On March 15, 1942, the RCMP issued evacuation notices to Japanese Canadians living on the Sunshine Coast and within days, they were gone – imprisoned and forced to labour on roads and farms in B.C.'s interior.
The Sunshine Coast Museum and Archives (SCMA) has yet to establish definitively how many residents returned to the Coast after restrictions lifted in 1949.
Local researchers, volunteers, descendents and new public databases are now filling significant longstanding gaps in the public record.
Hidden history
For three years volunteers have been reviving efforts to unearth what SCMA curator Matthew Lovegrove calls a “hidden history.”
It’s a history of the Japanese Canadian residents who lived on the Sunshine Coast before the federal government imposed a series of Draconian laws during the Second World War that effectively exiled them from their communities, homes and possessions.
They are histories hidden in a Gordian Knot of public archives, databases and long-defunct powerful arms of the Canadian government created through the War Measures Act.
“This is a huge gap in the archival collection,” said Lovegrove. “A lot of these people were community builders.
“And then they were just whisked away.”
The only known estimate of the Japanese Canadian population on the Sunshine Coast prior to the expulsion is 78. The number originates from the New Canadian, the sole government-sanctioned wartime newspaper run by Japanese Canadians.
It was a small but “noticeable number,” for the tiny settler communities dotting the prewar Sunshine Coast, according to former museum curator Kimiko Hawkes.
This year marks the 80th anniversary of the internment of Japanese Canadians – most of whom were Canadian citizens – following the December 1941 attacks by Imperial Japan on Pearl Harbour and Hong Kong.
Three months later, the Government of Canada legalized the expulsion of more than 21,000 Japanese Canadians living within 160 kilometres of B.C.’s coast.
Many communities never re-established themselves. Racist legislation severed the continuity of history.
Eight years ago Hawkes, whose grandparents emigrated from Japan before the war, penned a blog post and magazine article acknowledging a startling lack of information about early Japanese Canadian residents.
“Aside from a few passing mentions in the local history books and oral history interviews, very little exists in the official records that tells the stories of these immigrant families and what their lives were like,” wrote Hawkes at the time.
The historical gap has outlived her tenure as curator. Lovegrove, told Coast Reporter the omission remains “glaring.”
“We don’t have their photos, we don’t have their archives. We can try to put together an exhibit but we don’t have artifacts, really, that reflect Japanese settlers on the Coast,” he said.
In 2014, SCMA posted a request on its website for volunteers to help with research, to turn the number – 78 – into names and lives.
The Ikedas
Among the short list of documented names is the Ikeda family.
A few paragraphs in books by local authors and a handful of photos and oral histories were the sum total source material about the family in Whiskey Slough.
The people of Pender Harbour “loved the Ikedas,” according to resident Lewella Duncan, whose memory of the expulsion was documented in the book Women of Pender Harbour. The family shipped their home on floats from Steveston, B.C. in 1926. They fished for cod off the Coast.
In March 1942, the family members still living there - Torakichi, Hisano and two of their children, Kazuko (Cotty) and Masatsuga (Jack) – were forced from their home with only the possessions they could carry.
“Everybody in the harbour went over to the steamboat when they took the Ikedas away and everybody was crying,” said Duncan. “They claimed their boats.”
A ‘paper trail’ emerges
At the SCMA in Gibsons, in a room crammed with Sunshine Coast artifacts and books, Cynthia Hadden fanned the contents of a slim file folder on the table in front of her – the fruits of three years of painstaking work sifting through databases and book indexes.
Both Hadden, a former receptionist, and Carol Howie, an archives assistant who volunteers for the Pender Harbour Living Heritage Society, launched into the mystery after seeing the request for volunteers on the SCMA’s website.
Working independently of each other, they have been scouring public records and unearthing primary sources to untangle the confusion and provide definitive accounts.
Many of the files come from Landscapes of Injustice, a $5.5 million research and public history project, led by the University of Victoria with more than a dozen partner institutions.
Both Hadden and Howie have leaned heavily on its capstone achievement: an online database cataloging thousands of primary sources.
As Howie began looking into the history of Japanese-Canadians in Pender Harbour, she discovered “that portion of history was being undocumented.” It prompted her to start her efforts in earnest in 2020, including checking census records, genealogical records, newspaper clippings and the Landscapes of Injustice.
The Nakashimas
Howie and other volunteers have also surfaced materials in collaboration with another Japanese Canadian family, the Nakashimas, who owned the first temporary store in the tiny community of Egmont.
Eikichi Nakashima attempted to resist the expulsion by escaping in his boat, according to accounts documented by local historians Betty Keller and Rosella Leslie. Ultimately, the RCMP captured him and he and his family were sent to Lemon Creek in the West Kootenay region in the fall of 1942.
In another show of resistance, Nakashima became one of three men who, in 1944, took the federal government to court and challenged the right of the Custodian of Enemy Property to seize and sell Japanese-Canadian property.
It took three years for a decision. The Exchequer Court judge ruled against them. But by then, as Landscapes of Injustice contributor Eric Adams wrote in a paper on the subject, “the question of the government’s treatment of Japanese-Canadian-owned property had become moot—there was no property left to protect.”
But it’s not moot to Simon Fraser University communications professor Kirsten McAllister, a descendant of Eikichi Nakashima.
She told Coast Reporter “efforts to challenge injustice, even while interned, uncertain of their fate in the camps – became inspirations for younger generations of activists in the 1970s onward – including redress activists and my generation into the late 1980s and onwards.”
The Landscape documents, which include the Nakashima court files, trace the expropriation and sale of everything from fee simple land, to fishing boats, businesses and personal effects – items seized under authority of the Office of the Custodian of Enemy Property and enshrined under the legal but ultimately empty promise they would be held “as a protective measure only” – a promise proven empty by the Nakashima lawsuit.
Sifting through databases such as Landscapes of Injustice and Library and Archives Canada has allowed the Sunshine Coast museum to assemble a “paper trail” of evidence to expose the scope of the losses, said Lovegrove.
Painstaking work
Hadden travelled to Vancouver and pored over book indexes before moving to online databases. She combed through thousands of names, copying and pasting them into her own records. But the search was worth it. Both Hadden and Howie have pulled numerous letters of dispossession out of the woodwork.
Their work revealed the scope of loss for the Ikeda family – a family that never returned to live on the Sunshine Coast.
A 1946 personal property summary enumerates possessions seized and sold: tools, a gramophone, furniture, clothing, stoves, axes, nets, garden tools, a Brownie box camera.
Another letter shows an interested buyer put the value of a 30-ft. cod fishing vessel, the MV Ikeda, at $1,500, while original owner Torakichi Ikeda valued it at $3,200.
In the end, it sold for $1,600.
These documents reflect the federal government’s decision in 1943 to sell off seized items, usually for far less than they were worth.
Other documentation shows property arrangements made by the Ikeda family in anticipation of the government seizures. The Ikedas sold their land to the Mackays, another Pender Harbour family who later also bought the Ikeda home. It still stands today.
Receipts, notices of sale and other documents don’t simply prove the oral histories are true. As the Landscapes of Injustice project puts it, it also forces Canadians to discuss a shameful episode.
“That’s the question – who benefitted from the dispossession?” said Lovegrove. “A lot of it seems to be documented.”
A problem for coastal communities
The Sunshine Coast is one of many small coastal communities with gaps in the history of prewar Japanese Canadians because of the internment.
For guidance, Lovegrove said many are likely looking to Landscapes of Injustice and Nikkei National Museum, the country’s largest repository of community-driven Japanese Canadian history.
Lisa Uyeda, a collections manager with Nikkei Museum and Landscapes of Injustice steering committee member, told Coast Reporter, “Many individuals and families lost everything during the forced uprooting and again when they were forced to move east of the Rockies or were exiled to Japan, which makes it really difficult for the history of smaller communities, such as the Sunshine Coast, to be preserved.”
To fill in the historical record, Lovegrove hopes descendents, family friends and others with knowledge will approach the museum to share their oral histories. He wants to create an exhibit about the expulsion “on the Sunshine Coast, specifically to the Sunshine Coast.”
In the meantime, the volunteer efforts are proving collaborative in other ways, too. In at least one case, they’re reforging connections severed by unjust laws.
Kirsten McAllister, the descendant of Eikichi Nakashima, who owned Egmont’s first store, told Coast Reporter her family is also conducting their own research, “drawing on their recollections and their community relations” and through that have been building a relationship with Coast volunteers and the museum.
“The process of research is also a way for our family to rebuild relations to places and communities that were severed during the war and subsequently erased from history.”
