High Park In Winter

It's hard to believe, but we're only a few weeks away from the days when the Sakura cherry blossoms will be blooming again in High Park. So, I recently took the chance to take a walk through the park while it's all still full of winter. I had my eye out for Snowy Owls and Bald Eagles — both of which have been spotted there this year — and while I wasn't lucky enough to see any, I did get to see plenty of pretty. (Even if it was so cold on the banks of Grenadier Pond that my iPhone kept shutting down.) I've uploaded a bunch of my photos, along with a few archival pics, to a gallery on Facebook, which you can check out here (whether you have a Facebook account or not):

FULL GALLERY

And, as always, you can follow me on Instagram at @todreamsproject.

The Story Behind the Sakura Blossoms of High Park

The tradition was born in Japan more than a thousand years ago. People of the Imperial Court started hanging out under cherry trees every spring, taking advantage of the brief period when the blossoms burst into spectacular bloom. From there, the tradition spread to samurai culture and eventually all sorts of people in Japan were doing it. Today, the whole country keeps a close eye on "the cherry blossom front" as warm weather arrives in the south and then sweeps north across the islands. During the week or two when the flowers are open, millions of people all over Japan have picnics under the trees, take photos, get drunk, fall in love. They call it Sakura Hanami.

The tradition came to Toronto in 1959. That year, the Japanese ambassador gave us two thousand Sakura trees — a gift from the people of Tokyo to the people of Toronto. It was a thank you for welcoming so many Japanese-Canadians to the city in the wake of the Second World War.

By then, the Canadian government had a long history of official racism against Japanese immigrants. And it had only gotten worse during the war. Mackenzie King's Liberal government used the War Measures Act to brand anyone of Japanese descent as an enemy alien. In British Columbia, tens of thousands of Japanese-Canadians were rounded up and shipped off to internment camps. They called it an "evacuation".

It didn't end there. After the war, the government deported thousands of people "back" to war-ravaged Japan — even though half of them had been born in Canada. Those who weren't deported were forced to move away from the West Coast. As one racist asshole of a cabinet minister put it: "No Japs from the Rockies to the seas."

Many of them came east to Toronto. And here, they found plenty of racism too. During the war, Toronto's mayors were openly hostile to the new arrivals. The City refused to give any licenses to any Japanese-Canadian businesses. On their way into town, some new Torontonians decided it was best to avoid Union Station — for fear that anti-Japanese hysteria could turn the crowds ugly.

But there were also plenty of Canadians who were horrified by the government's racist policies. In Toronto, the Cooperative Committee on Japanese Canadians pulled together progressive organizations from all over the country in a public campaign against the government's bigotry. There were petitions, pamphlets, public meetings, sermons, fundraisers, letters to MPs, briefs to parliament, and court cases. The reaction from Canadians was overwhelmingly supportive. It took years, but eventually the government was forced to back down. In 1947, they abandoned the deportation policy. In 1949, Japanese-Canadians were allowed to move back to B.C. — and, finally, to vote.

Ten years later, those two thousand Sakura trees were planted in Toronto as a way to remember — and since then, the Japanese government has continued to give them to us as gifts. They bloom all over the GTA and the Golden Horseshoe. You can find them at York University, at U of T, at McMaster, at Exhibition Place, in the Royal Botanical Gardens of Hamilton and Burlington, at Niagara Falls...

But most famously, you can find them in High Park. A hundred trees were planted there in 1959 — on the hillside overlooking the eastern bank of Grenadier Pond. And since then, dozens more have been added. Today, during those brief spring days when the trees burst into pink and white, thousands of Torontonians get to enjoy our own Sakura Hanami, in awe of the beauty we've been given from Japan.

The planting of those trees was, of course, far from the end of anti-Japanese racism in Toronto. At the time those first Sakura were planted, there were still no new Japanese immigrants allowed into the country. There wouldn't be any more welcomed as new Canadians until 1967. But Torontonians continued to play an important role in the fight to make the government acknowledge what had happened — spearheaded by the efforts of Japanese-Canadian organizations founded in T.O. and backed by an unanimous motion from City Council. Finally, in 1988, the government of Canada formally apologized, compensated the survivors and cleared the names of those who had refused to be sent away. That very same year, the War Measures Act was repealed and replaced so that no Canadian can ever be legally rounded up on the basis of race ever again.

The Sakura of High Park are in bloom right now, but not for long. You can get updates from the High Park website here or by liking the blossoms on Facebook here.

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There's a famous Japanese short story about the Sakura — about someone who doesn't understand their beauty until he realizes the roots feed on the death and decay of previous generations. "There are bodies buried beneath the cherry trees!" he says. I'm keeping that line in mind as I visit the blossoms this year. There are plenty of metaphorical bodies buried beneath our Sakura too. But as you wander among the trees along with joyful throngs of Torontonians and tourists — with backgrounds from all over the world  — it's easy to see the beauty. It's not only in the trees.

Wikipedia has more on the history of cherry blossoms here. There's more on the Cooperative Committee on Japanese Canadians from the McMaster University Libraries here. There's a timeline of Japanese-Canadian history here. There's a CBC report about the apology and compensation on YouTube here. There's a short and very informative book about the uprooting of Japanese-Canadians in a PDF here.

Not everyone in Japan loves Hanami. The Japan Times has a great article about a bit of a backlash here. 

Bloor & High Park Looked Like Countryside Back in 1914

Jesus. I mean, by now I should be used to seeing photos of places just outside the city core looking like the middle of the freaking countryside in the early 1900s, but it still gets me every time. This one is Bloor Street at High Park. (I think we're looking east? With the park on the right? That's what the internet faintly whispers, anyway.)

Hmm. I don't have much to say other than that. I can tell you that Bloor Street was named after Joseph Bloor, a brewer who founded the village of Yorkville. He was also one scary-looking motherfucker. And I can tell you that by this point, High Park had already been High Park for about 20 years. The land had belonged to a fellow by the name of John Howard. He's hailed as Toronto's first serious architect: he built the old "lunatic asylum" on Queen West, the old bank building at Yonge and Wellington (which is the Irish Embassy pub now), the row of buildings along King East just west of Church (Victoria Row, which includes the Albany Club, a Conservative Party hangout I'm working on a post about) and, of course, Colborne Lodge, which is where he and his family lived in High Park. As I mentioned in a previous post, he gave the land as a gift to the city in 1876 to be used as a public park on the condition that his family would still get to live there, that the city would keep the park's name, and that no one would ever be allowed to drink alcohol on the grounds. (Sorry dude.) He was also an amateur painter. You come across his artwork all the time when you're digging around into the early history of the city.

Alright! That's all I've got!

Botany Classes Used To Really Overdress

Thanks to the fact that people back in the Edwardian era were crazy and stylish and deathly afraid of accidentally showing any skin, this is apparently what a botany class from the University of Toronto looked like back in 1910. Even when they were on a field trip tramping through the swamps of High Park.

Photo: A Bison at the High Park Zoo in 1908

The High Park Zoo was founded in 1893, when they started keeping deer in pens along what is now, appropriately, called Deer Pen Road. High Park was then less than 30 years old. It had originally been owned by John Howard, an architect and amateur painter, who bought it to use as a sheep farm and gave it its name. He gave the land as a gift to the city in 1876, to be used as a public park on the condition that his family would still get to live there in the house they'd built, Colborne Lodge, that the city would keep the park's name, and that no one would ever be allowed to drink achohol on the grounds.

Well, um, two of three isn't that bad.

Gradually, those original deer were joined by other animals. Like the bison in this photograph, which they think was probably taken in 1908. Today, there are llamas and peacocks and cattle and stuff. Mostly they lead pretty peaceful lives, except that once in a while someone will try to let some of them out of their pens. And, bizzarely, in 1999 someone broke into the deer enclosure and attacked three animals, slashing two of them with a machete and killing a third, taking it away, apparently, to be eaten.