| biography | The Nikkei Fishermen's Project Committee donation consists of materials that led to the making of two books; the first, Nikkei Fishermen on the BC Coast: Their Biographies and Photographs and the second, Spirit of the Nikkei Fleet: BC's Japanese Canadian Fishermen.
The Nikkei Fishermen's Project Committee came into being when a group of Nikkei Fishermen decided to have a reunion dinner for Nikkei Fishermen who fished the BC Coast since the Japanese came to Canada in the 1870s to the present. The invite for the dinner came in the form of a questionnaire (2010.11.1) that, once completed and returned, resulted in an informal directory.
With this information, they decided to publish a history of Nikkei Fishermen in the form of a directory and hired Masako Fukawa as an author consultant for the project. A second sheet was sent out, this time asking the Fishermen to pen their biographies. Along with the sheet, a call for photographs and general histories was sent out in the Bulletin and Nikkei Voice.
With all of this information Masako Fukawa put together a lengthy history of the Japanese Canadian Fishermen. In fact, it was too lengthy for the Committee's publisher, Harbour Publishing. The solution was to split the book into two tomes; one on the general history of Japanese Canadian Fishermen and the second a directory accompanied with short biographies on Nikkei Fishermen. |