Fujino, David Kenji

David Fujino was born in the internment camp of Greenwood, British Columbia, on January 28, 1945. He studied English Language & Literature at the University of Toronto but did not complete a degree.

Fujino was a fixture of Toronto’s Japanese Canadian community and the arts scene as a visual artist, painter, photographer, trumpet player, poet, and actor, often exploring post-internment Japanese Canadian identity and culture in his work. As a Sansei artist, he wrote poetry in the form of concrete visual poetry.

His writings have been published in numerous anthologies and journals globally. Through the 1970s, he wrote for Tora, a magazine published by the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre. In the 1990s, Fujino continued to be involved with important community initiatives such as the Toronto Chapter National Association of Japanese Canadians (NAJC) Art Committee, Weener Matsuri, and the Ai Symposium and worked on the follow-up to Aiko Suzuki’s directory of Japanese Canadians in the Arts—the Resource Listings about Japanese Canadians, which he revised in 1996.

From 2012 to 2017, he was a columnist for The Bulletin, providing a Toronto Japanese-Canadian perspective to the west coast community. For several years, he served on the board of the Toronto NAJC, including as president from 2014 to 2015.

Fujino died in Toronto on May 6, 2017.

Created by Alston So, March 2026.