Katie May
LETHBRIDGE HERALD
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Four years exploring interracial marriages among Japanese Canadians led Jeff Chiba Stearns to many a mention of Lethbridge.
The half Japanese-Canadian filmmaker from Kelowna, B.C. was told again and again while researching his animated and live action documentary that he should visit the city.
"Lethbridge kept coming up," Chiba Stearns said, after arriving in the city for the first time earlier this week.
"There is a large Japanese-Canadian population here."
His feature-length film "One Big Hapa Family" looks at what it means to be Japanese-Canadian today, inspired by his own family. The title plays on the Hawaiian term "hapa" for an individual of mixed race. At a 2006 family reunion, Chiba Stearns' mental light bulb lit. He realized, seeing his family all together, that no one after his grandparents' generation had married another of Japanese descent.
And his family is not alone. Japanese Canadians are the most likely of other ethnic groups to marry a different race - and almost all of them do. The National Association of Japanese Canadians reports that 95 per cent of Japanese Canadians intermarry with a different race.
"After the war, there was a lot of racism. It didn't matter where you were in Canada - there was a lot of racism because Japan was and had been the enemy. So because of that . . . a lot of Japanese Canadians felt that, 'OK, we need to become more Canadian. We need to show them that, yes, we are Canadian. We're not Japanese,'" he said. "There wasn't as much pressure for families to pressure their children to marry Japanese."
The movie, which premiered at the 2010 Calgary International Film Festival and has since been screened across North America and broadcast on CBC and PBS stations in the U.S., picking up awards along the way, was finally shown in Lethbridge this week at the Galt Museum. Chiba Stearns also spoke at the University of Lethbridge about the film and his other work. He hopes the film will "open people's eyes up" to how current generations of Japanese Canadians are adjusting to mixed marriages and multi-ethnic backgrounds - considering mixed-race individuals are one of the fastest-growing demographics in Canada.
"Are we past multiculturalism? I kind of think we are. I think Canada has become the sort of country that of course we're diverse, of course we're blended, of course we're letting people in from other countries and I don't think that we need to cater too much to that," he said. "I'm not going to advocate that this is the future race of humanity, but in a sense it's reality. If we're going to have a very blended society, we're going to have blending. What kind of saddens me is when you have these purists out there who say, 'no, the Chinese have to stay Chinese and the South Asians have to stay South Asian and the whites have to stay white,' because that's not how I see what Canada embraces."
The film has garnered positive feedback and discussion from many Japanese Canadian families across the country who see a bit of themselves in his work - exactly the response he'd hoped for.
"I think a lot of people can learn a lot from how the Japanese Canadians have adapted even though it was under some very unfortunate circumstances."
Chiba Stearns' next project, a feature film titled "Mixed Match," will explore the challenges mixed race individuals face when seeking bone marrow transplants.