Non-Fiction

Taya Mikado

Taya Mikado (she/her) is a mixed-race Japanese-Canadian Yonsei hailing from Southern Alberta but currently anchored in Tkaronto. She dabbles in poetry, prose and digital art while working towards becoming an innovative and compassionate lawyer. Losing her father to suicide at 13, and her mother to a motorbike accident at 18, has given Taya significant insight […]

Lara Okihiro

Dr. Lara Okihiro is a yonsei writer, researcher, and educator of mixed Japanese Canadian heritage. Growing up in the diverse, working-class Dixon Road neighbourhood in Toronto, she was close to her Japanese Canadian grandparents and often visited her Anglo-Irish Canadian grandmother on her rural Ontario farm. Though Lara did not like reading as a kid, […]

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 […]

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 […]

David Suzuki

David Suzuki is a renowned environmental activist, and the author of 52 books, including 19 for children. A geneticist by training, Suzuki has become well-known as a broadcaster and spokesperson for environmental conservation. His autobiography looks at his family’s history in Canada, including their experience in Slocan internment camp during the 1940s, when Suzuki was […]

Katsuyoshi Morita

Katsuyoshi Morita was the author of Powell Street Monogatari, a chronicle of stories from the prewar Japanese Canadian neighbourhood of Powell Street and Morita’s experiences in the internment camp of Greenwood during the forced removal. Powell Street Monogatari was originally written in Japanese, and translated into English by Eric Sokugawa (translation published in 1989).

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 […]

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 […]

Kathlyn Horibe

Kathlyn Horibe was a journalist and editor who published with magazines and newspapers in Canada, the United States, Europe, and New Zealand. She was also the author of Toronto Disasters: Devastation and Tragedies that Made the Headlines. She worked in management before changing her career to become a writer and editor of corporate communications and […]

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, […]

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 […]

Tomo Hattori

Tomo Hattori is a literary critic. He is an associate professor of Asian American studies at California State University, Northridge (CSUN). He is most recently the author of The Monkey and the Colonoscopy Machine: On the Destruction of Racism and Stereotype in Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese and Level Up forthcoming in Growing Up […]

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 […]