Interviews

1. Japanese Canadian Concentration Camps

2. Postwar Deportation Attempts

3. Resettling in Chatham

4. Father's Sacrifice

5. Joining the Civil Rights Movement

6. Chauffeuring the SNCC Leadership

7. Navigating the movement as an Asian

8. Photographing the movement

9. Re-examining Identity

10. Defining "Nikkei"

Wakayama,Tamio

(1941-2018) Japanese Canadian photojournalist and activist

Re-examining Identity

Now it's really ironic, I find it ironic. Here I am, product of the '60s. If nothing else, it was an era that brought everything into question. Everything was up for grabs. Every political, social, sexual truth that you thought existed, we'll check it out and see if it holds water.

Oddly enough, I never used that critical factor in examining my own history. Like, what did it mean that I had to grow up as an enemy alien? What did it mean that my people were locked up? Where was that at? Have I studied that? Have I analyzed that? Have I brought it toward public consciousness? No. No. I didn't. And part of that was the alienation was so deep, from my Japanese-ness, that I rejected my own community. And there was this kind of odd tension, because I rejected on one hand, but on the other hand it was a source, especially of my childhood, of community, of family and home.

Because slowly, we started to build our infrastructure back together. I can remember, like there was these wonderful picnics that we used to have as a community and we used to go out to this Boy Scout camp that we somehow managed to rent. It was isolated on the shores of Lake Erie and I loved it. I loved picnics and I'd go up there and fish all day and eat this wonderful bento food. But one year, for some reason, we couldn't rent it any more. So we had to go to a public park in Rondo. In Lake Erie. So we're out there and then we're out there, but we're not isolated any more. We got white folks all around us, doing their picnic thing. In the mean time, I'm really self conscious about eating onigiri and teriyaki and all this stuff. And ohashi. It wasn't comfortable any more.

communities culture identity

Date: February 9, 2011

Location: California, US

Interviewer: Patricia Wakida, John Esaki

Contributed by: Watase Media Arts Center, Japanese American National Museum

Interviewee Bio

Tamio Wakayama was born in New Westminster, British Columbia in 1941 shortly before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. His family was among the 22,000 Japanese Canadian Nikkei who were declared to be Enemy Aliens, deprived of their property and confined in concentration camps by the Canadian government. The Wakayamas were sent to the Tashme camp in a remote part of British Columbia for the duration of World War II. At the War’s end, forced to choose between deportation to Japan or relocation east of the Rockies, the Wakayama family remained in Canada, eventually settling in a poor section of Chatham. Tamio’s neighborhood friends were black children descended from slaves who had escaped by way of the Underground Railway.

In 1963, Tamio left university studies and journeyed South to join the American Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi, spending two years as a staff member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and beginning his photographic documentation of his experiences. Tamio’s work has been featured internationally at such prestigious venues as the Smithsonian Institution and his photographs have appeared in numerous TV and film documentaries, magazines, books, book covers and catalogues. Tamio has authored two major books and is currently working on a retrospective exhibit and a memoir.

He passed away on March 2018 at age 76. (June 2018)