"They're beautiful and they're white": Cherry Blossoms, Nikkei Aesthetics, and Settler Colonial Memory in Paueru Gai


Angela May, McMaster University

In so-called Vancouver, just south of the Burrard Inlet, is the neighbourhood once deemed “Canada’s poorest postal code” but better known today as the Downtown Eastside; along the northernmost stretch of the Downtown Eastside is Paueru Gai (“Powell Street/Town”), the largest historic home of Japanese Canadians; and at the centre of Paueru Gai, in Oppenheimer Park, is a commemoration of cherry trees: the Legacy Sakura. Planted in 1977 by the issei (first generation members of the Japanese diaspora) who had returned to Paueru Gai beginning in the 1950s, after the state’s attempted banishment of Japanese Canadians from British Columbia’s west coast (i.e., in the 1940s), the Legacy Sakura have been widely celebrated in the Japanese Canadian community and beyond for their beauty and commemorative value. However, less attention has been paid to the ways in which these cherry trees may nevertheless be wrapped up in historic and ongoing efforts to ‘clean up’ (read: gentrify) the Downtown Eastside. In this paper, I explore how the Legacy Sakura risk affirming (rather than upending) the logics of beauty, whiteness, and indeed cleanliness which not only led in the first place to the forced removal of Japanese Canadians, but which have, in recent decades, been mobilized against the low-income (and disproportionately Indigenous) Downtown Eastside community. As a mixed gosei (fifth generation) Japanese Canadian, I call for a renewed commitment to the Legacy Sakura, one that digs deeper for the spirit of justice with which these trees were planted, toward a practice of accountability to not just our neighbours in the Downtown Eastside, but to disenfranchised, racialized, poor, and Indigenous people across settler colonial Canada. I begin by contextualizing the 1977 planting of the Legacy Sakura within two concurrent events: the renovation of Oppenheimer Park and the Japanese Canadian Centennial celebrations (which marked 100 years of Japanese Canadian settlement in so-called Canada). By doing so, I investigate how even as the Legacy Sakura remain important expressions of Japanese Canadian history and grassroots organizing, these cherry trees are threaded through with the logics and practices of settler colonialism. I then turn to local news media to reveal how these logics and practices surfaced in everyday public discourse throughout the latter decades of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. Analyzing how these cherry trees were portrayed by journalists, city officials, and even Japanese Canadians, I emphasize how the Legacy Sakura (and, to some extent, Japanese Canadians themselves) were cast as fundamentally distinct from—even as they remained a part of—the wider Downtown Eastside. Drawing on the work of feminist sociologist Sunera Thobani, I consider how such exceptional interpellations of the Legacy Sakura helped to constitute a sense of the Japanese Canadian subjectivity, one that configured Japanese Canadians as more proximal to whiteness than our neighbours in the Downtown Eastside. In the second half of this paper, I consider how the Legacy Sakura advance what I call nikkei  (Japanese diaspora) aesthetics and why that matters in the context of the present-day Downtown Eastside. First, using the image of the sakura (cherry blossom) as an example, I theorize nikkei aesthetics. A set of visual and cultural sensibilities shaped by the postwar period in both Japan (e.g., kawaii [cuteness] culture) and North America (e.g., multiculturalism in Canada), I explain how nikkei aesthetics are ultimately expressed, consumed, and articulated across the Asia-Pacific by nikkei people (such as Japanese Canadians), often in order to recuperate a sense of identity in response to wartime violence. Then, drawing on anthropologist Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney’s examination of the cherry blossom and reading the Legacy Sakura as one example of nikkei aesthetics, I suggest that these cherry trees are not merely innocent expressions of Japanese Canadian collective memory, but complicated instances of Japanese Canadian inheritance, dating back to Imperial Japan’s Meiji Era (1868-1912). Ultimately, in this paper, I investigate the durability of the past and its impacts on the present. Through the example of the Japanese Canadian community in the Downtown Eastside and the Legacy Sakura, I reveal not just the limits of rote identity politics and dominant collective memory, but the possibilities for decolonial solidarities in the present.

This paper will be presented at the following session: