Hamilton

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 […]

Harold Takayesu

Harold Takayesu was a highly-regarded Hamilton-based ceramicist. In 2002, he received the Mather Award from the Ontario Craft Council for outstanding contribution to crafts over an extended period.

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 […]

Leslie Sasaki

Leslie Sasaki is a sansei art educator and artist living in Hamilton, Ontario. He was born in Winnipeg in 1953 to George Sasaki (b. Annacis Island, BC) and Rosa Adeline Sasaki (nee Takatsu, b. Hainey, BC) His formative artistic influences include his father, who was a sign painter and his mother, who encouraged her children […]

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 […]

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 […]

Bryce Kanbara

Bryce Kanbara is a visual artist, curator and proprietor of you me gallery in Hamilton, Ontario. He is a founding member and first administrator of Hamilton Artists Inc.; curatorial positions at the Burlington Art Centre, Art Gallery of Hamilton, Glenhyrst Art Gallery of Brant, and curator/chair of the Arts Committee at the Japanese Canadian Cultural […]