The Japanese immigrants who arrived in the North American West in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries included people with historical ties to Japan’s outcaste communities. Andrea Geiger examines the history of these and other Japanese immigrants in the United States and Canada and their encounters with two separate cultures of exclusion, one based in caste and the other in race.

Andrea Geiger’s book Subverting Exclusion: Transpacific Encounters with Race, Caste, and Borders, 1885-1928 will be available at the event.

Geiger reveals that the experiences of Japanese immigrants in North America were shaped in part by attitudes rooted in Japan’s formal status system, mibunsei, decades after it was formally abolished. In the North American West, however, the immigrants’ understanding of social status as caste-based collided with American and Canadian perceptions of status as primarily race-based. Geiger shows how the lingering influence of Japan’s strict status system affected immigrants’ perceptions and understandings of race in North America and informed their strategic responses to two increasingly complex systems of race-based exclusionary law and policy.

Andrea Geiger is assistant professor of history at Simon Fraser University.

REVIEWS of Andrea Geiger’s book Subverting Exclusion: Transpacific Encounters with Race, Caste, and Borders, 1885-1928

“Examining the tangled convergence between North American racial prejudice and the Japanese denigration of outcastes, this book is strikingly innovative and intensely thought-provoking. Andrea Geiger’s work sets a model of historical research and analysis practiced as an extraordinary—and courageous—art.”—Patty Limerick, author of The Legacy of Conquest

“This is a deeply researched, well written and also deeply felt book that will become an important text on Asian American history in North America. The author has a sensitive, knowing stance toward her material that is much superior to a lot of the literature in Asian American history.”—Bruce Cumings, University of Chicago

“Refusing historiographical silences and caricatures of homogeneity and stasis, Subverting Exclusion insists upon the diversity and movement of Japanese migrants in a trans-Pacific, transnational world. In the process, this superbly conceived study succeeds in rendering its subjects as emphatically human.”— Gary Y. Okihiro, author of Pineapple Culture: A History of the Tropical and Temperate Zones

“Elegantly written and deeply insightful, Geiger deftly combines an understanding of the law and racial formation and has offered a truly transnational history that blends Asian, Asian American, and broader issues of American immigration history.”—K. Scott Wong, Williams College

The Battle for Equality in War-Time Hawaii

Great Food line up announced

Contemporary Japanese food culture documentary
November 8, 7pm
* At the Vancity Theatre, 1181 Seymour St, Vancouver
75 min Documentary | Drama 2009 (Japan)
Japanese with English subtitles
Tickets $20 available online at Vancity Theatre and in person at the National Nikkei Museum & Heritage Centre.

DINNER TIME!!!
“eatrip” is a wonderful consideration of people and food. Try it! You’ll like this delectable morsel, this jovial dinner time, this lovely nibble at the link between people and food. To eat is indeed to live. Life is just an “eating trip” (eatrip).

People eat. That is how we survive. For humans, however, eating has become more than just sustenance and replenishment of nutrients. It has become an opportunity for bonding with others, for chatting about what we’ve been up to, and asking about our loved one’s days. The act of eating is also the act of interacting with nature. Meat, vegetables, fruit and grain are all living organisms that combine to sustain us. And if life is a journey, then surely eating is an excursion in itself. After all, is not life a series of dinner times? Are our lives not sequences of feeding, nurturing and growing?

eatrip is the directorial debut of food coordinator, creator and teacher, Yuri Nomura.
eatrip explores the interpersonal relationships that food nurtures. To eat is a universal experience and this documentary takes the audience on a journey throughout Japan looking at how life can be led optimally through the daily ritual of eating. From the Tsukiji fish market to an Okinawan farm, the film offers poignant interviews with intriguing personalities, a few of whom include: Nichiji Sakai, head monk of the Ikegami Honmonji temple; Kanji Takahashi, a distributor of Japanese soup stock (Bonito broth); Naoko Morioka, an Okinawan leading a self-sustainable lifestyle; So-oku Sen a tea ceremony master and descendant of famed Sen No Rikyu; and Yayako Uchida, a musician and writer who recites poems about food.
eatrip culminates with a passionate meal cooked by the director herself, for actor Tadanobu Asano and singer UA and a handful of other eclectic guests.

sponsors:

http://tokyogohan.com/english

Japanese martial arts groups in the Greater Vancouver area will get together for a charity demonstration meeting to support the affected people of the huge earthquake hit Japan on March 11. The event will start with a Taiko performance followed by various Japanese martial art demonstrations. This event was organized by some local martial artists who were inspired by active volunteers such as a Japanese Canadian film director, Linda Ohama who has been helping the people affected by the earthquake. Read more

Japanese Inspiration: Hiratsuka Un’ichi and the “Creative Prints” Movement

The Canadian National Vimy Memorial and the Japanese Canadian War Memorial: Landscapes of Trauma and Regeneration

Travelling Prints: Ukiyo-e, Sosaku Hanga, and the Inuit Print Practice