Vancouver

Susanne Tabata

Susanne Tabata is a documentarian and digital media creator whose passion is to find truth in overlooked subject material. She was born in Nanaimo and grew up in Tokyo and Victoria before moving to Vancouver to study International Relations at UBC. Her artistic practice is informed by the shadow of trauma experienced by her pre-war […]

Kanau Uyeyama

Kanau Uyeyama is a Vancouver-based architect who has run his own firm, Architecton, with the help of his wife, chief researcher Mary Todd, for over forty years. He received his Bachelor of Architecture at the University of British Columbia in 1957, and since then has designed numerous corporate and research facilities, schools, offices, and private […]

Kiyoko Boycott

Kiyoko Boycott is an ikebana teacher and practitioner. She is one of the founding members of the Vancouver Ikebana Association, and has been teaching and practicing ikebana for over 50 years. Before immigrating to Canada with her husband and children in 1959, Boycott owned a flower shop in the Aoyama area of Tokyo, where she […]

Grace Eiko Thomson

Grace Eiko Thomson, curator, historian and a social activist, was the founding director-curator of the Japanese Canadian National Museum, (now Nikkei National Museum) in Burnaby, BC. Born in Steveston’s Japanese Fishermen’s Hospital, she was raised in the Powell Street neighbourhood of Vancouver until her family was forced to leave in 1942. They settled in the […]

Noboru Sawai

Noboru Sawai was an American- and Japanese-trained printmaker whose work was exhibited all over the world, including in Canada, Japan, Italy, and Israel. He was born in Takamatsu, Japan, and immigrated to the United States in 1950 after working as a cook’s assistant for the United States military in Japan for four years. He contracted […]

Tamotsu Tongu

Tamotsu Tongu is a landscape architect, the president of Toko Garden Design based in Burnaby, BC. Born in Japan, he received certification in civil engineering, in the Saga school of ikebana, gardening, and master of landscape gardening, as well as a Bachelor’s degree from the Tokyo University of Agriculture for Landscape Architecture in 1979. After […]

Taiga Chiba

Taiga Chiba is an artist whose work takes on a variety of forms, including printmaking, fabric arts, sculpture, and dance. He was born in Shizuoka, Japan and studied Studio Arts at Musashino Art University in Tokyo. After 6 and a half years of teaching Art in high schools in Shizuoka Prefecture, he immigrated to Canada […]

Emiko Morita

Emiko Morita is a third-generation mixed-heritage Japanese Canadian arts administrator and from 2015 – 2024, the Executive Director of the Powell Street Festival in Vancouver, the largest Japanese Canadian arts and cultural festival in Canada. Previously, she worked in the publishing industry as the marketing director at Douglas & McIntyre, leading marketing campaigns for national […]

Roy K. Kiyooka

One of the first Japanese Canadian artists to achieve prominence on a national and international scale, Roy Kiyooka began his art practice as a painter, later turned his focus to poetry and photography, and engaged in a variety of trans-disciplinary, experimental, and community-building work in the Canadian arts scene. A Nisei, Kiyooka was born in […]

Daphne Marlatt

Daphne Marlatt is a writer who has published more than twenty books that are hybrid forms of poetry, autobiography, prose, travelogue, essay, theory, historical fiction, history, journal, theory, and manifesto. She was born in 1942 to British expatriates and spent her early childhood in Australia and Malaysia. Her family immigrated to Canada when she was […]

Uzume Taiko

Uzume Taiko is West Coast Canada’s premiere professional taiko drumming group. Performing both nationally and internationally since 1988, the group performs their unique West Coast Canadian taiko drumming style to different audiences, creating shows to perform at festivals, concert halls, schools, corporate and VIP events. Uzume Taiko celebrates the rhythm of life itself with shows […]