Thursday, April 10, at 7 p.m.

at Kidsbooks, 3083 West Broadway

Kidsbooks invites you to meet Joy Kogawa in celebration of her new book, Naomi's Tree. This beautiful picture book touches on the internment of Canadians of Japanese descent during the Second World War. Illustrated by Ruth Ohi, Naomi's Tree is based on the characters from Joy Kogawa's classic novel, Naomi's Road. Recommended for ages 8 and up.

Tickets are $5 available at Kidsbooks, or by phone at 604-738-5335, and are fully redeemable toward Joy Kogawa's books on the night of the event only.

If you would like signed copies but are unable to attend, please call or email us in advance.

For more information, email us at events@kidsbooks.ca or call 604-738-5335.

Jointly sponsored by Fitzhenry & Whiteside, Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival, The Land Conservancy of BC, and Historic Joy Kogawa House Society.

Writing the Memoir

Location: Historic Joy Kogawa House, 1450 West 64th Avenue, Vancouver

Date: Reading on Friday, February 22, 7:30 to 9 p.m.; writing workshop on Saturday, February 23, and Sunday, February 24, 10 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.

Cost: To be determined. Space is limited. To secure a seat, please register by emailing ametten@telus.net.

Many writers have demonstrated that even the most glamorous lives--of celebrities, war heroes, or politicians--can make for dull reading. Yet the most ordinary lives can make thrilling reading. How does the storyteller capture the essence of the story and develop a reader's interest? What are memoirs really about, and why write them? Through discussion, question and answer, exercises, and examining successful memoirs, this workshop will endeavour to answer such questions, as well as to show how memoirs might be structured, and how a writer decides what to put in and what to leave out. Memoirs are therapy for both writer and reader, but they are also good stories: at their best, they are art.

Sharon Butala is an award-winning author of both fiction and non-fiction. Her memoir, The Perfection of the Morning, was a Canadian bestseller and a finalist for the Governor General's Award. Ms Butala has been called one of Canada's true visionaries. In 2002 she was honoured as an Officer of the Order of Canada. Her newest work, The Girl in Saskatoon: A Meditation on Memory and Murder (HarperCollins Canada), will be in bookstores in March.

Watch this website over the next few days for more information. 

The Historic Joy Kogawa House was purchased by TLC The Land Conservancy of British Columbia in May 2006 after a successful public fundraising campaign to save the house from demolition. 

The property is one of the few residences in Vancouver identified as having been confiscated by the Canadian government and sold without the lawful owner's permission. 

In addition, the property has heritage and cultural significance for its connection with renowned Canadian author Joy Kogawa (born 1935) who lived in the house with her family between 1937 and 1942, when the family was forced to move. Kogawa's work has been nationally and internationally recognized.

The property is in the process of being preserved as a Canadian cultural and literary landmark. It will function as a writers-in-residence retreat and will host periodic special events.

However, while the full program is being developed, TLC The Land Conservancy is seeking a warden (caretaker) to live in the residence and assist in minor maintenance.

Details about the house 
The warden will have use of a living room, office room, dining space, two bathrooms, full kitchen, one bedroom, multi-purpose room, ample storage space, outdoor deck, small yard and enclosed garage for parking. Washer, dryer and dishwasher are included.

Duties required
In return for a very reasonable rent and utilities, the warden will be expected to assist with minor maintenance duties of the site. These would mostly include yard work, but can vary depending on skill and interest.

Also, the warden would need to accommodate the use of the house for approximately 2 or 3 events or tours a month, as well as visits from TLC and others to perform maintenance and restoration activities. These events or tours can be either private or open to the public.  The warden is expected to keep the inside of the house tidy before scheduled events or tours. The warden will be given sufficient notice to prepare for these activities. 

Rent
Rent is $700/month for a single occupant or $1000/month for a couple (plus utilities). 

No pets, no smokers and no children.

Available for February 1, 2008. Call (604) 733-2313 to apply, preferably before Friday, December 13.

TLC is a non-profit, charitable land trust protecting wilderness areas and cultural landmarks in BC. Since 1997, TLC has protected over 100,000 acres of threatened lands, involving more than 200 projects.  www.conservancy.bc.ca

 

Nov 10th, Joy Kogawa House

event:  War and Remembrance

featuring authors Ruth Ozeki

and Shaena Lambert

War and Remembrance

  

A reading in support of TLC’s writers-in-residence program at Historic Joy Kogawa House

  

Location: 1450 West 64th Avenue, Vancouver

  

Date: Saturday, November 10, 3 to 5 p.m.

  

Cost: Admission by donation.
Space is limited. To ensure a seat, please RSVP to (604) 733-2313.

  

Ruth Ozeki, the Vancouver Public Library’s One Book, One Vancouver author for 2007 for her novel My Year of Meats, will read her contribution to the new collaborative novel, Click, published by Scholastic to support Amnesty International. Ruth’s story describes the experiences of a Japanese boy living in Tokyo during the American occupation following the Second World War.

  

Vancouver writer Shaena Lambert will read from her novel, Radiance, which tells the story of a Hiroshima survivor whom a group of antinuclear activists sponsor for plastic surgery in New York in the 1950s. The story pits the ideals of peace at home against the realities of the war experience in Japan.

  

Special guest appearance by Canadian author and poet, Joy Kogawa.

  For more information, please call TLC’s Lower Mainland Office at (604) 733-2313, email vancouver@conservancy.bc.ca.     

A Place of Compassion:
Joy Kogawa's Dream Vancouver statement


Joy Kogawa holds up her arms to embrace and support everything she loves in the world
- photo Todd Wong

Joy Kogawa, author of Obasan, has written A Place of Compassion for her submission  to the Dream Vancouver conference and website, organized by Think City. While Joy will not be attending the conference, I will be as one of the directors of the Joy Kogawa House Society. 

Dream Vancouver is an all-day conference which will take participants from their dreams about Vancouver to a possible agenda for change. The conference will be facilitated by Bliss Browne, internationally-renowned speaker and president of Imagine Chicago.  Former City of Vancouver Co-Director of Current Planning Larry Beasley is key note speaker.  Ms. Browne will then facilitate a discussion-based session which will take participants through a series of questions designed to bring them to a collective vision of what the city could be. 

To attend you must register, click here.

Registration: 9:30 am - 10:00 am
Conference: 10:00 am - 3:30 pm
Reception: 3:30 pm - 4:30 pm

Location: Jewish Community Centre, 950 W. 41st Avenue, Vancouver (at Oak Street).

- photo courtesy Joy Kogawa

Is Joy a Vancouver dreamer?  She was born in Vancouver in 1935.  During WW2 in 1942, when she was 6 years old, her family was removed from Vancouver and sent to internment camps for Japanese-Canadians.  She forever dreamed about returning to the the house in Vancouver's Marpole neighborhood, even after the Canadian government confiscated the property of the Japanese-Canadian internment victims, and resettled them to work as labourers on Alberta beet farms.  She lives mostly in Toronto but returns to Vancouver often, and has great hopes for Vancouver as a city, and as a cultural entity.

Joy Kogawa and her brother Rev. Timothy Nakayama, at the opening event for Obasan, the 2005 choice for One Book One Vancouver at the Vancouver Public Library - photo Todd Wong

Joy is acknowledged as one of Canada's most important writers in the 20th Century for her ground breaking novel Obasan - a story about the impact of the internment on the Japanese Canadian community.  Since May 2005, when I met Joy, at the first Obasan event for One Book, One Vancouver event at the Vancouver Public Library, our developing friendship was been a wild ride as I became a key player on the Save Kogawa House committee (See my articles on Joy Kogawa & Kogawa House).
I have witnessed Joy speak in numerous circumstances and she always seems to have an unwavering position that calls for peace and compassion in so many circumstances.  It embraces her anti-war stance, the Japanese-Canadian redress, South African apartheid, the Chinese-Canadian head tax issue, Japanese atrocities against China in WW2, the history of her ancestor's home of Okinawa, the naming of the 401 Burrard building after Howard Green.  Joy doesn't look to find blame for right or wrong, she looks to find resolution.

Joy Kogawa and Todd Wong at the 2006 Canadian Club Vancouver's annual Order of Canada / Flag Day luncheon.  Joy was key note speaker, and Todd was one of the event organizers - photo Deb Martin

Vancouver has long had a reputation for a history with peace activism.  This is part of our social-cultural make up, and can be embodied through social policy initiatives.  Perhaps it has become such because so many people have come to Vancouver after leaving war, destruction, starvation, revolution, upheaval in their home lands.

Joy has given Dream Vancouver a very apt and fitting dream statement to find reconciliation and understanding "within and between the faiths, between rich and poor, among immigrant groups, in established neighbourhoods, in the Downtown Eastside, among those who are still suffering from unresolved injustices of the near and distant past can come to healing and hope and inner freedom."

Joy Kogawa and children from Tomsett Elementary School in Richmond.  After seeing the Vancouver Opera Touring Ensembles production of "Naomi's Road", the children were inspired to helps save Kogawa House from demolition.  Joy and the children stand in front of the house for their own private tour and reading event. - photo Joan Young

On November 10th, come to the 2nd open house event at Kogawa House.
Sunday, 3-5pm.  1450 West 64th Ave. (just East of Granville St.)
Admission is by donation.  Proceeds go to restoring historic Joy Kogawa House, now owned by The Land Conservancy of BC.

A Place of Compassion

Joy Kogawa, poet and novelist: The dream I have for this west-coast city on the edge of the peaceable ocean is the dream I have for the world - a dream of peace. What better time than this to abolish war as we face our common planetary fate?

We have choices - to continue blithely on our way, fighting and devouring one another for the rest of our dwindling days, or we can individually and collectively lay down our weapons and practice the ways of truth and reconciliation, cooperation and peace.

In a city where east-west faces and races meet and mix, where cultures both clash and blend, the ways of peace can be cultivated, watered, nurtured and the seeds of that action can fly to the farthest corners of our hearts and the world.

As a Japanese Canadian, I have welcomed conversations with two granddaughters of Howard Green, the politician whose public words against us during the Second World War were dreaded in our community. If they can seek to make peace with us on behalf of the grandfather they loved, ought we not to walk with them? What an opportunity for peace making and for walking on.

And ought we not, as Canadian descendants from Japan, to stand with those Canadian descendants of China, who seek a fulsome parliamentary acknowledgment from the country of our ancestors for the horrors their ancestors faced in the Rape of Nanking? Or is it our choice to turn aside and say, "These are no concerns of ours." I believe that the morally appropriate action is to respond to those who suffer and who call our names.

But it is not for me to say what is right for anyone else. We are each required to struggle with our own conscience and to respond to the many voices that call us.

read here:  for the rest of Joy's statement

Dream Vancouver:
Diversity in our History and our Future

When my great-great grandfather Rev. Chan Yu Tan came to BC in 1896, the roads were dirt, and there was a head tax on Chinese immigrants.

When I grew up in the 1960’s and 1970’s I marveled at the way Hawaiian culture was so ethnically diverse.  Asian faces were on nightly news casts, and Hawaiian culture was embraced by mainstream American culture.  In Vancouver, there was still a sense of racial divisions, and ethnic marginalization.  Chinese-Canadian and First Nations history were more likely relegated to sidebar stories and foot notes.

Today, I am living my dream of making Vancouver and Canada more racially tolerant and interculturally exciting!

Every culture that lived along the Silk Road from Italy to Japan, from India to Egypt now lives in Vancouver.  Through the cross-fertilization of ideas, we are able to express new ways of seeing ideas and expressing customs, of expressing the same oneness through many perspectives of the kaleidoscope of life.  But so many times we talk about Canada as a mosaic or multicultural, and become more concerned with the pieces while we lose sight of the whole.

Vancouver IS an inter-cultural crossroad and we are inter-historic… linking not only Vancouver’s history with each new wave of immigrants – but also with our collective global history.  We carry within us the global cultural history of the world… in our little city on the edge.

Vancouver must become a 21st Century Renaissance City.  The “Gateway to the Pacific” is gone with the passage of steam ships… we are now in the computer internet information era.  Everything is instant – within hours… minutes… seconds.  We know what is happening around the world.    Vancouverites can live here and work all around the world.

We must NOT be afraid of doing something new or borrowing from a different culture, nor to place an idea within a different context.  Creative synthesis takes what already exists and applies it to different scenarios – new and exciting.

This is the simple beauty of Gung Haggis Fat Choy.  How would a Robbie Burns Day be celebrated by Chinese-Canadians?  How would a Chinese New Year be celebrated by Scottish-Canadians?

What if…  Canadians had both Chinese and Scottish ancestry?  What if we celebrated both Robbie Burns Day and Chinese New Year on the same day… with the same families?

This is the future of Vancouver.  We are already acknowledged as the Canadian city with the most intercultural marriages.  

We are all one family.

I see a day for Vancouver when every family will have a member whose ancestry: paid the Chinese head tax; was an indentured Scottish labourer after the Highland clearings; was a French-Canadian settler; is First Nations; left Iran after the Shah was deposed; was in the Japanese-Canadian internment camps during WW2; or fished in the Maritimes; or worked oil fields in Alberta; and is addicted to dragon boat racing.

We MUST know our history to build our future.  How did we come to be here?  Who built and shaped this city?

People told us it was impossible, when we embarked on our campaign to save author Joy Kogawa’s childhood home from demolition.  But in our success we helped to build a corner stone foundation for our future Vancouver.  It gave Vancouver its first literary landmark for a Canadian writer.  It gave Vancouver a landmark from a dark period of its history when Canadians, born of Japanese ancestry were rounded up and sent off to internment camps in the mountains, and their property was confiscated… for no reason other than fear.  

Kogawa House can link history, literature, the arts, social-criticism, heritage, and multiculturalism all together.  By building understandings for our cultural history, through the arts, business, and even recreation sports like dragon boat racing, we can give value to our history… and to our future.

We need to educate and mentor our future leaders.  Our city, our societies and our education must embrace the continued diversity of our cultures. We must build inter-disciplinary social-cultural philosophical infrastructures throughout business, society, arts, politics, academia, sports and recreation.  There is no separation between business and art, between sports and history, between academia and recreation.  All is related, and everything is possible.  This is my Vancouver.

Todd Wong

 

Joy Kogawa's dream statement to be posted soon.

 

 

The Historic Joy Kogawa House Society is now incorporated with the BC Registry of Societies, which means we’re now a legal entity that can carry forward the purposes of the society:

 

Purposes

            The purposes of the Society shall be:

 

1.                  To operate and preserve the former Joy Kogawa family home at 1450 West 64th Avenue in Vancouver as a heritage and cultural centre and as a site of healing and reconciliation.

2.                  To establish in the former Joy Kogawa family home a centre for writers in which they can reflect on issues of conscience and reconciliation and write about their own personal experiences or the experiences of others, past or present.

3.                  To promote and negotiate the raising of funds for the pursuit of the Society’s purposes.

4.                  To encourage in the former Joy Kogawa family home educational programming along themes of social justice and social history, and to provide docent services for such programming.

5.                  To advocate on behalf of the continuing operation of the house in the public interest consistent with the above purposes.

 

Ryukoku students visit Kogawa House in July 2007

Ryukoku Summer Students Visit Kogawa House 

 

A group of 19 enthusiastic Japanese high school students and their teachers visited historic Joy Kogawa House early on the morning of Thursday, July 26, 2007. Members of the group attend school in various parts of Japan and came together in Vancouver to participate in Ryukoku Sogo Gakuen, a three-week educational program out of Steveston Buddhist Temple that promotes religious, cultural, and international understanding. The Ryukoku Summer English program has been in operation every summer for the past five years.

 

This year, an important aspect of the curriculum was to create some understanding and appreciation of the Japanese experience in British Columbia. As part of their preparation for their visit to Canada, students were required to read Joy Kogawa’s story of the internment, Naomi’s Road, as well as do some research about the author. The culmination of their learning was the exciting tour of the author’s childhood home during their visit to Vancouver.

 

Tamsin Baker, regional manager of The Land Conservancy of BC’s Lower Mainland office, was present at the house to welcome the group. Tamsin showed the students photos of the house during various times in the past and explained the history of the house and plans for its future. The highlight of the morning came when Joy herself arrived at the house, accompanied by David Kogawa and their son, Gordon. Her arrival was a completely unexpected surprise. The students and teachers were absolutely thrilled to meet Joy in person and gave her a very enthusiastic welcome. Everyone wanted to have a picture taken with Joy.

 

The Ryukoku School wishes to thank Joy Kogawa, David Kogawa, and Tamsin Baker for taking the time to make their visit to the house very meaningful and for helping to create wonderful memories for the students to take back to Japan.

 

—Posted on behalf of Joan Young

Cherry Blossoms at Kogawa House

I drove past the front of the house... everything looks nice, except the white picket fence has fallen down. 

I drove around the back of the house... and saw a most beautiful sight.  The cherry tree was in full bloom.

It is like the tree (and the house) knows it has a new life.  It is an old tree but heavy and full with blossoms.
Beautiful... I know if Joy saw the tree with its blossoms, there would be tears of happiness in her eyes.