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"

Tamio Wakayama

(1941-2018) Japanese Canadian photojournalist and activist

Defining "Nikkei"

Okay. Nikkei is really a Japanese term. Quite simply, it means a person of another country who is of Japanese descent. What it means to me in a more fuller sense is that I am bi-cultural. And that a part of me as a Nisei is hooked into Japan in a very odd kind of way, but firmly rooted in this country. Because one result of going to Japan was to realize that, for better or worse, I am a Canadian. My soul is rooted in the landscape of this country. And we talked before of land, and how much it influences who you are and what you've become and what you're a part of. So that the scale of land in Japan, which is very narrow, just small. Because it's a teeny little island, wore on me. Because I needed an expansive landscape of Canada. So if, for no other reason, I am Canadian in that sense.

But still, there's a part of me that is hooked into Japan through my parents. And probably, in a good way. Because the Japan they represent is the old Meiji era. And there are values, I think valuable values. Worthy values. That they inculcated in me, and that was a part of their life and their moral structure. You know, gaman. Ganbarru. Kizukau. Always aware of other people's feelings. All these things. To be humble, industrious. You know, simple values, but they are important. And values that are maybe not so strong now in Japan.

aesthetics identity metaphysics psychology theory of knowledge values

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)