Want to visit Powell Street before the Second World War? Launching Saturday (August 1) as part of the 39^th Powell Street festival, Nikkei Stories is a film/new media project that gives participants a walking tour through the neighbourhood's past, when it was home to the biggest Japanese-Canadian community in Canada.

The history of the neighbourhood still engenders intense interest, some 70 years after internment decimated the population. (The Vancity Theatre was turning patrons away when it screened The Vancouver Asahi late last year.) Nikkei Stories offers 10 short films about Powell Street—with tales of early immigrants, key individuals, and the area’s lively social and political history—merging archival materials with newly shot footage by filmmakers Gordon McLennan and Greg Masuda.

McLennan was responsible for last year’s similar and much-heralded Black Strathcona project. Masuda has a more personal angle: his grandparents lived on Powell Street when they arrived from Japan in 1907, until the family was forcibly relocated to Alberta in 1942.

Nikkei Stories can be viewed at its website or free by demand on TELUS Optik TV, although the best option is to head down to Oppenheimer Park with your mobile device and take the walking tour, ya spuds!