Nikkei Stories

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michi’s Memories The Story of a Japanese War Bride by Keiko Tamura ISBN 9781921862519 (Print version) $28.00 (GST inclusive) ISBN 9781921862526 (Online) Published September 2011 ANU Press: http://press.anu.edu.au?p=144351 This book tells the story of Michi, one of 650 Japanese war bri