Toronto

Pat Adachi

Pat Adachi is the author of Asahi: A Legend in Baseball (1992), the book widely credited as sparking a popular revival of interest in the prewar Japanese Canadian Vancouver baseball team, the Asahi. Although she did not consider herself a writer, Adachi had been a fan of the Asahi as a young girl in Vancouver, […]

Tamai Kobayashi

Tamai Kobayashi is a Toronto-based writer of short stories, poetry, screenplays, and a novel, Prairie Ostrich. Prairie Ostrich, which follows eight-year-old Egg Murakami and her family on their ostrich farm in rural southern Alberta, has been called an ‘exquisitely crafted story’ with ‘insights into childhood, loss, cruelty and triumph’. Prairie Ostrich was listed by the […]

Aiko Suzuki

Aiko Suzuki was a prolific and versatile artist whose work took the forms of textiles, acrylic and oil painting, or just painting, printmaking, installations, and even multimedia works and set design. She was also an art educator, curator, and a leader and mentor in the arts community: not the least of her achievements was the […]

Butch Watanabe

Jiro ‘Butch’ Watanabe was an accomplished jazz trombonist who played with numerous famous musicians and prominent large ensembles in Toronto and on various tours throughout the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. Born in Fraser Mills, British Columbia, Butch was separated from his family as a young man by the internment, with family members sent to different […]

Roy Miya

Roy Miya is a musician who was born in 1925, Vancouver. At the age of 16, he first heard Vernon Hakkaku on piano playing Amapola, written by Joseph Lacalle, while on a boat on the Skeena River. Roy was so impressed, he began to teach himself piano. His brother Louie introduced him to stride piano, […]

David Kenji Fujino

David Fujino was a multidisciplinary Sansei artist who wrote poetry in the form of concrete visual poetry; he was also an actor and a writer of reviews, interviews, and opinion pieces. Born in the internment camp of Greenwood, Fujino became a fixture of the Toronto Japanese Canadian community and the arts scene. In the 1970s, […]

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 […]

Densaku (Fred) Kondo

Densaku (Fred) Kondo was a painter, known for his piece ‘Evacuation’ which is in the collection of the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre in Toronto. He was born in the Shiga prefecture of Japan in 1899. He married Tsune Ebata in 1929, and the couple had one daughter, Hiroko (Betty). He exhibited in Vancouver as early […]

Ken Fukushima

Ken Fukushima is a Toronto-based architect who has designed such projects as the Art Gallery of Windsor, the Jane-Sheppard branch of the Toronto Public Library, Seneca College Markham Campus building, and a pavilion for the Canadian Film Centre in Toronto. After receiving his B.Arch at Carleton University and his M. Arch. from Cranbook Academy of […]

Gabe Anderson

Takashi Gabe Anderson is a visual artist, born 1970 in Toronto. He is a 4th generation Japanese- Canadian artist. His mother is Ayako Ellen Anderson nee Yamasaki. She was a set designer in the theatre, an actress, and a social activist as well as the founder of CSAC Creative Spirit Art Centre. Gabe’s biological father […]

Ellen Anderson

Ayako Ellen Yamasaki Anderson is an artist, writer, and social activist. She was born in 1943, in Sandon, BC. Sandon was an internment camp for Japanese Canadians during the war. Ellen is considered a sansei third generation Japanese-Canadian but her great grandmother was actually a first generation Issei from Japan. Ellen trained as a visual […]

Banri Nakamura

Banri Nakamura was born in Tokyo, and moved close to Kyoto to escape the air raids of the Second world war which caused the deaths of his father, grandfather, aunt, and uncle. After ten years of country life, Nakamura moved back to Tokyo, and studied at a Industrial art technical high school where he specialized […]

Peter Wakayama

Peter Hiroshi Wakayama is a retired architect born in Pt. Hammond, B.C. on August 28 1936. During the war, Wakayama was interned with family at Hasting Park, Vancouver, B.C., and in the interior of B.C. at Tashme, Roseberry, and New Denver. After the war, the family moved east to Chatham, Ontario where Wakayama went to […]

Joni Moriyama

Joni Moriyama has worked for more than 25 years as a ceramic artist making vessel and sculptural forms. She received her undergraduate training at the Ontario College of Art (now OCADU) and her MFA at Alfred University in New York State. Moriyama has taught ceramics and 3D design at OCAD University since 1999. She also […]

Rene Ohashi

Rene Ohashi is an award-winning cinematographer based in Toronto. After receiving his BA in Film Production from York University, Ohashi has gone on to work as Director of Film Photography on such films and television series as the 1985 Anne of Green Gables miniseries, The Wonder Years, Nikita, and The War Between Us. Recent credits […]