Nikkei Stories
父を語る（About My Father）
December 17, 2020
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By Yuri Furuno My father, Eric Masakazu Shimada (1912-2010), came to Brisbane on a permanent residency visa in December, 1998 at the age of 86. He passed away on the 30th August, 2010. You may think living here for 12 years towards the end of his life would not provide much of a story
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My Life Story by Iseko Williams
October 16, 2020
My Life Story by Iseko Williams Background to this story Iseko Jenny Williams kept an occasional memoir of her life in Japan and Australia. Iseko’s interviewer and biographer, Hiromi Ogata, who interviewed her from August to September 2018, published the
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Pearl Hamaguchi’s Oral History from Broome
September 11, 2020
My name is Pearl Hamaguchi. I was born in Broome in 1940. I live in Broome. I’ve lived nowhere else. My grandmother on my father’s side, Yae Yamamoto, was Japanese. Yae was from Ichoda-mura (now part of Amakusa city), a village on Shimoshima Island, the largest of the Amakusa Islands
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The first recorded Japanese in Australia: Steve Dawson’s family story
August 29, 2020
By Steve Dawson It is a privilege to be able to write about my family’s ancestral Japanese roots which trace back to Sakuragawa Rikinosuke, the first recorded Japanese immigrant to take up residence in Australia. Technically, this pioneer was my great-great grandfather, but our
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Akane Kanai’s Nikkei family
August 28, 2020
by Akane Kanai My mother, Yumiko, and my father, Masakazu, met in Sydney in the early 1980s. My dad had dreams of trying something different, separate from his large family in Nagoya; my mother had previously moved to Australia from Tokyo, with her first husband, a clever man named Jo
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Jim McFarlane’s Nikkei Australian family history
April 22, 2020
All individuals featured in this article have been approached for permission to be named. My name is Jim McFarlane. My sister Coral and I come from a Japanese mother and an Australian father who met in Hiroshima during our father’s service in the occupation forces in 1952. Setsuko Nak
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Finding a balance between the two: Interview with artist Mariko Konno
December 12, 2017
by Timothy Kazuo Steains I recently interviewed the twenty-seven-year-old Nikkei artist Mariko Konno. We went to the same primary school, all those years ago: SJS or the Sydney Japanese School. It’s a Japanese international school in Sydney, and Mariko and I were in the interna
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Story of the Steains Family by Tim Steains
November 02, 2014
My name is Timothy Kazuo Steains, I am of Okinawan and white Australian descent, and am 26 years old. I was born in Australia and have always lived here. As a child I attended Konomi Yōchien, and the Sydney Japanese School. I speak conversational Japanese, and have a modest repertoire
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Story of Hasegawa Family by Andrew Hasegawa
October 06, 2014
By the time I was born in the early 1960s the long shadow of world war two was starting to fade. The 1950s and 60s saw wave after wave of immigrants arrive in Australia but almost no Asians or Japanese. The white Australia policy still prevailed and if the colour of my skin was anythi
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