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

Resettling in Chatham

But it was tough, at the beginning. And I can remember overhearing a conversation of Jack Nishizaki, and he was an older Nisei gentleman at that point. He came from a large family and he was talking with his brothers - and now Jack is a black belt Judoist. They were talking, whispering. He said, “I was attacked by a bunch of guys that worked. They called me a dirty Jap, go home, and they tried to do a number. So I did a--” And described this move, and managed to disarm this violent attack and lay them out.

Well, I mean, shit. I had my own battles, going to and from school with much less skill and even lesser glory. It was difficult. Even little things, like I remember my father was able to buy a house. He was one of the first people to buy a house, and I grew up in the black ghetto of Chatham, the poor part of town. Chatham is rather unique in having such a thing as a poor black community because Chatham was once the terminal of the Underground Railroad. So growing up, I played with my Nisei friends and the black kids in the neighborhoods who were the descendants of runaway slaves.

discrimination interpersonal relations postwar World War II

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)