Kikyo: Coming Home to Powell Street

Patricia Morley is professor emeritus of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University and the author of Margaret Laurence: The Long
Journey Home and As Though Life Mattered: Leo Kennedy’s Story.

Kikyo, or homecoming, is a photographic record of a community returning
to its roots. The author/photographer has taken Vancouver’s Powell
Street Festival—an annual event (since 1977) celebrating
Japanese-Canadian history and culture—as a metaphor for the
rejuvenation of a community that was brutally uprooted in 1942, and that
took many years after the war to find itself again.

The year 1977 was the centennial of the first Japanese immigrant’s
arrival in Canada. The date also falls more than a generation after the
internment of some 22,000 Japanese-Canadians as “enemy aliens.”
Powell Street was the centre of the Japanese-Canadian community before
1942.

Tamio Wakayama’s eloquent introduction traces his own journey out of
alienation and self-hatred, a revolutionary process. For him,
understanding began as he shared in the civil-rights movement in the
American South in 1963–65, and it matured in Japan, where he learned
that racism is universal, arbitrary, and solely in the eyes of the
beholder. Wakayama’s photographs have been exhibited in Canada, Japan,
England, and America.

Linda Uyehara Hoffman gathered some 80 oral histories and edited them
for Kikyo, where they form a counterpoint with the images. Video artist
Paul Wong’s afterword is a thoughtful essay on racism, stereotyping,
and the interface of documentary photography with metaphor and myth.
Kikyo is a beautiful book, a multilayered feast for mind and eye that
yields its wisdom slowly to the unhurried viewer.