Nobuko Hagiwara, 1937 09 14–2025 03 14

My aunt Nobuko was born in Tokyo, the second of what would eventually be five sisters. If her older sister Hisae, my mother, was the one whose strength of will kept the family alive through the firebombings, the subsistence living of evacuated urban children, and postwar poverty and chaos, it was my aunt Nobuko’s indomitable positivity that kept everyone happy. My mom made sure that everyone was safe, fed, clothed and working hard; my aunt showed by example that, no matter how dark things got, you didn’t need to make things worse by reacting with negativity. It wasn’t merely performative on her part either: she seemed to have genuine difficulty complaining about misfortune.

Nobuko was a talented fashion designer. She helped support her mother and sisters while living in Japan by working for a major Japanese fashion brand and brought those skills with her to Canada, where she established her own atelier, NOKOH, in Yorkville in Toronto. For decades, her shop was a gathering place for the wives of local expat Japanese executives, who would begin by ordering a fancy dress for a gala occasion, then be enticed by Nobuko’s charm into joining her informal sewing club / tea party that, most days, occupied one end of her huge worktable.

To help put her younger sister Tomoko (who predeceased her by two years) through undergraduate and then graduate school, she took on a second job working as a chef at the Japanese restaurant Mariko, where she passed on her skills and love of food to many younger Japanese Canadians.

After age and infirmity led her to retire, she moved her worktable to her apartment and continued hosting her sewing club for many years. Eventually, she had to leave it behind to move into Castleview Wychwood Towers Long-Term Care, where she received the highest standard of care from dedicated staff throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. She spent her last days receiving palliative care at Toronto Western Hospital, and died well cared for, peacefully, and without discomfort, fading away on the seventh day after she stopped receiving hydration.

I must have first met Nobuko when I was two years old, on my first visit to Japan. I have no memories of the trip, but Nobuko often spoke fondly of it. She ended up coming to visit us in Toronto for a few years, to help look after my brother (Ted) and me when we were little. When I was eight years old, we spent a year living with my aunts and grandmother as part of my father’s sabbatical trip around the world. I have nothing but happy memories of that year, and Nobuko was a big part of it: living with her was like living in a fine Japanese restaurant. That led to high school summers spent in Japan. I remember for the last one, I spent the week living in a company dormitory where I had a summer job (working for George Fukuda on the development of the SMC-70 microcomputer) at Sony’s Atsugi plant, and lost 1 kg of body weight a day due to the long hours and adult portion sizes at the cafeteria; Nobuko made it her personal mission to help me regain that weight (and more) when I came home each weekend.

When my grandmother died, my aunt Nobuko and her lifelong companion and sister Tomoko came to live with us in Toronto. The house wasn’t big enough for the three sisters to live together amicably though, and Nobuko and Tomoko found their own place on St. George St., from whence they commuted daily on foot to the atelier in Yorkville.

When I moved to France, my parents came to visit me once and brought Nobuko along. I thought at first that she had come along to see French haute couture first hand. While she was certainly interested, she had seen plenty of it in Japan; what she was really there for was the food. She would go out for a walk each morning, visiting all the nearby patisseries, and she would come home only when she could not carry any more pastries. As I watched her eat an astonishing, heroic quantity of food each day, I had a flashback to those summer weekends I had spent as a teenager in Tokyo, and was glad I could return a favour.

Late in life, Nobuko was afflicted by a neurodegenerative disorder that gradually stripped her of her ability to move, but never touched her sunny attitude or joie de vivre. She taught us how to make some of the foods that were important to her, especially the New Year’s osechi, but she has tragically taken the secret of her amazing castella cake with her to her grave.

Per her request, the last things she had to eat and drink were a cafe latte from Mofer Coffee, and a croissant from Douce France. As I write this, I’m toasting her memory with a somewhat inferior coffee and croissant, but will find better ones in coming days to remember her properly. If you’d like to do something in her memory, please find something to do that makes you happy, and share that joy with those around you.

Thank you in chronological order to those who made my aunt’s last years as comfortable as they could be: Dr. Josephine Kennedy, Dr. Elizabeth Slow, Dr. Joel Ross and the excellent staff at Castleview-Wychwood Towers LTC, Dr. Rupal Shah and the medical and nursing staff at Toronto Western Hospital, Dr. Mohamed Alfagi and the rest of the palliative care team at TWH.

Nobuko is survived by her two remaining, and loving, sisters Kimiko and Toshiko; her devoted nephews and nieces John, Edward, Taro, Katsuji, Keiko, and Takako; and several grand nephews and grand nieces.

Contact

For more information, please feel free to contact John Chew electronically on Facebook or Google Hangouts, or by email at poslfit@gmail.com.