British Columbia

Kiyoshi Matsuzaki

Kiyoshi Matsuzaki was an architect. He was born in Shanghai, China to parents from Steveston, BC, and grew up in Tokyo. At age 18, Matsuzaki began his architectural studies at the Rhode Island School of Design, and worked at a firm in Hamden, Connecticut for some years after graduation, where he met his wife, fellow […]

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 […]

Joyce Kamikura

Joyce Kamikura is a painter and print-maker. She was one of the first Canadians to be bestowed Signature Member of the National Watercolor Society (NWS – USA). She was also one of the first women to be given the top ranking title in the Federation of Canadian Artists as a Senior Signature Member (SFCA). Exhibitions […]

Stanley Fukawa

Stanley Toshinori Fukawa is a Nisei sociologist, community organizer, historian and writer. He organized the Mid-Island Japanese Canadian Society, affectionately called the ‘Seven Potatoes’ (nana imo) Society and served as the writer/editor/publisher of their newsletter. He also wrote numerous articles for and served on the editorial committee of Nikkei Images, the journal of the Nikkei […]

Masako Fukawa

Masako Fukawa (nee Shinde) is a Sansei educator and writer. Born in Prince Rupert BC, she was removed from Steveston and relocated to the ghost town of Greenwood. Returned to Steveston in 1951, attended UBC, the University of Michigan, University of Victoria and taught in Japan and in Nanaimo. She developed resources for teachers and […]

Lotus Miyashita

Lotus Miyashita is an artist and graphic designer based in Vancouver. She graduated from Vancouver Community College and Emily Carr College of Art & Design. Her early design work includes The Bulletin/Geppo in the early 1990s, and the 1994 print directory “Japanese Canadians in the Arts” and she has also done design work for a […]

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 […]

Takao Tanabe

Takao Tanabe is among the first wave of prominent Nisei Canadian artists, with a sixty-year painting career that still continues today. Born in Prince Rupert, BC to a fishing family, Tanabe was forcibly relocated away from the coast as a teenager, eventually ending up in Winnipeg, where he began his artistic studies. He went on […]

Mitch Miyagawa

Mitch Miyagawa is a filmmaker and writer known for his 2012 documentary A Sorry State. A Sorry State won the Writers’ Guild of Canada Screenwriting Award for Documentary in 2013. It was commissioned by TVO and Knowledge Network. His play The Plum Tree was produced several times across western Canada, as well as a public […]

Susanne Tabata

Susanne Tabata is a documentarian and digital media creator whose passion is to find truth in overlooked subject material. She was born in Nanaimo and grew up in Tokyo and Victoria before moving to Vancouver to study International Relations at UBC. Her artistic practice is informed by the shadow of trauma experienced by her pre-war […]

Kanau Uyeyama

Kanau Uyeyama is a Vancouver-based architect who has run his own firm, Architecton, with the help of his wife, chief researcher Mary Todd, for over forty years. He received his Bachelor of Architecture at the University of British Columbia in 1957, and since then has designed numerous corporate and research facilities, schools, offices, and private […]

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 […]

Grace Eiko Thomson

Grace Eiko Thomson, curator, historian and a social activist, was the founding director-curator of the Japanese Canadian National Museum, (now Nikkei National Museum) in Burnaby, BC. Born in Steveston’s Japanese Fishermen’s Hospital, she was raised in the Powell Street neighbourhood of Vancouver until her family was forced to leave in 1942. They settled in the […]

Noboru Sawai

Noboru Sawai was an American- and Japanese-trained printmaker whose work was exhibited all over the world, including in Canada, Japan, Italy, and Israel. He was born in Takamatsu, Japan, and immigrated to the United States in 1950 after working as a cook’s assistant for the United States military in Japan for four years. He contracted […]

Tamotsu Tongu

Tamotsu Tongu is a landscape architect, the president of Toko Garden Design based in Burnaby, BC. Born in Japan, he received certification in civil engineering, in the Saga school of ikebana, gardening, and master of landscape gardening, as well as a Bachelor’s degree from the Tokyo University of Agriculture for Landscape Architecture in 1979. After […]