Terry Watada



Terry Watada (born 1951) is a Toronto writer with many productions and publications to his credit.

Life and work
Watada was born in 1951. He lives in Toronto and teaches at Seneca College. He is well-known in the Japanese-Canadian community for his monthly column in the Nikkei Voice, a national community paper. He has written in all genres (fiction, poetry, drama, prose) and edited two anthologies, and is also known as a musician and composer.

His essays have been published in such varied journals and books as Canadian Literature (UBC), Ritsumeikan Hogaku “Kotoba to sonohirogari” (Ritsumeikan University Press, Kyoto Jpn), Crossing the Ocean: Japanese American Culture from Past to Present, Jimbun-shoin Press (Kyoto Jpn), the National Library of Canada’s website, and Anti-Asian Violence in North America (AltaMira Press, California). He also has a monthly column in the Japanese-Canadian national journal the Nikkei Voice.

As a playwright, he has seen five of his plays receive a mainstage production, starting with Dear Wes/Love Muriel during the Earth Spirit Festival at Harbourfront in 1991. Perhaps his best known is Vincent, a play about a Toronto family dealing with a son with schizophrenia. It has been remounted several times since its première in 1993. Most notably, it was produced at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa and the first Madness and Arts World Festival in Toronto (2003). The second Madness and the Arts World Festival invited Vincent to be included in its program in Muenster, Germany, during May 2006. His other plays include Mukashi Banashi I and II (children’s plays) and Tale of a Mask. He recently expanded the play into a two-act play. The new version was successfully featured in the fu-GEN Asian Canadian Theatre Company’s Mega Potluck Play Reading Festival in June 2008.

He composed the Japanese-Canadian children’s history section and the Japanese, Chinese, and South-Asian Canadian history sections for the National Library and Archives of Canada websites.

Essays about his work have appeared in the International Journal of Canadian Studies, Modern Drama (UTP), and Transcultural Reinventions: Asian American and Asian Canadian Short-Story Cycles (TSAR Publications).

In addition to his literary work, Terry Watada is also a singer/songwriter/producer with a number of records to his credit, including: Night's Disgrace, Runaway Horses, Yellow Fever, Living in Paradise and The Art of Protest, among others. His songs dealing with the Japanese/Canadian/American experience have been used as references in Asian-American history course studies at various universities.

Poetry

 * A Thousand Homes. Mercury Press, 1995.
 * Ten Thousand Views of Rain. Thistledown Press, 2001.
 * Obon: the Festival of the Dead. Thistledown Press, 2006.

Fiction

 * Daruma Days (short fiction). Ronsdale Pres,s 1997.
 * Kuroshio: The Blood of Foxes (novel). Arsenal Pulp Press, 2007.

Non-fiction

 * Bukkyo Tozen: a History of Buddhism in Canada (history). HpF Press, 1996.
 * Seeing the Invisible (children’s biography). Umbrella Press, 1998.