Nisei

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 […]

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 […]

James Jun (Jim) Koyanagi

James Koyanagi was a Burlington-based architect and a founding partner of the Svedas-Koyanagi Architects firm. He was responsible for the design of such notable buildings as the Burlington City Hall, the Royal Botanical Gardens, and the University of Toronto Athletic Centre, among many other buildings throughout Ontario. Born on Sea Island, Vancouver, Koyanagi was a […]

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 […]

Ted Teshima

Ted Teshima was born in Sea Island, British Columbia on Sept. 4, 1938. While in high school, he was inspired by a book about Frank Lloyd Wright and chose to pursue architecture as a career. He graduated from the School of Architecture at the University of Toronto in 1962 and went on to become partner […]

Tamio Wakayama

Tamio Wakayama is a photographer.

Walter Sunahara

Walter Sunahara was a painter. He was born in Vancouver and during WWII was interned as a child at Bay Farm, Slocan. Moving east after the war he earned a degree from the Ontario College of Art, Toronto in 1959. Walter then pursued graduate studies at the Tokyo University of Fine Arts specializing in Nihonga, […]

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 […]

Kazuo Nakamura

Kazuo Nakamura was an internationally recognized abstract painter, widely noted for his application of rigorous mathematical structure to his depictions of both landscapes and more abstract visuals. Born in Vancouver in 1926, he was teaching himself how to paint landscapes when he was forcibly relocated as a teenager to the Tashme internment camp, where he […]

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. […]

Roy Kumano

Roy Kumano was one of the most well-known Nisei harmonica players, and a member of the Lemon Creek Harmonica Band. He was very active as a harmonica performer and bandleader in Vancouver prior to the forced removal, giving solo performances as well as leading groups such as the Gakuyukai and Hompa Harmonica Bands. He was […]

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 […]

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 […]

Harry Aoki

Harry Hiro-o Aoki was a Nisei harmonica and stand-up bass player, known for his musical virtuosity and his enthusiasm for fostering intercultural understanding through music. Born in Cumberland, BC, the second son of two Japanese Language School teachers, Harry grew up listening to Bach and Duke Ellington, and debating intellectual and social ideas around the […]