The Artist
"I went back to Chemainus somehow looking for my home. When they showed me the photos, there was my father, there were my uncles! Shige, I found out, was a good friend of my dad. Painting the mural was a really personal statement."

Stan Taniwa left Chemainus as a baby, evacuated with his parents and six siblings to an internment camp in the interior of BC during WWII. What followed was an extremely difficult time for Japanese-Canadians. Taniwa's father died, leaving a large family for his mother to raise single-handedly. The Taniwas settled in Thunder Bay, Ontario, where Stan originally studied architectural drafting.

When he undertook fine art studies at the University of Manitoba, it was to pursue an interest in ceramics. He began exhibiting his work in 1970, and has since shown his ceramic creations from Ontario to Alberta. Taniwa teaches and is a juror for the Canada Council and the Manitoba Festival of the Arts. He has restored an old brick church in Eden, Manitoba, where he has established his home and studio. Since The Lone Scout WS painted in 1991, Taniwa was completed other paintings as well as continuing his work in clay.

The Art
Edward Shige Yoshida was born in Victoria, BC in 1908, and was raised in the quiet mill town of Chemainus. In 1929, he realized his dream in starting the 2nd Chemainus Boy Scouts, an all Japanese-Canadian troop and the first of its kind in the country. The delicate, porcelain plate quality of his portrait in the mural The Lone Scout belies the wit, energy, and determination of this slightly built but significant character in the life of Chemainus.

Chemainus town was home to a community of 300 Japanese-Canadians who had settled in the area between 1900 and the 1940's. Mill workers, fishers, and business people and their families, were all interned after the attack on Pearl Harbour in the US precipitated an attitude of paranoia and mistrust towards Canadians of Japanese descent.

By a series of coincidences, Stan Taniwa came to paint The Lone Scout, and included in the black and white gathering in the background of the mural are members of his family, then and now. The location of Taniwa's family home is just across the street from his mural.