Mitch Miyagawa (b. 1971)
Mitch Miyagawa was born and raised in Edmonton. The Canadian government has apologized to Mitch’s extended family three times. In 1988, Prime Minister Mulroney apologized to Japanese Canadians for their interment during the Second World War. His mother’s second husband paid the Chinese head tax in 1919 and Prime Minister Harper apologized to the families for that in 2006. His father’s second wife is a Cree woman and Harper apologized to residential school survivors in 2008.1)
Mitch graduated with a masters in creative writing from the Fine Arts program at the University of British Columbia. He and his wife and two sons moved to the Yukon in 1998. Mitch has written several well-received articles for Canadian publications. His first play, The Plum Tree, was inspired by his family history and was produced in 2002. In 2004, he produced a documentary film with David Oppenheim, Our Town Faro, for the National Film Board. He co-produced The Lottery Ticket (2003) and Artifacts (2007) and co-wrote a feature film, The Asahi Baseball Story (2007).2)
Miyagawa was the playwright-in-residence at Nikai Theatre in Whitehorse and his play Carnaval was produced by Nakai in 2007.3) In 2012, Miyagawa became the co-ordinator of Yukon Cultures Connect at Yukon College, tasked with a two-year program to build awareness about cultural diversity in the community and its institutions. The federally-funding program was driven by a team of people representing Kwanlin Dun First Nation, l’Association franco-yukonnaise, Canadian Filipino Association of the Yukon, the Yukon African-Caribbean Association, Japanese-Canadian Association of Yukon, Yukon Arts Centre, and the Multicultural Centre of the Yukon.4)
Miyagawa’s 2012 documentary, A Sorry State, is a first-person film centered on a journey he and his father took back to Alberta, looking for the farmhouses his family lived in after they were interned. The film was not intended as a family history but is more powerful because of it. It premiered at the Edmonton Film Festival and then moved to the Knowledge/Access networks.5) The film won Mitch the 2013 Canadian Screenwriters Award.6)
In 2014, Mitch Miyagawa became a Certified Trainer with the Centre for Nonviolent Communication. He works in British Columbia, Alberta, and Yukon and lives on Gabriola Island in British Columbia.7)