Originally appeared in The Vancouver Sun, September 17, 2011:

by Brad Frenette

Imagine yourself on Powell Street on a sunny Vancouver afternoon in 1921, past the tea houses and schools, past Morimoto & Co. Dry Goods, into the heart of bustling Japantown. You would hear things typical in any town across North America at the time: the splintering of the baseball bat, the warm thud of a ball hitting a glove, the proclamations of a confident umpire.

At Powell Street Grounds, now called Oppenheimer Park in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, a legion of baseball fans would be crowded around the dirtpatched diamond.

On the field, a remarkable story was starting, starring a band of Japanese-Canadian baseballers called the Asahi.

Birthed in 1914 by Harry Miyasaki, the Asahi assembled the best amateur Japanese players in the area to compete against Vancouver’s Caucasian clubs, at a time when the popularity of the sport was at a frenzy across North America’s West Coast.

Faced with a clear height and weight disadvantage, Miyasaki, a drycleaner by trade, developed a winning strategy dubbed “brainball,” a combination of speed, harmony and a perfected execution of the squeeze play.

“We didn’t have muscle,” says Kaye Kaminishi with a laugh. The Kamloops resident, now 89, is one of only three surviving Asahi. “We usually stole bases and bunted. And squeeze plays. Not too many homers.”

Joining the Asahi as a rookie in 1938 was like being welcomed into the “family home,” Kaminishi remembers. His first hit, a line drive that left the humble boundaries of Powell Grounds, is his favourite memory.

“From first to second base I stumbled. The ball was on the street, so I should have had a home run. All the players gave me a laugh.”

After winning Vancouver’s International League in 1919, the team’s renown grew over the next two decades. Their exploits were praised in the press and by the cross-cultural fan base who packed the humble Powell Grounds.

The field was so small that the Asahi used to break windows in nearby buildings during the games, “so they’d have to pay for a few windows each game,” recalls Grace Eiko Thomson, the former executive director of the National Nikkei Museum & Heritage Centre in Burnaby.

“The bleachers didn’t hold everyone, so there were people all over the place.”

Baseball, notes Thompson, was that rare thing that could close the generation gap between the immigrant parents and Canadian-born children within the Japanese community. It also transcended racial divides. In 1926, the Asahi were voted the most popular sports franchise in Vancouver, at a time when Japanese-Canadians were confronted with rampant and blatant racism: “They responded to the times, and became incredible. When they went home, they didn’t have the right to vote. When they were playing on the field, it gave a lot of hope and pride to the community.” Despite the Asahi’s popularity, there was nothing any baseball team could do against the cause and effect of a world at war. After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, the Japanese became the enemy, and by proxy, so did Japanese-Canadians. Citizens were forced from their homes and businesses and Japantown soon was emptied.

The Asahi, too, were displaced, sent to internment camps and the “ghost towns” of B.C. and across Canada.

The team’s dominating run ended with their last game on Sept. 18, 1941, but their verve continued. Ex-Asahi, including Kaminishi, soon began to organize games with other interned baseball fans. A makeshift league was born in the camps and by July 1, 1943, a championship series was held in the Slocan Valley, drawing RCMP officers and other white fans and spectators.

The Asahi excelled, says Thomson, because “this was the only place they could level the playing field.”

Despite not being a baseball fan, Thomson’s interest in the team’s story inspired her to curate an exhibit about the team for the museum and in 2006, she petitioned Parks Canada to honour the team. The request was granted a few weeks ago, and on Sunday, a plaque will be hoisted in Oppenheimer Park, 70 years to the day since the team played its last official game.

“Each year it wasn’t easy,” says Kaminishi.

“It wasn’t just playing ball. The fans gave us encouragement – that’s the reason we lasted.”

In Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table, an 11-year-old boy named Michael boards a passenger ship for a three-week journey from Colombo to England. It is a trip familiar to the author, who, as an 11-year-old, boarded a similar boat, and crossed the same sea. However, the similarities between the two Michaels are divided there – between the real life of the man and the fictional life of his creation.

Ondaatje has worked this tricky space before – poetically transmitting his interpretation of the life of an outlaw in The Collected Works of Billy The Kid, of a missing Canadian theatre magnate in his novel In The Skin of The Lion, and of a desert-roaming count in The English Patient. With The Cat’s Table, Ondaatje serves forth another work based on real events; however, as the author assures, this book too is a “work of fiction.”

Ahead of his appearance tonight at St. Andrew’s Wesley United Church, as part of The Vancouver Writers Festival’s reading series, the Booker award-winning Canadian author discusses his latest work.

Q: How did the idea for this novel come about?

A: I began six months after I finished Divisadero, the last book. I was telling my family about how I was put on this ship as a kid from Sri Lanka, and it got me thinking – my God, that is a bizarre thing for a child who is 11 years old. I don’t remember the trip very much, so I thought it would be fiction. I took the idea and I had to create the characters and the situation and make it as dramatic as possible – sort of like an adventure story – and I had to populate the boat with all these characters.

Q: The boat provides an interesting dynamic: a kind of floating stage for your characters. Do you see this book as maybe more theatrical than previous works?

A: That’s not a bad example – the stage, like some kind of comedy, where people come in one way and go out the other way; the idea of having a limited space and lots of characters. Most of my books have three or four characters, but this one has 12, or something like that. It’s crowded, but at the same time, everyone is very solitary – you go to your room, and you are alone, but then you go the deck, or the passageways. You have the possible farce in there as well.

Q: Is a degree of playfulness, a good sense of youth, important for a writer?

A: Oh yes. I think in some ways, that playfulness – which I hope I still have – is something I tap into. It’s funny, I’ve just been re-reading Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis, which I first read when I was 18 years old. I loved it then, and reading it again – it’s just such a wonderful book about youth and being against the world. A fantastic book, very, very funny. There is this youthfulness and playfulness and [the characters] are also unaware of danger, which is interesting.

Q: There is a certain inference by giving your character the same name as yourself, which you address in an afterword in The Cat’s Table. Was there a time when your 11-year-old was not named Michael?

A: I hadn’t thought about calling him Michael at all for the first part of the book and then when I did I thought this is a bit risky. I didn’t want it to be seen as memoir. There was a bit of a danger there. But I think I separated him from myself more because if I had the gall to call him Michael then he could really not be like me, should not be like me.

Q: The novel shifts time and place, coming to Canada, to Vancouver and beyond.

A: Everyone’s going west in the book, gradually, so I kept going that way. I wanted some of it to take place in Canada and also I wanted the last scene to take place on one of the Gulf Islands. The idea of having a ferry to continue the idea of the ship was important, the metaphor of a boat journey seemed to me a good way of continuing the story in the present.

Q: The Cat’s Table is a great image, and one I’ve never heard it before. Is this a thing associated with passenger ships?

A: Not at all. It’s a German term. I was talking to somebody in Germany, and they talked about the cat’s table being a term for a location at a dinner party or large banquet where it was the least significant or the least privileged location, by the bathrooms or the kitchen.

So if you are part of a big event, and you don’t have a good seat, and you are at the cat’s table.

It’s a phrase that has nothing to do with ships really but it was so close to the captain’s table, that I put it in the book.

Q: If you were seated at the cat’s table for a ship ride, what other writers would you want along with you?

A: I need about a week to answer that question. Some would have to be badly behaved writers, for sure. It would have to range from someone like Michael Winter – who is actually a very well behaved person – to someone like James Salter, who is also very interesting. The others, I’d have to think about.

Q: You have created many characters in your novels. Do certain ones sit with you more closely than others?

A: I think Hanna stands out to me. She was in In The Skin of the Lion and The English Patient. Kip certainly does and Temelcoff does in In Skin of the Lion. It was odd when Caravaggio and Hanna went into the next book – The English Patient. Temelcoff was the one I was really fascinated by. There is no real distinction: they are not loved more than other characters.

Q: You were involved in the process of making your novel The English Patient into a film, which had great success. Is it a process you’d be interested in participating in again?

A: I hadn’t thought about this as a film at all, not that I’d thought about The English Patient as a film. I think I was very lucky with The English Patient working with somebody like Anthony Minghella but I don’t know if this would make a film. Perhaps it can, but I haven’t really thought about it in that format. To translate it to film would have to be something else completely.

Following the riots in Vancouver, one photo was shared more than the rest among users of Twitter and other social media.

The photo shows a young couple tangled in each other’s arms on the street, kissing, while the police and mayhemmakers clash all around them.

“I was trying not to get my ass kicked,” says Vancouver freelance photojournalist Richard Lam, who took the photo, when asked if he had stopped to talk to the couple.

Indeed, it was a hectic and unexpected path that led to the photo, he explains: “I was shooting the game -and me and another photographer decided to go. By the time I got out there it was out of control. I started out in front of the Sandman Hotel and ended up at the Bay. There were still looters coming out, two cars were on fire.”

Soon, he was forced onto Seymour Street, corralled by the tide of rioters and police, who were “waving sticks and shields.” There, between Georgia and Robson, he spotted the couple.

“I thought people were hurt. Next thing I knew there was some guy running toward the riot police, another waving a mannequin leg. I really didn’t know what they were doing.”

Lam got the shot, and several more, and didn’t think much of it. He returned to the media room at Rogers Arena, where his editor took his memory card and imported it.

“I didn’t even look at it. A colleague said, ‘Nice photo.’ Then I went back to the editing room, and looked at it. My jaw dropped.”

The photo has kept Lam busy, with media outlets such as NPR and MSN interviewing him.

“I’ve been fascinated by [the response]. I don’t want to sound idealistic, but I was just doing my job.”

Last year, Dr. Henrik Scharfe, of Denmark’s Aalborg University, e-mailed an order for a new gadget to a Japanese manufacturer. It was a gadget with a considerable price tag, the kind of cost associated with luxury: an Italian sports car, a precious stone, a flight to space on Virgin Galactic.

Dr. Scharfe’s order was a rare thing. In his e-mail, sent last May, he asked for an android, one designed as a physical replica of the professor himself.

The order went to a Japanese company called ATR, and specifically to Prof. Hiroshi Ishiguro, a leader in robotics, and the inventor of robots he calls geminoids.

Starting in 2005, and working with the Tokyo-based company Kokoro, Ishiguro had already built two previous geminoids — androids designed to be lifelike replicas of their owners, and operated via a sophisticated motion capture system.

The Geminoid DK would be Ishiguro’s third project, and the first using a Caucasian model.

Despite being one of the few humans able to boast about having an android simulacrum, Dr. Scharfe, who serves as director of Aalborg University’s Center for Computer-mediated Epistemology, assures his motives are scientific.

As he awaits the delivery of his tailor-made android, the professor tells The Vancouver Sun in an eimail exchange how he got involved in the project, and how he hopes his geminoid will help open up new discussions about the emotional connections possible between man and machine.

Q: How did this project begin?

A: We have been following Professor Ishiguro’s work with the geminoids for years. What really fascinates me it is how easy it is to open really deep and interesting conversations with people about it. Regardless of background. It is very hard not to react to this kind of technology. But honestly, I thought about the implications for a long time before I decided to go ahead with it.

Q: Aside from the research, you now have an animated version of you. Any plans to send it anywhere in your stead?

A: We plan to send it to different places. For instance, we will feature the Geminoid on some national TV programs here in Denmark. We have two confirmed agreements with the Danish Broadcasting Cooperation at the moment — one in the vein of (popular BBC news show) HardTalk, with the Geminoid in the chair, and one more family-oriented program that I visited before (this time we’ll both be in the chair).

We are also taking it to a combined scholarly conference and art exhibition called IRL: In Real Life 2011 in Dublin this summer. I’ll give a keynote there, and guests and delegates will have the ability to interact with the Geminoid personally.

Also, we have an agreement with a shop owner here in Aalborg (a men’s fashion shop). The Geminoid will be in the shop window, and customers can interact with it inside the shop as well. Previous research on interactive technology in shopping windows mainly focused on screens facing the street. In this case, there is also an incentive to enter the shop.

Q: Did you have to pitch yourself as a model for this Geminoid? Was it a bidding process?

A: The robot is manufactured by Kokoro, the same company who built Geminoid HI-1 and Geminoid-F. Essentially, I sent them an email placing an order for a geminoid.

Because the geminoid is custom-built we had many conversations about the details, especially the face, during my visits at the factory, and also via email. This geminoid is the first with a Caucasian face, and that calls for several different design solutions, compared to the previous geminoids. Regarding the exterior, this has to do, of course, with details from the moulding of the head such as shape and size of the eyes, and density of the beard. Regarding interior, we considered especially the range of movement in the face and in the torso. Western people tend to use the upper half of the face significantly more than people of Asian origin, and we needed to make sure that this geminoid was equipped to perform the communicative tasks we wanted it to in a Western setting.

Including the equipment needed to control the geminoid in the lab, the price tag is in the area of $200,000 US.

Q: That’s a hefty price tag. Who paid the bill?

A: The Geminoid project is funded by a local foundation, who supports many different research activities, and by Aalborg University.

Q: How long did it take to finish?

A: It takes about six months to build such a geminoid. My first visit at the factory in Japan took place in September 2010. That’s when we did the moulds of my hands and face. Creating the face is an extremely complicated process with many steps, beginning with a complete mould of the entire head. I have come to greatly admire the artisans at Kokoro.

Q: Does the robot function with artificial intelligence (AI), or only via motion capture?

A: Not really AI, but there is some simulation going on here. What people will experience when they go into the geminoid lab is a mix of two things. First, some movements are pre-programmed, such as the breathing system and blinking at random intervals. Secondly, some movements are read directly from the face of the operator, and transferred onto the robot.

Q: You posted a video of the android on YouTube, and have been updating people throughout the process. Much of the public discussion about the Geminoid DK seems to tend toward the sarcastic, the fearful and the humourous; but there is serious research to be done with this robot.

A: Correct. We have used social media to show parts of the process, and this nearly finished result. To me, this is an important part of the project, and I enjoy taking this kind of research to a broader audience.

A career shift from supermodel to super-advocate is unusual, and for Christy Turlington Burns, it is also deeply personal.

In 2005, after suffering complications after the birth of her daughter, she embarked on a mission to understand the global epidemic of maternal mortality.

She went back to school to study public health at Columbia University, and began working with organizations such as CARE as Advocate for Maternal Health, and in 2008 began work on her first directorial effort -a documentary called No Woman, No Cry. In it, Turlington Burns travels around the world to share the stories of pregnant woman at risk.

Turlington Burns spoke to Postmedia News Service from her home in New York about how she got involved and how the film came to be.

Q: How does one transform from a supermodel to an expert on maternal health?

A: When I evolved and became a mom and learned that the (medical) complication I had was linked to the leading cause of maternal mortality in the world, that made me want to dig deeper. I had the opportunity to travel with the aid organization CARE a couple of years after I had my first child, and was pregnant with my second.

We travelled to El Salvador, where my mother was from, and being in that country with poor women living in rural areas while pregnant, that was the ‘a-ha’ moment.

Had I had the experience I had with my daughter Grace in that community, I would have died. I thought I could help other women make that connection, to bring it closer to them.

Q: You travelled to Bangladesh, Guatemala and Tanzania. Why these locations?

A: In Bangladesh, we wanted to show an urban story.

It was in the slums of Dhaka, and through a community health worker we met Monica, our main mom.

Her story turned out in a way that helped us communicate the cultural limitations in her area, which are the biggest mysteries of all working on these issues.

I chose Tanzania because it’s (among the countries) with the highest maternal mortality rates.

Its president has been incredibly vocal and taken a leadership position.

It’s a sub-Saharan African country where there are high rates, but political will, and (we wanted to) find out what is the big gap. And that is the human resource gap -that women live in rural areas and are way too far from the care that they should have access to in an emergency.

In Guatemala, the physician we focused on is an obstetrician who worked for Planned Parenthood.

She was eight months pregnant herself when we filmed with her.

I wanted to pick a country that had a large indigenous population, and that has grappled with some of the ideology that is so present in Latin America that is a barrier to care for so many women.

Originally appeared:
National Post
Sat Apr 30 2011

by Brad Frenette

One of the first writers to document Vancouver also gave the city his name. “To describe the beauties of this region will, on some future occasion, be a very grateful task to the pen of a skilled panegyrist,” wrote George Vancouver in 1792. Of course, Captain Vancouver would have little notion of the city that would swell in the centuries beyond him -a place of glass and grit, of social woes and woeful real estate prices, a city encased in natural beauty and consistently named the most liveable place in the world.

George didn’t stay in Vancouver, though, so the task indeed had to fall to the pens of other panegyrists. And there has been no shortage of talented writers to help describe the place in recent years. Home to Canada’s greatest creative writing school (UBC), Vancouver-based writers have shone brightly in the past decade’s CanLit year-end lists and shortlists.

To discuss the place they call home, and the challenges and benefits of life as a writer in Vancouver, I gathered several of the city’s acclaimed writers, including Billie Livingston, Annabel Lyon, Kevin Chong, Timothy Taylor, Steven Galloway, Caroline Adderson, Lee Henderson, Zsuzsi Gartner, Ian Weir and John Vaillant. A full transcript can be found on The Afterword.

Brad Frenette Distanced from the major publishing houses and media concentration of Toronto, Vancouver sits, more or less, as a hub on its own. Has this distance helped to create a community?

Steven Galloway I think that Vancouver has a terrific literary community … precisely because it’s so removed from where most of the publishers are, and where the “national” media is.

Kevin Chong There is a community but it’s decentralized. We don’t have the same circuit of writing events to bring writers together for gossiping, schmoozing, envying and brawling. Personally, I don’t mind that.

Caroline Adderson Far flung writers are generally not invited to take part in the kind of fundraising soirees and breakfast book clubs that get your picture in the Globe and the Post, since it costs too much to bring us out. Thus the reader of the arts pages tends to see Ontario writers over and over. We’re not at the parties Kevin mentioned so can’t demonstrate to publishers and festival directors and future jurists that we are as witty and fun to be around as the writers in Toronto.

John Vaillant Writing’s a pretty hermetic business, and communing takes a lot of time and energy, which competes with writing and other living time and energy. That said, I’m continually impressed by the writers I run into and read here. I wonder if Vancouver, by virtue of its marginal location, doesn’t draw more mercurial, nomadic and independentminded writers and artists to begin with.

Ian Weir I’ve crossed over into the novel-writing dodge after years as a playwright and TV writer, and the contrasts are intriguing. There’s a stronger sense of local identity among the TV writers, in part because the funding system induces producers to hire in-province people. I think the prose writers tend to be more genuinely supportive of each other, even though the “community” may be more loosely knit.

Annabel Lyon In the age of Facebook and Twitter, geographical location seems almost a quaint concept, and I’m not really sure how relevant it is in a discussion of community. I feel part of various writing communities but where in the country they live seems an almost arbitrary parameter for a community.

Timothy Taylor Cities in the West are increasingly similar, culturally smoothed by travel and immigration and technology and a common interest in Charlie Sheen. But I’ll shout out to Vancouver’s literary scene on one score already raised: I don’t sense a lot of rivalry between writers on the ground there. It’s probably a size related matter. Small cities tend to auto-boosterism, which isn’t a bad thing. We are having this discussion after all, aren’t we?

Brad Frenette Vancouver is a fairly young city -125 years old as of last month -and is still developing its literary mythology. Is Vancouver a blank slate for a writer?

Zsuzsi Gartner I’ve been very consciously, starting in my first collection and going whole-hog in the book just released, to use Vancouver, particularly Commercial Drive and a certain mythical cul-desac in North Vancouver, as not just settings but actual characters in the stories. So Commercial Drive (or the Lions Gate Bridge, or Robson Street, or Kingsway, or Blood Alley) may not be part of our collective memory yet, like Montreal’s St. Urbain Street -but coming soon and with increasing momentum to a bookstore near you!

Lee Henderson Vancouver as a blank slate for mythmaking sounds like total crazy-talk to me. There’s the rebirth myth of the West, which is an especially popular point-o’-view out East to describe what we have going on out here. If folks aren’t aware of the good writing out West, it’s unlikely because Yonge Street is so pervasive. It’s that readers are busy gorging on Maritime lit myths written by men and women named Michael.

Steven Galloway Do people really have a firm definition of what Yonge Street or any other street in Canada “means?” We have a fully formed and functioning sense of mythology and literary tradition here. That others don’t know about it doesn’t negate its existence. Why, I often wonder, are books set in B.C. considered “regional,” while writers who write exclusively about Toronto such as Russell Smith aren’t considered regional writers? There are senior editors at major publishing houses who have never been west of Hamilton and seem proud of it. While I can’t say that this has affected me personally, I see it happen to other Vancouver writers all the time. But it’s not really just a Vancouver thing. The Vancouver Island crowd gets nailed with this too, and Albertan writers and Manitoban writers. The East coast seems to do OK, probably because Torontonians vacation there.

Ian Weir Location does make a difference in terms of the business of writing -at least, it does if your publisher is regionally based, since it really is more difficult for regionally based publishers to get a book onto the radar of the Eastern media. When Daniel O’Thunder launched, a pillar of the local scene emailed his congrats -and added wryly that I should expect it to sink without a trace, since that’s what usually happens to fiction that’s published on the West Coast. Mercifully, the book picked up some award nominations, and my wry friend emailed back to say that he was happy to see that I’d been one of the exceptions