In November 2019, I was in a US hospital for five days. My temperature was hovering around 102°F. I sweat profusely, followed by the chills. I couldn’t get out of bed without collapsing to the floor. I was dizzy, I had lost my appetite, I was extremely weak.
…for me and my family anyway. Back in 1920, my father first came to Canada from a small village called Kiyama, Fukui-ken, Japan. His father, my grandfather, had brought him and his chonan, his first son, my uncle, to work. Poverty plagued Japan at the time, according to Toyo Takata, …
Though not widely acknowledged, J-Town Toronto did exist. Very little of it can be found today and, back in the day, no one called it J-Town or Little Tokyo or anything. Probably because it formed for a relatively short time just after 1949 when Toronto’s City Council lifted its restriction …
From Toronto-based writer, Terry Watada and Bloomington, Indiana-based poet, Hiromi Yoshida, are pieces that can be read as the remains of beings past, the memory of memories, the parts of a person embedded in our psyche or those aspects we wish to keep and uplift. Enjoy...
My wife and I have noticed over several years now that certain terms in Japanese have English words accompanying them with the same meaning. Thereby creating a strange redundancy. Most of these “atrocities” were created by hakujin but Nikkei have carried on ignorant of the implications. Below is a list …
Many decades ago (more than I care to count), I and my parents were watching evening television in our eastend Toronto home when a knock came at the front door. My parents were not expecting anyone, so it was a curious event.
As I watched the circus of race and denigration that is the White House, Congress, and American society in July, I tried to remember how some Democrats are at times politically expedient and opportunistic and how most Republicans are hypocritical and cowardly. Why can’t right-wing politicians just call the man …
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