After her grandmother refused to attend her 100th birthday party, Linda Ohama found out the matriarch harbored a terrible secret. In the months following, the Vancouver-based director coaxed her feisty old obachan into disclosing the truth on camera.

        The result is the award-winning documentary, "Obachan's Garden." Ohama lovingly portrays a quirky, music-loving centenarian whose sometimes tumultuous life is symbolized by her beautiful, wayward flower garden.

        "As a filmmaker, I have lots of trust," explained Ohama in an interview. "Every time my grandmother told me something I just knew she was leading us somewhere."

        Her grandmother, Asayo Murakami, emigrated from Japan in 1924 as a "picture bride" and moved to a fishing village near Vancouver. With her new found freedom, she rejected the man who had paid her passage and married for love, later raising eight children. During W.W. II, she lived through the heart-wrenching internment of the Japanese community and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima where her relatives lived.

        But what Ohama discovered was that her grandmother had been forced to abandon two young children when she left Japan. Retelling her obachan's life story and determining the fate of her lost children took Ohama five years. It also brought her to Japan where she returned last week for the Japanese premier of the 90-minute film. An enthusiastic crowd of several hundred at the Canadian embassy theater in Tokyo marked the first stop in a 17-city tour that includes Okonomochi, her obachan's hometown.

        "When my grandmother heard we were taking the film to Japan, the first thing she told me was 'I'm coming, too!'" Making the trip proved impossible for Ohama's obachan, now 104, but the director described how the spirited old woman laughed and cried while watching the film at its Canadian premier. Afterward, she addressed the audience and led them in cheering "banzai." "She played her violin and she sang. Once you give the microphone to my grandmother, she just takes over."

        In "Obachan's Garden," Ohama uses multi-layered story-telling to recreate a life representative of many Japanese women emigrants. Family photographs, and archival footage of pre-war Japan and Vancouver help her tell the story. Interspersed are dramatized incidents from her grandmother's life. However, despite the obvious sincerity of the Japanese-Canadian actors, including Natsuko Murakami, another of Asayo's granddaughters, playing the young Asayo, these scenes lack the emotional impact of the real events unfolding in the film.

        To create some of them, the director organized, then recorded, a replanting ceremony at the site of her grandmother's one-time home and flower garden. The property, confiscated during the war, was never returned. Today, it's part of a national historic site commemorating the Japanese-Canadian community. In the film, Asayo's extended family have the bewildering experience of revisiting the ancestral home and finding it a museum.

        "My grandmother's life shows that where a person is born and grows up always stays a part of them," said Ohama. "In recognizing that, we all have a responsibility and connection to each other."

        One of the extraordinary moments that follow in "Obachan's Garden" suggests that her obachan may not have been a model parent. Ohama's own mother bursts into tears, complaining bitterly about the neglect she suffered as a child. In addition, Ohama links four generations by introducing her own daughter, Caitlin, Asayo's great grand-daughter who retraces Asayo's journey from Japan.

        "Last summer, I became an obachan myself -- birth, life, death -- that's what it's all about," said Ohama. "Everything changes. But I think the Japanese-Canadian community will always have a future and continue to evolve."

        Ultimately, the small, wizened figure of Asayo herself provides the film's most enduring images. At her bedside in a voice no more than a rasping croak, she confides in Ohama or crankily orders the camera away. Finally, in her old garden once more, Asayo, confined to a wheelchair, is reunited with her surviving daughter from Japan, Chieko, who has flown to Vancouver to meet her. It is a wonderful, touching scene, one unique in film.

        "I feel very privileged to have witnessed it," said Ohama. "It was like seeing a 101-year-old woman giving birth to an 80-year-old baby."

Back to the top of this page.