Literary Arts

Masaki Watanabe

Masaki Watanabe is a journalist/translator and a jazz musician with an international background. Born in Tokyo in 1945 to a Japanese Finnish father and a Japanese mother, he graduated from International Christian University in 1966 after which he joined Reuters news agency in London. He has since worked as a Reuters correspondent in North America […]

Saeko Usukawa

Saeko Usukawa was an editor for everything from alternative-culture magazines to major publishing house Douglas & McIntyre. Born in Lemon Creek internment camp, Saeko grew up in Toronto. After studying briefly at university, she quickly became the youngest editor at Macmillan Publishers. She also became involved in the women’s movement and protests against Apartheid and […]

Ruth Ozeki

Ruth Ozeki is the author of the novels My Year of Meats (1998), All Over Creation (2003), and A Tale for the Time-Being (2013). She is also a filmmaker and a Zen Buddhist priest. Her novels have been published in over thirty countries, and translated into 11 languages. Ozeki splits her time between British Columbia […]

Chie Kamegaya

Chie Kamegaya was a poet and author of Seasons in New Denver: Haiku (1994). Born in Japan to a samurai family, Kamegaya became a teacher in Tokyo, where she met her husband. After marriage, she joined him in Canada, and they both taught at the New Westminster Japanese Language School from 1931 to 1941, when […]

Ruth Ohi

Ruth Ohi is a writer and illustrator of children’s books. She has illustrated over 60 books, 19 of which she is also the author. Her work includes the illustrations for Naomi’s Tree by Joy Kogawa, and more recently a book about the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, Kenta and the Big Wave.

Rui Umezawa

Rui Umezawa is a Toronto-based writer of such books as Strange Light Afar and The Truth About Death and Dying. Born in Tokyo in 1959, he left Japan as a child with his father, a theoretical physicist who pursued career opportunities in Europe, the United States, and eventually Canada. Umezawa writes novels, essays, and stories […]

Ann Sunahara

Ann Gomer Sunahara is a legal scholar and author of the The Politics of Racism: The Uprooting of Japanese Canadians During the Second World War. Published in 1981, The Politics of Racism examined federal government records of the Japanese Canadian internment which had only recently been declassified at the time of Sunahara’s research. It is […]

David Suzuki

David Suzuki is a renowned environmental activist, and the author of 52 books, including 19 for children. A geneticist by training, Suzuki has become well-known as a broadcaster and spokesperson for environmental conservation. His autobiography looks at his family’s history in Canada, including their experience in Slocan internment camp during the 1940s, when Suzuki was […]

Mary Adachi

Mary Adachi is a book editor and the widow of Ken Adachi. She worked for Penguin Canada and has edited such books as Blood and Chrysanthemums by Nancy Baker and Howard Engel’s mystery books. She also worked on The Life Of Margaret Laurence by James King for Viking Press.

Katsuyoshi Morita

Katsuyoshi Morita was the author of Powell Street Monogatari, a chronicle of stories from the prewar Japanese Canadian neighbourhood of Powell Street and Morita’s experiences in the internment camp of Greenwood during the forced removal. Powell Street Monogatari was originally written in Japanese, and translated into English by Eric Sokugawa (translation published in 1989).

Maryka Omatsu

Maryka Omatsu is a former lawyer and Canada’s first Asian woman judge. She is the author of the non-fiction book Bittersweet Passage: Redress and the Japanese Canadian Experience. Published in 1992, Bittersweet Passage speaks of the Japanese Canadian struggle to come to terms with the injustices of the 1940s, through the lens of a sansei […]

Frank Moritsugu

Frank Moritsugu is a Nisei journalist and author of Teaching in Canadian Exile: a History of the Schools for Japanese-Canadian Children in British Columbia Detention Camps During the Second World War (2001), with the Ghost Town Teachers Historical Society. Moritsugu grew up in the Vancouver neighbourhood of Kitsilano, and attended Kitsilano Secondary, where he was […]

Takeo Ujo Nakano

Takeo Ujo Nakano was an Issei poet and author of the memoir Within the Barbed Wire Fence, which recounts his experience of the Japanese Canadian internment in road camps and the Angler POW camp. Born in Japan, Nakano immigrated to Canada in 1920, and was living in Woodfibre, BC with his wife and young daughter […]

Aki Shimazaki

Aki Shimazaki is a French-language novelist and translator best known for Tsubaki (1999), a novel set in Nagasaki in which the dropping of the atomic bomb figures prominently. Tsubaki, her first book, has been translated into English, and her books have also been translated into Japanese, German, Hungarian, and Russian. Shimazaki was born in Gifu, […]

Kathlyn Horibe

Kathlyn Horibe was a journalist and editor who published with magazines and newspapers in Canada, the United States, Europe, and New Zealand. She was also the author of Toronto Disasters: Devastation and Tragedies that Made the Headlines. She worked in management before changing her career to become a writer and editor of corporate communications and […]