Ontario

Lorne Hawryluk

Lorne Hawryluk is a Toronto-based actor who was active in the 1980s and 1990s. His theatre credits include Song for a Nisei Fisherman (Sansei North, 1987); film credits include Breaking All the Rules (CBC-TV, 1987) and Kung Fu, The Legend Continues (Warner Bros, 1993). He also performed in a Musical Theatre showcase at the Banff […]

Machiko Yamamoto

Machiko Yamamoto is a Toronto-based textile designer. Born in Japan, she received her Bachelor of Education in Arts and Crafts at the Kyoto University of Education in 1975. After graduating, she worked as a textile designer for custom orders in the 1970s. Her work has been displayed in Canada, Japan, and New York City, as […]

Junko Nishinoiri

Junko Nishinoiri is a Japanese- and Canadian-trained printmaker who was active in Toronto in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Born in Japan, she studied printmaking at Tama Art College in Tokyo, and then at Ontario College of Art in Toronto, in the 1980s. She won awards for lithography in Ontario, including a scholarship from […]

Grace Murao

Grace Murao is a printmaker who was actively exhibiting work in the 1980s and early 1990s. Born in British Columbia, she received her BFA from the University of British Columbia in 1984, and her MFA at the University of Calgary in 1986. Later moving to Toronto, she showed her work in solo and group shows […]

Masako Yamaguchi

Masako Yamaguchi was a koto player from the Kansai region of Japan. She was trained in the Ikuta style of koto playing, her principal teachers being Miyako Kyakuden, Kinrei Shizuki, and Soyo Nakamura, and was herself for decades an important koto teacher in Toronto. She also received her BA in English Literature from Kansai University […]

Mona Oikawa

Mona Oikawa is a writer. An active player in the 1980s and 1990s in Toronto in the lesbian and Asian Canadian literary scene with various publications of poems and short stories, she is now best known as an academic, particularly for her book Cartographies of Violence: Japanese Canadian Women, Memory and the Subjects of Internment, […]

Takashi Yamashita

Takashi Yamashita is an architect who operates in the corporate world of commercial real estate, finance, and development. A partner and president at Takol Real Estate in Toronto, he is also a member of both the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada and the Manitoba Association of Architects. Born in Manitoba, he received his BES (Architecture) […]

Harvey Okawara

Harvey Hideo Okawara was an architect, born in Vancouver, BC, and interned in Tashme, before moving to Toronto where he completed high school and attended the University of Toronto. He worked at various private architectural firms and for 25 years worked for the Federal government in the formerly named Department of Defence, and Department of […]

Dennis Tanaka

Dennis Tanaka is an award-winning Toronto-based architect and president of Dennis K. Tanaka, Architect Inc. Born in British Columbia, he received his Bachelor of Architecture from McGill in 1968. He has been responsible for numerous additions, renovations, and master plans for community buildings around Ontario, and has received provincial and national masonry awards for design […]

Margaret Ishii

Margaret Ishii is a Toronto-based architect and university lecturer in interior design. She holds degrees in Environmental Studies and Architecture from the University of Waterloo, and has over thirty years’ experience as an architect, working on projects such as the redevelopment of the Pearson Airport’s Terminals One and Two, Fredericton Medical Centre, and a number […]

Yoichi Shimizu

Yoichi Shimizu is a Japanese-born graphic designer who worked primarily in Toronto. After graduating from Naniwa Art College in Osaka, Shimizu worked for a Japanese design company, Nippon Create Design Limited, for from 1974-1976. He then immigrated to Canada and worked for Gottschalk and Ash Limited in Montreal, later moving on to different design companies […]

Vernon Hakkaku

Vernon Hakkaku was a well-known piano accompanist for many Nisei singers during and after the Second World War. He was known for having a distinctively Japanese style which suited the Nisei singers well. Terry Watada recalls: ‘Vernon Hakkaku was a postal worker in Toronto. His house in Cabbagetown was sparsely furnished, with only a baby […]

Toyo Takata

Toyo Takata was the author of Nikkei Legacy: The Story of Japanese Canadians from Settlement to Today. Born in Victoria, Takata spent two years in internment camps before resettling in Toronto. He was the English editor for The New Canadian from 1948-1952, and also served as president of the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre. Takata was […]

Yon Shimizu

Yoshio ‘Yon’ Shimizu was the author of The Exiles: An Archival History of the World War II Japanese Road Camps in British Columbia and Ontario. Born in Victoria, Shimizu was a young man just about to finish high school when the government ordered the removal of all Japanese Canadians from the west coast. Shimizu was […]

Tomoko Makabe

Tomoko Makabe is the author of Picture Brides: Japanese Women in Canada and The Canadian Sansei, two non-fiction books on Japanese Canadians. Born in Japan, Makabe became a writer, researcher, and consultant in Toronto. She originally wrote the oral history-based Picture Brides in Japanese, based on interviews with five Issei women; it was translated into […]