Harry Aoki: a Japanese Canadian legacy through music

by Carolyn Nakagawa

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Harry Hiro-o Aoki was the second child born to Sadayoshi and Masa Aoki in the small mining community of Cumberland, BC, in 1921. His parents were Tokyo-trained teachers, sent to Cumberland by the Japanese Ministry of Education. They ran a Japanese school built for them by the Japanese Canadian community there, who wanted “a proper Japanese language teacher from Japan” for their children. The Aokis were highly cultured: as Harry has said, “My parents were college graduates. My mother played the piano; my father played violin and read philosophy”.

Cumberland was highly segregated; in his early years, Harry was unaware of racism, sheltered within the Japanese community there. But this changed drastically when he began to attend public school: he started judo training at age five and eventually became a black belt, not out of interest in the martial art but for protection. “We had schoolyard rumbles. We really had to fight to go to school and to fight on our way back,” he said.
 

 
The Aokis moved to Vancouver in 1934, where Harry attended Britannia Secondary School. After graduating from high school, Harry worked with a lumber company while his older brother Ted went to the University of British Columbia. It was going to be Harry’s turn to go to university when Pearl Harbour was attacked and the Aokis were forced to relocate away from the coast along with the rest of the Japanese Canadian community. While the rest of the family moved to Iron Springs, Alberta to work on a sugar beet farm, Harry went to Blind Bay, near Salmon Arm, to work in a sawmill, later explaining “I didn’t like the idea of being kicked out, so when I went east I bought my own ticket”.

Harry had learned the piano and violin from his mother growing up as well as his father and his neighbour, but when he left Vancouver, he was unable to take his violin with him. Instead, he put a harmonica in his pocket, which “kept [him] from going crazy” in the logging camp where “there was nothing else to do”. An injury in a logging accident before the war ended saved him from being sent east under “selective service”, a program that relocated Japanese Canadian men to fill labour shortages in logging camps on Crown timber land in Ontario; instead, he joined his family on a sugar beet farm in Iron Springs, which is where he first taught himself to ski. He also took a correspondence course in music with the University of Chicago, and was even offered a scholarship for his good marks in the class, but he was unable to accept it due to US immigration laws at the time which had strict immigrant quotas for “Japanese” people.

Instead, he went on to work as a logger and an electrician, eventually taking a job with BC Hydro. During this time period and into the 1960s, he also worked as a ski instructor. While he was still in Alberta, the concertmaster of the Calgary Philharmonic, impressed by his skill at the harmonica, had advised Harry to take up playing the bass, an instrument with which he would never be out of work. Harry had deferred the advice, though, because of the expense of a double bass. He finally ordered one for himself when he broke his leg skiing in a competition and needed something to alleviate his boredom; it cost $198 and was made of plywood. In this way, Harry became the only bass player in Prince George. This is also where he met Jim Johnson, a musician working as a schoolteacher.

In 1965, Harry and Jim Johnson started playing together regularly under the name Moods of Man in Qualicum Beach on Vancouver Island. They caught the eye of the CBC there, and soon were making regular radio appearances and recording eighteen episodes of a TV version of their act. For three years following, they toured in schools and other venues across the continent, spending a lot of time particularly in Saskatchewan and Alberta and even going as far as Inuvik, while keeping their day jobs. Harry’s collaborations with musicians from many different cultural backgrounds drew attention, and he was invited to be music director for the cultural programmes during the 1978 Commonwealth Games in Edmonton.

It was a huge undertaking, involving auditions across the province of artists from various cultural traditions. He also formed his own group of musicians for the Games, the Alberta Folk Ensemble. The group included musicians from 19 different ethnic groups, and when they got together, they “spent more time in bull sessions than in rehearsal”. The group continued to play together and be available for bookings for some years after the Games were over.

Harry returned again to Vancouver in the early eighties, making himself known on the local music scene and inviting many fellow musicians to jam sessions in his basement suite near Oakridge Centre. In 2002, at the age of eighty, Harry founded the First Friday Forum and Coffeehouse, a monthly event hosted by the JCCA. Upon debuting the event at the Nikkei Centre, Harry wrote, “the existence of the Centre is a result of the racism that caused our [Japanese Canadians’] evacuation in 1942. I thought we should consider initiating a program to address the ongoing problems of racism in a form that was accessible to the audience”. His band, the Gang of Seven, initially served as a “flagship” group for the evening, and Harry would invite a variety of other artists to come perform. Using the “pan-cultural language” of music as a starting point, Harry would also speak and lead discussion on cross-cultural exchange and issues of racism.

Harry hosted the event for several years before declining health made it increasingly difficult to maintain his leadership role. Around this time, a dedicated group of musicians, supporters, and collaborators, known collectively as the Aoki Legacy Group, worked together to preserve and honour his many years of creating music and connections across cultures. In 2008, a concert was held in his honour at the Firehall Arts Centre in Vancouver; at that event, the Group announced that an Aoki Legacy Fund would be established in partnership with St. John’s College at UBC to support cross-cultural initiatives in the arts and foster Harry’s dream of intercultural understanding. Harry Aoki passed away on January 24, 2013 at the age of 91.

For further reading, see this bibliography.