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Shizuye (Shichan) Takashima  December 25, 1928 September 21, 2005 = Vancouver, British Columbia
 * birth_place =Vancouver, British Columbia
 * nationality = Canadian Japanese artist and writer best known for her use of ominous figures in her early paintings and an award winning children’s book A Child in Prison Camp (1971) in which she narrates the perspective of a youth living through internment during the Second World War.

Life
Called Shichan by family and friends, Ms. Takashima was the youngest of six children of Senji and Teru Takashima, a first-generation (Issei) gardener and a housekeeper. She was born three months prematurely, weighing less than three pounds, and suffering from a congenital dislocation of both hips. As a small child she spent a year in traction in hospital as doctors tried unsuccessfully to correct her birth defect, which meant she was a year late enrolling in elementary school. She walked with a pronounced limp for the rest of her life.After Japan bombed Pearl Harbour on Dec. 7, 1941, the Takashima family was caught up in reprisals against Japanese Canadians. Before the war, there were more than 22,000 Japanese Canadians in B.C., most of them either naturalized or native-born Canadians. Their homes, farms and fishing boats were confiscated and sold for paltry sums, single young men were sent to labour camps, and families were relocated to eight internment camps in the interior of B.C. Her four older brothers were sent to work on road gangs in Ontario, while Ms. Takashima, her father, mother and older sister were removed to an internment camp outside the village of New Denver, in the Kootenay Mountains near the Alberta-B.C. border. They lived under surveillance in a hastily built one-bedroom wooden house without electricity or running water, and were forced to share their accommodation with another family. They had to walk more than a mile to get drinking water and there was no school beyond Grade 8. In 1944, William Lyon Mackenzie King's Liberal government passed a law saying Japanese Canadians who returned to B.C. after the end of the war were liable to be deported. Ms. Takashima joined her older sister Mary in Hamilton in September of 1945 and was reunited with the rest of her family in Toronto a year later. She studied commercial art at Central Technical School and then went to the Ontario College of Art (now the Ontario College of Art and Design), graduating in fine arts in 1953.

Writing
A Child in Prison Camp 1992 When Shizuye Takashima, “Shichan” as she was called, was eleven years old, her entire world changed forever. As a Japanese-Canadian in 1941, she was among thousands of people forced from their homes and sent to live in internment camps in the Canadian Rockies. Although none had been convicted of any crime, they were considered the enemy because the country was at war with Japan. In this true story of sadness and joy, Shichan recalls her life in the days leading up to her family’s forced movement to the camp, her fear, anger, and frustration as the war drags on, and the surprising joys in the camp: a Kabuki play, holiday celebrations, and the ever-present beauty of the stars. The result is an evocative and poignant account of daily life in an internment camp, with all its deprivations, rivalries and small joys, accompanied by Ms. Takashima's impressionistic watercolours (which are now in the Osborne Collection of the Toronto Public Library). Like the diary of Anne Frank, the slice of life described here is expressed through the feelings of a young girl barely out of childhood. And perhaps because of that, there is a beautiful innocence, an ability to seize the magic of the moment, a sense of the joy of simply being alive, that are a testimony to the strength of the human spirit. The book contains over one hundred pages of text and eight small reproductions of her original paintings. It is ideal for grade 5 and up, while the original larger format is a treasure for kindergarten to grade 4. The book had a huge impact. It went into several reprints, was excerpted in newspapers and magazines, won a gold medal from the Canadian Children's Library, and was published in several countries, including Japan, where it was also turned into a musical. A Child in Prison Camp marked a transition for Ms. Takashima, from painter to writer and illustrator, but there were other more fundamental changes going on that had a profound impact on her life and her art.