©Wil Yeung
“You could just feel the
energy of the festival
”
Int e rnational
Man of Matsuri Interview by Michael Kanert
T
he Japan Festival Canada, held annually in Mississauga, is North America’s largest celebration of Japanese culture. We spoke to Khaled Iwamura, who has been the event’s MC since its first year, to learn more about the spirit of Japanese festivals and find out what makes Japan Festival Canada such a special occasion.
says. “It got read about 130,000 times.” While those are impressive numbers in a city of 800,000, Iwamura recalls the moment of tension when, at 11 a.m. that first Sunday in July, he and Wakasa stood onstage at Celebration Square wondering how many people would actually show up. Based on readership numbers, Iwamura predicted 15,000 to 25,000 attendees. He was only half off: in the end, some 40,000 people arrived, making Japan Festival Canada the biggest one-day culture event in Mississauga history. A year later, the second event drew 70,000 people over two days. Even in the rain, the third event attracted 80,000 attendees, who were regaled with modern and traditional music, dance, food, sake, martial arts and more.
“I'm half Japanese, half Egyptian, born in Montreal and now a proud resident of Mississauga. And I was super-excited, because I was like, ‘A Japanese festival is coming to my city.’ So of course I wanted to be involved.” The year was 2016, and Khaled Iwamura was speaking to Terry Wakasa, organizer of Japan Festival Canada. This would be the festival’s inaugural year, and Iwamura had signed on to be its master of ceremonies.
Iwamura’s path to master of matsuri—the Japanese word for festival—might be traced back to the Toronto International Caravan, a culture festival that was held annually from 1969 to 2004, where he fell in love with Japanese taiko drums. “They moved me because you could feel the percussion—you could feel it in your soul,” he says, clenching his fingers for emphasis. He signed up for lessons with the late taiko performer Chris Kano, then, six months later, joined Kano’s performance troupe, called Yakudo. The next 15 years saw Iwamura performing at clubs and cultural events from Toronto to Hong Kong.
A ubiquitous Mississauga media presence, Iwamura is the founder of insauga, the largest media company in the city. Combined with offshoot companies inbrampton and inhalton, his QuickBite News network boasts some 3.5 million monthly pageviews, with 1.2 million unique users centred on the western flank of the Greater Toronto Area. “When we put out an article about a Japanese festival coming to Mississauga, it blew up,” Iwamura
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