‘A pioneering artist and activist’

Enemy Alien: Tamio Wakayama
by Paul Wong (ed.)

Vancouver: Figure 1 Publishing, 2025
$40  /  9781773272801

Reviewed by Philip Huynh

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The namesake of Enemy Alien is the photographer Tamio Wakayama, a pioneering artist and activist who chronicled, with urgent humanity, disparate peoples and moments in history, from the Freedom Movement in America’s Deep South to Vancouver’s Powell Street Festival. This expertly curated and well-composed book intends to rectify Wakayama’s relative obscurity. He is both the subject of Enemy Alien and, to a large extent, its author. It is a book of his photographs framed by essays from fellow artist Paul Wong and other pillars of the artistic community (Sirish Rao and Eva Respini, co-CEOs of the Vancouver Art Gallery), followed by an interview of Wakayama’s longtime partner Mayumi Takasaki. But at the heart of Enemy Alien is Wakayama’s own autobiography Soul on Rice, which gives context to the photographs as it narrates his journey from oppression towards self-definition.

Wakayama was born in 1941 in New Westminster. His parents, immigrants from Fukuoka, had found a modicum of prosperity operating a grocery store from their Fraser Valley home servicing the growing Nikkei (Japanese immigrant) community in Vancouver’s Little Tokyo. The Japanese attack at Pearl Harbour occurred only a few months after his birth, and soon the Nikkei were branded by the government as Enemy Aliens. He spent the rest of his infancy interned along with his family and community first in cattle stalls in Hastings Park, and later camps in the BC Interior.

Following the war, the Nikkei were scattered across the country to isolated communities. Wakayama’s family settled in the Lake Erie town of Chatham, once the northern terminus of the Underground Railroad. There he grew up with a tight-knit Nikkei community that was devout in preserving their culture, all within a world that spent its evenings watching John Wayne fighting the Japanese at the local cinema. Wakayama writes affectionately about the community’s meticulous preparation for Shogatsu (New Year) celebrations, pounding glutinous rice against a wooden round to make mochi, carving animals out of daikon and carrots to garnish the plates of osechi ryori. He came of age by joining the men wandering house to house to regale their hosts with jokes and song and enjoying the alcohol-laden hospitality.

It was in Chatham that Wakayama developed a keen and nuanced understanding of human dignity and the universal forces arrayed to suppress it, connecting his own sense as an “enemy alien” with the plight of other communities that were not, at the outset, his own. It was also in Chatham, surely, that he developed an almost liquid ability to move among the town’s disparate communities, whether Nikkei, white, or black. He would use these skills later in life as a photographer to access disparate communities in their moments of self-creation.

The moment of his own transformation came in the summer of 1963. He was home from university with his mother while working as a Libby’s crop tester, collecting peas and poisonous cabbage for the company’s lab. After watching on television the historic March on Washington, Wakayama packed a sleeping bag and drove south. He had no plan, just “the distant hope that perhaps, within this Black movement for freedom, I could locate the matrix of my own liberation.”

On a whim he drove down to Birmingham, Alabama, after hearing news of the bombing of a Baptist church. He entered the city into a fomenting rage, surrounded by a crowd of black people who rushed his Beetle. When they saw that he was not white, they gave him directions to lodgings at the YMCA. This was not the last time that he would be served by his outsider status.

He would soon join the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), led by John Lewis. There he found his calling as a photographer. In the Deep South, Wakayama was no longer seen as an enemy, but simply as alien to both sides of the Movement. His universal outsider status afforded him a veneer of neutrality which brought the guard down on all his photographic subjects. Consequently, his photographs reveal both white and black folks in moments of arresting candidness.

A vivid example is the photo of “Super Snick” which graces this book’s cover, the bare-chested black boy with a frayed cape tied around his neck preening cheerfully over his own sense of power. There is also the photo of two black sharecroppers, one grinning toothlessly at Wakayama while the other eyes him with stoic curiosity, resting her chin on a knuckle. Then there are the Mississippi white men in cowboy hats on a smoke break from intimidating sharecroppers registering to vote. One of them has turned his bashful, almost conspiratorial gaze to the camera as he slips his fingers beneath his belt buckles.

Wakayama’s photographs of the Deep South were taken in 1964. Afterwards, while the Movement was still gaining momentum, Wakayama returned to Canada where he joined the Student Union for Peace Action (SUPA) in Toronto. Back home his professional currency rose as he befriended prominent journalists, artists, and thinkers — along with being approached by adoring women who saw him as a true freedom fighter. He describes his own “imposter syndrome” and expresses a whiff of contempt for Canadian activism being practiced from a safe distance, without the constant spectre of violence that haunted the American South. Even so, his photos of activists keeping cold vigil on Parliament Hill and outside the US consulate in Toronto contain an urgency that belies his own belittling characterization.

Wakayama spent the rest of the 1960s wandering from one disparate project to another — photographing First Nations on reserves in Saskatchewan, the Doukhobors in Brilliant, B.C., and Fidel Castro during the 26 de julio celebrations. This is, in a sense, the journey of an artist struggling to redefine and continually transform himself. It’s a difficult journey, since he had appeared to find his calling early as a Movement photographer, where his gifts seemed perfectly suited to expressing intimately the tumult and mysteries of a particular time and place.

He traveled to Japan on a personal journey to connect with his roots. There he found himself perpetually alienated from family (particularly an estranged sister) that he had difficulty communicating with, and more generally with Japan’s “highly structured, hierarchical society.” His estrangement is reflected in the photographs which appear in this book, which are characterized more by impersonal seaside landscapes and the juxtaposition of the ancient within the urban (for example, a parked car beside a temple). People, when they are depicted, are looking away from the camera, or wearing sunglasses on a subway, or are glimpsed only faintly, reflected in shophouse windows.

As the social activism of the 1960s petered out, Wakayama’s photography took an experimental turn with staged and abstracted shots of the female form. He enlisted models who wandered through the rain forest wearing nothing but a mask, their limbs stretched out like tree branches, or who lay nude and faceless on a sand dune, the curves of their torsos melding with the undulations of sand. During this post-Movement phase he both indulged in an artifice which cut against his own “disdain of the notion of art for art’s sake,” and deprived himself of his true canvas — faces.

His true calling was in capturing human expressions unselfconsciously focused on meeting the moment, whether that moment was inherently historical or made momentous by Wakayama’s framing. In the last phase of his career, he found both a community cause and a return to his artistic métier in Vancouver’s Powell Street Festival, as one of its founders and also its chronicler. There is a strong affinity between his Powell Street and Movement photos in the way he captures the faces of his subjects in the throes of self-expression — whether it is the simultaneous pain and ecstasy of a taiko drummer or the composed attention of an odori dancer articulating a nuanced turn of her wrists. Wakayama’s gift was in capturing moments of sublimity when his subjects are immersed in their own creation, whether or not they are conscious of being photographed. With the Powell Street photos Wakayama was no longer an outsider to his subject. He returned full-circle to his original impulse in joining the Movement, which was to take part in “a revolution of the self.” He had now completed his revolution.

Oddly, my biggest issue with Enemy Alien is in ascertaining exactly what kind of book it is and how to read it. Calling it an illustrated autobiography would be unjust, given that the locus of Wakayama’s professional and maybe even personal identity is in the photos more so than the words. But then is this book a photographic survey that is, indirectly yet mainly, explained by Wakayama himself? As a wiser writer once said, you should never ask a bird to explain how it flies. The brief accompanying essay by Eva Respini insightfully contextualizes his art within the wider tradition of Movement and other photographers. We could have used more of this expertise throughout the book, with more analysis and context of individual photos as they are presented through the phases of his career. Instead, there is something unknowable about what Wakayama left us, both in his words and photos. Mayumi Takasaki’s interview hints at his slipperiness. When speaking about Soul on Rice, she says she did not read the whole thing. “I figured if he wanted me to read it, he would have given it to me to read.”

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Philip Huynh is a writer and lawyer. His collection of short stories, The Forbidden Purple City, was a finalist for the 2019 City of Vancouver Book Award. His stories have been published in many literary journals and in the Best Canadian Stories and The Journey Prize Stories. He lives in Richmond, British Columbia, with his wife and twin daughters.

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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