Memoir

Lillian Nakamura Maguire

Lillian Nakamura Maguire is a second-generation Japanese Canadian, new playwright living and retired in the countryside near Whitehorse, Yukon. Her first play, Hidden Memories was accepted by Ruby Slippers Theatre “Advance Theatre: New Works by Diverse Women” for reading at the 2017 Vancouver Fringe Festival, in partnership with the Fringe Festival and Equity in Theatre. […]

Leslie Shimotakahara

Leslie Shimotakahara is a fourth-generation Japanese-Canadian writer, who resides in Toronto. Leslie holds a B.A. in English from McGill and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Brown in Modern American Literature. Her first book, a memoir called The Reading List, won the Canada-Japan Literary Prize in 2012, and her fiction has been shortlisted for the KM […]

Jess

‘Jess’ is the pen name of a Nisei who wished to remain anonymous when he wrote his autobiography, the self-published Ignomy. Ignomy is a heart-wrenching portrait of an angry and bitter Nisei that follows his life from childhood through to the internment experience. Ignomy is a raw early account of a survivor of the Japanese […]

Diana Morita Cole

Diana Morita Cole received the 2017 Richard Carver Award for Emerging Artists for her book, Sideways: Memoir of a Misfit, which tells of her birth behind barbed wires in a Minidoka incarceration site. Cole grew up in a ghetto on the Near North Side of Chicago, where she was coddled by her 80-year-old grandfather, who […]

Maryka Omatsu

Maryka Omatsu is a former lawyer and Canada’s first Asian woman judge. She is the author of the non-fiction book Bittersweet Passage: Redress and the Japanese Canadian Experience. Published in 1992, Bittersweet Passage speaks of the Japanese Canadian struggle to come to terms with the injustices of the 1940s, through the lens of a sansei […]

Tom Morimoto

Tom Morimoto is the author of the memoir, Breaking Trail: From Canada’s Northern Frontier to the Oil Fields of Dubai. He was born in Edmonton and grew up in Fort McMurray, one of seven brothers. As a young man, he worked in his father’s garden and on a scow on the Athabasca River with the […]

Tom Sando

Tom Sando is the author of Wild Daisies in the Sand (2002), a book based on his diary entries from the 1940s when he was imprisoned in Petawawa and Angler. Born in British Columbia, he was raised and educated in Japan by relatives after the death of his mother, and returned to Canada in 1938 […]

Marjene Matsunaga Turnbull

Marjene Matsunaga Turnbull is a ceramicist and doll-maker. She produced functional pottery from 1987 – 2012. She also created Nikkei kokeshi (Japanese wooden dolls) – each one unique in facial expression and design. From 1981, Turnbull compiled family stories and in 1991 finished writing and editing the book Hisaoka Family Memoirs. Turnbull needed to know […]

Joy Kogawa

Joy Kogawa was born in Vancouver in 1935. As a young child, she and her family were forced to leave their home in the Marpole neighbourhood and move to the Slocan internment camp in the interior of British Columbia. Her family’s experience of the forced uprooting of Japanese Canadians later inspired her 1981 novel, Obasan. […]