TY - JOUR
AU - Jane Komori
AB - Abstract This article brings together family history and personal memory with analysis of several Japanese Canadian rock gardens. The article argues that Japanese Canadians have related themselves to the environments of the World War II incarceration camps and the places in which they were forcibly resettled afterward through the collection and arrangement of rocks for both formal memorials and as vernacular expressive forms. The article reads the rock gardens as a diasporic articulation of nature that adapts both the aesthetic principles of Japanese rock gardens and dominant Canadian conceptions of the land and the environment. Indeed, Japanese Canadian memorial rock gardens, which connect viewers to the “nature” that played a key role in both the experience and administration of mass incarceration, contradict settler colonialist representations of the landscape and environment as ahistorical, empty, and pure. With their insistence on the Canadian status of the memorials, the gardeners reveal the Japanese Canadian community’s conflicted attachment to Canadian nationalism—a quandary that will only become more pressing as efforts to memorialize mass incarceration proliferate following the 2022 British Columbia Redress announcement.
BT - Radical History Review
DA - 05/2025
DO - 10.1215/01636545-11609975
DP - DOI.org (Crossref)
IS - 152
LA - en
N2 - Abstract This article brings together family history and personal memory with analysis of several Japanese Canadian rock gardens. The article argues that Japanese Canadians have related themselves to the environments of the World War II incarceration camps and the places in which they were forcibly resettled afterward through the collection and arrangement of rocks for both formal memorials and as vernacular expressive forms. The article reads the rock gardens as a diasporic articulation of nature that adapts both the aesthetic principles of Japanese rock gardens and dominant Canadian conceptions of the land and the environment. Indeed, Japanese Canadian memorial rock gardens, which connect viewers to the “nature” that played a key role in both the experience and administration of mass incarceration, contradict settler colonialist representations of the landscape and environment as ahistorical, empty, and pure. With their insistence on the Canadian status of the memorials, the gardeners reveal the Japanese Canadian community’s conflicted attachment to Canadian nationalism—a quandary that will only become more pressing as efforts to memorialize mass incarceration proliferate following the 2022 British Columbia Redress announcement.
PY - 2025
SN - 0163-6545, 1534-1453
SP - 178
EP - 194
T2 - Radical History Review
TI - “I Look Nature”
UR - https://read.dukeupress.edu/radical-history-review/article/2025/152/178/400126/I-Look-Nature-Japanese-Canadian-Rock-Gardens-and
VL - 2025
Y2 - 2026/07/17/12:59:48
ER -