Music

Roy Miya

Roy Miya is a musician who was born in 1925, Vancouver. At the age of 16, he first heard Vernon Hakkaku on piano playing Amapola, written by Joseph Lacalle, while on a boat on the Skeena River. Roy was so impressed, he began to teach himself piano. His brother Louie introduced him to stride piano, […]

Lemon Creek Harmonica Band

The Lemon Creek Harmonica Band was a long-enduring and well-loved musical group, a legacy of popular harmonica bands of the 1930s and 1940s. It was formed during the internment at the Lemon Creek internment camp by a group of young Nisei men who needed a diversion from internment life and was led by Junji Ikeno […]

Noriko Kim Kobayashi

Noriko Kobayashi is a musician. She earned a M.A. degree in Ethnomusicology from the University of British Columbia, in addition to a B.A. in Music and Psychology from U.B.C. She also earned a music degree from Capilano College in classical voice studies and is also a published author on the subject of taiko. Prior to […]

Dana LaCroix

Dana LaCroix, born April 1, 1966, is a Canadian-born singer and songwriter. She has released six roots and blues-influenced studio albums that incorporate elements of pop, roots-rock, country and folk music. LaCroix was born in Toronto, Canada, to Naomi LaCroix (née: Tanaka), a registered nurse and Pat LaCroix, a Canadian musician and photographer who toured […]

San Murata

ARTIST San Murata is an Ontario-based painter living in a historic small town near Toronto. Born in Japan, he graduated from the University of Musashi in Tokyo with a degree in Economics in 1964. In 1968, he travelled to Canada to ‘have a look around’, and liked it so much that he decided to stay. […]

E. Kage

E. Kage is a Taiko artist/performer and a digital audio artist. Born in Japan growing up in Canada, they embraced the art of Taiko as a way to express their empowerment as a mixed race queer youth. Since the 1980s they co-founded several Taiko/music groups touring parts of Europe and North America. Their digital audio […]

Rick Shiomi

Rick Shiomi is a Toronto-born theatre artist now based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and a leader in early Asian Canadian theatre movement in the 1980s. He credits his time spent in Vancouver in the 1970s, working with the Powell Street Festival in its early years, and later with the Redress movement, as what gave him the […]

Jon Kimura Parker

Jon Kimura Parker is a pianist who regularly performs as a soloist with orchestras around the world. After studying piano with his mother, Keiko Parker, and his uncle, Edward Parker, as a child, he went on to train at the Vancouver Academy of Music, the University of British Columbia, the Victoria Conservatory, the Banff Centre, […]

Fubuki Daiko

Fubuki Daiko (Blizzard Drums) is a professional Japanese taiko group founded in Winnipeg in 1995. Three of the group’s members (Hiroshi Koshiyama, Naomi Guilbert, and Bruce Robertson) received their formative training from Grandmaster Seiichi Tanaka, the founder of the San Francisco Taiko Dojo and the father of North American Taiko. With the SF Taiko Dojo, […]

Roy K. Kiyooka

One of the first Japanese Canadian artists to achieve prominence on a national and international scale, Roy Kiyooka began his art practice as a painter, later turned his focus to poetry and photography, and engaged in a variety of trans-disciplinary, experimental, and community-building work in the Canadian arts scene. A Nisei, Kiyooka was born in […]

Terry Watada

Terry Watada is a poet, novelist, short story writer, historian, playwright, columnist, essayist, and music composer. He has published five poetry collections, three novels, a short story collection, two manga, two histories on the Buddhist Church in Canada, and two children’s biographies. Significant titles include Kuroshio: The Blood of Foxes (Arsenal, Vancouver 2007), novel, The […]

John Endo Greenaway

John Endo Greenaway is a self-described hapa-sansei who lives and works in the Metro Vancouver area. Born in London, England to a Japanese Canadian mother and an English/Irish Canadian father, he has spent the last 55 years trying to figure out where he fits in. He will let you know when he does. In the […]

Uzume Taiko

Uzume Taiko is West Coast Canada’s premiere professional taiko drumming group. Performing both nationally and internationally since 1988, the group performs their unique West Coast Canadian taiko drumming style to different audiences, creating shows to perform at festivals, concert halls, schools, corporate and VIP events. Uzume Taiko celebrates the rhythm of life itself with shows […]