Apparently it was time for the Powell Street Festival to reinvent itself. The move from its traditional home at Oppenheimer Park wasn’t in the blueprints for the 38-year-old festival that celebrates Japanese-Canadian arts, culture, and heritage.
But the park was taken over by dozens of tents last month in a protest against the city’s attempt to evict the homeless from Oppenheimer so the oldest community celebration in Vancouver had to come up with a quickly drawn-up backup plan.
“We got together and we thought about the various options that were there, keeping in mind we’d done so much planning already,” said festival president Nina Inaoka Lee. “We wanted to do it and be respectful of the community and what’s going on in the park right now.”
The three-day long festival held this past weekend turned into a block party. Craft booths were linked together by flowing strips of white sheets overhead for shade along the north end of Jackson Avenue while the south end was packed with food stalls offering everything from smoked salmon to SPAM musubi. On the stage at the Vancouver Japanese Language School Saturday was Hazel Yip, better known in her Cosplay group as “Haru,” danced and spun to vocaloid Hatsune Miku’s pop song “Weekender Girl” in a black-and-white maid’s outfit that she and her boyfriend sewed together for her performance.
The Vancouver Japanese Language School is the only property in the Powell Street area that retained Japanese ownership during and after the internment in 1942. (The federal government sold the homes of Japanese-Canadians and used the profits to pay for internment after Japan went to war with the Allies, including Canada, in 1941.)
Look closely at the tiled entrances to buildings along Powell Street, passersby can still see Japanese surnames left in place from a time when about 8,000 Japanese Canadians — more than a third of the country’s total of 22,000 at the time — lived in the neighbourhood during the early 1900s. The festival also included a walking tour of the area where buildings and history were revisited. Oppenheimer was surely included in the tour as the home field of the wildly popular Asahi baseball team before it was disbanded, its players interned during the Second World War.
Inaoka Lee has more recent history with area. She attended the Japanese Language School and her family was always a part of the festival in both musical and martial arts.
“The festival brings a familiar feeling. It feels like coming home and connecting with people,” she said. “There is no community hub for all the Japanese groups that exist here in Vancouver so I think what the festival does is bring everybody together, it’s a big reunion of sorts. I’m connecting with my language school instructors, my peers I went to class with, the Japanese-Canadian community.”
More than a meeting place, it’s also a great way to educate others about Japanese-Canadian culture, Inaoka Lee added.
“It’s a place for the Japanese community to come together but it’s also a place for people to learn more about Japanese culture and arts in this little area, in the neighbourhood.”
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