that I can’t grasp hold of them.
New Denver
The next day is Friday, my one full day to myself before the festival takes place over the weekend. I spend the morning video-calling my husband and writing in my journal, followed by lunch in Yaletown with a friend. Then I take the SkyTrain to the Nikkei National Museum & Cultural Centre in Burnaby, where I’ve booked an appointment with the Archives team. When I first participated in the Powell Street Festival two summers ago, I met Lisa Uyeda, the museum’s collections manager. She mentioned that the museum might have archival photographs of my ancestors and encouraged me to visit the next time I planned to be in Vancouver.
How youthful and transformed both my great-grandmothers look as middle-aged women.
Upon arriving at the elegantly designed museum, I’m guided to a room on the second floor, where a table has been laid out with a dozen folders. Two members of the Archives team, Daien and Grace, have kindly put together a selection of materials pertaining to the family members whose names I emailed to the museum earlier. Wearing the thin blue gloves provided, I spend the next hour examining countless black-and-white photographs, some in envelopes, others arranged in albums. Several photographs are accompanied by Post-it notes bearing dates, places, and the names of the people depicted. While some faces and images are familiar to me, most are not. How youthful and transformed both my great-grandmothers look as middle-aged women. I’ve previously seen only photographs of them when they were old, near death.
The greatest surprise is a collection that shows my maternal great-grandmother, Moto Ennyu, in New Denver in the late 1940s and early 1950s, according to the Post-it notes. New Denver was one of the many camps hastily built on the sites of BC’s ghost towns to house the 22,000 Japanese Canadians interned. What startles me about this group of photographs is that they seem to have been taken after the war and the internment had ended. I’ve heard about a small number of Japanese Canadians who didn’t wish to leave New Denver, long after they were free to go, but I had no idea that my great-grandparents were among them. Although this desire to remain behind baffles me, as I examine the grainy pictures of my great-grandmother with her church congregation, it becomes clear that they’d established a tight-knit community full of friendships.
The expression on her face, reverence touched by a strangely girlish joy, teases at my imagination.
It appears that my great-grandmother was close to a younger woman named Kinori Oka, whose family donated these pictures to the museum. An online search reveals that she immigrated to Canada as a picture bride in the 1920s and later became a notable poet. The photographs before me show Mrs Oka and my great-grandmother at the helm of New Denver’s United Church, while my great-grandfather, an atheist and man of science, is rarely seen. I’m moved by one particular picture of an outdoor funeral, where Mrs Oka takes centre stage, reading from the Bible, while my great-grandmother, at the far left, has one arm extended towards the sky. The expression on her face, reverence touched by a strangely girlish joy, teases at my imagination. What was the nature of her spiritual life? Clearly, she isn’t merely going through the motions of prayer. What I detect on her face is a deeply felt and treasured belief.
Nikkei National Museum & Cultural Centre 2001.28.2.22.60
At the Festival
As I arrive at the festival grounds late on Saturday morning, the rain is clearing. The park at the centre of what was once the largest Japanese Canadian community in Canada, known as Paueru Gai, is full of booths and programming tents, as well as a large stage for a variety of scheduled performances, including taiko drumming in traditional and contemporary styles, community-based song and dance, and an organ trio that fuses jazz with other types of music. This unique blend of the old and the new is representative of the festival’s programming, which spans the blocks around the park, where food trucks, craft and marketplace booths, and an additional stage have been set up. Literary and other events that require a quieter, more intimate atmosphere are convened indoors.
To this end, I make my way towards the nearby Firehall Arts Centre, where a preview reading for a Japanese Canadian anthology on memory and place is being held. As a contributor to this forthcoming anthology (edited by Michael Prior, Kerri Sakamoto, and Leanne Toshiko Simpson), I’m excited to hear a sampling of the poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction that its pages will contain.
Emiko Morita, the former executive director of the Powell Street Festival, reads from her piece, which offers an informative, moving account of how the festival evolved from plans for a summer centennial celebration in 1977 to honour the first Japanese settlers and revive the displaced Japanese Canadian community. Over the years, it drew together a diverse array of community members and Japanese Canadian artists across a host of disciplines and styles and helped to incubate and propel the Redress Movement, the political fight for reparations for the wartime losses and incarceration that Japanese Canadians endured.
My emotions are equally stirred by the readings of other contributors to the anthology, whose poems and prose pieces reflect an impressive range of voices and styles across differences of age, gender identity, and sexual orientation. While some pieces are historical in subject matter, others address the past more elliptically, rooted in the present.
Emiko Morita
Later in the day, after taking in a jazz concert, I attend Art Miki’s event. He has written a Japanese Canadian history book for children titled Road to Justice (2025), illustrated by his son, Geoff Miki. The room is packed with an audience full of warm questions. It’s not surprising that Art receives a folk hero’s welcome. As former president of the National Association of Japanese Canadians, he led the fight for redress that culminated in a settlement with the Canadian government in 1988. People in the audience want to hear Art talk about that exciting, stressful period leading up to the achievement of redress, which I remember vividly from my childhood. After almost forty years, the community remains galvanised and inspired by this David-versus-Goliath moment. The energy in the room is palpable.
So, too, during Suzanne Elki Yoko Hartmann’s reading from her memoir, The Nail That Sticks Out: Reflections on the Postwar Japanese Canadian Community (2026), I feel a visceral connection to the memories shared. Suzanne, whom I know from writing circles in Toronto, reads from a section that discusses her time as a child at the Toronto Japanese Language School, where, as one of the few mixed-race children, she struggled to understand and learn Japanese, despite being top of the class at her English public school. After Suzanne’s reading, I share with her and the audience that I had a similar experience of attending Japanese language school on Saturday mornings for a few unhappy months before my mother pulled me out. I remember sitting at the back of the classroom and praying for invisibility as Japanese words flew over my head. This is what it must feel like to be a refugee child newly arrived in Canada with no English, I recall thinking to myself. Although I’m Japanese Canadian on both sides of my family, neither of my parents was taught Japanese as a child. Their parents were encouraged not to pass down the mother tongue, lest it make their children targets of schoolyard bullying in the late 1940s and 1950s.
While I mostly attend literary events, a multidisciplinary piano performance by Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa is on my must-see list. When she heard about my novel The Breakwater upon its publication in the spring, Rachel reached out to me through my author website to discuss a shared focus in our creative endeavours. Over a video call, we chatted extensively, and I learnt that, like me, Rachel had a relative who spent decades in Essondale Asylum. Our conversation made me excited to see her perform at the Powell Street Festival.
And what an intriguing, riveting performance it proves to be. Called Chiyo: A Thousand Generations, it’s structured as a series of fragmentary memories or open-ended vignettes. Rachel plays the piano and talks to the audience, though she often appears to be talking aloud to herself in an attempt to understand the past from a place of rawness and vulnerability, which the emotionally resonant music underscores. I’m particularly moved by the story of her visit as a child to the psychiatric hospital where her grandmother then lived. But her grandmother refuses to see Rachel and her father. This pushes Rachel, through the eyes of her child self, to reflect on whether it might have been anger or a sense of abandonment that compelled her obaasan to turn them away. This dramatic monologue brings back what I felt as a child when my family and I went to visit my great-uncle at his care home, but he didn’t want to see us, and my grandfather in particular. As I witnessed those two old men backing away from each other, trembling and overcome by emotion, I experienced a wave of guilt and fear of my great-uncle’s anger towards us all. In the case of Rachel’s family history, her grandmother’s mental illness and inability to care for her children during the internment years led to further tragic consequences when her eldest daughter committed suicide by drinking lye.
Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa
Following this event, I’m glad to be able to attend a healing circle on the patio behind the theatre. Facilitated by Patti Ayukawa, it offers an opportunity for a small gathering of audience members to share their emotional responses to Rachel’s performance. During my turn, I talk about my great-uncle. Although I never knew him, I’m anguished by how he was marginalised and erased from our family. Then, as another group member is sharing unsettling memories, sirens suddenly pierce the air and bring our session to an end. Several ambulances are arriving in the neighbourhood, which is home to many safe-injection sites and communities living in various forms of precarity and marginalisation. I’d planned to walk to Main and Hastings, where my grandmother’s family had their restaurant, but I decide that now is not the time to stroll around the neighbourhood.
The next afternoon, at my own event, I’m delighted to see a number of friends from the Japanese Canadian and writing communities, old and new. A close friend from my high-school years, who happens to be in Vancouver on holiday, attends. It’s a pleasure to meet my mother’s cousin, who is the family archivist and oversaw the translation of my great-grandfather’s diary, which has been a source of inspiration for more than one of my writing projects.
Moderated by Camille Kiku Belair, the event begins with me reading from the opening pages of The Breakwater. Set in the pre-war years, it’s a scene of two young Japanese Canadian brothers walking along a windy breakwater in Victoria, where they sight a sea monster with a horse-shaped head. This monster that confounds their vision is a portent of dark times ahead, both personal and political in nature. An increasingly fraught relationship between the brothers as they grow older. The asylum. The internment.
After my reading, I’m struck by the many thoughtful questions that audience members ask about my research process, my family’s response to the novel, and the reactions of other writers in the community. The question that stays with me most is posed by Art Miki, who wants to know when I first became aware of the internment of Japanese Canadians. He shares that when he was growing up, people in his family didn’t talk about it, as was typical of most Japanese Canadian families at the time. Reflecting for a moment, I reply that there’s never been a time when I didn’t know about the internment, because my grandmother was very outspoken. In my earliest childhood memories, she was unashamed to go on at length about everything her family had lost. The beautiful house on Graveley Street. Two businesses. A car. A rabbit hutch. And so much more. Angry and disillusioned, she didn’t turn these emotions inward towards silence and shame. Art remarks on how rare my grandmother’s attitude was, and I’m reminded of how lucky I am to have had an unconventional, loud-mouthed obaasan like her as my first muse and mentor.
How to cite: Shimotakahara, Leslie. “Return Trips: A Japanese Canadian Writer Revisits Her Family Past at Vancouver’s Powell Street Festival.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 25 Aug. 2026, chajournal.com/2026/08/25/return-trips.
Leslie Shimotakahara is an award-winning author of three novels and a memoir, as well as numerous short fiction and essays. She won the Canada-Japan Literary Prize (2012) and has been shortlisted for the K.M. Hunter Artist Award. Her writing can be found in the National Post, World Literature Today, and anthologies and periodicals. She holds a PhD in English from Brown University, and lives in Toronto with her husband. Visit her website for more information. [All contributions by Leslie Shimotakahara.]