Category Editorial

While the Vancouver Nikkei community can sometimes be fractious and is not always the model of cooperation, the fact is, we are a small but powerful community bound together by a common history. Like in any family, competing interests and…

Living in a house with three women (no, I’m not a polygamist, two of them are my daughters—you’ve been watching too much reality TV), I have long had ambivalent feelings regarding my gender and our relationship to clothes. On the…

In the 2007 book, Nikkei Fishermen on the BC Coast, Their Biographies and Photographs (Harbour Publishing), over 3600 Nikkei fishermen are listed, going back to the late 1800s. How many women are on that list? Exactly one. There are admittedly, more women involved in recreational fishing, but they are still vastly outnumbered by the men.
Happily, my wife Amy is one of those exceptions to the rule. She grew up in a family of recreational fishermen and can not only catch fish with the best of them, she can clean and filet them with a surgeon’s precision, all good qualities in a mate, as far as I’m concerned.

One of my most prized possessions is an old wooden box. It’s about the size of a shoebox that a pair of size 16 shoes might come in. It’s got a hinged lid with an old-fashioned handle bolted to it,…

A few weeks back I was driving my daughter Kaya to school. Normally she takes the school bus, but given that it was her birthday and that she would also be graduating from middle school that same night, I drove…

I know I’ve been over this territory before on these pages, but it never hurts to revisit some things, such as the idea that real heroes are found, not in the sports section or on Entertainment Tonight but under our own noses.

If intermarriage was ever an issue within the Canadian Nikkei community itself, it has long since ceased to raise eyebrows among even the most hardened in-laws. And as for the reasons for looking outside the community for love, I’m sure they’re as varied as the individuals involved.

I was nine years old when I first became aware of “identity” as a concept. I remember the circumstances to this day. I was in bed one night while my parents stayed up, playing some records on the Heathkit hi-fi…

Anyone watching the opening ceremonies would be forgiven for thinking that Canada is a nation of English-speaking, fiddle-playing white people who get along well with the First Nations minority and, oh yeah, have some happy Francophones in their midst as well. There were a fair number of comments following the ceremonies expressing disappointment that our country’s diversity wasn’t better represented. Hopefully, they said, this would be rectified in the closing ceremonies. Silly people.

I never met Lois Hashimoto, but was saddened to hear of her passing on January 8th in Laval, Québec. Lois was a regular contributor to the letters-to-the-editor section over the years, firing off an e-mail whenever she was offended by…