This Light of Ours by Leslie G. Kelen

Author:Leslie G. Kelen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 2011-02-19T16:00:00+00:00

The Photographers

Interviews and Biographies

Tamio Wakayama

Tamio Wakayama was born on April 3, 1941, a few months before the outbreak of the Pacific War. He and his family were part of the community of some twenty-two thousand Japanese Canadians (Nikkei) living along the coast of British Columbia who were declared enemy aliens and placed in remote internment camps for the war years. After the war, the internees were faced with the choice of being deported to Japan or else settling east of the Rockies. Wakayama’s family went east and settled in Chatham, a farming town in southern Ontario. Chatham was once the terminus of the Underground Railway, so many of Wakayama’s boyhood friends were Afro-Canadian descendants of runaway slaves.

As Wakayama explains, the central challenge of his life was coming to terms with the internment and the debilitating effects of the postwar racism. The healing process began in the fall of 1963 when, instead of returning to finish his university education, he drove south and became part of the American Civil Rights Movement. After working as a volunteer janitor and driver for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), he was accepted as a staff member of the Atlanta office. In the following year he managed the darkroom for the Southern Documentary Project, which was part of the Freedom Summer ’64 campaign and, at the end of summer, he took over as the SNCC field photographer in Mississippi.

At the end of 1964, Wakayama returned to Canada and assisted the Toronto-based Student Union for Peace Action (SUPA) in organizing in behalf of the Civil Rights Movement. He also participated in a photographic tour of various SUPA-sponsored organizing projects and photographed for the Company of Young Canadians (modelled on the American VISTA program). In 1971 Wakayama spent a year in Japan, a life-altering experience which led him to reconnect with his roots. He eventually moved from Toronto to Vancouver and became part of the reawakening Nikkei community that had grown around the prewar settlement of Little Tokyo. In 1975 he became the curator/ director of the Japanese Canadian Centennial Project, which two years later produced A Dream of Riches, a monumental exhibit on the one-hundred-year-old history of the Nikkei that has been seen in over forty venues in Canada, the U.S., and Japan. This work is today seen as the opening salvo in the Canadian campaign for redress of wartime injustices.

I didn’t go south with any set plan like I’m going to join this wonderful movement. Essentially, I’m just this kid from small-town Chatham. I said, “Mom, I’ve worked hard all summer, I just want a little vacation in the States before going back to finish my final year of college.” But in another way, leaving was huge, absolutely huge. I was one of the early college dropouts from a small town in a very white community, to which is added the rigors of Japanese parents who didn’t put up with much nonsense. And all this would not have been possible if my father hadn’t died, ’cause I would have had to answer to him.

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