Raymond Moriyama LL. D. (born October 11, 1929) is a Canadian architect. In 1970, Moriyama co-founded a private practice in Toronto with Ted Teshima called Moriyama & Teshima Architects which is renowned for designing many major buildings across the world, including the Canadian War Museum and the Canadian Embassy in Tokyo. His focus is on humane architecture with the pursuit of true ideals, democracy, and unanimity of all people. Early life and education Born in Vancouver, British Columbia, Raymond Moriyama suffered burns as a four-year-old and was sometimes teased about his scars. During the eight months he spent bedridden after the accident, he saw an architect coming and going from a nearby construction site, "with a blueprint under his arm and a pipe in his mouth." Moriyama decided then and there that he would become an architect too. Moriyama's father was an outspoken pacifist who was arrested and made a Prisoner of War for his activism. Moriyama was then twelve; his pregnant mother was left with him and his two sisters to run the family hardware store. Shortly after, he and his family were forced out of Vancouver and confined to an internment camp in the Slocan Valley of British Columbia during the Second World War. Japanese Canadians on the West Coast were classified as security threats, in a policy similar to that of the United States. He said these years were influential in his later career. Moriyama has described his experiences in internment camps as miserable. During this time, his mother experienced a miscarriage, in which Moriyama then grieved the loss of a potential younger brother. He looked for a place for escape and solitude, and decided to build a treehouse outside of camp, as a lookout point. He made friends with Canadian farmers who supplied him with lumber and tools to build. He describes his experience of finding escape as such:"In despair, I decided to bathe in the Slocan River on the other side of a little mountain away from the camp. The water was glacial, but it was better than hot tears. To see who might be coming, I built an observation platform. Soon I found myself wanting to build my first architectural project, a tree house, without being found out by the RCMP. I used just an axe as a hammer, an old borrowed saw, six spikes, some nails, a rope, and mostly branches and scraps