NAJC-QC Farnham Nikkei Memorial Project Subcommittee
Sara Hanako Breitkreutz
Sara is a mixed-race yonsei originally from Alberta who has been living in Montreal since 2010. She holds an MA in Cultural Anthropology, and has over a decade of experience with ethnography, oral history, and community-based research. She is passionate about the need for all Canadians, including Nikkei living in Canada, to explore and understand their own family’s stories as they interact with Indigenous histories in the places we call home. In addition to the Farnham Nikkei Memorial Project, she worked on its sister-project, the Quebec Nikkei Archives Project, coordinating work with community archivists who catalogued and digitized parts of the Japanese Canadian History and Archives Committee of the JCCCM collection at the McGill University Archives. She has been active in the Montreal JC community since she started playing taiko in 2015.
Alianne Kimura
Alianne Tamiko Kimura is a mixed-race yonsei woman from the West Island of Montreal. She is currently a Master of Arts student in the Department of Anthropology at McGill University. For her MA thesis, Alianne has proposed an archival research and archaeological mapping project at Lemon Creek, a former Japanese Canadian internment camp located in the Slocan Valley of British Columbia, where her paternal grandfather, Kanao Kimura, and his family were imprisoned during World War II. Through her research, Alianne seeks to explore daily life and practice at this site, as well as the ways in which Japanese Canadians actively resisted the traumatic experience of internment.
Toby Kimura
Toby Kimura is a mixed-race yonsei born and raised in the West Island of Montreal. His grandparents, Kanao Kimura and Kiyoko Ishihara, were interned at Lemon Creek and Rosebery respectively and were later relocated to Montreal. Inspired by his grandmother Kiyoko’s artistic spirit, Toby is pursuing his Master of Music in Classical Saxophone Performance at McGill University. Toby is committed to community work and cultural reconnection and worked at the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre of Montreal as a summer student from 2021 to 2023.
Alison Reiko Loader
Alison Reiko Loader draws heavily from interviews and archives for both her artwork and research in the fields of film and animation. A sansei/yonsei whose multiplex community involvement dates to the early 1990s, she completed her SSHRC-funded PhD thesis (Communications, Concordia University) and has taught part-time in Concordia University’s Department of Design and Computation Arts since 2001. She teaches full time in the 3D Animation program at Dawson college and volunteers with a local community literacy program.
Julie Tamiko Manning
Theatre creator Julie Tamiko Manning (a key organizer in the recent revival of the NAJC-QC) is a sansei who grew up in Farnham, where her family stayed after their time at the Farnham relocation camp. Her rich ties to this community laid the groundwork for this project. As an actor, playwright, and cultural consultant, Julie’s works (eg. Mizushobai (The Water Trade) and The Tashme Project: The Living Archives) are often informed by Japanese Canadian history and based on extensive community-based research with Survivors and their descendants. Her decades of experience, both in the Quebec Japanese Canadian community and with the orchestration of large projects including multiple collaborators, has contributed significantly to the success of the Farnham Nikkei Memorial Project.
NAJC-QC
The Quebec Chapter of the National Association of Japanese Canadians (NAJC-QC) is a nonprofit community organization built on the pillars of Community, Education, and Human Rights. Through its work, the NAJC-QC strives to support the development and strengthening of an inclusive Japanese Canadian community in Quebec, educate the wider population on Japanese Canadian history as well as other human rights issues, and encourage the Nikkei community to take collective action in solidarity with social justice movements in the province of Quebec and abroad. As an organization by and for Japanese Canadians, we aspire to support a proud, flourishing, and interconnected community which values the full range of experience of all Nikkei and works towards justice for all.
2024-2025 Board Members
Kristen Kiyomi Perry, President
Toby Kimura, Vice-President
Alianne Kimura, Treasurer
Carol Yamabe Breitkreutz
Anne Koizumi
Alison Reiko Loader
Julie Tamiko Manning
Rachel Takasaki
Sean Wolanyk
The NAJC-QC was originally founded in 1988-1989 during the Redress period, and was actively involved in the Japanese Canadian community at both the local and national levels until about 2000, when it ceased its activities. After over 20 years of dormancy, a group of five Montreal‐based sansei and yonsei decided to revive the NAJC-QC, to address issues affecting Japanese Canadians across all generations at the local level and represent the province of Quebec as part of the larger NAJC organization. At the time, this newly‐formed collective included Donald Hiroshi Watanabe, Julie Tamiko Manning, Junji Nishihata, Kristen Kiyomi Perry, and Sara Hanako Breitkreutz.
Funders
In 2023, the NAJC-QC received funding from the Cultural Development stream of the NAJC Endowment Fund to begin the first phase of this research project, which focused on archival research and oral history interviews with Japanese Canadians who lived at the Farnham Hostel. Then, in 2024, we received a grant from the Japanese Canadian Legacies Society (JCLS) Community Fund to install a physical memorial in the town of Farnham and to develop a digital memorial in the form of this website. The unveiling of the physical monument is schedued for November 2025.
