Toronto

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]