Category National Feature

The Importance of the GVJCCA to the NAJC

by Ken Noma President, National Association of Japanese Canadians Vancouver subscribers of The Bulletin will have already have heard through the grapevine that Gary Matson, President of the Greater Vancouver Japanese Canadian Citizens Association, has decided not to seek another…

2013’s Word of the Year was the decidedly inelegant “selfie.” President Barack Obama made it famous and controversial at the same time when he had one with Denmark’s Prime Minister Helle Thorning Schmidt during Mandela’s memorial service.

Born in a time of prosperity, I never saw my father cry but my brother did, just once. Thus that sense of betrayal, of confusion and of the absolute lack of self-esteem was planted in the ten-year-old’s mind until the day he died some 69 years later. That is the true meaning of redress: a gesture of compensation for a lifetime of hurt and shame.

She told me of her grief and pain when her husband died. His ghostly voice she claimed gave her comfort and strength in facing the challenges of the funeral arrangements.

“The racialization of Japanese Canadians as an enemy ‘race’ served to normalize the identity of a Canadian citizen as white. The web of power authorized through the War Measures Act enabled the making of white bourgeois subjects ...

The Young Leaders Conference sparked from a youth meeting and digital storytelling workshop that happened at last year’s National Association of Japanese Canadian (NAJC) Annual General Meeting in Kamloops, BC.

As a child growing up in Regina, I remember my parents often welcomed newcomers from Japan to our home. My mother would miraculously prepare a tasty Japanese dinner from the “surprise” packages hidden away in her kitchen.

In the mid-1970s into the 1990s, photographer Yosh Inouye ran a successful studio in the middle of a thriving Toronto advertising scene where his specialty was table-top photography. This native of Gifu, Japan, first arrived in Toronto in 1968, with training from Tama Art School (1960-1962) and Kuwazawa Design School (1962-1964) under his belt. His first Canadian job was as a photographer’s assistant ...

After admiring the black figurative sculpture of Sun Yat-Sen — considered the father of modern China — we walked on River Street alongside the canal, passed by the rows of homeless and their buggies, then crossed a small white bridge and arrived at a Shinto temple.

Sugar Brown’s real name is Ken Kawashima, whose full-time job is professor at the University of Toronto. He’s a Japanese-American from Ohio, educated in New York and Chicago, but has made his home in Toronto for the last 10 years.