Tak was 19 when his family was exiled from Canada to Japan. There were various reasons why his parents chose exile to Japan over dispersal to eastern Canada. One was uncertainty about what would happen if they chose the latter. They were also concerned about the welfare of close relatives …
Tak vividly remembers hearing the news of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. “It was a Sunday and I was with friends out on Powell Street on our way home from playing badminton at the Japanese Language School when we heard the news from a radio in a parked car. It …
As a young man in Onomichi, Kazuko’s husband Takeshi got experience writing for a religious sect called Nanmyo Horen Gekkyou, which helped him become a very skilled writer in Japanese. Soon after moving to Canada his writing talent was discovered by his friend Gordon Kadota who was the founder of …
Both Kazuko and Takeshi continued working in Kobe and financially supporting the education of Kazuko’s younger brother and sister till they finished high school. After graduating, Kazuko’s younger brother and sister returned to Canada around 1955. First the younger brother worked for a lumber company and then for Nelson Chocolate …
Kazuko was thirteen years old when her family was exiled to Japan. Her parents made the difficult choice of exile to Japan because their kids were still small and her father felt a strong responsibility to take care of his adoptive mother who was still alive and living in Onomichi. …
Shortly after the beginning of the war with Japan, the Canadian government ordered all Japanese Canadians living within 150 kilometers of the coast to “evacuate.” Kazuko’s family were given only twenty-four hours to leave their home. She remembers her mother telling her to quickly pack her own clothes. The police …
Kazuko (Katy) Makihara was born into the Fukuhara family on September 26, 1933 in her parents’ home near Vancouver Cannery on Sea Island (now the location of Vancouver International Airport). Her birth was assisted by a Japanese midwife, Ms. Watanabe. She had an older sister, Hisaye, a younger sister, Judy, …
Mikio Ibuki is a good example of those Nikkei exiles who intended to return to Canada but ended up staying in Japan. He was born in Vancouver on January 1, 1940 as the first child of Suejiro and Mitsue Ibuki. As mentioned earlier, he has a younger sister, Kazuko (born …
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