Nisei

Kasha Konaka

Kasha is a circus artist from Vancouver, Canada. She specializes in contortion acrobatics and has performed extensively in the Greater Vancouver Area for various corporate events and productions.

Hitoko Okada

Hitoko Okada is a fibre artist and craft maker based in Hamilton, Ontario. She started her career as a props maker and costumer in professional theatre in Vancouver, British Columbia and throughout Southern Ontario, including The Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario, The Grand Theatre in London, Ontario, and Mirvish Productions in Toronto, Ontario. Her […]

Jeff Hamada

Jeff Hamada is second generation Japanese Canadian artist living and working in beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia. In 2008 he created Booooooom which quickly became one of the most prominent art blogs on the Internet and is the largest of its kind in Canada.

Mary Akemi Morris

Mary Akemi Morris is a watercolour and acrylic painter born in the internment camp of Tashme, British Columbia in 1945 and now based in London, Ontario. She is a graduate of Fine Arts, University of Toronto and has taught art in secondary schools in North York and London, Ontario. In 2019, she exhibited her art […]

Henry Takatsu

William (Henry) Takatsu was born on 1927 in Haney, BC (now Maple Ridge) the second youngest of seven siblings to parents (strawberry and vegetable farmers), Shunsuke and Tatsu Takatsu (nee Mitsuhashi), who were originally from Narita, Chiba Prefecture, Japan. During the Federal government internment, his family was relocated to the Franco-Manitoban community of La Rochelle, […]

Natalie Purschwitz

Natalie Purschwitz is a visual artist based in Vancouver, BC. Her work seeks out spaces between art, design, performance and daily life. Purschwitz has shown her work nationally and internationally at the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Nikkei National Museum, the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Canada House in London, England and the Prince Takamato Gallery in […]

Toru Fujibayashi

I was born at home into a world of chaos on the 23rd February, 1942 in Vancouver, BC, an enemy alien destined for internment in the Slocan Valley…brief stays in Popoff, Bay Farm, then settling in Slocan City. In 1963 fate would find me at the Alberta College of Art for 4 interminable years. And […]

Fumiko Greenaway

Fumiko Greenaway (née Endo) was born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan on April 16, 1929, the eldest child of George Chohei Endo and Tomie Endo, formerly of Miyagi-ken, near Sendai, in northern Japan. A cook, George had come to Canada and followed the railroad east, finding a job with the CPR hotel in Moose Jaw. Setting […]

Shizuo Kato

Shizuo Kato was a Japanese Canadian artist who studied painting in Paris in the late 1930s. Originally from Vancouver, Kato worked at his uncle’s Powell Street shoe store and took night school art classes before travelling to Paris to study at the Cour de l’Academie Colarossie, former place of study for Picasso and Matisse. Ten […]

Robert Ito

Robert Ito is a well-known film actor. Born in Vancouver in 1931, he began his performance career early, winning local singing, dance, and elocution competitions from the tender age of eight as “little Bobby Ito”. He also performed in talent revues in the community, both in Vancouver, and later in Hastings Park. He was interned […]

Aki Hyodo

Aki Hyodo was a talented amateur Nisei actress well-known in the Powell Street community. She was a member of the Powell United Church Young People’s Society, which first entered a play into the city drama festival in 1939. In each of Powell YPS’s three entries into the city drama festival, in 1939, 1940, and 1941, […]

Stan Shikatani

Born 1928. Prince Rupert BC. Relocated to Toronto in 1946. Studied design, typography and painting. Honors Graduate. Ontario College of Art. Worked professionally for 10 years before accepting a teaching post at Sheridan College,School of Art and Design. Stan pioneered the graphic design curriculum in the field of design education at Sheridan and the level […]

Miyo Ishiwata

Miyo Ishiwata was a Nisei poet whose work appeared frequently in The New Canadian in the late 1930s and 1940s. While many writers contributed poems to The New Canadian, Ishiwata was among the most frequently published, and arguably the most popular: several readers of the paper wrote to praise her work for its sensitivity and […]

Mark Toyama

Mark Toyama was a Nisei writer who published several popular works in The New Canadian prior to his early death. He was perhaps best known for his poem “powell st,” first published in The New Canadian in 1940 and then reprinted in 1942 in the midst of the Japanese Canadian community’s forced removal from that […]

Eiko Henmi

Eiko “Cindy” Henmi was a popular writer for The New Canadian in the 1940s. Originally from Victoria, Henmi graduated from the University of British Columbia in 1939. She usually wrote under the pen name “Cinderella”, and was best known for her regular column “Femme-Fare” (1940-1942), but also occasionally contributed short stories and essays under her […]