“I Look Nature”

Abstract This article brings together family history and personal memory with analysis of several Japanese Canadian rock gardens. The article argues that Japanese Canadians have related themselves to the environments of the World War II incarceration camps and the places in which they were forcibly resettled afterward through the collection and arrangement of rocks for both formal memorials and as vernacular expressive forms. The article reads the rock gardens as a diasporic articulation of nature that adapts both the aesthetic principles of Japanese rock gardens and dominant Canadian conceptions of the land and the environment. Indeed, Japanese Canadian memorial rock gardens, which connect viewers to the “nature” that played a key role in both the experience and administration of mass incarceration, contradict settler colonialist representations of the landscape and environment as ahistorical, empty, and pure. With their insistence on the Canadian status of the memorials, the gardeners reveal the Japanese Canadian community’s conflicted attachment to Canadian nationalism—a quandary that will only become more pressing as efforts to memorialize mass incarceration proliferate following the 2022 British Columbia Redress announcement.