One of the things that sticks out in Elizabeth Stephen’s mind about her first trip to Japan is the attention paid to even the most minute of details.
“Oh, I remember the aesthetics,” she said. “The simplest things are beautiful. Even something you’d buy at a convenience store, or our version of a deli, everything has something beautiful added to it. An item of food would not just be in a plain black or white container. It’s springtime so there’s a little cherry blossom on the side!”
That long ago two-week high school student exchange steered Stephen to Asia many times, for a grand total of six years of teaching English and learning Japanese. After her last visit she moved to Vancouver in 1997 and stayed until 2010 when she went back to her hometown of Edmonton where she and her husband Yasushi Baba still live. Despite the distance, the couple is still very much involved with the Japan Fair Association of
Vancouver as well as their baby — the Sakura Days Japan Fair that was held this past weekend at VanDusen Botanical Gardens.
They started the fair in 2009, missed the following year due to the 2010 Winter Olympics, and have watched its growth every year since, especially after teaming up with the April-long Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival. Thanks to technology, meetings with fellow organizers are a cinch and everything that needs to be done is mostly done before Stephen and Baba drive to Vancouver for each year’s fair.
“We were talking about the growth just the other day, how we used to have the fair just in the floral hall,” Stephen said. “The first year, two thousand people came and we’re like ‘whoa! ’ It was more popular than we thought it might be.”
Now thousands make their way through the historical Vancouver garden for the Sakura Days Japan Fair — the word sakura, by the way, is Japanese for cherry blossom — taking in the seemingly endless fair features that included Japanese drumming, anime cosplay shows, sake seminars, haiku workshops, and martial arts demos. The fair echoed the culture’s attention to detail as a walk through the visitor’s centre and garden was never without something to engage the senses, including a food stop where there was no shortage of ramen and takoyaki.
Near the rose garden, the Vancouver Japanese Gardener’s Association set up a traditional garden with stones, flowers, ponds, and 40-year-old bonsai trees to commemorate its 50th anniversary. Once again, the care in the details made it difficult to believe the garden was a gravel patch up until only a day and a half before Sakura Days. “Even I didn’t realize it was just put together for the fair,” said VJGA member Shuzo Hara, out for the weekend to help his fellow gardeners celebrate.
Stephen loves when a plan comes together.
“I had this vision when we first started talking about doing the festival in 2007 or 2008 and it’s amazing to see that it’s almost getting to that point,” she said. “When I walk around here, I hear all these different languages and I love it. I remember when I came back from Japan what struck me about Canada is its multiculturalism. Everybody hangs out and gets along and it makes me really happy to see that the fair appeals to everybody.”
Baba agreed, adding one little touch would make the fair a little more authentically Japanese.
“I cannot drink here outside, that’s a huge difference.”
