In The Shadow of the Pines

My new undertaking is the most personal story I have conceptualized to date. Although I have considered making my personal narratives the subject of my work, I was afraid to pursue and uncover the stories that for many years I tried to hide. In the Shadow of the Pines is my first documentary relating to my experience growing up as a Japanese Canadian woman through the form of animation.

This is a story about my relationship with my Japanese immigrant father, Joe Kei Koizumi, who worked as the school janitor at the elementary school that I attended, a career he held for over 35 years. My father was bold, and often came off as bull-headed. There were no pretenses. He was simply not capable of acting or being any other way. As a young girl growing up, I was often embarrassed of my father. While I wanted to avoid any undue attention, my father attracted it, with his loud and exuberant personality. He had an anxious energy; I wanted to be small and calm. While my father was a free spirit and didn’t seem to care what anyone thought or said about him, I grew up constantly aware of what others may think or say about me. In short, I wanted to be the opposite of my father.

The story begins with a memory of when I was 7 years old, and I am hiding under a desk at school when my father comes into the classroom to clean the mess of another student. Hiding under a desk is the visual metaphor for my shame, disguising my identity, my social class, and my feelings of unworthiness. I would hide in door entrances upon seeing my father down the hallway or make quick turns and full detours to the bathroom just to avoid running into him. I wanted my father to be the dad who put on a suit in the morning, had a briefcase and drove to his downtown office job – the Japanese Salaryman, or the wise and noble Japanese sensei but he wasn’t either of those men. So, I covered it up and disguised myself in an exterior of purity and a fabricated perfection and became the daughter of the father I wanted. And while I lived in fear of people asking me ‘what does your father do?’ because somehow I thought it would define me, my father was proudly telling all of his friends and people he didn’t even know about his daughter who is studying film at a university in Vancouver. My father offered to put a second mortgage on his home to pay for my graduate studies at a prestigious film school in NYC, an offer I could not accept. These feelings of shame contrasted by those of my father’s pride, pride in his family and the life he had built under difficult circumstances as an immigrant and the life he survived in Post WWII Japan. It wasn’t until after his death when I was writing my father’s eulogy that I sat down to ask, ‘who was my father?’ and ‘who was this man to me?’ It was then that I reflected on the memories of my childhood with my father and felt a deep sense of regret and a need to reconcile my relationship with him.