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Grace Eiko Thomson was interned with her family during the Second World War, moved to Winnipeg and embarked on a remarkable career as a curator, historian and activist
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Grace Eiko Thomson’s life was turned upside down in 1942, when her Japanese Canadian family was forced to leave Vancouver for an internment camp at the Minto mine in the B.C. interior.
After the Second World War, Japanese Canadians still weren’t allowed to return to the coast, so the family moved to Manitoba. But she eventually returned to Vancouver, and became one of the leading figures in Japanese Canadian culture, as a curator, historian, teacher, writer, mentor and activist.
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Thomson died on July 11 in Winnipeg, where she had moved last September to be close to her family. She was 90 years old.
“She passed away at home,” said her son Michael. “She was diagnosed about three months ago with pancreatic cancer. She was in hospital for about a month, but we got things set up with palliative care so she could return to her apartment.”
Thomson was born Eiko Nishikihama in Steveston Fisherman’s hospital on Oct. 15, 1933, and grew up at 510 Alexander St., when it was a thriving Japanese neighbourhood residents called Paueru Gai (for Powell Street).
“It was an incredibly vibrant place in the sense that all the infrastructure was there,” Thomson said in 2014. “It was a ghetto, (but) it was there for people to support each other, find work for each other, people like my parents. My mother particularly, who had no English. It was a place where she didn’t need to worry about that, because there was everything there.”
This all changed when Japan attacked Pearl Harbour and Hong Kong on Dec. 7-8, 1941, and 22,000 Japanese Canadians were forced to leave the West Coast.
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She took the name Grace to avoid discrimination, and the family settled in Winnipeg in 1950. She married Alaistair Macdonald Thomson and the couple had two boys.
![Grace Eiko Thomson in 2022](https://i0.wp.com/smartcdn.gprod.postmedia.digital/vancouversun/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/png-0527n-internmentcamp-027-1.jpg?resize=700%2C516&ssl=1)
According to a biography by Derek Lam published by the Nikkei Centre in Burnaby, she went to university as a mature student in the late 1960s. She got a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Manitoba and studied Asian art history at the University of B.C. before becoming an assistant director and curator at the University of Manitoba’s School of Art Gallery. Later, she moved to Prince Albert, Sask., where she taught art history at the University of Saskatchewan.
Her career as a curator thrived. She worked with Inuit artists in the north and Indigenous artists on the Prairies, before returning to B.C. in 1995 as curator of the Burnaby Art Gallery.
In 2000, she became the founding executive director and curator of the Japanese Canadian National Museum at the Nikkei Centre in Burnaby.
She would curate several ground-breaking exhibitions, including Re-shaping Memory, Owning History: Through the Lens of Japanese Canadian Redress; Shashin: Japanese Canadian Studio Photographers to 1942; and Levelling the Playing Field: The Legacy of Vancouver Asahi Baseball Team.
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She also became politically active. From 2005 to 2010 Grace was president of the National Association of Japanese Canadians. Her brother-in-law, Art Miki, was also president, and led the successful fight to get redress and a formal apology from the federal government for the treatment of Japanese Canadians during the war.
In 2022, she published a memoir of her mother and herself, Chiru Sakura: Falling Cherry Blossoms, which was shortlisted for the City of Vancouver Book Award.
“She was a remarkable person, larger than life,” said Sherri Kajiwara, director and curator at the Nikkei Centre. “She was a force to be reckoned with. To many in the Japanese Canadian community she was a mentor, she was a friend, an adviser. She was obviously a respected elder, but also one of the girls.”
She is survived by her sister Keiko, sons Michael and David, five grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. A memorial to her will be held Sept. 3 in Winnipeg.
jmackie@postmedia.com
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