Created and performed by Japanese Canadian theatre artists, Julie Tamiko Manning and Matt Miwa, The Tashme Project: The Living Archivesis an embodiment of Nisei character, language, spirit and story. This piece is the artists’ love letter back to their community.

 Julie Tamiko Manning is an award-winning Montreal actor and theatre creator. Her first play Mixie and the Halfbreeds(with Adrienne Wong), is a play about mixed identity in multiple universes. It was recently produced by fuGEN, Toronto’s Asian-Canadian theatre company and is on the list 49 Plays by Women of Colour. She is working on her third play called Mizushōbai(commissioned by Tableau D’Hôte Theatre) about Kiyoko Tanaka-Goto, a Japanese picture bride turned “underground” business woman in 1930’s British Columbia. Julie is currently an acting mentor with Black Theatre Workshop’s Artists Mentorship Program.

Matt Miwa, a graduate from the University of Ottawa’s theatre program was most recently featured in Evolution Theatre’s production of Little Martyrs. Other credits include Swiss Cheese in the NAC English Theatre production of Mother Courageand the Stranger in Théâtre de l’île’s production of La soif de l’or. Besides theatre work, Matt is also a short-narrative video maker and a performance artist. Matt is currently participating in the Ottawa Fringe’s underdevelopmentprogram, writing and directly his play, “Bold Woman, Love!”  Matt has proudly served on the board of the Ottawa Japanese Community Association for the past five years. 

The Tashme Project: The Living Archives is a one-act verbatim theatre piece that traces the history and common experience of the Nisei through childhood, WWII internment and post-war resettlement east of the Rockies. Nisei (2nd generation) is a Japanese term for a person born in the Americas whose parents were immigrants from Japan.

As a general rule, stories of internment have not been passed down and remain largely untold in Japanese Canadian families. The Tashme Project involved extensive outreach to the community to develop a verbatim theatre work, “when we sat down in formal interview with our elders, we were asking for and hearing these stories for the first time; our life-long curiosities were finally being satisfied and the murky picture of our families’ past – our legacy – was finally being fleshed out. The Nisei themselves were ALL reluctant at first, but what was promised to be half hour interviews almost always extended to two-hour sessions.” The stories collected are touching, often humorous and continue to inspire a great pride and admiration for the Nisei elders.

The Nisei, now in their 70’s and 80’s, were children at the time of internment and their stories of adventure and play are presented in sharp relief to the more common internment narratives of hardship and injustice. Made up of 25 interwoven interviews with Nisei from Toronto, Hamilton, Kingston, Montreal and Vancouver, the piece moves from voice to voice, story to story with fluidity and with a purposeful and constructed gracefulness.

We are honoured to bring this work to the stage at Prismatic 2019 and invite you to experience the words and lives of the Nisei.