I remember always being encouraged by my family to participate in KJCA activities, such as odori, taiko, and language classes. My grandparents were delighted that I was able to do a high school exchange in Osaka. Overall, I spent my childhood very culturally connected to the Kamloops Nikkei community. It’s difficult to trace the legacy...Continue reading
Author: Nicola Tabata
Incarceration, Dispersal, and Dispossession
In my early teens, I took a tour through incarceration campsites. It was the first time I was able to contextualize my grandparents’ wartime lives; during the time when they should’ve been planning their futures, they were instead forced to exist in limbo for years. I don’t think it’ll ever be possible for me to...Continue reading
COVID-19 and Racism
The pandemic and subsequent rise in anti-Asian sentiment is just the most obvious way in which racism still permeating our society has revealed itself in the past few years. I think there’s an undeniable commonality with the WWII incarceration. Although COVID-19 is a different beast than a global war, “Asianness” continues to be the way...Continue reading
Intermarriage
While all my family members from my grandparents’ generation, as far as I am aware, married within the Japanese Canadian community, almost all members of my father’s generation intermarried with non-Japanese Canadians. I followed suit and also married someone outside the community. I think this high rate of intermarriage is undeniably a partial product of...Continue reading
Biography, Self-Identity
Name: Nicola Akiko Tabata Pronouns: She/her Birthplace: New Westminster, Canada DOB: in 1994 Life Events: Graduated with BA Philosophy and Sociology 2018, Taking MA International Relations/Political Science (2019-present); married 2019 Identify as Japanese Canadian Whenever I am asked the question “What are you?” I, like many people of colour, have learned that the asker is...Continue reading
Intergenerational Trauma
I can’t pinpoint any specific ways I feel intergenerational trauma has presented itself in my family; however, I think that’s probably a sign that the concept of intergenerational trauma is still often not discussed or taken seriously in the present day. Maybe if I had grown up with intergenerational trauma in my conceptual toolkit, I...Continue reading
Family History
Every time I think about my family history, I come to realise just how much I’m missing. What I do know comes largely from questions put to my grandmother when I was an adult, and so much of my grandfather’s life remains a mystery. My grandmother was born in Vancouver, where her parents owned a...Continue reading