A Place to Remember – Hapa Collaborative

A contemplative installation marks pain and resistance.

At the southwest corner of Steveston Community Park, in the seaside village of Steveston, is a quiet, slightly sunken garden space that inspires contemplation. Pathways guide you to a bench carved from stone, and towards a large boulder, cleaved in two, embedded with round bronze markers and place names of locations across the province and beyond. Japanese plum trees beckon you with blossoms in the springtime, and fruit in the summer. It’s a serene and welcoming oasis of calm, despite its roots in one of the darkest chapters of Canadian history.

This landscaped public art installation was commissioned in 2017 by the City of Richmond and the Steveston Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre Advisory Committee to mark the 75th anniversary of the forced removal of more than 2,500 Japanese Canadians (Nikkei) from Steveston in 1942, during World War II. But, as explained by Joseph Fry, BCSLA, founding principal of Hapa Collaborative, who was chosen to design the installation, it also honours and celebrates their return home seven years later.

“It’s one of the few communities where, after the war, Japanese were allowed to return back, in 1949,” he notes. “This was, in part, because the people who had taken over the fishing industry didn’t know how to fish. They wanted these great fishermen to come back and help. So, it’s one of the few Nikkei communities that, post-war, still has some semblance of community.”

There’s a subtlety to the memorial; there is no large placard or overt signage to be found here. To understand its history and meaning, visitors must engage with the installation to discover the words carved into the back of the large boulder; on its opposite side, which faces the walkway, they can read the names of internment and POW camps to which Steveston residents were forced to move during the war.

“The subtlety is deliberate,” explains Fry. “I’ve always felt that public art should do two things. It should create a sense of curiosity, and then intrigue and entice you to come in and satisfy that curiosity. I don’t want it to be too didactic or make it really obvious. I want people see it unfold.”

Councillor Harold Steves, Chair of the Parks, Recreation and Cultural Services Committee of Council for the City of Richmond (which includes Steveston), says the site reflects the peacefulness that was interrupted by the war. He still remembers the day he lost his childhood playmate, Fumiko, and how he and his parents watched her family board the train out of Steveston.

“I was a little kid when the evacuations happened, and my earliest memory is going down to the trains when Fumiko’s family had to leave,” he recalls. “Our two families went together, and as Fumiko went up on the steps of the train, she suddenly handed me her teddy bear and said goodbye. I’ve just never forgotten that.”

  
   
(Images above) Questionnaire cards written by hand at engagement session, asking questions such as “What do you wish for?” and “What do you worry about?” in both English and Japanese languages.

“He described it like a scene out of the movie Roots, where all the families come out and get off the train and they line up on the platform, and the farmers would come and look over them to see how many able-bodied family members you had,” he recalls. His parents were part of the approximately 800 Nikkei who returned in 1949, out of the 2,000 who had been forcibly removed.

“I really felt strongly that we should honour the perseverance and the resilience of the first and and second generations of Japanese Canadians for suffering through all this injustice and racism, and be able to come back,” he says. But he confesses that he originally had quite a different memorial in mind. “I had this vision of a statue or a sculpture, using maybe a 100-square-foot area of undeveloped green area that was surplus to the Steveston park,” he says. “But Hapa Collaborative looked at the whole site in its totality, which I thought was brilliant. I have to admit that my thinking was changed 180 degrees.

The memorial isn’t just another project for Fry – it’s also deeply personal. A resident of Steveston, his maternal grandparents were forced from their home in Vancouver’s Powell Street neighbourhood and interned at a camp in Slocan. “I’ve always had this interest in commemorative acts related to that event,” he explains. “When this opportunity came up, I was really excited about its potential. We made the pitch to do something a little bit more landscape-based and experiential and use the site’s relationship to the Steveston Tram building.”

The Tram Building, just behind the memorial, houses a historic tram car – one which would have carted the Japanese Steveston residents away during the war. “They left their community by the interurban that sits here,” Fry says, gesturing towards it. “There are lots of images during the internment of people waiting for the train. So, we had this idea of making the connections of coming and going, [with paths going] right up to the corner and back into the park.”

In developing the memorial, the Hapa Collaborative team, including Hanako Amaya, BCSLA, and Pengfei Du, BCSLA Intern, also engaged with community members, including seniors, to hear their stories and ideas. Paradoxically, one of the most important elements of the piece was inspired by a group of women who were reluctant to get involved.

“This group of women were 70, 90, and even 100 years old,” recalls Fry. “They were in the craft room [of the cultural centre], making these amazing woven placemats out of salmon can labels. During war time, they would take all the paper off the cans, fold them into origami patterns, and make coasters, placements, and baskets out of it. So, they were busy working away and didn’t really want to talk about the internment.”

The origami pattern they were weaving is today reflected in the basalt paving stones of the site, which were locally sourced and finished three different ways. For Fry, this element adds a special tribute to the strength and resilience of the women who were interned.

“All the men were put on the work camps out in Jasper and Banff, and the women were left in the internment camps with the kids,” he points out. “They could only take as much as they could carry with them, and yet they still were able to use little bits of paper and create beauty in tough situations. We felt that this was a kind of act of resistance and thought, what if we introduced it into the site? This, to me, is one of the most important aspects of the commemoration – building something that ties the site together, just as these women had done at the time of war during internment, to hold the community together.”

Higo and Fry stress that the installation is about more than just what happened to the Japanese Canadian community. “What we heard from older generation who experienced the internment is they want this to be a recognition of racial injustice in a global sense, not just the Japanese experience,” says Fry, noting the rise of anti-Asian, anti-Muslim, and anti-Semitic rhetoric and hate. “They want to make sure that it acts as a marker for future generations, so that their young kids, kids like mine, are aware of the story.”

To check out the original article from the Fall 2021 Issue of Sitelines Magazine, please click here.

Written by Jessica Werb
Jessica Werb is a writer, editor, and communications consultant based in Vancouver, BC.