(12:47 minutes), 2022
Watercolour, stop-motion puppetry and digital animation

Tides & Moons: The Herring Capital is a mixed media animation that explores the histories and memories of the Japanese Canadian salted herring industries in the Nanaimo surrounding regions.

In the early 1920’s Japanese Canadian fishers lived and worked in Nanaimo at Hammond Bay (also known as Kujira Bay), Departure Bay, Shack Island (a way station for salmon and coho fishers traveling north), and Saysutshun. While Nanaimo had been known as a coal town for half a century, it also had 43 Japanese herring salteries. Due to the unexplainable abundance of this fish during a short window of time, and a demand for salted herring as an important export to Asia, Nanaimo became known as a herring capital.

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