Nikkei National Museum & Cultural Centre

Published purpose

The Nikkei National Museum (NNM) and the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre are partnering to preserve and make accessible the materials related to their project, Home Run at Powell Street. The historic Powell Street neighbourhood in Vancouver, BC is one of the earliest established communities that was forcibly lost during the Second World War; it was also home base to the legendary Vancouver Asahi Baseball Team. Situated on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the Coast Salish Peoples, in particular, the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations, Japanese Canadians called this area Paueru-gai. Today, the neighbourhood faces the threat of gentrification, demolition and the potential loss of a vibrant multicultural community. The project aims to capture the history of the Powell Street area through digitization, description, conservation, cleaning, and long-term storage, to make this collection accessible, in-person and through a shared online database hosted by the NNM.