Les Takahashi

Les Takahashi is a sansei, born, raised and educated in Toronto. He is a retired Humber College teacher where he taught sociology for about 30 years. He joined the Toronto NAJC board in 2020.

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 the 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 have lived in Japan for two to three years, and developed social networks in the Nikkei community, and his grandchildren speak 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 two grandchildren.