Category: Uncategorized

  • Alpine Inn Residents During WWII

    Alpine Inn Residents During WWII

    I have recently added a spreadsheet to this site that I have been working on intermittently for the past two years. It lists all the residents I could find who lived at Alpine Inn, a self-supporting site located at Christina Lake, BC, during WWII. Thanks to Kathleen Smythe and Nobby Hamagami who did the majority…

  • Mourning Sky

    Mourning Sky

    We visited the Umami Art Exhibit at the Nikkei National Museum this past weekend when we attended the Nikkei Matsuri celebration. I was surprised by an artwork by Marlene Howell entitled Mourning Sky. It was a painting of confiscated Japanese Canadian fishing boats surrounded by a collage of letters and fishing boat registry pages from…

  • Kishizo Kimura and the Nippon Tennis Club

    Kishizo Kimura and the Nippon Tennis Club

    I have written an article about my grandfather Kishizo Kimura and the Nippon Tennis Club (NTC). Much has already been written about the Asahi Baseball Club but the NTC was also popular within the Nikkei community. As far as I can tell, no one has documented the history of the NTC until now. The NTC…

  • My Grandfathers Had Both Been Previously Married!

    I found out some shocking news after translating some of the koseki documents. Both my grandfathers had previously been married! I don’t think any of their children knew about this. Kiheiji Kishi, my paternal grandfather, had a first wife named Kiyoe Hamachi. They were married on Aug. 1, 1919. Unfortunately, Kiyoe died in Japan on…

  • Koseki Documents

    Koseki Documents

    This was an exciting week as I received three koseki packages from Japan. They were for the Kimura, Makino, and Kishi families. It is a daunting task to translate them into English, especially when I don’t speak or write Japanese. Thankfully, I was able to use Google Translate and DeepL. It’s incredible how far these…

  • Kishizo Kimura Early Years

    Kishizo Kimura Early Years

    Mr. Kishizo Kimura was born on May 27, 1899 in the Village of Hikona, an incorporated part of the present city of Yanago, Tottori-ken as the third son of Tsunejiro Matsushita and his wife Taki. On October 12, 1902, Mr. Kimura was legally adopted by Tamotsu Kimura and his wife Mumeno to be their heir.…

  • Kishi Family History

    Kishi Family History

    Teizo Kishi was a boat builder in Katsuura, Wakayama-ken Japan and owned the Kinpa Inn on the waterfront.  He came to Steveston B.C. because he had heard stories about the town’s location near the mouth of the Fraser River and decided that it would a good place to start a boat building business in B.C.…

  • The Project

    The Kishi-Kimura Family History Project involves researching, documenting, sharing, and storing information about the Kishi and Kimura families on this website. Photos, stories, interviews, news articles, book excerpts, historical documents, maps, genealogical data, and links to others’ research about the families, will be published for family members, interested parties, and future generations. Although much research…