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This oral history is from an interview conducted by the Oral History cluster of the Landscapes of Injustice project.
there were two sisters who were thereand they were preteens during the war. They were girls but they stayed on there until about 1952. The migration restrictions came off in 1949 but they stayed on there and they worked on the farm and it became a community that they were a part of. And, you know, people said
oh, these girls are good looking.It's just a comment that stayed in my mind. There was this other, total happenstance, of a friend, a colleague of my wife's at Vandusen Gardens got a copy of Vanishing British Columbia and he was astounded to find the Calvin Farm in there because he had grown up on a nearby farm. Again, he had been about ten, eleven years old in the latter years of the war but he remembered working on the farm and he remembered the Japanese Canadian families who were there. He said that he had a crush on one of these girls, Setsuko, who was there and this was, by this time, in the early 1950s. That stayed with me and I thought, hm, what if I recreated the Calhoun Farm in this situation of it but created a couple of teenage characters. You know, a sixteen or seventeen or eighteen year old girl and give her a male cousin who was on there because this was a big extended family and then have them interact with somebody who would be a local farm boy and, you know, just watch what happens. That was in effect how it began. It began just with drawing it. I had the geography, based on a couple of old photographs, down; opened up the landscape a little bit; began to draw it; put in school buses which didn't exist until after the war. There had to be some way to have these people interact that wouldn't otherwise happen and then, you know, explore. The young man who is unnamed, he gets nicknamed 'Cowboy' because of the sharp sense of humor that Toshiko has because he smells of cows. She's only ever lived in the city and she's way more sophisticated than he is. She's smarter she is, in a sense, empowered and has had the bad luck of the war coming in the way of her plans to go to university to become a teacher, to study more literature. His vision is much smaller, is much more local, he's grown up in a quite religious rather, racist, community; knows very very little of the outside world but he's a nice guy; not the sharpest knife in the drawer, effectively. You've got both the racing that's happening there between the Japanese ancestry people and then the Caucasian people in the area but you've also got a social class interaction beginning to happen. They're thrown together by circumstance. He's lonely and lives out in the middle of nowhere and she, in a sense, is this girl he's attracted to and she feels that her teenage-hood, her girl-hood is effectively passing her by. I really wanted them to think and act like teenagers, not that that term existed in the 1940s, but in a sense to be self-focused rather than having a big picture view of the world which I don't think ... you know, I don't think that ... I certainly didn't have one when I was seventeen or eighteen.
I'm going to go too.I think it's just sort of a reasonable decision that teenagers would make. They would just say
well, we'll go. It'll be okay. It'll all work out.So they hop on a freight train and end up hitchhiking the final part of the way to get to Vancouver during the war and the adventure goes from there. So Toshiko would be, I guess, in her late eighties by now if we did a ...
I wonder if you knew her. I wonder if you knew Toshiko.In a way. It's interesting, the woman who came to the book launch, her name was Aki and is a mother of Vivian Ringstad and I think she was born Kobayashi. Let me just get that because I can put it properly on your tape. This doesn't have her birth name on it. It'll just take a sense and then I can get her proper name for you. She sounds very familiar to me. Yeah, she's very involved with the ... Oh, this is not going to give it to me on this form. Anyway, we can fill the name but I think it might be Wakabayashi. But regardless of this ... but she had arrived in there. She had arrived into the Blind Bay area which is very near Tappen and she's ninety-six now. She was an adult of about twenty-four, twenty-five and it's kind of interesting because when this is presented with this rather willful young woman who, in a sense, is Canadian. She insists that she's Canadian, that her Japanese-ness is not something that she's ashamed of but she sees her future just totally in Canadian terms. I don't know exactly how that sat with people who were around at that time and then also that there's a bit of sexual activity that comes along in there too. You know, you can imagine somebody looking at that and thinking
I would never have done thator
this is a made up kind of a character.
everything's changed, there's no going back.When they get to Vancouver they go out and walk down the street of her old block and she sees that the whole block has been transformed. It's either been bought by or rented out to white people. She carries a little photograph of her and the girls on the block in 1942, you know, before Pearl Harbour. She just looks at it and her whole world is gone and at that point she's, in a sense, free to move on. I don't know exactly how the real people would respond to that and I'm sure to get more feedback from people as it goes along. The one that I'm most interested in hearing from, when she gets a copy of the book, is this woman Saiyan Reiko Upton who is the daughter of Kathy Fukahara-Upton who was born on the farm and Saiyan was the one that was an educated anthropologist. She's now working and she's been working for the past several years for the Department of Foreign Affairs. She's a refugee processing officer in Beirut. She just wrote and said she was probably going to be coming back on a break back to Canada, back to Vancouver later in the fall and said she was going to get a copy or something like that. I really want to know what she thinks about this, whether she thinks this is a reasonable portrayal of a young woman. But again, what I'm doing is throwing out in the graphic novel format what looks to be, on the surface, a kind of a standard treatment of Japanese Canadian history. A group of people who are exiled, who losing everything, who are countering the racism and everything but then trying to turn that on its ear a little bit by saying, you know, these people were individuals. They did not necessarily behave according to type and saying that, in a sense, that idea which was said very much by Japanese Canadians at that time saying
we are Canadians.Well, okay, here's one who is Canadian whose whole vision is her ... she wants to study literature. She's eighteen years old. She thinks Romeo and Juliet is the best play ever written. She's effectively memorized it and then to play her off this guy and then the question is
do you feel sorry for Cowboy, himself?as he gradually realized that she won't marry him, that her vision of the future doesn't include a guy who's going to be a mechanic. So you get all of these threads going along at the same time and along the way the beauty of the graphic novel format is that if you stage the scenes, if you illustrate it in a way that ... you know, I hope I've done with this scene ... you can put a lot into it that just gets into people subtly, it's not didactic. You're not creating characters who are making pronouncements, so that you can absorb something of the atmosphere of the time and staged scenes that are really, what you would call teachable moments, what Barack Obama would call teachable moments or learning opportunities where you can say that. For example, where Cowboy realizes that Toshiko wants to come with him and he says
we're elopingand she says
not so fastand then he has found out that if she married him that she would be reclassified as white. So it's that kind of hard information that you can insert into a graphic novel in a way that is more difficult than a conventional novel. When you put that kind of information into nonfiction it just becomes effect piled up on effect. With any luck, people who are reading this will discover this level of detail about that time almost by osmosis rather than by having it hammered into their heads that this was going on.
yeah.Even film, in the Sleeping Tigers movie, that movie on the Asahi baseball team that was done a decade or more ago and you see the film has a shot of that and all of these, in a sense, they've replicated the Japan town or the Little Tokyo and this camp situation so all the interactions and stuff are going on there. But instead, he's this kid he's just totally isolated and he's just got his cousin Toshiko over there. It also made sense just from the logistics of telling the story to have only the single narrator and to have that narrator be Cowboy, the character, because he then is discovering what Toshiko chooses to tell him about her culture rather than, you know, if it were told from a third person narrator, an omniscient narrator that you would see Toshiko going through and doing all this type of stuff and it would kind of, to my way of thinking, get the story more bogged down and it would have to introduce a whole range of characters who can only just appear slightly. They just step on stage like Toshiko's father appears very briefly at one point. In a sense, it's his learning and his interpretation where he's discovering all kinds of stuff about himself and as well about her, you know, a little bit about her culture but, again, it's not really about him learning about a Japanese culture in Canada it's about him learning about injustice is the theme of the thing.
oh, it might look different if I was seventeen and Japanese or ...? It might have been that. I think part of the thing was the opportunity to recreate, reimagine, a city that had disappeared more or less by the time I was born and so, you know, looking for historic references, recreating the squatter's community on False Creek where Toshiko and Cowboy end up, and Chinatown and all that business. The Japanese-Chinese interaction is also one of the threads that runs through here. From the artistic point of view and comparing it with Vanishing Vancouver and Vanishing BC that the artwork in them is generally ... I go out and I sit down in front of the place and, obviously, I take a view liberties with the place. I move trees around or, you know, I simplify things. I'd make a painting that would, in a sense, stand on its own as a work of art. With a graphic novel, you're staging it like you're making a film. You just don't have to hire the actors and get the old cars and that type of thing. As an intellectual exercise, it's really very interesting where you've got a page for them and your narration has pushed you forward into a scene and you say to yourself
what shape should the panel be for this? How can I make this really work?So in some cases there is total bird's eye views, aerial views, and in other cases effectively worm's eye views and long kind of panoramic landscape panels and then small ones that are extreme close-ups. What you're doing is filmmaking without a camera and a crew. It's just huge fun. It's really really a lot of fun. Everything that you contemplate doing in a graphic novel, like for example, if you put a character in a dress that has all kinds of detailing on the dress and then you realize that that character has to appear in the next few pages in that dress you're setting yourself up for a lot of drawing. So you think your way through this. Or you've got them in a room and a room has a piece of furniture and you've got to draw that piece of furniture time after time after time so you're thinking all the way through this which I think is an intellectual exercise. It's very very interesting. In the Vanishing Vancouver Vanishing BC thing you're looking more for tableau that exists and represents something a little more than what they are. So, you know, in a romantic nostalgic sense, the lonesome farmhouse on the ridge with the view down the valley, that type of thing.
they would probably do this at this point.In a sense the characters would begin to lead the story. I don't want to be too precious about it but what they were doing in this had to stand a test of plausibility and it's much harder to do that if you storyboard the whole story. This is a reason why a lot of graphic novels and certainly comic books have a formulaic quality to them. There must have been tons of research that you had to do to sit down and write this. Did you have a moment in doing the research where you were just sort of like
gosh, that's new to me? I just kept learning as I went along. For example, this actually would have happened just slightly before I started on this but I was involved in the Places that Matter Program. It was a project of the Vancouver Heritage Foundation, begun in 2011 for Vancouver's 125th birthday. It was, in a sense, a historical commemoration project rather than a heritage preservation project. One of the sites that was identified very early on as being worthy of a plaque were the livestock buildings at the PNE which was the center of the internment, the beginning of the internment, the 'rounding up,' for lack of a better term, of all the coastal Japanese population who arrived there. The men were put in the hockey arena and effectively in a dormitory situation. The women and children were put into what were effectively the livestock pens. In the build up to that and in the writing of the plaque it was quite interesting from my point of view because I was doing a lot of the plaque writing and the vetting of things and then as you got a sponsor involved with the plaque which, in the case of this, was the Nikkei Association. They wanted to have control over what the plaque said. I was really surprised at how charged the language was that they wanted in there. They were still really mad. This is seventy years on and time had not healed the wound for a lot of the people who were involved in that and it added to me this sense of injustice that was not just that they had lost their livelihoods and that they had been uprooted and treated ... they were obviously second class citizens because they had never been allowed to vote whether they were Canadian born or otherwise. But bringing back the whole thing and in particular I think of learning along the way of the mechanism by which property was seized and sold and this was particularly that I was very involved with the Vancouver historical society and I tended to lecture by Jordan Stanger Ross of UVic and where he was describing preliminary research. They were trying to find the trigger for this business of the property not being held by a custodian but being disposed of. I knew that very little of the money had reached the former owners. It's just astonishing the way that this juggernaut had come along.
you did this to usand
you're guiltyand all the rest of it. I was seeing the anger that was going on and I thought
well, okay that's totally fairbut in the graphic novel I put in a couple of panels that spoke to the way in which Cowboy would respond to this. In the first one, it's where Fiko, the cousin, says to him
anyway it's not your fault. Just don't be an enemy.In a sense, Fiko is saying to him
I know you're not responsible for this decision and even though you're white you didn't do this.In the other scene, later on, when Toshiko and Cowboy are fleeing, they're on the road, and they see a Native Indian kid riding a horse and she's not aware that they're just on the edge of an Indian reserve and Cowboy says
well, they're different. Like, they don't come to school. They go to school in Kamloopsand Toshiko says
well, why not?and he says
I don't knowand she pulls out her identity card and says
see, I'm different too. Is it always going to be this way for me?He says,
people like me don't make the rules.I don't know if that's a cop out but, in a sense, he's saying
just because I'm white doesn't mean I'm responsible for what's happened to you.So I thought, fair enough, to have him throw that back at her at this point effectively saying
don't tar me with this brush of just because I'm this race that I am therefore one of your oppressors.To have that go back and forth I hope that people who do a close read of it will see that and will mull that over. I really wondered about doing this. I wondered whether I was straying into something. Was this relationship with the Chinese ... there are two Chinese characters. One is the guy who runs the café in Salmon Arm who is a no nonsense guy and he doesn't want any trouble in his café. The second one is the ... where Toshiko says that she can pass as Chinese and that's the way that she's going to get a job when they come to Vancouver and she speaks a little Chinese because she worked in the fish packing plant. She says that she's a little taller and her family always teased her for looking more Chinese than Japanese. There's the other part that runs along in there where they point out that Life Magazine had wrote an article, late in 1941, called
How to Tell Japs from the Chinese.This is actually, you can find it on the web. I had heard of it before and I'm looking for it. December twenty-second 1941, so that's a couple weeks after Pearl Harbour and it's yeah
How to Tell Japs from the Chinese published in Life Magazine pages eighty one and eighty two.So you'd find that on the web. It's got pictures because the Chinese were American allies, British allies, and the nationalists were allies. It had all of these pictures and a kind of ... is physiognomy the right word? This analysis of facial features and head structure that says that, you know ... they used the term that this guy's Chinese and he's our ally and this guy's a Jap, right. So Toshiko says,
my family always teased me and said I look more Chinese than Japanese.So she goes off and with the willfulness of an eighteen year old, manages to get herself a job as a waitress in Chinatown in Vancouver once they've arrived.
well, they banned all Chinese immigration.So, in a sense, it just comes up in the course of the plot and then she's working in the café and Cowboy comes in after having worked unloading fish from fish boats that turned out to have been stolen from the Japanese and he's really offended by the theft of the boats and by the casual racism of the fishermen. He's just worked for them for a few hours and made a couple dollars unloading fish and then he says to her
I can't go back, the boats are stolen.In the next frame, she steals a plate of food and gives it to him. I'm going to interested to see whether in the reading of this if people pick up on that contrast because it's the sort of thing that you would do. You're a bit desperate, you're on the run, you have no money. You know, here's a guy, the boss has gone outside for a smoke, I can feed him a plate of food and then not charge him. She only ends up charging him a nickel for the coffee that he's had and she's able to say
well, I could only give you one cup because coffee is rationedso it throws in just this other little fact that you can dump in there. So anyway it was fun doing this. Fun trying to craft the history into it and, you know, these are the sorts of things that come along. Is writing about the Chinese-Canadian community a third rail in Vancouver? It seems like that could be ... Yeah, I couldn't do it. The reason that I think I was able to write about the Japanese-Canadian community was partly the knowledge of just a straight historical knowledge but also the creation of a character who is not expressing her Japanese culture. I would have found that a bit difficult to do. I would have felt presumptuous if I had told a story from her point of view. So then she would have been interacting with her parents ... I thought about this and I did quite a lot of reading about the habits, you know, the way that parents were addressed, the way that grandparents were addressed, what she would have done, and how it kind of would have been interesting to imagine her with her nascent Canadian-ness and so on and doing that. But, in a sense, that's another book, another character. To a degree, I think that if I were to contemplate doing a graphic novel about Chinese-Canadians it would be tough. You could go through the motions, you could draw the people, you could stage scenes of them learning back and forth. Larry Wong who's the past president of the Chinese-Canadian Historical Society, he's a great character. I could get Larry to vet the whole thing but it's not my place. What's very interesting about this class at McGill, that's been learning and discussing the book, that one of the questions that I received from them was about the depiction of First Nations. They picked up on just a couple of characters who just barely come on stage in the novel and ...
was that difficult? How did that work out?
well, it was only bringing them in just to do a thing and not trying to get into their heads of what was going on other than the fact that they were suspicious of and antagonistic to the policewhich I think is historically correct but not trying to stage scenes where they would interact where you would have a group of Native people who would be interacting amongst themselves. To me, it would be really difficult to do. The trope is that all novelists write autobiography now. Cowboy obviously in me but he comes out of a culture that I was really aware of: both that small town interior BC culture but then also just ... I was born in 1951 and the world was just infused still with the Second World War, all through my growing up. Our parents were all war veterans, my mother was a Canadian army nurse and the stories were still very much a part of what was going on. I could write and draw with great confidence about that. It was kind of interesting getting into other cultures, other ethnic groups, and what you could do and whether what you would do would have any credibility at all and also whether you're being incredibly presumptuous doing it. All the appropriations come up that are more in fine art, probably, than in literature but they're huge. You can't pick up anything about Bill Reid or Emily Carr without getting into a bit of an appropriation debate. Oh, for sure. Yeah, and I think one of the ways that, you've probably said this but, you avoid the appropriation label is by not assuming or not suggesting that these are stand-ins for every Japanese and every country boy. Yeah, and that was one of the questions out of the McGill class was
do you feel that you are making this too much a story about individuals and therefore not properly telling the story of the Japanese-Canadian internment?I said,
yeah, I really do feel thatbecause I think that, at least for the purposes of this, history is made by individuals as much as it is made by definable groups and by classes within those groups. I think it's a lot easier to teach history if you teach it in a kind of Marxist way of people being a part of groups and they behave because of that and there's obviously an element of that in the behavior of individuals. But I think the other thing that's very Canadian about Toshiko is that Toshiko sees herself as being mobile. She's born into middle-class but Japanese-Canadian. She sees herself as being middle-class but just Canadian. Well, she's not really just Canadian. There's obviously a side of her that values her own culture although that's never explicitly stated. She's, in a sense, mobile within her classes. The question that, I guess, comes up in this and right at the end when Cowboy comes back from the army to help his mother after his father has died and she goes looking and he realizes that they haven't just gone back to Vancouver, they've gone to Toronto, why? They weren't allowed to move back to the coast. He learns another aspect of this but when that comes off and when he meets her in Vancouver in 1950 and she's with her fiancé who is also her prof, which I just had to throw in
oh, the Nikkei National Museum is going to love this.No, I mean I'm really pleased that they seem to like it, that they carry it in their shop. I hope people will talk about it and disagree with it or say
why'd you have to do a romance? Why'd you have to do an interracial romance? Why couldn't you have done ...You play this thing out and you say
well, what about a romance in the KanupsWell, that would have gotten me into this thing of being more deeply immersed in the Japanese-Canadian culture than I feel qualified to be. Yeah, I don't know. Well, the geography thing I think one of the reasons that people have so much difficulty understanding and remembering history is because they are not approaching it from a geographical point of view. I organize my mind geographically and I pin little facts to places. That's the way that I remember. That's the way that I see broad patterns. If I had ever pursued any kind of academic career, I probably would have been a geographer rather than a historian. I think that the ... The Japanese-Canadian thing, this is where all these things begin to come together, yes it's about war time and it's about the Japanese-Canadian experience but it's about human rights and, to me, which is something that I could potentially be a champion of or be an advocate for that sort of thing. The current exhibition at the Nikkei National Museum is called Revitalizing Japan Town? with a question mark at the end of it and it's talking about the right to remain. Particularly, it's talking historically about the displacement of Japanese-Canadian people, obviously, in 1942 out of the Japan-town area and the potential displacement of the people who live there now who are the poorest of society and whether reintroducing the idea of Japan-town, of a rebranding of that, would be a trigger for more gentrification.
well, it's an election year.Now we've had that election and where do you imagine this story going? Is this story a cautionary tale about C-51 as you said, or the Niqab issue or ... Even the way that we have this election, which was so frayed around the device of identity politics ... Yeah, dog whistle politics. Yes, it's a story about Japanese-Canadians but, like you said, there's all these human rights threats. So what are these human rights threats and is the job done now because we all went and we wrote it or is the work just ... No, I don't think these things ever go away. I think they retreat back into the shadows and particularly in economic good times they do. As hard times come along and anti-immigration ideas and that was partly racial and that was partly immigration. I remember the expression about Japanese-Canadians in the 1930s:
the peaceful penetration of our province.It was the fact that, unlike the Chinese who were controlled by head taxes coming in, it was very difficult for women to come in because of the Hayashi-Lemieux agreement that entire families could immigrate and the Japanese-Canadian birth rate was very high. The number of children, I hope I'm right about this, but I think there were 500 students at Strathcona elementary or maybe between Strathcona and Britannia which would be the elementary in the high school. In 1941 all these little Japanese Canadian children they were industrious and they were going to have more children and that was the peaceful penetration thing that some politicians were completely against. In terms of the story about Toshiko, and this is where it would get back to Toshiko's character, would be whether people would see her as an individual.
oh yeah, there were these Japsto use the term of the time which, apparently, is coming back into slang unfortunately. But they would see these kids as being kind of a block. All the girls were demure and I didn't know what they wanted to do but they just did this stuff which wasn't like us. So if creating a really empowered, smart female character, entirely plausibly to do that, whether people looking at that now would say
yeah, they were individuals.You know, like any population, like any group within society there were the smart ones and there were the dumb ones, and there were the adventurous ones and there were the conservative ones but they would say
they're just like us because they're individuals.The Canada that we ought to have is one where it's a meritocracy where doors open for people and people are able to pursue their dreams regardless of their race. So I really hope people would see this and they would see this really fraught couple of months which is the summer in 1944 which effectively is the main part of the book. They would see a young woman trying by her wits to get through this with some sense of dignity and without throwing her life away. That would be my hope. Besides, I really like strong women. I really like empowered women. It's so much easier to make her a three dimensional character and really to make Cowboy a three dimensional character too because he has a lot of learning to do in the book. He loves her and he wants to be with her. If you look at the whole story from his point of view he is not enlisting, not going to fight the patriotic fight and it's partly just because he wants to be with her and he knows that if he goes away from her he'll never get back with her. Everybody, in a sense, has an opportunity to make a bunch of decisions and that rather than just being type-cast by race and plotting through a plot of triumph or hard times or victimhood or whatever it would be. You mentioned talking to a class at McGill. Is there something that you really hope that they get from this story? Yeah, oh yeah. It's funny because, again, you've got a lot of time to kill when you're doing a graphic novel because the part of your brain that's drawing is not the part of your brain that's thinking verbally and so on. You know, you're just drawing away. Part way into this I began to think, you know, this can be curriculum somewhere. It introduces a little bit of sex or a little bit of whatever in it and you think
okay, high school curriculum and beyond.Hooking up with Lou Yong Teel, the publisher of Midtown Press, he has a French side of the imprint there so the idea of it being translated, that was an interesting challenge because of French running twenty or thirty percent longer to say the same things. I guess twenty to twenty-five pages into the book we agreed that he would publish it and also make a French addition so he began to redesign the panels just a little bit, leave a little bit more oxygen in the panels to make room for the French. Just that idea that a story could come out of British Columbia could be useful to people both to entertain them but also to teach them a lot of stuff, to me, I hope I'm right about this, but to teach them history in a more subtle way than you would get out of just the textbooks. I don't know what school textbooks are like now but the stuff when I was in school, many years ago, gone, almost fifty years ago, it was horrible, I mean, the textbooks were terrible. The fact that I remembered anything from them at all, I think just shows how much of an interest I had in history.
well, I'll name my character Toshikojust because it's got that nice sound to it. A good friend from back in that period, he was an English ESL teacher, and he hadn't married a Japanese woman but he had as a girlfriend a Japanese-Canadian woman named Wanda. Wanda spoke no Japanese and Tom spoke very good Japanese. He was a linguist and he loved that. A bit of Wanda's character, the fact that she was of Japanese ancestry but she'd been born here and grew up here and she could probably speak a few words but she would describe herself as being Canadian. When she and Tom went off to Japan and people would come up or they would be speaking with people and everybody would address Wanda and Tom would have to answer. I thought that was pretty funny but it also, you know, I mean, all these things they speak to mobility within a society. I think that an enormous wake up call for Canada, the Second World War represented in various years but all the racial restrictions begin to fall off beginning in 1947 with the repeal of the Chinese Immigration Act. South Asians get the right to vote in 1947. Finally, the restrictions on Japanese-Canadian movement and citizenship come off in 1949 and then there are a handful of others, the Mennonites and then, of course, the First Nations that follow that a little bit afterwards. The Canadian body politic gave its head a collective shake after the war. Probably the founding of the United Nations and the realization of how much hatred there had been that had prompted the war just caused people to think towards a new kind of country, a new kind of tolerance. There was a lot of Chinese immigration into Vancouver in the 1950s and then in the 1960s and then thereafter. Particularly with the Pearson and Trudeau governments it becomes a much more multicultural country, a hugely richer country for that. The nostalgia for an earlier Canada might be for architecture or the amount of oxygen that there is around buildings or, you know, the affordability or that type of thing but in terms of what kind of a place it was to live in it's just nothing like it is now.
Trutch the racistall up Trutch Street in Kitsilano and then there's a flurry of interest in the Media whose memory is a mile wide and an inch deep, call me up and say
what's this about?or call up somebody else like John Atkin. So you try to explain and try to put him in a context of a period but because the media only has four minutes for it ... Context becomes difficult. It does. It does. He had this useful life and then he became a really negative influence on history. What we are still dealing with because of the decisions that he made when he became governor, you know, stripping out the preemption ability of First Nations people and reducing the reserves by ninety percent and all of this type of thing. I think it was in his term as ... we were actually a province by then ... but I think he was leftenant governor that First Nations people were disenfranchised, it was 1874, and then combined with all the federal initiatives of residential schools ... Now it's just astonishing history but that's what makes it so great is that it's so completely nutty. Like, who would believe that a Japanese ancestry woman could be declared white by marrying a white guy? That is admittedly a little strange. Your knowledge is encyclopedic to say the least. Did it always just sort of spawn out of curiosity? Yeah, just curiosity and geography. I'm really interested in change. If I were forced to describe in one word what it is that I'm interested in, I'm interested in change. I'm interested in the way that societies respond to it. I'm interested in the way that Landscapes responds to it. The theme of Vanishing Vancouver was changed due to development. The theme of Vanishing British Columbia was changed due to abandonment. What can you learn just from the evolution of a building across a few generations? What will it tell you about people's priorities? I mean even the evolution of house design in Vancouver is one of my huge interests. I was going to say I thought ... change is probably more apolitical. I was going to say that it was ... there's a certain romanticism or a nostalgia but a wistfulness through a lot of your work. I don't know, there's something about watercolour. Oh, yeah. Yeah, watercolour lies really sweetly and people go all soft and gooey in front of watercolours. It's partly, I think, because a well done watercolour leaves a lot of room for the imagination so people approach it with all this cultural baggage. The softness of the colour and the arrangement of how the shadows are cast and everything it seems to, when people are looking at watercolours, it seems to bypass their intellect and go directly into their emotions. I'm really intrigued by this and play to it in a way. I never put it explicitly ... nostalgia making things into paintings I wouldn't say. It's interesting when people are able to add those themselves. As a tool in the books, which is what they are there, illustrations of a book that has a political point to make, they sell so softly. They're so soft and so sweet. Photography, generally, doesn't have that ability although there are people who do soft focus in photographs and stage things really beautifully and they have that, kind of, same effect. But it's a cultural thing with watercolour, I think. Oh yeah, which is interesting because in Toshiko you didn't choose to use watercolour, which is the medium that everyone thinks of when they think of...
black and white makes it look like it happened long agoand I thought
well, yeah, that's fair enough.I'm really interested in everybody's interpretation of it but really, probably, what it comes down to is that there's real pleasure pushing pencil around on a piece of paper and probably the closest that I could get to, like, scratching with a stick on a cave wall, just something that goes right back to the basics of representation and without the bells and whistles of colour and so on. Even if colour were available it would be hard to imagine, really. Anybody who takes on a graphic novel is sort of a combination of a dreamer and a fool because they're an enormous amount of work.
turn on a dimeAmerican way, I may be not entirely correct about this, I don't know it well enough but it's like they did it, bang, they were attacked, they made the decision, it was the wrong decision they recognized that and, in a sense, they got over it really quickly whereas the apology and redress here, another really interesting thing, 1988 the Mulroney government. The conservative government does it. Trudeau would never do it. Trudeau would never apologize for what happened in the past; Pierre Trudeau. I think his son would if something like that came along. I mean, it will be interesting to see whether the head tax redress movement gets any traction with the new Liberal Government, you know, I can't guess. It is amazing. I'm always reminded when we talk about redress that it happened under a Conservative government. Well so, of course, did the Species at Risk act and the absolute heyday of Environment Canada was under the Mulroney government and the heyday of the American Environmental Protection Agency was under Nixon but, mind you, down there that was with ... you know, the states is hard to compare because that was with a democratic congress. Yeah, I was going to say the heyday of not much was under Nixon. Well, thank you again. It's been a pleasure.