Even though World War II was over in 1945, it was not until 1949 that all the restrictions were lifted and Japanese Canadians were regranted their freedom to live wherever they chose to in Canada. According to Ohama’s research, as soon as traveling to Japan was allowed, Asayo made several trips back to Japan to find her two daughters. To help the audience envisage the Japan Asayo visited during the postwar years, a vibrant Japanese melody
accompanies the sequence starting from a moving train, then quickly shifting to an image of a woman enjoying the mountain view from a carriage window. The audience as such were invited to see from Asayo’s point of view: images of a street performance by amputated war survivors are succeeded by blast destroyed buildings, a billboard providing information about the coming Floral Festival, high school students in uniforms, and finally the busy and lively streets. This thirty-second-long sequence inexplicitly suggests the stunning pace of postwar Japan, which underwent a reconstruction from a site of destruction and poverty to a place of prosperity.
Asayo did not get any valid information about her missing daughters during these postwar trips. Yet, even though Asayo finally stopped traveling back to Japan, she kept her connections with it. In 1992, Asayo was introduced to Prince and Princess Takamado during the Japanese Royal family’s visit to Canada. After her absence for her 100th birthday party in 1998, Asayo finally told her Canadian family about the two children she left behind in Japan.
This revelation propelled Ohama to change the focus of her original plan of making a documentary for Asayo’s Canadian life to exploring Asayo’s Japanese experiences.
Ultimately, Ohama’s documentary not only makes Asayo’s secret tie with Japan known to the public, but also bridges her Japanese past to her Canadian life when the Canadian family members planned her reunion with Chieko, one of the missing daughters, in the rebuilt garden in Canada on her 103th birthday.
Certainly, Obaachan’s Garden provides a perfect picture of Asayo’s life story and offers glimpses of Japanese national history when revealing her intimate connections with Japan.
Yet, what should not be neglected is that this documentary also accounts for Asayo’s Canadian family’s changing relationship with their ancestral country. Due to Asayo’s
ambivalent attitude towards her Japanese past, many details of Asayo’s Japanese experiences,
as demonstrated above, were not told by herself, but disclosed through the Canadian family’s investigation and their trip to Japan. In the following, I shift my attention from Asayo to her offspring. I argue that when urging Asayo to retell her Japanese past, Asayo’s Canadian family members are also pushed to foster their relationship with Japan.
Ohama has made efforts to offer a “true” vision of Asayo’s life story. In the director’s diary posed on her official website, “LINDA OHAMA- Award Winning Director & Producer,”
she states that “I began to develop Obachan’s Garden to tell the story of 100 years of life, through her [Asayo’s] eyes.” Also, according to Amsden’s “The Power of Memory,” Ohama has claimed that “I tried to be true to my grandmother’s feelings and the way she saw her world through all those years” (31). Ohama also mentions Asayo’s reaction after watching Obaachan’s Garden. “She [Asayo] looked at me, motioned around her heart and said: ‘That is my real story” (qtd. in Louis B. Hobson, “Garden of Love”). Undeniably, Ohama has
endeavored to reconstruct her grandmother’s life in Japan. For instance, when she discerned the omissions of Asayo’s memories, she hired a researcher in Japan, and planned a trip to Onomichi to find out the facts of Asayo’s life in Japan. Also, in her director’s dairy, she claims that in order to genuinely present the Japan in different periods, “I put out a ‘wish list’
search via emails, for ‘archival footage from Onomichi as close to my grandmother’s time there as possible.’”
By claiming the “truth” value of Obaachan’s Garden, Ohama foregrounds the Canadian family’s intention to “claim Japan” as part of their family history. This intention for the Canadian family members to “relive” Asayo’s Japanese experiences is mostly obviously seen through the fact that in all reenactments in the documentary, young Obaachan is played by Natsuko Ohama, who, like the director, is a granddaughter of Asayo. By reenacting several significant events in Asayo’s life, Natsuko Ohama absorbed Asayo’s memories into her own experiences. On a similar note, the last scene of Obaachan’s Garden also shows the Canadian
family’s attempt to reclaim their cultural heritage. In the dramatization, young Obaachan and Caitlin are shown together with the former happily teaching Caitlin how to play the violin. As a group of Japanese lined up and walked through the field, young Obaachan chose to follow them, hence leaving the violin for Caitlin. The film ends with the image that Caitlin played her great grandmother’s violin, symbolizing the passing on of Asayo’s Japanese heritage to her Canadian offspring.
The documentary as such records the process of how the Canadian-born family rebuilt their connection with Japan. Because of Asayo’s silence about her Japanese past over the seventy years, the Canadian family’s connection with Japan was rather tenuous before the making of this documentary. In the film, Ohama confessed that “all our lives we her family here [sic] in Canada never imagined other children, another family or a life could exist for her.
This was never part of our story. For us, Obaachan’s life really begins in 1924 when she left Japan.” Asayo’s revelation of her hidden past hence became a turning point for her Canadian family. Natsuko, one of Asayo’s Canadian-born daughters described her feeling when hearing the existence of her half-sisters: “This is where Alice goes down the rabbit hole. All of a sudden people are appearing that you didn’t know existed before. The ocean parts and life become more complicated [sic].” Endeavoring to verify Asayo’s account of her missing daughters and fill in the gaps of Asayo’s memories, the three generations of the Canadian family, including Chizuko, Ohama and Caitlin, decided to visit Asayo’s hometown, Onomichi, for the first time.
The family’s visit to Japan functioned as a self-journey, significant to the whole family.
It was not only a trip to find their relatives left in Japan, but a trip to discover their own root.
As Caitlin said, “[c]oming to Japan is very special for me and my whole family, because when we get back, we can tell them about the things that we see here.” It would be an exaggeration if I state that the Canadian family members regain their intimate connections
with Japan simply through the visit, yet the film presents how the Canadian family
reconstructs their understanding about Japan through the trip. According to Caitlin, “[w]hen I first time heard about great grandma’s secret, having relatives in the Imperial Palace, I
thought that not many people have relatives close to the Emperor, and in Japan the Emperor is considered a god so maybe I was a goddess. I guess it is somewhat like a fairytale.”
Despite the fact that these are Caitlin’s naïve words, they suggest that the Japanese Canadian family knew little about their ancestral country before the family trip to Japan, and the way they considered their relationship with Japan was rather imaginative. However, the Canadian family members constructed actual connections with Japan during the trip. They visited Asayo’s parents’ grave and her family home “that dates back several centuries.” This trip to Asayo’s hometown reinforced the Canadian family’s identification with Asayo’s Japanese past. Black-and-white images of Japan in old times such as Japanese daily activities and Taiko drumming at the festivals are interlaced with what the Canadian family saw during their trip. Caitlin comments her feeling of the trip: “I was really enjoying the feeling that like I was back in time. I was great grandma’s age maybe about four years before she was going to leave for Canada.”
Apparently, the Canadian family in their trip won access not only to the contemporary Japan but also to the old Japan in which Asayo had been lived. During the trip, Ohama’s family eventually gathered the useful information about Asayo’s two missing daughters. Even though Fumiko, Asoyo’s oldest daughter, passed away four years ago, Ohama still visited her family, recorded Fumiko’s daughter’s recitation of the poem written for Fumiko, and included Fumiko’s photographs in the documentary. While Fumiko’s daughter appreciated Ohama’s retelling of Asayo’s Japanese past, which complemented Fumiko’s life stories and thus made Fumiko no longer a person “who had no past,” Fumiko’s family history in return also
becomes an integral component of Ohama’s family history. Additionally, as the Canadian
family eventually found Asayo’s another daughter, Chieko, and planned her reunion with Asayo in Canada, Chieko symbolically becomes a member of Asayo’s Japanese Canadian family. From this perspective, Ohama’s family is largely expanded. Their family history is no longer a story beginning in 1924 in Canada, but started much earlier in Japan.
In effect, the trip to Onomichi commenced the Canadian family’s close connections with Japan. For instance, Ohama immeasurably strengthened her relationship with Japan after this family trip. In her director’s dairy of Obaachan’s Garden, Ohama affirms the importance of this trip to Japan and the filmmaking of Obaachan’s Garden: “The research and filming also took me to Japan and my beloved Onomichi for the first time. Strangely, that town has always felt so familiar to my soul, something that I cannot ever explain even today. I can only
personally experience this feeling and be inspired to create.” After Obaachan’s Garden, Ohama directs A Sense of Onomichi (2007), in which she poetically explores the spirit of her grandmother’s hometown and praises how this town has captured the imagination of great artists. Also, according to Sue Frugson, Ohama embarked a 15-city tour in Japan to promote Obaachan’s Garden (53). As her official site records, during the past decade, she was frequently invited to several groups, schools, and universities in Japan to present a series of lectures on Japanese Canadian history or her experiences as a Sansei Canadian film director.
She even made great efforts to promote cultural and educational ties between Japan and Canada. She has created a series of free workshops on art, food, and storytelling for youths in Japan. After hearing the news about the Great East Japan earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011, she immediately held a charity concert in the Vancouver Japanese Canadian community. She and her daughters also organized a quilt project, in which young Canadians wrote a cloth letter, expressing their cares to the Japanese kids in the devastated areas. The making of Obaachan’s Garden indeed changes the Canadian family’s relationship with Japan and enables them to establish strong affiliation with their ancestral country.
In conclusion, Obaachan’s Garden invites us to view Japanese picture brides’
experiences from a transnational perspective. As Asayo and her Canadian offspring collaborated in reconstructing and representing Asayo’s Japanese memories, their
relationships with Japan are enacted on the screen. The images of Japan, offering glimpses of Japan’s national history, allow us to approach Asayo’s concealed Japanese experiences and help us know her from a new perspective. Through searching and revealing Asayo’s Japanese past, Asayo’s Canadian family also build their relationship with Japan from the ground up and “claim Japan” as part of their Japanese Canadian history. By retelling a hundred-year life story of a Japanese picture bride, Obaachan’s Garden indeed displays the intertwined
connections between personal, family, ethnic as well as national histories.