Matt Miwa and Julie Tamiko Manning wrote and star in The Tashme Project: The Living Archives.
- Title: The Tashme Project: The Living Archives
- Written and performed by: Julie Tamiko Manning and Matt Miwa
- Genre: Documentary theatre
- Director: Mike Payette
- Company: Tashme Productions
- Venue: Factory Theatre
- City: Toronto
- Year: Runs to Feb. 10
The Tashme Project: The Living Archives is a new documentary play about life during, and the legacy of, Japanese-Canadian internment in the Second World War.
The show is created and performed by Julie Tamiko Manning and Matt Miwa, who are, respectively, Sansei and Yonsei (third- and fourth-generation) Japanese-Canadians based in Montreal and Ottawa.
These two actors interviewed dozens of Nisei (second-generation) Japanese-Canadians, the last living link to the internment camps. The people they spoke with were sent to the camps as children or teens and are now senior citizens whose stories will soon disappear.
Excerpts from the interviews the performers conducted have been arranged to provide a chronological picture of what it was like to be rounded up and moved to the camps as “enemy aliens” shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, to live under internment, and then to be dispersed across Canada afterward (or, in the case of one woman, to move to Japan and back again).
Tamiko Manning and Miwa play all of the family, friends of family and strangers they interviewed. Under the direction of Mike Payette, they try to convey the individual personalities and quirks, the humour and the varying levels of reluctance with which these elders spoke about this painful past.
One interviewee tells of seeing her mother cry for the first and only time in her life when her father and brother were taken away. Another speaks of having to burn a toy she had gotten for Christmas in a bonfire; it wouldn’t fit in the single suitcase each person was permitted to bring to the camp.
What links many of the interviewees is that they were sent to Tashme, one of the eight internment camps established in the interior of British Columbia by the government of Canada.
It’s remembered as a place of hardship, where water would freeze in the sinks in the uninsulated shacks in the winter and children drowned in one of the two rivers that ran through it in the summer.
But Tashme is also remembered as a place of growing up – and the interviews describe bullies and friendships, outdoor games and weddings, and a strong sense of community in the face of adversity. “Tashme was beautiful,” says one, describing the physical splendour of a place now known as Sunshine Valley.
Tamiko Manning and Miwa are very different performers: She really sinks into each Japanese-Canadian she portrays, while Miwa’s quick sketches of character are more physical and stylized and stay on the surface.
The shortness of the scenes, however, makes it hard to really connect with any of the characters we meet in the play; they come and go. Black-and-white pictures are projected on the hanging rectangular slabs of Plexiglas that make up the backdrop of James Lavoie’s simple set, but it’s hard to always figure out who or what they are before they disappear. It’s as if these stories are vanishing in front of our eyes.
When she’s playing herself, Tamiko Manning really seems to be speaking from the heart as she describes a trip she took with an ex from the West Coast town her ancestors were born in and all along the route to Tashme. Miwa doesn’t reveal as much, or feel as much, about his family history. When Tamiko Manning describes the pain of imagining family heirlooms lost long ago, Miwa tells her, “I’ve never felt that."
As the two write in a program note, the displacement, incarceration and deportation of Japanese-Canadians was meant to erase their community from Canada – and, in some ways, was a “success." Tamiko Manning and Miwa see an ongoing loss of culture, language and identity – and The Tashme Project is an attempt to fight against that.
The one-act show they’ve created has the virtue of saying what it is, right in its title – a “project,” a “living archive.” It feels like one of those oral-history magazine articles on stage. If it doesn’t quite satisfy as a play, it doesn’t pretend to be one.
I, nevertheless, would have liked something more to anchor the enterprise – perhaps to know more about how being “half-Japanese,” as the two creators describe themselves early on, contributes to or complicates or conflicts with their concerns about the loss of Japanese-Canadian culture.
J. Kelly Nestruck