Over the course of the past month or so in PLP, everyone has been getting ready for the winter exhibition, and this year our project was about apologizing and what an apology is. We studied the history of discrimination towards three different Asian groups in BC, and then we were each tasked in groups of three with making a memorial to remember one of those groups and what happened to them.

The driving question for the entire project was, “How can we keep an apology alive so the wrongs of the past are remembered—and not repeated—today?” My answer is that there are many different ways to keep an apology alive, but the most efficient and effective way would be a public memorial because it sparks interest in people who don’t know about the event and also serves as a place that people can go to, to remember.

The group that my group was assigned to create a memorial for was the Japanese and the Japanese Canadians. Each person in my group did an individual project and helped create the main memorial. I made a timeline about the history of discrimination in BC towards the Japanese and Japanese Canadians.The memorial we developed was a Japanese maple tree to represent the Japanese families and their family trees that were separated as a result of the internment camps. The tree had interlinked paper clip chains hanging from the branches, which were meant to show how the people were chained up in internment camps, and their relationship with Canada is still bound by those same chains. And lastly, the tree had paper boats that people could make and then stick to or around the tree; the boats represent the 1,200+ Japanese sailing boats that were taken and impounded and then sold to pay for the Japanese people’s internment. The boats on the tree represent that and also the other things that were taken and sold like houses, businesses, personal items, and cars. Here’s what the memorial ended up looking like. For our group’s food, I tried to make some traditional Japanese candy called Hanami dango, but I messed up the recipe, and the food ended up tasting pretty bad. The other groups had great concepts too; they both also had a really good memorial and definitely worked just as hard. Here are blog posts from people in the other two groups that worked on making memorials to the Japanese and Japanese Canadians:  In the shadows – Winter exhibition 2023) and (How We Apologize).

Overall, I think the exhibition went quite well, and I’m quite happy with how I did as an individual and with how my group did. To make it even better I think we could have put more effort into an interactive component, and I could have practiced making the food in advance. I also think we shouldn’t have had two out of our three individual projects be on iPads, as it made our table look a bit bland.

Thanks for reading; I hope you have a good day or evening.