This post introduces Jane Komori’s recently published Radical History Review article, “‘I Look Nature’: Japanese Canadian Rock Gardens and the Memorialization of British Columbia’s Carceral Landscapes.”
In the summer of 2018, I was working on a small organic farm in Saitama, near Tokyo, Japan. I was studying how farmers in Japan understood their relationship to the land and environment, because I wanted to know whether those ideas had been retained and adapted by Japanese immigrants as they interacted with very different ecologies in places like western Canada. On one of my days off, I took a train to Chichibu to visit the Chinsekikan museum run by Hayama Yoshiko. The museum displays Yoshiko’s father’s massive collection of jimbutsu seki (人物石), or “people stones,” which are arranged on shelf after shelf in an aging two-story house. When Yoshiko generously opened the house for me, she explained who her father was. She said that after her father was given a rock that resembled a face, it appeared in his dreams and exhorted him to collect more; and so he took frequent walks along the nearby river and the enormous quarry in the mountains above the town in search of them. She encouraged me to see the shapes in the rocks that her father did, pointing out some of her favorites – a turtle, Jesus Christ, the distraught face from Edvard Munch’s The Scream.
The museum thrilled me, and it made me deeply homesick. I missed my grandparents – both nisei, or second generation Japanese Canadians – who had their own massive collection of rocks at their house on Secwépemc Territory in Kamloops, British Columbia. I hadn’t ever been that interested in their sprawling rock garden, but at Chinsekikan, I told Yoshiko that my grandfather would have had a lot in common with her father. In reply, she asked me whether Nikkei, or Japanese diasporic people, are interested in jimbutsuseki, too.
These were precisely the kinds of questions I was trying to track in the realm of agriculture: what ideas about nature, the environment, and the non-human does the Nikkei community have? Where are these ideas continuous with those in Japan, and where do they depart? Have they been modified in the context of the local environment? Have they shifted in response to the political and social contexts of immigration, as well as other important histories – of mass incarceration during the Second World War, of settler colonialism?
While still in Saitama, I tracked down an episode of Weird Homes, a Canadian daytime television show that I vaguely remembered my grandparents appearing on when I was a child. It was surprising to watch again – they were so lively, and had so much to say about the rocks that I had taken for granted. In the episode, my grandparents shared all kinds of ideas – about nature, about the relationship between the human and the non-human, about animacy, and about history. I was captivated. And, even as my broader research agenda pivoted away from the questions that were shaping my early graduate research in Saitama in 2018, I continued to work on the project about the rock gardens.
My grandfather, Art Komori, and his rock garden, featured on the “Fantasy Gardens” episode of Weird Homes in 1998. “Fantasy Gardens.” Written and directed by Arthur Black, Eva Wunderman, Moyra Rodger, and P. J. Reece, Homes II Productions Inc. and Yaletown Entertainment Group.
In my article, I compare my grandparents’ rock garden with other rock gardens constructed by Japanese Canadians before, during, and after World War II mass incarceration. In my research, I found that the experience of mass incarceration was deeply tied to the environments and landscapes in which incarceration occured. On the one hand, the state sited internment camps in remote, mountainous valleys because they were easily guarded and nearly impossible to escape from. On the other hand, many incarcerated Japanese Canadians formed strong attachments to the environments they were confined to. Contextualizing the rock gardens within the region’s “carceral natures,” I focus on the environmental and social politics of Japanese Canadian rock gardens. I seek to understand how these gardens respond to histories of immigration, mass incarceration, and dispossession while also expressing a particular vision of nature.
“I seek to understand how these gardens respond to histories of immigration, mass incarceration, and dispossession while also expressing a particular vision of nature.”
This vision of nature is a uniquely diasporic one that shuttles between Canadian settler colonial ideas – about nature as pristine, untouched, without history – and Japanese perspectives and conventions embedded in the aesthetics and design principles of rock gardens. My aim is to critique the colonial elements contained in this conception of “nature,” while highlighting other aspects of the rock gardens that suggest a politics of environmental justice and anticolonial solidarity. Over all, I try to foreground the words and perspectives of the rock gardeners and collectors who, I argue, can provide inspiration as we struggle with our histories and reimagine the intersection of society, politics, and the environment for our future.
Jane Komori
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