History

Kimiko Fraser

Kimiko Fraser is an illustrator and historian-in-training based on the beautiful West Coast of British Columbia. She grew up constantly making—drawing, painting, knitting, sculpting, bookbinding etc—and has never learned how to stop. Kimiko earned a degree in Bachelor of Arts, Honours History, Major Visual Arts from the University of Victoria. Kimiko works with many mediums […]

Ann-Lee and Gordon Switzer

Ann-Lee and Gordon Switzer are the authors of Gateway to Promise: Canada’s First Japanese Community, and Sakura in Stone: Victoria’s Japanese Legacy. A husband and wife historian team, they became interested in the prewar Japanese Canadian community in Victoria after becoming involved in the local Japanese Canadian community and being asked to write about the […]

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 […]

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 […]

Michael Hoshiko

Michael Hoshiko was the author of Who was Who: Pioneer Japanese Families in Delta and Surrey (1998). A speech pathologist by profession, Hoshiko’s interest in Japanese Canadian history led him to become a repeat contributor to The New Canadian and the Nikkei Voice.

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 […]

Midge Ayukawa

Michiko ‘Midge’ Ayukawa was a Nisei historian who specialized in Hiroshima immigrants and women’s experience in Japanese Canadian history. Born Michiko Ishii in Vancouver, Ayukawa was interned in Lemon Creek as a teenager. Her family resettled in Hamilton after the war, and she studied chemistry at McMaster University, earning both a bachelor’s and a master’s […]

Audrey Kobayashi

Audrey Kobayashi is a Professor of Geography at Queen’s University and a highly respected scholar in the Japanese Canadian community. Many know her for her book Memories of Our Past: A Brief History and Walking Tour of Powell Street. Kobayashi’s academic work has a longstanding relationship with the Japanese Canadian community, which she is continuing […]

Tatsuo Kage

Tatsuo Kage is the author of Nikkei Kanadajin no Tsuiho, translated into English as Uprooted Again: Japanese Canadians Move to Japan After World War II by Kathleen Chisato Merken. Born in Japan, Kage studied German history in Japan and Germany, eventually becoming an academic specializing in European political and diplomatic history. Kage worked as a […]

Randy Enomoto

Randy Enomoto is the editor of Honouring Our People: Breaking the Silence, a collection of stories from the 2009 Honouring Our People conference held by the Greater Vancouver Japanese Canadian Citizens Association. He also co-edited, with Genevieve Fuji Johnson, the volume Race, Racialization & Anti-Racism in Canada and Beyond. He is active in the Vancouver […]

Roy Ito

Roy Ryoichi Ito was a Nisei writer and historian, the author of We Went to War: The Story Of The Japanese Canadians Who Served During The First And Second World Wars (1984), Stories of My People: A Japanese Canadian Journal (1994), and the Japanese Canadians (1977), an illustrated history for high school students. Born in […]

Roland Kawano

Roland Kawano is a priest and the editor of A History of the Japanese Congregations in the United Church of Canada 1892-1959, published in 1998. The book is a translation of a previously commissioned history available only in Japanese that documented the founding of the Japanese church in British Columbia in the late 1800s, and […]

Ken Adachi

Ken Adachi was the author of the seminal history of Japanese Canadians, The Enemy That Never Was (1976). A journalist by profession, Adachi was commissioned to write the book by the National Association of Japanese Canadians. He was born in British Columbia in 1928, and he and his family were forcibly removed from Vancouver to […]

Barry Broadfoot

Barry Broadfoot was a noted Canadian oral historian, famous for his book Ten Lost Years which shares oral histories of the Great Depression. Among his many other works is the book Years of Sorrow, Years of Shame, a collection of anonymous oral histories about the Japanese Canadian internment. It was published in 1978, not long […]