Traditional Arts

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 […]

Takeo Yamashiro

Takeo Yamashiro is a shakuhachi master who has lived and practiced his music in Canada since 1972. Prior to his arrival in Vancouver, Yamashiro trained under and played with two Kyoto Masters, Shuzan Yamashita and Kofu Kikusui. In 1971, he was appointed with mastership and the designated name of Rempu (Lotus Wind), the Chief Protégé […]

Ruth Yamada

Ruth Yamada was a sumi-e artist and watercolour painter, and founder of the Toronto-based group Sumi-e Artists of Canada. Professionally, Yamada worked as the lead fashion artist for Fairweather Clothing. Her sumi-e and watercolours were exhibited at a number of solo exhibitions in Ontario, and part of group exhibitions internationally, including in Japan. Yamada was […]

Chiyoko Izumi

Chiyoko Izumi is an odori dance instructor in Hamilton, Ontario, who has been teaching odori for over 70 years. She began to study odori at age 10 in Vancouver, two years before she was sent to Japan to care for her sick grandmother. Izumi returned to Canada after her grandmother’s death, and married her husband […]

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 […]

Yuriko Igarashi Kitamura

Yuriko Igarashi Kitamura is a watercolour painter. Kitamura graduated from university in Japan, and worked in pharmacology there before she and her family moved to the U.S., finally settling in Canada. After 20 years as a homemaker she began taking art courses at the U of A Faculty of Extension, under Mr. Harry Savage. His […]

Peter Wakayama

Peter Hiroshi Wakayama is a retired architect born in Pt. Hammond, B.C. on August 28 1936. During the war, Wakayama was interned with family at Hasting Park, Vancouver, B.C., and in the interior of B.C. at Tashme, Roseberry, and New Denver. After the war, the family moved east to Chatham, Ontario where Wakayama went to […]

Teruo Adachi

Teruo (Terry) Adachi was born in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia. Life took him to Tottori-ken, Japan (ages 6 to 10), Vancouver, B.C. (his teen years), Jackfish and Valetta, Ontario work/farm camps during the war and, finally, Toronto in 1942. He studied painting and drawing in Toronto at Central Tech and the Ontario College of Art […]

Takako Yokoyama

Takako Yokoyama is a tea ceremony and ikebana practitioner. She joined the Omote-Senke tea school and Kōfu-Mishō ikebana school when she was 15 years old in Japan. She received her master certificate from both schools. She has since devoted her time to these traditional arts since her immigration to Canada in 1982. In 2017, she […]

Kiyoko Boycott

Kiyoko Boycott is an ikebana teacher and practitioner. She is one of the founding members of the Vancouver Ikebana Association, and has been teaching and practicing ikebana for over 50 years. Before immigrating to Canada with her husband and children in 1959, Boycott owned a flower shop in the Aoyama area of Tokyo, where she […]

Suezan Aikins

Suezan Aikins is a Nova Scotia-based artist who grew up in Montreal and studied fine art at universities and art schools in New Brunswick, Toronto, Montreal and Halifax. In 1984-1985, her lifelong dream was realized when she went to Japan to study traditional Japanese art techniques under internationally known artist Yoshida Toshi, and his master […]

Toshiko Yoshikawa

“Toshiko Yoshikawa (maiden name Kodama) was born in 1920 on the family owned strawberry farm in Mission B.C. She departed for Hiroshima Japan with her father just prior to the start of the Pacific war. Yoshikawa’s love of ikebana (flower arrangement) started while living in Japan when she asked her husband for permission to take […]