Ten Thousand Things
Multicultural Webfinds, by Jean Miyake Downey

"Ten Thousand Things" is a Buddhist expression representing the dynamic interconnection and simultaneous unity and diversity of everything in the universe.

Healing Japanese Canadian Diasporan History – Multicultural Noh play The Gull

in late spring’s drenching sea-mist we return at last
to fish the grounds our father knew, this wild spray –

We are Nikkei fishermen heading up the coast from Steveston. Five years
after the war ended, eight years after we were exiled from this coast where
we were born, we have finally been allowed back to fish. We brothers are
fishing for a Steveston cannery, although we no longer have our father’s
boat. Our parents died in the mountains where we were interned after
everything we had was seized and sold. Now we have come back. On a
rented boat we are heading up the coast for the Skeena run.

– Daphne Marlatt, "The Gull"

The Gull is Canadian poet Daphne Marlatt's resonant Noh ghost drama about two Japanese Canadian fishermen brothers in 1950.

Waki and Wakitsure had been forcibly relocated from their home on Canada's Pacific coast to a World War II internment camp in 1942. They were not allowed to return until four years after the war ended. By then, their parents had died. Following the structure of many traditional Noh plays, the brothers journey to a specific place, their home in the small fishing village of Steveston. Traveling up the coast, they meet a creature, half-woman and half-bird, representing the spirit of their mother. Fearing the antagonistic reception they will find on the west coast, she pleads with them to return to their ancestral home in Wakayama-ken.

Canada's first Noh play, The Gull, a bilingual production created by Pangaea Arts, a multicultural theater based in Vancouver, premiered May 10.

This was not a new subject for Marlatt who had been repeatedly drawn to the tight emotional knot that has been a part of Steveston's psychological landscape since the forced relocations began. This story has been with her for thirty-five years, beginning as a long poem first written for her evocative 1974 poem-series, Steveston, a collaborative work with photographer Robert Minden . The poet notes that the metamorphosis from her poem to a Noh play happened naturally because poetry and Noh share both lyricism and psychological depth.

The conception for this play began with Heidi Specht, Pangaea Arts director, who approached Noh master Richard Emmert, creative director of Theatre Nohgaku, based in Tokyo, and Marlatt about a collaboration based on Steveston. A work in progress for a few years, involving travel back and forth across the Pacific, the play features Noh master Akira Matsui , Emmert's long-time colleague, professional Japanese Noh musicians, and Canadian actors.

Within the text's interstices, The Gull is a collaboration with the Japanese Canadian community. Marlatt cast the creation of this play out like a fisherman's net, interweaving a Steveston fisherman's ghost story and the poetry of Joy Kogawa, Roy Miki, Gerry Shikatani and the late Roy Kiyooka into the lines.

Ancient Buddhist influences, the spiritual core of all traditional Noh plays, are also at play in this drama. Marlatt, who was born in Australia, spent her early childhood in Penang, Malaysia. Raised in part by a devoutly Buddhist Thai nanny, she remembers, "It's only in recent years that I've realized that my own interest in and practice of Buddhism had its seed with her."

Traditional Noh allowed for the expression and catharsis of deep yearnings for liberation and release from deep worldly emotional attachments. Emotional complexes, created through overpowering fear, anger and grief, as well as the healing of these complexes, are central to many Noh plays. Ghosts who refused to leave until they were heard by the living symbolize unresolved emotional conflicts that continue after death. In The Gull, Marlatt created characters who express the collective memories of loss experienced by interned Japanese Canadians and still-lingering memories of concern felt by Japanese people who worried about their loved ones across the ocean during those years.

Denial and minimizing the extent of what happened kept this racist chapter of Canada's history hidden. This is not the face of multiculturalism that the Canadian government has projected to the rest of the world.

In recent decades, members of the Japanese Canadian community began the expression and healing of emotions generated by the tremendous harshness of their experience -- through literature, the arts, and political activism, including demanding and receiving some reparations. These processes of expression and healing are continuing and moving into the next generation.
Internment trauma not affected not only Japanese Canadians and their families in Japan, but also vicariously affected non-Japanese Canadians who loved their Japanese neighbors and friends. Although some non-Japanese Canadians protested the violations they witnessed, they were powerless to change their government's actions until a critical mass of protests built momentum in response to the call for mass deportations of Japanese Canadian citizens to Japan. These compassionate witnesses also need healing.

The Gull is a powerful expression of historical fear, shame, and grief that still haunts Canada's Pacific coast and reaches back into Japanese Canadian diasporan family connections in Japan. This collaboration is also a powerful expression of continued yearnings for liberation from the emotional weight of a painful past. The concentrated energies of exquisite Noh music and dance combined with the incantatory chant of this reverberating story seek to help release repressed layers of emotions that reach deeply into Pacific Coast's psychological landscape, and, simultaneously, support the authentic communal embrace of all of Canada's multicultural past and present.

Marlatt answered a few questions about her play recently, with such illuminating and textured responses, I am sharing them:

Speaking about your poem-series "Steveston,' you recalled, 'There was something in Steveston which drew us, over and over again, and which our work attempted to enunciate - something under the backwater  quiet, the river hum of comings and goings, the traffic of  work, that was 'shouting' at us to tell it.' When I read this, I was seized with a feeling that there is still something shouting at you that is being voiced through The Gull. Are the energies in your poems still shouting out for more attention?   Were there many ghost stories told to you in Steveston?

What was 'shouting' at us in Steveston?  There was the place and its history which drew me from the first time I visited Steveston and walked through the last cannery camp which had been recently abandoned by its occupants – there was such a tangible sense of people's lives, the fragility of their lives on the north bank of the Fraser River, a big river rushing out to sea. 

And, of course, the fragility of people's lives in the face of crushing historical events like World War II.  The internment of Japanese Canadian families, the seizure and wholesale auctioning of their property at bargain prices (property like boats, homes, cars that had been very hard-earned). And their forced relocation to hostile environments (the hostility of racism & war panic in the general Canadian population), not to mention the federal government's attempt to force people "home" to Japan ("repatriation," when the majority of Japanese Canadians, at that point, had been born here & saw Canada as home).

All of that bit of dirty national history was never talked about when I was in school in the '50s learning Canadian history.  So that was an eye-opening result of doing further research in Steveston through the oral history project and Maya Koizumi's extensive interviews with members of that original Steveston fishing community who had moved back to Steveston in the years after the war.    At that point (in the early 70s when we did this work), what had happened to the JC community was not discussed within the community. The sansei- initiated movement for redress didn't begin until later in the decade when the government released its wartime documents -- so perhaps that was part of what was 'shouting' at us to be voiced and heard then.

However, that wasn't all of it. 

I think now, looking back, that our Steveston work was a profoundly spiritual as well as politicizing event for me.  

What fascinated me about the place was the deep sense of impermanence in the estuary and the fragility of human life that first hit me when I walked through Star Camp. Steveston's early history was a history of fire and flood.  As we continued going down there, walking the streets and docks, watching people at work and talking to them in their homes, another equally strong recognition took root: how interconnected these lives were with the river, the island (the village is on an island dyked off from the sea), the estuary as a whole, the sea itself.  At that point, you could still find the remains of what had been a cannery boomtown. The old canneries, net sheds and pilings lining the riverbank were remains of small financial empires collapsed or eaten up by bigger ones.  So, there was a strong sense of the cycles of tides & seasons wheeling through human economic-historical cycles.  Each life with its individual calamities and exploits connected with other lives including the lives of the salmon, cod, shrimp, ducks that fed that life, and all of it turning through cycles of change.

My writing is fairly improvisational. In a sense, when I start out to write a poem I am fishing with language for something that is wordless and gradually assumes a shape in the net of verbal sound & play as I write.  I may have some idea of the subject area (the spot where I set my net or cast my "line") but not of what is actually going to surface there.

I think I am am talking about this not so much in terms of spirits as of energies pulsing through the place.  My sense of ghosts has to do with the residual energy of lives lived in a certain location –  but that's also quite close to the concept of ghost Noh in which a travelling priest comes to a place that has some story attached to it and then encounters the ghost of the person whose story this is.

Yes, I occasionally heard about ghosts in Steveston and that always interested me, perhaps because I came from a colonial culture in Penang where ghost stories were told.  But also because what we call history contains many ghosts, both told and untold.

Is Steveston still a predominantly Japanese-Canadian community?  Did many return to Japan?

Steveston has changed a lot in the intervening years.  It lost its separate postal address and became part of the larger area of Richmond, a suburb of Vancouver. canning there came to an end in the 1990s and the largest cannery sold its huge site to developers. Now dozens of condominiums stand there and elsewhere in the village.  Fishing has been severely curtailed by dwindling salmon stocks and although there is still a very small fleet of fishboats. Steveston has become largely a tourist version of what it once was. 

There is still an active Japanese-Canadian community which maintains a strong cultural presence but it is no longer a dominant part of the new population.  One of the Nisei fishermen we interviewed who became our guide in Steveston, had been imprisoned in Ontario for protesting during the war.  He did take his family to Japan but returned to Steveston a few years later.
As you can see, it wasn't so much a matter of "return" to Japan for many Japanese-Canadians -- the more accurate word would be deportation.  In 1946, the federal government tried to force some 10,000 people to "repatriate" but huge public protest stopped that plan.  Still, almost 4,000 people were deported. 

And, it was not until 1949 that Japanese Canadians were allowed to move back to British Columbia.  Only a small number of fishermen returned that year and although they encountered racist attitudes on the waterfront and elsewhere, they persisted.  In 1950, a much larger number returned. 

I don't know how many families found their way back to Steveston over the years, but it was only a small percentage of those who had once lived there.

I actually think the Noh format is the perfect vehicle for expressing this contemporary narrative which echoes ancient Buddhist  themes of emotional attachment and the yearning for release and liberation.

I agree.

How was this project conceived? 

First of all, Heidi Specht of Pangaea Arts conceived the idea of a Noh play about the Steveston Japanese-Canadian community and approached Joy Kogawa about writing it. 

Joy referred her to me.  Heidi's phone call came out of the blue and posed a huge challenge that was also an immediate delight because I had for a long time been interested in Noh – ever since taking an undergraduate class in Japanese literature in translation from Dr. Shuichi Kato who happened to be teaching at University of British Columbia in the early '60s [interviewed in KJ #48]. 
 
Recently I had gone to Japan on a small reading tour and I had seen Noh live in Tokyo, so my interest had been re-kindled.  Heidi's call was one of those remarkably synchronistic events.  Having herself studied with Rick Emmert, she had already approached him about composing the music so when Rick came out to Vancouver to give a brief workshop in Noh chant and movement, I took it and felt immediately that he would be a wonderful person to work with. 

My sense is that this project is a form of collective healing for your community (and the world), by expressing the layers of emotions that have yet to be expressed fully about what happened to Japanese-Canadians in Canada. Do you share this view as a poet or have any comment?

I would like to think that my and our initial work in Steveston contributed to this process of healing.  And, I do think that The Gull sounds some of the deeper emotional layers of that trauma. 
But these have been sounded already in work by Japanese Canadian writers, both known voices, and little known voices.  Healing from violent assault on one's civil rights is, I would think, a very long and complicated process.  As an outsider, I play only a small role in it. 

Still, over the intervening years, this country has seen redress finally achieved for the Japanese Canadian community in 1988, thanks to incredibly difficult organizing within that community. 
We have also seen the strong emergence of literary voices writing about life in Canada from their perspective in both poetry and fiction, writers like Joy Kogawa, Roy Kiyooka, Roy Miki, Kerry Sakamoto, Hiromi Goto and the environmental activist David Suzuki who has published two volumes of his autobiography.

I am very drawn to your interweavings of the poetry of Joy Kogawa and other Japanese-Canadian poets throughout the play (which is really a long poem of yours). Would you let me know what you chose to include, and why.

Traditional Noh plays are highly allusive and often weave quotes from the classical poetic repertoire or from other Noh plays into their texts. 

That's one of the features of Noh that I find very contemporary and I wanted to keep it alive in my play.  However, I realized that quoting from those sources would mean nothing to a Western audience so I chose instead to weave in some lines from poems by the contemporary Canadian poets Roy Miki, Joy Kogawa, and Roy Kiyooka. 

I chose lines with very strong images and, as in Noh, I used them to carry certain thematic motifs of the play. 

I've also used the image of Miyako birds from Sumidagawa.  This line will be delivered in Japanese, one of Akira Matsui's lines.  His performance in Japanese in what is essentially a bilingual production helps to illustrate the generational conflict between the Issei mother and her Nisei sons in the play.  

How was the run and how did the audience respond in Vancouver?

It was great run! We had full houses the first two nights and almost full thereafter.

The last performance was on Mother's Day, which seemed very fitting, not only given the script but also because Akira's 84-year old mother flew all the way from Wakayama to see him perform (along with his older sister). And Lenard's mother (one of our producers) was also in the audience.

We had lots of enthusiastic response from the audience but what pleased me most was the response I heard from a number of women whose fathers were fishermen from Steveston, whose grandparents came from Mio, who loved the details in the play like place-names on the fishing route and names of some of the internment camps. There was a feeling that this was their story, very familiar, and they loved the unfamiliarity of Noh that carried it. I think it made their story feel new to them. So yes, people were moved.

The hayashi were terrific. Akira's dance of grief, anger and confusion in Act II was very powerful. It added so much to the text.

I went to every performance except one matinee and if I write a second play, I will have a much better idea of how dance interacts with the script.

Philip's set added West Coast elements so nicely to the Noh stage and Margaret's costumes were stunning, so it really was a successful blend of Canadian & traditional Japanese elements.

Do you have plans for the next phase of the project?  Will it be brought to Japan?

Wakayama City has expressed interest in having The Gull performed there and Pangaea Arts would love to do that.  However, it's a very expensive production to tour so that depends on whether they can raise the necessary funds to take it to Japan.

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