Part 2 of Umami: Savouring Artistic Nikkei Identity officially opened on May 29, 2025, with a conversation featuring exhibiting artists and curator Sherri Shinobu Kajiwara. This exhibition, named “Umami” to reflect the rich and complex layers of flavour, delves into the richness of Nikkei artistic identity. It brings together a diverse range of talent, from emerging voices to established figures, including several Japanese Canadian Legacies Art fund awardees. Spanning traditional to contemporary art practices, the Umami exhibition shares the rich essence of our Japanese Canadian creative community. During the opening, the artists offered insights into their art. The exhibit runs until September 27, 2025, in the Karasawa Gallery. Admission by donation.
Yoshiko Hirano was represented by her son Robert Hirano
Yoshiko was born to Junsaku and Ria Maeda in 1920 here in Vancouver. During WWII as a nisei Canadian she was interned to interior BC, where she met and married Kichiro Hirano. Post war they eventually made it to Toronto where they raised five children. At the age of 60 she studied sumie painting for 6 years, and then began to paint prolifically for 30 plus years. In the early 2000 she moved to next door Robert Nimi Nikkei Home where she resided until 2023 where she passed at the age of 103. Over the years she gifted a lot of her art to family and friends. But after her passing the family decided to share her remarkable gift with others. Which is the purpose of this show.
Some of the paintings on display I discovered in the rims paper in portfolios she left behind. It’s a retrospective show. You’ll see some of her early works where she was trying to master control of her brushes. Then she progressed into self expression understanding composition, colour, and feeling. I was most impressed with her honest expression using minimal brush strokes to create some playful serene paintings, eventually verging on abstract.
Vivien Nishi
There are two animal sketches. I grew up on a potato farm. As a kid I’m obsessed with horses. I’m like “Dad, let’s get a horse!” And he’s like “No, no, no—there was a horse in Mission.” And I’m thinking. What the heck is Mission? Are you religious or something? And that’s how I found out that my grandparents were in Mission, BC and moved en masse to Southern Alberta.
My uncle had a predilection of German Shepard dogs. My dad told me the story when they left the homestead they had a German Shepard dog named King, and sadly they tied him up and left him behind when the RCMP escorted them to the train station. When I’m looking through the Landscape of Injustice files, there’s a dog listed there for five dollars. My dad said he wasn’t a very socialized animal so he probably ran free. The dog probably tried to bite the tenant farmers that came to harvest the crop, so he was destroyed.
Many farmers went to sugar beets because they were farmers. And I really feel the Japanese Canadians in them. 50s, 60s, 70s Japanese Canadians dominated the potato industry. It was a cash crop that could support a family, not like sugar beets. That industry is worth 1.3 billion dollars. I’ve only researched this in the last month but we know they worked so hard in Southern Alberta. Sugar beet work was terrible, but all that hard work, I’m so proud there’s so much industry there now. I toured the Potato Growers Association and heard wonderful stories about how the pioneers set that industry.
I have two series to show. One of them is called ‘Kochō and Me.’ Kocho is the name of my great grandmother. She was institutionalized at Essondale Hospital, which is later known as Riverview Hospital in Port Coquitlam. She was diagnosed with manic depression, which is an outdated term for bipolar disorder. I did a lot of work searching through archival records, I went to the BC Archives and went through her hospital records and found she was treated with something called Veronal which is a sedative. She was born in Japan, in Nara, and the legend is that she was trained as a geisha. This work is a depiction of the veronal bottle with illustrations of geisha sleeping around it. It’s kind of an idea or sedated beauty of performance.
Then it moves on to a piece called ‘Hydrotherapy Room,’ which I learnt that she was also treated with hydrotherapy which was this process of confining people to bath or spraying them with water for long periods of time. I just wanted to depict the interior of a hospital room with windows that she could escape to emotionally.
The last piece in the series is more about healing and my own journey of bipolar disorder. I called it ‘Dialectical Behaviour Therapy Room’ as a play on ‘Hydrotherapy Room’ because DBT is a more modern technique for working through symptoms of bipolar. My room with some comforts, like my background, like a pillow, just things that just make it a bit more comfortable. The ways that I’ve learnt how to heal with that background.
The other series is called ‘Family Jewellery’ inspired by my great grandfather. He was a jeweller in the Powell Street neighbourhood before 1942. It depicts one of his jewelry pieces that was passed down to me from my grandmother, a necklace that he made
The other one is a charcoal drawing of costume jewelry that my mother collected and had been passed down from my grandmother as well. What I imagined was maybe they were collecting these as a way to reclaim jewelry for themselves because a lot of it was lost.
Bryan Kobayakawa & Annie Sumi
Bryan Kobayakawa was in attendance to introduce their work.
The piece Annie and I created started as a commission from the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre in Toronto. And they commissioned us to write a series of songs for a conference in 2019. And then the pandemic happened and we took a break, and someone told us to talk to Mike Abe from Landscapes of Injustice. Mike shared a pile of documents about both of our families, and that became the bulk of the research for the song writing. In those files I found one about a sewing machine that had travelled from West Vancouver to Slocan where my family was interned. Immediately I realised the sewing machine that has been in my basement in my childhood. I used to shoot tennis balls at it, and it was a hockey net to me. To know it was something that had travelled with them before internment, through the camps and then beyond gave it this empowering and importance. This was at a time when preparing for concerts seemed like a crazy thing to do because we were all staying home alone. Somehow we got the idea of putting the songs in the sewing machine. We had written four songs, some tell family stories, some the searching we were doing, and a way to express something around our family history.
I’ve always been fascinated with music technology so I figured out a way to make the treadle on the sewing machine play back the music. We also collaborated with a shadow puppet duo in Vancouver called mind of snail. We gave them a checklist of items from the case files as well imagery that came to our minds from our family stories. With all these little analog animated shadow puppet videos they sent us, Annie edited those to be like a music video for each song.
Marlene Howell
My first painting is called ‘A Memory.’ And it’s dedicated to my grandmother. As a child I used to watch her cooking rice in a cast iron pot which I have kept. It was a ritual. After dinner she would soak the pot in cold water and scoop all the grains and eat it. I used to watch this with curiosity because we had so much rice. And then I asked her one day why she did that. In broken English she would say ‘no waste, no waste.’ I still have her original ochawan, which are depicted in the painting, and on the bottom of them it says ‘made in occupied Japan.’ The shamoji, I added a couple of grains of rice as a reminder to me of the grains of rice she used to eat from the pot.
The second painting is called ‘Sweet.’ It’s an origami of a cat. Also the Baton candy that we used to eat as a child. I didn’t like the candy but I liked the prizes.
The 3rd painting is called ‘Mourning Sky.’ I was inspired by old archival photographs of confiscated fishing boats tied together. Through the archival department I was able to find hundreds of billsales. You might even find one of your relatives’ billsales. There are magnifying glasses for a closer look.
The fourth painting is called ‘Resourceful.’ This reflects an old sewing machine and the background is a sack of Botan rice. As a child, I remember my grandmother, not throwing away the empty bags of rice, but washing them and making pillow cases. There’s a lot of memory – good ones.
Molly JF Caldwell was not able to attend and provided this statement to share at the event.
My obsession with textiles predates any coherent sense of self. Before desire had a name, there was the compulsion to stitch, pull, knot, loop. Sewing, knitting, crochet, weaving—each was a vocabulary I didn’t yet know, but craved fluency in. At ten, I got my first sewing machine for Christmas. I locked myself in my bedroom for hours, the TV always on, tuned to MuchMusic, the flicker of early-2000s R&B music videos playing like kinetic wallpaper.
After finishing my first garment, something split open inside me. It wasn’t just pride, it was recognition. The audacity of making something (a skirt) from nothing (an old towel, some loose thread). That you could intervene in the world like that. That transformation was not only possible, but inherent to making. That the “nothing” of a complicated girlhood could be refashioned into power.
There’s a colonial logic that frames textile conservation as preservation, an impulse to fix meaning in place. To treat cloth as static, fragile, and whole only when untouched. This logic ignores the radical capacity of textiles for transformation: threads into fabric, plants into pigment, garments into grief, memory, or magic. Does a textile cease to be its “authentic self” when removed from use, hung on a wall as an art object? And conversely, does an artwork become “just” a textile again when it returns to functional, embodied use?
My parents were married on August 19, 1980. My mother’s wedding dress remained boxed, untouched, until 2025. I chose to deconstruct it: unpicked the lace, harvested the beads and pearls, shredded the fabric into strips and wove them into something new. My grandparents married on February 17, 1951, after meeting in Southern Alberta, where they had been incarcerated and forced to labour on sugar beet farms. Incarceration meant the loss of homes, jobs, possessions, but perhaps the most profound loss was that of rituals, the quiet cultural inheritances that carry us across generations.
By weaving my mother’s dress, I don’t just transform it but alter the fabric of our family’s story. I make space for new traditions, ones that were lost or interrupted, but never fully gone.
