New monument to Japanese Canadians reminder of dark period in B.C.’s past
Henry Shimizu was a carefree 13-year-old, working in his parents’ hotel and restaurant in Prince Rupert, fishing with friends and attending school, when his life was turned upside down.
It was 1942, and government agents arrived with orders that all people of Japanese descent had to leave.
Henry’s parents, Shotaro and Kimiko Shimizu, were told to pack up suitcases and gather their four children. They were loaded onto trucks for a long, miserable ride to Vancouver, where they stayed in animal stalls in Hastings Park.
They were issued woollen, numbered blankets, which they could use for either privacy or warmth in barns that reeked of cattle and horse dung.
The Shimizu family was later transferred to an internment camp at New Denver, in the Kootenays, where they spent four years living in shacks with another family — 12 people in total stacked in bunks in two bedrooms with a common cooking area. It was more than 1,600 kilometres from the home and life they had built on the coast.
The shiplap walls of the shacks in the internment camps were built with green slabs of wood, which separated the first winter, letting in cold wind and drifts of snow.
This week, Shimizu — a month shy of his 98th birthday — saw his name etched into one of 100 half-ton slabs of granite that form a 300-foot-long wall and ornate garden at the new Japanese Canadian Monument.
Dozens of survivors, their families and dignitaries gathered on Saturday to officially open the monument at Academy Close, between the north end of Beacon Hill Park and St. Ann’s Academy.
The curved pattern of stone slabs hugged an audience of hundreds as they gathered to honour the monument’s dedication.
Geri Onishi Kraus travelled to Victoria from London, Ont., to attend the ceremony, searching for her name and those of many of her family and friends.
Kraus was born in Hamilton after her parents were removed from the west coast of B.C. and said it wasn’t something they spoke about growing up.
“I didn’t know until my father was in his 80s.”
Etched into the curving wall of panels are names of more than 22,000 Japanese Canadians who were forcibly removed from the west coast and sent to internment camps during the Second World War.
More than 3,000 Japanese Canadians were moved off Vancouver Island, including more than 300 from the Victoria area and 79 from Mayne Island.
Each name is listed by the region where they were torn from their homes, their possessions and properties confiscated and later sold in weekly auctions by the provincial government. Homes, businesses, farms, boats, household items — even pets — were sold off.
Properties were sold for cash at a fraction of their value, and the Japanese Canadians were forced to accept it, some taking the money with them to camps and using it to survive and to eventually start over.
Paul Kariya, president of Japanese Canadian Legacies Society, said at the ceremony that while the memorial can’t bring back homes, fishing boats and businesses, the stone etchings mean “the names of those uprooted will endure.”
More than 90% of Japanese Canadians living in B.C. were detained under the War Measures Act, even though most were Canadian citizens, including members of Shimizu’s family.
“They assumed we were enemies, but we were born in Canada,” said Shimizu, whose father had come to Canada in 1907, working hard to save enough to open a hotel and buy rental houses with a partner.
“They ignored that. They said, ‘You are from Japan.’ ”
Eventually, he said, “the government did feel a little guilty because they realized that most of us were born in Canada and they were putting us in jail with no wrongdoing. I think they realized they had done us a lot of harm and wanted to do something for us that’s positive.”
The monument project is part of a $100-million redress package announced by then B.C. Premier John Horgan in 2022 in recognition of wrongs committed by the province against Japanese Canadians during the Second World War. The money was earmarked to support heritage and education initiatives, and the monument in a Japanese-inspired garden is the centrepiece.
The process of researching and collecting the names inscribed on the memorial walls spanned more than seven years and was done by the University of Victoria’s Humanities Computing and Media Centre in partnership with the Japanese Canadian Legacies Society.
Thousands were forcibly removed from a 160-kilometre exclusion zone from the coast and sent to hastily built camps at former mining sites and farms in the B.C. Interior. Others were sent to road-building camps or to sugar beet farms in Alberta, as well as camps in Ontario and Manitoba. About 4,000 were exiled to Japan, a country many had never even known.
The camps in B.C. were around places like Greenwood, Kaslo, East Lillooet, Hope and in the Slocan Valley, where one of the largest was near New Denver, with hundreds of shacks built in open farm fields.
In 1949, Japanese Canadians were permitted to return to the west coast, but they were still subjected to racist policies and treatment for years, and many communities never recovered.
After their internment, the Shimizu family moved to Edmonton, where Henry worked weekends as an “elevator boy” in a hospital, living in the basement with other orderlies and maintenance staff.
He kept his memories of internment to himself for many years, determined to continue working hard to improve his life without remorse or anger, and studied hard for a career in medicine.
He eventually enjoyed a long career as a plastic surgeon and clinical professor at the University of Alberta Hospital, training new generations of medical practitioners.
Shimizu’s daughter Yoshiko Shimizu, the youngest of his four children, said the new memorial will go a long way toward educating Canadians about what happened to her family. “When I was in high school, only Japanese descendants knew internment camps ever happened,” she said. “It was the secret shame in Canada that nobody would talk about. But it’s changing now.”
Another section of the monument has the names of 3,113 children born to families after the uprooting began and before the restrictions were lifted on March 31, 1949.
Among them is Tony Ibaraki. His father lived in Kelowna and owned property and wasn’t sent to the camps, but his mother was moved from the coast to Hasting Park and then to a camp in Greenwood in south-central B.C.
In 1945, Ibaraki’s father was given paperwork to pick up his bride-to-be.
“They didn’t talk about any of this until after 1949,” said Ibaraki. “They didn’t want to identify themselves as Japanese for a long time. It was hard.
“But I think a lot of people who were interned would be in seventh heaven to see this.”
The monument was both a challenge and inspiration for Hamilton, Ont.-based architect Bruce Kuwabara, whose parents and relatives were forced inland from the coast.
The idea was to create a naming wall similar to the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C., but in a more accessible form, as opposed to a long continuous wall.
“We made panels that were the size of a door. It scaled well to the individual standing in front of it. We wanted an intimate monumentality,” said Kuwabara, who expects the wall to become a pilgrimage site. “People will come to the wall, see the name and touch it.”
The 100 granite panels are placed in a wave pattern, depicting the 100-mile or 160-kilometre exclusion zone, he said.
None of the panels touch — they’re separated with uniform spaces that allow the panels to “curve” over the distance and let light and air through.
“I’m paraphrasing Leonard Cohen, who said there’s a crack in everything — that’s how the light gets through. It represents rupture and struggle. The air and the light gets through to represent healing,” said Kuwabara. “This wall breathes.”
Kuwabara’s parents were also sent to Hastings Park animal pens and later moved to Sandon, near New Denver, where his mother raised the children while his father and some of his brothers were sent off to work camps clearing forest and building parts of the Trans-Canada Highway.
When the war ended in 1945, the federal government offered interned people the choice of deportation or relocation east of the Rocky Mountains.
Kuwabara said the federal government offered some $3,000 to go to Japan, but many had never been to the country. “So a lot started to migrate because they never had anything to go back to,” said Kuwabara, noting strong communities were formed in Steveston, Vancouver and Victoria, though many, like his family, settled in Ontario.
Deportation was later cancelled due to public protest, but not before about 4,000 people were sent to Japan. On April 1, 1949, Japanese Canadians were given the right to vote, and the legal restrictions to control their movements were removed.
The episode is now acknowledged as one of the worst human rights violations in B.C.’s history.
In 1988, the federal government formally apologized and offered compensation to Japanese Canadian survivors and their families.
Architect Jack Kobayashi of Whitehorse-based Kobayashi Zedda worked with Susanne Tabata, chief executive of the Japanese Canadian Legacies Society, on the first pre-design of the monument, which formed the scope and scale of the project. The province then selected Toronto-based architecture firm KPMB, led by founding partner Bruce Kuwabara, who worked with Vancouver-based landscape architect Kelty Miyoshi McKinnon of PFS Studio. Chandos Construction is the general contractor.
Quebec-based Premier Jet engraved the walls. Interpretive boulders, including a dedication by the Songhees First Nation, were engraved by Victoria’s Mortimer’s Monumental Works.
At the ceremony, architect Kuwabara said the curved design for the monument was chosen by community members because of how it emulates a ripple of water. “In that, was a metaphor of change,” he said. The ripple creates three smaller bays for reflection, and each slab resembles a large door.
For Kuwabara, the design was rooted in a strong personal connection. “My entire family on both sides are on the wall,” he said.
dkloster@timescolonist.com
