Author Description

Sixty stunning duotone photographs by Wakayama, documenting the history of the Powell Street Festival, are interwoven here with the voices of some eighty people involved with the Festival - people of Japanese descent and many other ethnic backgrounds.<br><br>The Festival is an annual Vancouver event celebrating the history and culture of Japanese people in Canada. In the early years of the century, Vancouver's Little Tokyo was a thriving neighbourhood, home to the Nikkei (Japanese Canadian) community. Then, in the 1940s, the community was interned, dispossessed and dîspersed, and Little Tokyo gave way to Vancouver's urban poor.<br><br>Japanese Canadians began to revive their Vancouver community after 1949, and in 1977 a group of volunteers organized the Powell Street Festival, a celebration of the history and culture of the Japanese in Canada. Today the annual Festival is still a strong focus for the community - a powerful symbol of cultural self-determination.