In 1977, inspired by the Asian American and Civil Rights Movements in the United States, young nikkei living in Vancouver, British Columbia organized a celebration of Japanese Canadian arts and culture called Powell Street Festival. Since its inauguration in 1977, the Festival has taken place in Paueru Gai (“Powell Town”), the largest historic home of Japanese Canadians, and has been widely celebrated as a kind of Japanese Canadian ‘homecoming.’ However, even as the Festival’s location—in Paueru Gai—places it within Vancouver’s poorest neighbourhood, the Downtown Eastside, little work has considered the Festival’s (or indeed the Japanese Canadian community’s) relationship(s) to the Downtown Eastside. In this paper, as a mixed gosei Japanese Canadian, I do so. Drawing on oral histories, archival records, and my own experiences, I argue that there is such a thing as the myth of Powell Street Festival, an unwritten but well known and popular cultural text in the Japanese Canadian community that advances—via its roots in the radical politics of the Asian American and Civil Rights Movements—Japanese Canadians’ supposed ‘right to return’ to Paueru Gai, to the relative exclusion of present-day Downtown Eastside residents. I therefore problematize the myth of Powell Street Festival, showing how it romanticizes Japanese Canadians’ return to Paueru Gai and (if unwittingly) disavows the more radical ‘trouble-making’ politics which inspired the Festival in the first place. I conclude by calling for a return to Japanese Canadian ‘trouble-making,’ one that centres the legacies of dispossession and ongoing violence in the Downtown Eastside.