Non-Fiction

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 […]

Art Miki

Art Miki is a community activist and retired educator living in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Born in Vancouver in 1936, he was five years old when his parents and grandparents, wanting to keep the family together, chose to relocate to a sugar beet farm in Ste. Agathe, a French-speaking community 40 kilometres south of Winnipeg. Following the […]

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 […]

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 […]

Roy Miki

Roy Miki is a Vancouver-based poet and critic, well-known for his award-winning poetry, literary criticism, theoretical texts, editorial work, as well as for his activist work as part of the Redress movement in the 1980s. He is the author of five collections of poetry, including the Governor General’s award-winning Surrender (2001), the documentary text, co-authored […]

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 […]

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 […]

Noriko Kim Kobayashi

Noriko Kobayashi is a musician. She earned a M.A. degree in Ethnomusicology from the University of British Columbia, in addition to a B.A. in Music and Psychology from U.B.C. She also earned a music degree from Capilano College in classical voice studies and is also a published author on the subject of taiko. Prior to […]