At the City of Vancouver Book Award ceremony held this past October during the Vancouver Writers’ Festival, I presented a poem, entitled “Gift,” that I wrote to commemorate a very special donation of 1000 cherry trees by the Vancouver family of Bunjiro and Kimi Uyeda to the Park Board in 1935 in advance of the city’s golden jubilee. The Uyeda family were well-established local business owners and philanthropists, owning and running a fabric store on Dunsmuir Street downtown. According to the book, The First 100 Years by Park Board historian R. Mike Steele, these donated cherry trees were not planted until 1942 because of labour shortages and financial constraints experienced during the Depression.
Three months before the trees were planted, however, the family was forcibly relocated, interned and dispossessed. The trees were even referred to as “Chinese” cherry trees because of the racism at that time. 22,000 Japanese Canadians were incarcerated during World War II, removed from the west coast and prevented from returning for years after the war ended. (The racism was so severe that interned Japanese Canadian children were barred by the Board from using the New Brighton Pool in July of that year despite a heat wave.)
This donation of cherry trees was mentioned in Nina Shoroplova’s wonderful book, A Legacy of Trees. Nina did some investigating and found what we believe to be the four remaining trees from the donation in Stanley Park near the causeway. Unlike most of the cherry trees in the city now, these ‘Somei-yoshino’ trees were not grafted, but have grown from their own roots. This type of cherry tree has a longer life span than others, of around 80 years or so. (Nina has informed me that there is also one more very old ‘Somei-yoshino’ near the Pooh Corner Daycare by Lost Lagoon which might be one of the donated trees.)
After being forcibly relocated to Kaslo, the Uyeda family moved to Montreal after the war. One of the Uyeda family’s granddaughters, acclaimed composer, Leslie Uyeda, moved from Montreal to Vancouver to live and work. In 2012, she accepted degrees on behalf of her two aunts, Mariko Uyeda and Lily Yuriko Uyeda, at a special ceremony at UBC to recognize and honour Japanese Canadian students whose education was disrupted in 1942 when they were exiled from the BC Coast. In her oral history interview for Landscapes of Injustice, she talked about how she only learned much later of her grandparents’ donation, the loss of their Dunbar home, her two aunts being pulled out of UBC as students, and the family’s life in Kaslo. Until I reached out to her, she hadn’t known that any of her grandparents’ donated trees might still be alive.
After reading the poem during a Jane’s Walk in Stanley Park this summer organized by local poet, Kevin Spenst, I decided to commission the printing of a limited edition poetry broadsheet. Given the significant age of the trees and their limited lifespan, I was concerned that these trees might not be around much longer. Printmaker and artist Soyeon Kim manually typeset the poem and made a limited edition of 20 prints at New Leaf Editions on Granville Island, overseen by master printer Peter Braune. The poetry broadsheets feature a woodblock print carved by Soyeon on cherry wood that depicts the four remaining donated trees.
I presented a broadsheet (beautifully framed by Soyeon) to Leslie Uyeda immediately following the book award ceremony. Broadsheets were later given to the Nikkei National Museum and Cultural Centre, Historic Joy Kogawa House, City Hall, the Museum of Vancouver, the VPL (for the 9th floor Poet’s Corner area), Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies (ACAM) at UBC, the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival, and the Legacies of Injustice project at UVIC. The photo below was taken at City Hall in February 2025 with Leslie Uyeda, the composer and granddaughter of Kimi and Bunjiro Uyeda (on the left), and printer Soyeon Kim of New Leaf Editions (on the right).
On the subject of Japanese Canadian internment, two poetry videos were made for the City Poems Project based on Joy Kogawa’s poem, “What do I remember of the evacuation.” (You can see brief excerpts of those poetry videos at the 0:16-0:24 second mark of this compilation of trailers compiled by curator Alger Ji-Liang for the Mount Pleasant Community Arts Screen, or watch the full versions by Emily Carr University student team here and by an SFU student team here on the VPL YouTube Playlist 2023.)