Literary Arts

Roland Kawano

Roland Kawano is a priest and the editor of A History of the Japanese Congregations in the United Church of Canada 1892-1959, published in 1998. The book is a translation of a previously commissioned history available only in Japanese that documented the founding of the Japanese church in British Columbia in the late 1800s, and […]

Roy Miki

Roy Miki is a Vancouver-based poet and critic, well-known for his award-winning poetry, literary criticism, theoretical texts, editorial work, as well as for his activist work as part of the Redress movement in the 1980s. He is the author of five collections of poetry, including the Governor General’s award-winning Surrender (2001), the documentary text, co-authored […]

Marjene Matsunaga Turnbull

Marjene Matsunaga Turnbull is a ceramicist and doll-maker. She produced functional pottery from 1987 – 2012. She also created Nikkei kokeshi (Japanese wooden dolls) – each one unique in facial expression and design. From 1981, Turnbull compiled family stories and in 1991 finished writing and editing the book Hisaoka Family Memoirs. Turnbull needed to know […]

Shizuye Takashima

Shizuye Takashima was one of Canada’s foremost Nisei painters. Beginning in the late 1950s, she became noticed on the Canadian art scene for her skilful and sensitive figurative paintings, but her style and subject matter underwent many transformations throughout her career. She is most well-known for her book, A Child in Prison Camp, which tells […]

Toyoshi (Yoshi) Yoshihara

Toyoshi Yoshihara was born in Tokyo, Japan, in 1937. After graduating from Waseda University (B.A.), he immigrated to Canada in 1970. Besides running a successful heavy equipment marketing business (Komatsu Canada Ltd.), he promoted theatre exchanges between Canada and Japan, and has translated more than 50 Canadian plays into Japanese, and five Japanese plays into […]

Miyo Tominaga

Miyo Tominaga is a tanka poet. She was born on August 6, 1918 in Nagano Prefecture and studied tanka and shodo in Japan. She moved to Quebec in 1987 and was the instructor of a tanka study group in Montreal in the 1990s and a long-time member of the ASUKA tanka group now dissolved. She […]

Naomi Guilbert

Naomi Guilbert is a writer who set aside writing in 1995 to focus on music when she co-founded the Winnipeg based professional taiko group Fubuki Daiko with her husband, Hiroshi Koshiyama. Guilbert received her formative training with Grandmaster Seiichi Tanaka and the San Fransicso Taiko Dojo where she was also a principal instructor. She has […]

Tetsuro Shigematsu

Tetsuro Shigematsu is a writer, actor, performance artist, broadcaster, stand-up comic, scholar, filmmaker, and theatre artist. Originally trained in the fine arts, he found a similar creative outlet writing for CBC Television’s This Hour Has 22 Minutes. Then in 2004, he became the first person-of-colour to host a daily national radio program in Canada when […]

Frank Nakashima

Frank Tadashi Nakashima was born in Toronto on July 22, 1951. He is a graduate of York University (Toronto) Bachelor of Fine Arts 1975, specializing in the performance practice of Medieval and Renaissance music. He has performed with The Toronto Consort (1972-1974), the Tafelmusik Chamber Choir (founding member) 1981-1986 and was a consultant for Poculi […]

Manami Hara

Manami Hara was born and raised in Tokyo Japan. She became fascinated with Western theatre and the English language and at the age of 18, left Japan home to become a stage actor in North America. She moved to Vancouver, took ESL classes and graduated from Studio 58, a two-year conservatory Theatre Arts program at […]

Baco Ohama

Baco Ohama describes herself as a sensorialist, a writer, a text walker, a maker, and as an artist who works with the felt and the found. She says she is drawn to slow conversations and everyday poetics, and often finds herself thinking about the relationships between history, language, and location. A sansei who grew up […]

Mieko Ouchi

Mieko Ouchi is an actor, writer, and director working in theatre and film/TV. Mieko trained at U of A’s BFA Acting Program, the Women in the Director’s Chair Program and the National Screen Institute. Film roles include Nori Sato in Global TV’s The Guard, The Orange Seed Myth and Other Lies Mothers Tell, Fear Itself, […]

Joy Kogawa

Joy Kogawa was born in Vancouver in 1935. As a young child, she and her family were forced to leave their home in the Marpole neighbourhood and move to the Slocan internment camp in the interior of British Columbia. Her family’s experience of the forced uprooting of Japanese Canadians later inspired her 1981 novel, Obasan. […]

Dorothy Livesay

Dorothy Livesay was a widely respected Canadian poet. Amidst a long and noted body of literary work, she is included in this directory for her long poem Call My People Home (1950), one of the earliest artistic works to address the Japanese Canadian internment and decry its injustices. Call My People Home was also recorded […]

Ken Adachi

Ken Adachi was the author of the seminal history of Japanese Canadians, The Enemy That Never Was (1976). A journalist by profession, Adachi was commissioned to write the book by the National Association of Japanese Canadians. He was born in British Columbia in 1928, and he and his family were forcibly removed from Vancouver to […]