Ontario

Garry Kawasaki

Garry Kawasaki is a musician who played bass and provided vocals for the Asia Minors, an Asian Canadian top 40s rock band that played in Toronto in the 1960s. He collaborated many times with Terry Watada, including appearing in his album Runaway Horses and several other recordings. He has also performed with the band the […]

Archie Nishihama

Akira ‘Archie’ Nishihama is a musician and composer. He studied music in Osaka, and composed several songs for schools in Japan, as well as the kohka (school song) for the Toronto Japanese Language School. He is also well known for his arrangement of the song Wonderful Canada for the Sansei Choir in Toronto. Nishihama was […]

Robert Yamashita

Robert Noboru Yamashita is a retired architect. He worked for the City of Toronto from 1968 to 2000, where he was the lead figure for homelessness, poverty, mental health, and housing issues. He is currently exploring a practice as an abstract painter and photographer.

The Singing Knights

The Singing Knights were an Asian Canadian folk band in Toronto in the 1960s and 1970s. They were formed by the Chung family, and at one time featured Garry Kawasaki and Terry Watada. They toured Ontario, and once performed for Prince Charles of England.

Sansei North Productions

Sansei North Productions, a theatre production house, was established by Terry Watada and operated out of the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre in Toronto. Its primary purpose was to present Japanese American playwright Lane Nishikawa’s one-man show about Sansei identity, Life in the Fast Lane. It did so in 1983 and 1984. In 1987, Watada teamed […]

Helen Koyama

Helen Koyama is a Sansei writer based in Toronto. Her poetry was published in the landmark Asian Canadian anthology Inalienable Rice in 1979, and she also did illustrations for Rikka and Ricepaper magazines. She has worked in the Japanese Canadian community in Toronto, including for The New Canadian, which also published her poetry. She currently […]

Ruth Ohi

Ruth Ohi is a writer and illustrator of children’s books. She has illustrated over 60 books, 19 of which she is also the author. Her work includes the illustrations for Naomi’s Tree by Joy Kogawa, and more recently a book about the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, Kenta and the Big Wave.

Rui Umezawa

Rui Umezawa is a Toronto-based writer of such books as Strange Light Afar and The Truth About Death and Dying. Born in Tokyo in 1959, he left Japan as a child with his father, a theoretical physicist who pursued career opportunities in Europe, the United States, and eventually Canada. Umezawa writes novels, essays, and stories […]

Ann Sunahara

Ann Gomer Sunahara is a legal scholar and author of the The Politics of Racism: The Uprooting of Japanese Canadians During the Second World War. Published in 1981, The Politics of Racism examined federal government records of the Japanese Canadian internment which had only recently been declassified at the time of Sunahara’s research. It is […]

Mary Adachi

Mary Adachi is a book editor and the widow of Ken Adachi. She worked for Penguin Canada and has edited such books as Blood and Chrysanthemums by Nancy Baker and Howard Engel’s mystery books. She also worked on The Life Of Margaret Laurence by James King for Viking Press.

Frank Moritsugu

Frank Moritsugu is a Nisei journalist and author of Teaching in Canadian Exile: a History of the Schools for Japanese-Canadian Children in British Columbia Detention Camps During the Second World War (2001), with the Ghost Town Teachers Historical Society. Moritsugu grew up in the Vancouver neighbourhood of Kitsilano, and attended Kitsilano Secondary, where he was […]

Takeo Ujo Nakano

Takeo Ujo Nakano was an Issei poet and author of the memoir Within the Barbed Wire Fence, which recounts his experience of the Japanese Canadian internment in road camps and the Angler POW camp. Born in Japan, Nakano immigrated to Canada in 1920, and was living in Woodfibre, BC with his wife and young daughter […]

Jamie Parker

Jamie Parker is a concert pianist with an extensive career both as a soloist and as part of chamber ensembles, including the renowned Gryphon Trio. Born in British Columbia, he studied at the Vancouver Academy of Music and the University of British Columbia, and continued on to The Juilliard School. He is now a teacher […]

Laura Suzuki

Laura Suzuki is a graphic designer with a multidisciplinary background, including biological psychology, science writing, and print and web design. She co-founded the company Doodletronics with illustrator Peter Cook, which specializes in web communications and also produces books about science, nature, and the environment for children.

Shozo Ushiroguchi

Shozo Ushiroguchi is a photographer who began making black and white photographic prints over 50 years ago when he moved from Japan to Germany; that’s where he apprenticed in a photo studio in West Berlin and attended a technical institute for film and photography. Over the years, his black and white prints have continued to […]