AGM & Other 2020 Updates

PRESIDENTS MESSAGE

The AGM for the year 2019 was held on January 19, 2020. We were encouraged to have in attendance new faces, young and old, stretching from age 23 to 93. We welcomed two new Board members, Stéphane Hamade and Les Takahashi.

Notices of the AGM-Special meeting, 2020 Membership Campaign and a year-end report were sent by Canada Post in November and December to members. All motions were passed without objection. The 2020 membership campaign has been very successful, and we appreciate the support of our returning and new members and generous donors. Total membership and donations have far surpassed where we were at this time last year.

2020 Members will have now received their first mailing with the special discounted Bulletin rates for members.

PRESENTATIONS

Departing Board member, Tokugi Suyama was recognized for twenty years of service on the Toronto NAJC Board with the distinction of being the Toronto NAJC’s first Honorary Board Member. This accolade was for his service on the Board as well as his service to the Toronto J.C. Community at large. The creation of an Elder’s Council was announced as part of outreach initiatives.

Janet Sakauye has also stepped down but will continue to serve on the Social Justice Committee. She was not able to attend the AGM and a tribute will be posted on our website. Ron Shimizu continues as a Board member but was pleased to welcome Michelle Walters as our new Secretary. We are extremely grateful to Ron for seven years of dedicated and excellent service as Secretary.

The second installment of $20,000 for our three-year commitment of $60,000 to Momiji Healthcare Society was made to its Executive Director, Eric Hong.

PANEL DISCUSSION

Kim Uyede-Kai moderated a panel discussion with five younger guests and members – Stéphane Hamade, Derek Sakauye, Koji Takahashi, Midori Takahashi and Michelle Walters. Kim put forth two questions 1) What was one moment that defined for you what it meant to be a fourth generation Canadian/American of Japanese ancestry?  2) How do you see your story reflected/not reflected in the Japanese Canadian Toronto area community today?

The questions were based on the discussion title, “Where Do We Go from Here” the name of a famous Martin Luther King Jr. speech and proved to be highly engaging and provocative. It was agreed that the hour spent on this discussion was not nearly enough time as we were all eager to hear more. We hope to have a chance for a repeat. We also learned more about the Tsuru Solidarity project from Jun Cura-Bongolan.

2020 BOARD MEMBERS (Executive Committee)

PRESIDENT, Lynn Deutscher Kobayashi VICE-PRESIDENT, Kim Uyede-Kai SECRETARY,

Michelle Walters, TREASURER, Randy Sakauye

DIRECTORS, Mika Fukuma, Stéphane Hamade, Yosh Inouye, Ron Shimizu, Les Takahashi

HONORARY BOARD MEMBER, Toku Suyama

NEW BOARD MEMBERS

STÉPHANE HAMADE began his involvement in the Japanese Canadian community in 2017 after a trip to Japan to visit his grandfather’s hometown and helping the NAJC with Media and event logistics in their 2017 Annual General Meeting. In 2018, he got involved with the Young Japanese Canadians of Toronto and in 2019 joined the Japanese Young Leader Committee. During the Federal election he also ran a successful social media campaign to remove a picture of internment from a Peoples Party of Canada campaign ad.  

Since graduating from university, he has been involved with a few organizations the Canadian Intern Association, the Ontario Arts Council, OPSEU, the Association des Communauté Francophone de l’Ontario-Toronto and worked on electoral campaigns at 3 levels of government and a successful federal leadership campaign.

LES TAKASHI is a sansei, born, raised and educated in Toronto. He is a retired Humber College teacher where he taught Sociology for about 30 years.  This is his first year as a Board member.

Through observation of and reflection on his family’s issei and nisei generations,  he has some sense of the cost of discrimination and persecution which almost achieved cultural genocide. He deliberately refers to this as a “family” experience because one result of wartime persecution was isolation from a Nikkei community.

Thankfully, Canada’s present social environment has allowed various minority communities to make efforts to recover their heritage. In his own family, this is seen in the yonsei and gosei members who participate in Japanese culture, for example, his children having lived 2-3 years in Japan, and developing social networks in the Nikkei community, and his grandchildren speaking more Japanese than he does.

In retirement, he is trying to develop his own Nikkei networks devoting time at the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre as an archiving volunteer and as a board member of the Toronto NAJC. He and his wife, Gayle, have two adult children and 2 grandchildren.