Success at hockey was based on skills, not race, explains Eugene Ouchi, a Japanese Canadian talking about his childhood. A scene from The War between Us, a film about the forced confinement of Japanese Canadians in Canadian internment camps, helps to make the point that hockey was an "ice-breaker" between the two communities.

Why is hockey effective at bridging different cultural communities?

Mieko Ouchi is half Celtic, half Japanese... and all Canadian. In 1993, Mieko, an actor, began researching a documentary about her grandfather, Edward Ouchi, a Japanese immigrant to Canada. Then she was cast to star in The War Between Us, a film on the World War II internment of 22,000 Japanese-Canadians--re-enacting a key episode in her own community's history. Part Japanese-Canadian history, part autobiography and family chronicle, Shepherd's Pie and Sushi looks at complex questions of personal and cultural identity with a light touch. Using archival material, dramatic re-enactment, powerful scenes from The War Between Us and moving interviews with members of the Ouchi family, the film relates the early history of Japanese-Canadians and looks at Mieko's and her family's struggles with their own identities.