Literary Arts

Mona Oikawa

Mona Oikawa is a writer. An active player in the 1980s and 1990s in Toronto in the lesbian and Asian Canadian literary scene with various publications of poems and short stories, she is now best known as an academic, particularly for her book Cartographies of Violence: Japanese Canadian Women, Memory and the Subjects of Internment, […]

Yoshimaru Abe

Yoshimaru Abe was an entertainer, artist, haiku poet, garden designer. Born in 1914 in Fukuoka, Japan, Abe immigrated to Canada in 1927 to join his parents in Port Hammond, BC. There he worked for the local lumber mill while also working on the family strawberry farm. With other Japanese community members, he engaged in shibai […]

Tom Morimoto

Tom Morimoto is the author of the memoir, Breaking Trail: From Canada’s Northern Frontier to the Oil Fields of Dubai. He was born in Edmonton and grew up in Fort McMurray, one of seven brothers. As a young man, he worked in his father’s garden and on a scow on the Athabasca River with the […]

Tom Sando

Tom Sando is the author of Wild Daisies in the Sand (2002), a book based on his diary entries from the 1940s when he was imprisoned in Petawawa and Angler. Born in British Columbia, he was raised and educated in Japan by relatives after the death of his mother, and returned to Canada in 1938 […]

Tomo Hattori

Tomo Hattori is a literary critic. He is an associate professor of Asian American studies at California State University, Northridge (CSUN). He is most recently the author of The Monkey and the Colonoscopy Machine: On the Destruction of Racism and Stereotype in Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese and Level Up forthcoming in Growing Up […]

Toyo Takata

Toyo Takata was the author of Nikkei Legacy: The Story of Japanese Canadians from Settlement to Today. Born in Victoria, Takata spent two years in internment camps before resettling in Toronto. He was the English editor for The New Canadian from 1948-1952, and also served as president of the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre. Takata was […]

Yon Shimizu

Yoshio ‘Yon’ Shimizu was the author of The Exiles: An Archival History of the World War II Japanese Road Camps in British Columbia and Ontario. Born in Victoria, Shimizu was a young man just about to finish high school when the government ordered the removal of all Japanese Canadians from the west coast. Shimizu was […]

Art Miki

Art Miki is a community activist and retired educator living in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Born in Vancouver in 1936, he was five years old when his parents and grandparents, wanting to keep the family together, chose to relocate to a sugar beet farm in Ste. Agathe, a French-speaking community 40 kilometres south of Winnipeg. Following the […]

Michael Hoshiko

Michael Hoshiko was the author of Who was Who: Pioneer Japanese Families in Delta and Surrey (1998). A speech pathologist by profession, Hoshiko’s interest in Japanese Canadian history led him to become a repeat contributor to The New Canadian and the Nikkei Voice.

Tomoko Makabe

Tomoko Makabe is the author of Picture Brides: Japanese Women in Canada and The Canadian Sansei, two non-fiction books on Japanese Canadians. Born in Japan, Makabe became a writer, researcher, and consultant in Toronto. She originally wrote the oral history-based Picture Brides in Japanese, based on interviews with five Issei women; it was translated into […]

Midge Ayukawa

Michiko ‘Midge’ Ayukawa was a Nisei historian who specialized in Hiroshima immigrants and women’s experience in Japanese Canadian history. Born Michiko Ishii in Vancouver, Ayukawa was interned in Lemon Creek as a teenager. Her family resettled in Hamilton after the war, and she studied chemistry at McMaster University, earning both a bachelor’s and a master’s […]

Audrey Kobayashi

Audrey Kobayashi is a Professor of Geography at Queen’s University and a highly respected scholar in the Japanese Canadian community. Many know her for her book Memories of Our Past: A Brief History and Walking Tour of Powell Street. Kobayashi’s academic work has a longstanding relationship with the Japanese Canadian community, which she is continuing […]

Tatsuo Kage

Tatsuo Kage is the author of Nikkei Kanadajin no Tsuiho, translated into English as Uprooted Again: Japanese Canadians Move to Japan After World War II by Kathleen Chisato Merken. Born in Japan, Kage studied German history in Japan and Germany, eventually becoming an academic specializing in European political and diplomatic history. Kage worked as a […]

Randy Enomoto

Randy Enomoto is the editor of Honouring Our People: Breaking the Silence, a collection of stories from the 2009 Honouring Our People conference held by the Greater Vancouver Japanese Canadian Citizens Association. He also co-edited, with Genevieve Fuji Johnson, the volume Race, Racialization & Anti-Racism in Canada and Beyond. He is active in the Vancouver […]

Roy Ito

Roy Ryoichi Ito was a Nisei writer and historian, the author of We Went to War: The Story Of The Japanese Canadians Who Served During The First And Second World Wars (1984), Stories of My People: A Japanese Canadian Journal (1994), and the Japanese Canadians (1977), an illustrated history for high school students. Born in […]