Canada’s oldest Buddhist temple celebrates milestone
Canada’s first Buddhist temple, founded by 14 Japanese immigrants in Vancouver a mere 18 years after the city was incorporated, marked its 115th anniversary over the weekend.
The Vancouver Buddhist Temple celebrated the milestone Sunday with a ceremony in its current home on the corner of Jackson Avenue and Powell Street, the heart of what was once a thriving Japantown neighbourhood.
Around 200 people of all ages attended Sunday’s 115th anniversary service in the temple’s hondo, or shrine room, including visiting representatives from temples in Toronto, Seattle and Calgary. After the ceremony, attendees enjoyed a lunch including sunomono salad, tuna sashimi and shogayaki, sliced pork with onions in ginger sauce.
The day was a festive occasion, but while speakers addressed the crowd about the Vancouver Buddhist Temple’s history, more than one raised a chapter that was devastating for both the temple and the broader community: what one speaker referred to as “the shadow of the war.”
In 1942, with Canada and its allies at war with Japan, the Canadian government detained and dispossessed most people of Japanese descent living in B.C., supposedly in the interest of “national security.”
Sitting in the quiet temple after Sunday’s ceremony, Mary Kawamoto, 92, shared memories of roller-skating down Powell Street as a 14-year-old in 1941, when the friendly, vibrant neighbourhood was filled with restaurants, cafes and shops.
The following year, Kawamoto’s family had to leave Vancouver, and when they finally returned to Powell Street in 1950, she said, the neighbourhood was unrecognizable. The street upon which she had roller-skated as a teen felt unsafe eight years later.
“It was definitely not Japantown anymore,” she said. “When I came back, I was scared to walk down the street.”
Through the 1950s, more Japanese families began to return to Vancouver, and some reopened businesses on Powell Street. A few institutions were revived, including the Vancouver Buddhist Temple. But the neighbourhood would never return to what it was before the war.
Sherri Kajiwara, director-curator of the Nikkei National Museum dedicated to Japanese Canadian history, said the stories of the past can hold lessons for the present.
Canadian society hasn’t entirely left behind the kind of racism that Japanese people endured in Canada not only during internment, but in the decades before the Second World War, Kajiwara said recently.
“The lessons learned are not lessons relegated to history,” she said. “They are very, very much appropriate to today.”
Still, despite the uglier elements still present in Canadian society, Kajiwara struck a somewhat optimistic tone for the future, saying: “In Canada, I think the potential opportunity to be better does exist here. And that’s really the challenge that all of us face: how do we do that?”
Kawamoto said the 115th anniversary was “very meaningful” for her.
“I’m so proud that they started something like this for us, in those days,” Kawamoto said. “And to carry on, and 115 years later, we’re still here.”