Advisory
Community Council
The Community Council consists of established or emerging leaders who have a strong understanding and interest in Japanese Canadian history and are able to provide a national perspective to the Landscapes of Injustice project. The Council’s role is to be a community sounding board for project leaders, partners, and students, acting as a source of advice and guidance from the wider community of Japanese Canadians to help ensure that the project is delivered in ways that are best suited to their needs and remains accountable to the community concerns.
Vivian Rygnestad
Vivian Wakabayashi Rygnestad is a retired school principal and lives in Richmond B.C. She is committed to learning, understanding, honoring, preserving and teaching others about Japanese Canadian history. Along with her extended family in B.C. and Toronto, she has been active within the Japanese Canadian…Read More >>
Art Miki
Arthur Miki has had a distinguished career as an educator and community activist. He began his career as an elementary school teacher and later served as principal for 18 years. He is president of the Asian Heritage Society of Manitoba that organizes Asian Heritage Month activities and also president of the Japanese Cultural…Read More >>
Susanne Tabata
Susanne Tabata is a digital media producer whose passion is to elevate west coast stories into the arts. Susanne was born in Nanaimo, and lived in Tokyo and Victoria before moving to Vancouver in 1978 to study International Relations at UBC. Tabata’s father is a Japanese Canadian whose internment experience during and after…Read More >>
Eiko Eby
Eiko Eby, a Nikkei Yonsei, is currently the President of the Central Vancouver Island Japanese-Canadian Cultural Society in Nanaimo, B.C. (more commonly referred to as the 7 Potatoes Society). She has been actively involved in the Japanese-Canadian community in Nanaimo since 1987 and is a member of the National Executive …Read More >>
Sally Ito
Sally Ito lives and writes in Winnipeg. She has published three books of poetry, a collection of short fiction and is currently working on a memoir. Sally was a writer in residence at the University of Manitoba in 2012. Her father was a Kika-Nisei and her mother is from Osaka.
Tosh Kitagawa
Tosh Kitagawa was born in Mission City BC and lived with his family on a ten acre farm on Cherry Street until the 1942 expulsion. In order to keep the family together and to keep his teenage children busy, my father “chose” to go to the sugar beet fields of Alberta. He went to school and graduated from Lethbridge…Read More >>
Keiko Mary Kitagawa
Keiko Mary Kitagawa was born on Salt Spring Island, BC. Her family was exiled in April of 1942 after their father was taken away by the RCMP in March of 1942. They were incarcerated in Hastings Park, Greenwood, Magrath, Alberta (after father was released from Yellowhead Pass work camp in August of 1942), Popoff…Read More >>
Norm Ibuki
Norm Masaji Ibuki is an elementary school teacher in Brampton, ON and has written for a variety of Nikkei publications over the past 2 decades including the Nikkei Voice (Toronto), Northwest Nikkei (Seattle) and now, primarily, the Discover Nikkei website. Before WW2, his Dad`s family lived on a 10-acre farm…Read More >>
Jennifer Hashimoto
Jennifer Hashimoto is a Winnipeg sansei who has lived and worked in Toronto as an editor and researcher for a legal publisher for over 30 years. Her parents’ families were sent to Manitoba to work in the sugar beet fields during WWII. Jennifer was active in the redress movement in the 1980s and in the Japanese Canadian …Read More >>
Advisory Board
Rosemary Ommer
Rosemary E. Ommer is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of History at the University of Victoria, where she is also the university-wide SSHRC grantscrafter. She was the Director of ICOR at UVic, and P.I. of the Coasts Under Stress Project. She has formerly been the Director of the Calgary Institute for the Humanities…Read More >>
Chad Gaffield
Chad Gaffield, one of Canada’s foremost historians, recently stepped down after eight years as President of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada on August 31, 2014 and he returned to the University of Ottawa where he is Professor of History and University Research Chair in Digital Scholarship. Dr. Gaffield’s teaching…Read More >>
Henry Yu
Henry Yu is involved in the collaborative effort to reimagine the history of Vancouver and of British Columbia through the concept of “Pacific Canada,” a perspective that focuses on how migrants from Asia, Europe, and other parts of the Americas engaged with each other and with First Nations peoples historically.
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Gary Okihiro
Gary Y. Okihiro’s research focuses on United States, southern Africa, and world history. Okihiro is the author of 11 books, most recently a trilogy on space/time, two volumes of which have been published:
• Pineapple Culture: A History of the Tropical and Temperate Zones (2009)
• Island World: A History of Hawai’i and the United States (2008)
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Eiichiro Azuma
Eiichiro Azuma is Alan Charles Kors Term Associate Professor of History and Asian American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is specialized in Asian American history with an emphasis on Japanese Americans and transpacific migration, as well as Japanese colonialism and U.S.-Japan relations…
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