Nikkei in the Pacific Northwest: Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians in the Twentieth Century

14. Reclaiming and Reinventing "Powell Street" : Reconstruction of the Japanese Canadian Community in Post-World War II Vancouver

14 I RECLAIMING AND REINVENTING "POWELL STREET" Reconstruction of the Japanese Canadian Community in Post-World War II Vancouver MASUMI IZUMI In theearly monthsof1942, athrivingethniccommunitydisappearedfrom the map ofVancouver. People gathered at the station with two suitcases per individual. In most cases, whatever they had in those suitcases were the only things they were allowed to keep. Everything else they had lefttheir houses, furniture, family possessions-was later sold andlost forever. The trains took the people into the mountains} With this forced mass migration, "Little Tokyo," or the "Japantown" on Powell Street disappeared. Shortlyafter, in interior British Columbia, small ghost towns were rehabilitated, and new ethnic enclaves appeared. Their existence, however, was temporary. Within several years, people were dispersed again, this time all across Canada. As the Japanese Canadians left their spartanhousingcenters, government officials toldthem neverto form a community again. Before the uprooting, Powell Street was a thriving Japanese Canadian community. The300 and 400 blocks on Powell Streetwere the commercial and business area. People lived on and around these blocks. There were stores, pharmacies, doctors' and midwives' offices, taxi companies, banks, tofu factories, rooming houses, hotels, and even a department store.2 In the earlyyears ofthe city's development, many ofthe residents were single men, stayingin boardinghouses. Bythe1930S, however, JapaneseCanadians owned most ofthe buildings in the area, which became alivelycommunity offanillies. AJapaneselanguage school opened in1928, and there were Buddhist and Christian churches, where children could enjoy cultural and athleticactivities . OppenheimerPark, or the "PowellGround,"layin thecenter ofthecommunity. Asahi,asemi-professionalbaseballteam, played and practiced in the park, drawing large crowds of people} RECLAIMING AND REINVENTING "POWELL STREET" In the 1960s, Powell Street was not the vital community it once was. It was an impoverished area, askid row, whose residents were predominantly disadvantaged by their class, race, andlor age. Run-down rooming houses and cheap apartments, owned often by absentee landlords, were occupied by those who were left behind during the postwar prosperity and development of the city of Vancouver. Among them were a number of Issei, the first generationJapanese Canadians,who had returnedto the neighborhood they had cherished before the uprooting. This paper examines the reconstruction ofthe postwar Japanese Canadian community in Vancouver with particular focus on the development that took place in the PowellStreet area in the 1970S. The process of reconstruction was affected heavily by the Canadian state policy of multiculturalism , and this study will place the ethnic community construction in a dialecticrelationship betweengovernmentpolicyandcommunityinitiatives. The PowellStreetcommunityrevival occurred at ahistoricaljunctionwhere ethnic and governmental politics intersected. Manypast studies on the Japanese Canadian communityhave beenlimitedto the "cultural"aspectofmulticulturalism. These studieslist "heritage items" such as heritage language education, religion, sports, and art, and often focus on non-mundane occasions suchasfestivals andceremonial rituals .4 However,as Lisa Lowehas pointed out, the representationofcultural diversity in a multicultural society must be distinguished from the existing structural hegemony that determines the material conditions ethnic individuals experienceineverydaylife. Criticizingthe naIve celebration ofmulticulturalism in the sixteen-day-Iong Los Angeles Festival ofthe Arts, Lowe states: The synthetic production ofmulticulturalism unravels and its crises are best seized and contested at the moments when the contradiction between the representational economyofethnicsignifiers, on theone hand, andthe material economy of resources and means, on the other, becomes unavoidably clear. That is, what the claim to "new stories for a new America" made dangerously invisible is that to most African Americans, Asians, or Latinos living and working in Los Angeles today, for the other 349 days of the year, it may be very clear indeed who "owns" culture.5 Sharingthe above critical viewpoint, this study focuses on the pragmatic aspectsoflifeessential for the survival ofminoritycommunitiesand, in many cases, the survival ofindividual persons in a literal sense. On Powell Street, 310 MASUMI IZUMI community activists simultaneously engaged in everyday political and social activities and their own cultural production. Through the reclamation of Powell Street, the once-erased Japanese Canadian community recovered its "ground" and reinvented its psychological "hometown." This is a story of how the Japanese Canadian ethnic landscape reappeared on Powell Street in the 1970S. The 19605: Community Resistance to Vancouver Urban Renewal Schemes The uprooting of Japanese Canadians during World War II was a massive governmental assault on the existence of a visible ethnic community in Canada. On August4,1944. PrimeMinisterW. L. Mackenzie Kingexplained in Parliament the reason for the dispersal ofJapanese Canadians. He made it clear that the incarceration was Ottawa's response to British Columbia's concern that the province had "within its borders...