Muriel Kitagawa

Tsukiye Muriel Kitagawa (1912–1974) was born in Vancouver in 1912. As a Nisei (second generation Japanese Canadian) she was one of 21, 000 people of Japanese ancestry who were interned or forced by the federal government to give up their possessions and leave the west coast of B.C. in 1942. In 1932 Kitagawa was senior editor for The New Age, the first newspaper to express the Nisei perspective and provide an outlet for that generation’s expressive thought and literary writing. She also married that year. In 1938 she began writing for The New Canadian, where she was a regular contributor under several pen names. With four young children, including twins born right in the middle of the uprooting of the entire B.C. Japanese Canadian community, Kitagawa and her family moved to Toronto to join her brother Wesley Fujiwara who was attending university there in June of 1942.