This Is My Own: Letters to Wes and Other Writings on Japanese Canadians, 1941–1948 is a collection of letters written by Muriel Kitagawa during this period, as well as statements, essays and manuscripts which arose from Kitagawa’s commitment to write about the injustices of the government’s policies and to educate the Canadian public on the history and perceptions of Japanese Canadians.

Muriel Kitagawa
Tsukiye Muriel Kitagawa was senior editor for The New Age, the first newspaper to express the Nisei (second-generation Japanese Canadian) perspective and provide an outlet for that generation’s expressive thought and literary writing. 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, Muriel and her family moved to Toronto to join her brother Wesley Fujiwara, who was attending university there in June of 1942.

Roy Miki
Roy Miki is a writer, poet, critic and professor emeritus at Simon Fraser University. He has taught and written about the work of bpNichol for many years and was the editor of Pacific Windows: Collected Poems of Roy K. Kiyooka, which won the 1997 Poetry Award from the Association of Asian American Studies. His major bibliographic study, A Record of Writing: An Annotated and Illustrated Bibliography of George Bowering, won the Gabriel Roy award from the Association for Canadian and Quebec Literatures as the best book on Canadian Literature for 1991. Miki lives in Vancouver. Miki is also the editor of This Is My Own: Letters to Wes and Other Writings on Japanese Canadians (1985), Tracing the Paths: Reading‚ Writing The Martyrology (1988), Meanwhile: The Critical Writings of bpNichol (2001) and Redress: Inside the Japanese Canadian Call for Justice (2004), as well as co-editor with Cassandra Kobayashi of Justice in Our Time: The Japanese Canadian Redress Settlement (1991).

Muriel Kitagawa's profile page

Roy Miki grew up in Winnipeg and moved to Vancouver in 1967. He has published widely on Asian Canadian writing, Canadian literature, cultural activism, and contemporary poetry, and has edited works by George Bowering, bpNichol, and Roy K. Kiyooka. He is the author of Redress: Inside the Japanese Canadian Call for Justice (2004) and In Flux: Transnational Shifts in Asian Canadian Writing (2011), as well as six books of poems. His third book of poems, Surrender (2001), received the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry. Cloudy and Clear, his most recent book of poems, is part of Flow. With his wife, Slavia Miki, he has also co-written a children’s book, Dolphin SOS (2014), awarded the 2014 Christie Harris Illustrated Children’s Literature Prize. Roy taught in the English department at Simon Fraser University for over thirty years. He received the Order of Canada in 2006 and the Order of British Columbia in 2009.

Roy Miki's profile page

“The publication of This Is My Own means that [Kitagawa’s] passionate loyalty, her rage, haven’t been left to moulder in the grave. What a relief that is. What a cause for celebration.”
— Joy Kogawa

“This collection is skillfully woven together.”
— Amerasia Review