Kan Azuma and the Japanese Canadian Diaspora

In 1967, new Canadian immigration rules set aside prejudicial ranking by race, reversing long-standing patterns of immigration from Europe to Asia. Four years later, Canada adopted an official policy of multiculturalism. A number of Japanese-born photographers came to Canada at that time, importing values, formal strategies, and aesthetic notions, Kan Azuma among them. This chapter examines the reception of Azuma’s work, as it was shaped by a multiculturalist nationalist rhetoric. Such rhetoric sometimes probed, but ultimately failed to grasp, the complex web of ideas mobilized by the Japanese diaspora – in Azuma’s case, Symbolist poetics and phenomenology.