Experiences of an Internment Camp Teacher

Ten years ago, Susan Yatabe was going through a long-forgotten corner of her mother’s basement. She discovered a collection of children’s drawings, black and white photographs of schoolchildren and teachers, valentines, and wartime correspondence from Kaslo BC dating back to the 1940s. Her mother, Kazuko Shinobu, had been interned there during the war and taught Grade 3 for one year before leaving for Toronto in 1944. 

The unearthed artifacts form the basis of an exhibit, The Experiences of An Internment Camp Teacher, on until July 18 at The Langham in Kaslo. Several of Kazuko’s students and fellow teachers were housed in The Langham Hotel, which is featured in some of the drawings, along with other buildings in the town.

Upon discovering the trove of artifacts, Susan made it her mission to track down as many of Kazuko’s former students or their relatives as possible. Because her mother didn’t record the names of her 27 students, it took a lot of detective work on Susan’s part to identify them and make contact. In the end she was able to contact over half of the students. Twelve of the former students and two fellow teachers, or their family members, generously shared their family stories and photographs in the exhibit. 

The centrepiece of the Langham exhibit, funded in part by a JC Legacies Intergenerational Wellness grant, is a series of 27 pictures drawn by Kazuko’s students of buildings in Kaslo, some of which no longer exist. The crayon drawings were made on 6-inch square pages of newsprint and represent a unique perspective on an internment camp, seen through the eyes of a child. 

by Susan Yatabe

Kazuko’s Life Before Internment

Kazuko was born in Vancouver to Sada Shinobu and Saburo Shinobu, who emigrated from Miyagi-ken, Japan.  Sada Shinobu was a fine arts teacher who had taught needlework at a girls’ art school in Tochigi Prefecture and in the Imperial Palace.  Sada opened a school on Alexander Street in Vancouver that taught sewing, cooking and Japanese fine arts, the Girls’ College of Practical Arts.  Kazuko’s father Saburo was an insurance agent and certified life underwriter for Manufacturer’s Life Insurance.  He was a social activist and a community leader instrumental in obtaining the vote for Japanese Canadian First World War veterans in April 1931.  He took part in the 1936 Vimy Pilgrimage, witnessing the unveiling of the Vimy Memorial in northern France. 

Kazuko spent nearly two years in northern Japan when she was 11 and 12 years old, living with her grandmother in the ancestral family village in Miyagi-ken.  She attended school in the village.  She experienced bullying in Japan (because she was Canadian) just as she had experienced bullying in Canada (because her background was Japanese). 

On her return to Vancouver, she became the editor of the Templeton Junior High School yearbook.  She was an excellent student, particularly in French and Latin, and won an award for penmanship.  Her two brothers attended the University of British Columbia, graduating before the start of the Second World War.  Kazuko was unable to attend the University of Saskatchewan as planned due to the internment (and the resulting loss of family savings).  The years she spent interned during the war were the years she should have been in university.

The Shinobu family was forcibly moved to the Kaslo internment camp in the BC interior on September 3, 1942.  Kazuko said that many of the townspeople in Kaslo were very unhappy about the arrival of the Japanese Canadians, which tripled the population.  After four very uncomfortable months housed in the crowded and derelict Kaslo Hotel, the family rented a small house in Kaslo with their savings.  The family missed their piano, which was in temporary storage with friends in Kelowna.  They moved the piano to Kaslo at great expense.

The Kaslo sewing school in front of the Kaslo Hotel, June 1943. From Kazuko Shinobu’s photo collection.

First Row Mitsuko Murakami, Hannah Kasoka, Tsugie Hashimoto, Fuzzy Furuya, Toyo Taira, Mrs. Shinobu, Mikiko Ohashi, Kazuko Toda, Jean Hayashida, Aiko Baba, Kaneko Sasaki, Amy Yamazaki.
2nd row Sue Matsugu, Toyoko Sakurai, Mrs. Toshiko Joan Minamide, Sadako Furuya, Mrs. Inouye, Mrs. Mary Takahashi (Kumagai), Mrs. Shimizu, Yukiya Yoshida, Katy Murakami, Kay Idenouye, Emiko Fujimoto, Ayako Nagatakiya. 

Back row Tamiko Suzuki, Chikie Kimura, Kiyae Nakano, Fujika Hirakima, Fumi Shiozaki, Katsuko Yodayama, Masako Morimoto, Lily Matsushita, Sachiye Suzuki, Mrs. Fay Baba (Iwara).

Identification of people:  Kazuko Toda

The quality of medical care improved dramatically for everyone in Kaslo, not only for the internees, with the arrival of Japanese Canadian professionals: Dr. Kozo Shimotakahara (medical doctor), Dr. Edward Banno (dentist) and Dr. Henry Naruse (optometrist).

The New Canadian, the only Japanese Canadian newspaper allowed to publish during the Second World War, was moved from Vancouver to Kaslo.

Education of Kaslo Internee Children

No provision had been made by the BC or the Canadian governments to educate the 3000 children who were being relocated to internment camps with their families.  Both governments were arguing about who had responsibility for educating these students as families arrived in the internment camps.  Kaslo schools would not accept evacuee children, and those still left in Vancouver were not re-admitted into schools in September 1942.  Some of the nisei who had graduated from high school or university without teacher training, began an unofficial school in Kaslo.  Sachi Takimoto and her friends Fusako Inose, Betty Shinohara, Molly Fujita, Marie Yoshida, Toyo Taira and Amy Nishida started school-like classes for children in June 1942.  The classes met at Vimy Park, and later, in the Drill Hall, the Kaslo Bakery and the shoe shop.  

New Denver Summer School

Hide Hyodo and Terry Hidaka, the only Japanese Canadians with teaching degrees, organized a month-long training course for 125 nisei high school and university graduates in the summer of 1943.  The course took place in New Denver.  Kazuko Shinobu was one of the teacher trainees who attended.

The Langham exhibit includes a map of the homes of the students and teachers during internment in Kaslo.  It was constructed from a photograph of an internment-era map of Kaslo at the Kootenay Lake archives (photographed by Kazuko’s grandson Ewan) overlain with locations of the internee homes provided by archivist Elizabeth Scarlett.

There was no class list found among the artifacts from Kazuko’s basement.  The names of the students were obtained from the pictures that they had drawn or from the valentines they had given Kazuko.  Some students signed their drawings and valentines with their full names, but many signed their first names only.  Determining the full names of some students was not straightforward and took many months.  Combinations of the following were used to establish the students’ surnames:

• asking former students to identify their classmates in old photographs
• advertisement in the Nikkei Voice newspaper
• help from friends and relatives with contacts among internees
• Landscapes of Injustice database
• list of Kaslo family names that Kazuko’s father Saburo compiled for the Kaslo koyukai (friends club)
• obituaries
• Library and Archives Canada records of Japanese Canadian families deported to Japan 

Years later, with her once-excellent memory starting to fail, Kazuko could only remember the names of three of her students:  the top student, the student who caused the most trouble, and a student that she felt very sorry for because his family was deported to Japan.

Leaving Kaslo

Kazuko left Kaslo in October 1944, at a time when the government was ordering internees to either be deported to Japan or to move east of the Rockies.  This was a second and very stressful uprooting for Japanese Canadians.  Returning to their original homes in BC was not an option for internees – their homes and possessions had been sold by the government.  Kazuko went to Toronto to continue her education, and in 1945 her parents left Kaslo and joined her in Toronto.  Kazuko corresponded with her former students Makoto Kanda and Naomi Teranishi after arriving in Toronto; their letters are part of the Langham exhibit.

The memories of racial prejudice and wartime internment were never far away from Kazuko’s consciousness.  They affected all aspects of her life and behaviour.  

When she was 90 years old, Kazuko’s long-term memory was still impressive, while her short-term memory declined.  To make the most of her long-term memory and to distract Kazuko from the reality of her dementia, her daughter Susan began to record Kazuko’s extensive knowledge of family and Japanese Canadian history.  They could spend time together productively even though communication was difficult and there was an underlying urgency to this work.  They read every book on Japanese Canadian history in Kazuko’s large collection (some multiple times), and discussed letters from family members in Japan and from Kazuko’s friends in Canada.  As their friends in Kelowna had stored some of their possessions during wartime, the Shinobu family had been able to keep their old photograph albums. Kazuko and Susan were able to identify and label family and friends’ photographs dating from the Meiji era up to the 1950s.  Kazuko was still able to recall many stories about the people in the photographs.  Eventually, even her long-term memory faded.  Kazuko died in 2019, aged 94.

Contacting the Former Students

Susan contacted 15 of Kazuko’s 26 grade 3 students (now 90 years old or older), or their relatives, beginning in 2018.  Some of the former students had been deported to Japan in 1946 and could not be traced.  Some students had died very young.  Some died recently, but left no descendants.  Several died recently after initial contact had been made with them.  Some relatives of the former students were unwilling to talk about their late parents’ internment.  

Thirteen of Kazuko’s former students and two of her former fellow teachers, or their family members, have generously shared their family stories and photographs in the exhibit.  

Student Drawings

The centrepiece of the Langham exhibit is a series of 27 pictures drawn by Kazuko’s students of buildings in Kaslo, some of which no longer exist.  The crayon drawings were made on 6-inch square pages of newsprint.  There are no dates provided with any of the drawings, and it was assumed that all drawings were created at the same time.  Many of the houses in the drawings include flowers, so it is probable that the drawings were made in April, May or June 1944. The following buildings were depicted in the students’ drawings.  

Numbers of Buildings in Student Drawings

Kootenay Lake School: 1

Langham Hotel: 4

Kaslo Hotel: 5

R&K Block, 1896: 2

Former drugstore building (now demolished): 3

Burns Meat Market building (now demolished): 2

Kemball Building: 1

Individual houses: 9

The children housed in the Langham Hotel, Kaslo Hotel and former drugstore building drew the buildings where they were living.

Reminiscences of Kazuko’s Grade 3 Students

Susan interviewed thirteen of Kazuko’s former students or their relatives.  

After interviewing Kazuko’s students and students’ families, Susan found it rather surprising that their memories of internment in Kaslo were mostly positive.  As eight-year-olds, the students were happy to be surrounded by other children.  Many of them spoke about tobogganing in winter down a steep hill on wooden sleds built by internees.  Jim Miyazaki said he was lucky to get a ride on one of the sleds but did not enjoy pulling it up the hill. In school, the children were together with other nisei and there was no racial prejudice.  Some of the children had difficulty in school because their first language was Japanese; instruction was in English only.  Many fathers were sent to distant road camps or assigned to work in provinces outside of BC, so the children were living with their mothers and sometimes grandparents.  Their mothers and grandparents shielded them from the harsh realities of their incarceration.  

Yukiko Ruth Minamide remembers that on the ground floor of the Langham Hotel, there was a front parlour mainly used by the men and a communal kitchen at the back with a large cooking stove and rows of long tables.  Each family was assigned a section of the table.  Beyond the kitchen was the ofuro (bath).  In Kaslo, her father worked with other men, cutting trees for fuel for the stoves and the ofuros.  Ruth enjoyed living among friends in the Langham Hotel.  They played hopscotch, jacks, kick the can and hide and seek; she remembers playing card games like War and Old Maid, and swimming in Mirror Lake.  Some internee boys were naughty and would throw chestnuts at the non-Japanese people in Kaslo.  Her grandfather would scold these boys and tell them to behave themselves.

Nobuaki Uno’s father had been sent to a road camp, building the Hope-Princetown Highway.  His father later joined the family in Kaslo.  The Uno family lived on the second floor of the Kaslo Hotel.  Nobuaki remembers that the rooms were small.  The building was already in poor shape when they moved in, with plaster falling off the cracked walls.  The kitchen was in the middle of the second floor, with a woodstove for cooking.  There were cockroaches in the kitchen but fortunately not in the rooms where his family lived.  There was no Buddhist church in Kaslo, but a Buddhist priest would hold a service every weekend in the basement of the Kaslo Hotel.

Ray Tani’s house was located at the top of a big hill in Kaslo, below a mountain.  Halfway up the hill, the road flattened out.  A local family lived at the flattened section of the road. The kids who lived there would taunt Ray as he returned from school.  One day, an old Japanese man with a cane walked up to the kids and told them to leave Ray alone.  He then walked with Ray up the hill and the kids never bullied Ray again. 

Jim Miyazaki and Sachiko Tabata both remember attending the early school set up in Vimy Park by Sachi Takimoto and her friends.

Regarding the B.C. government’s Kaslo highway road sign describing the internment, Jim said, “the sign said the lakes were stocked with fish, but we were not allowed to fish.  We couldn’t buy fish hooks and the Mounties used to come after us if they saw us fishing.”  As a large number of internees in Kaslo were fishermen from Steveston, this seems particularly unfair.  Jim said that Kaslo would show movies that were shared among the internee ghost towns.  There were two Japanese-speaking men who provided live voices while the movies were playing. 

Jim said: “I don’t remember any of my teachers from grade 1 to grade 5, but I remember Miss Shinobu.  She was the only teacher who tried to help me read and spell.  She kept me after school to teach me but I was a real bad kid in those days and skipped out many times”. Jim suffered from dyslexia, a condition which caused him to struggle academically and was not diagnosed until years later.

Sachiko Tabata remembers the communal kitchen in the building where her family lived (above the drugstore, on Front Street at Fourth Street).  They shared their living space with many other internee families.  The Kootenay Lake Archives lists nine families living in the same building, although some of the families did not stay as long as Sachiko’s family.  The families of fellow students Tokiko Okano and Takashi Imoo also lived above the drugstore.  As most men were living in road camps away from Kaslo, most of the people in the upper floor of the drugstore building were women and children. She remembers the Japanese baths set up in Kaslo, away from the hotels and buildings.  Groups of males and groups of females took turns using the baths.

Marina Yoshida’s parents had operated a rooming house on East Hastings Street in Vancouver.  The rooming house was just becoming profitable when the Second World War began.  Marina was the oldest of three children.  Marina’s father was sent in March 1942 to the Blue River road camp in Alberta, leaving her mother, Murako, struggling to prepare for internment in Kaslo with the three young children.  Marina had a photograph of her parents saying goodbye to each other.  At that time, Murako didn’t know if she would ever see her husband again.  The family was not reunited with their father until they had moved to Ontario, two and a half years later.

After the Pearl Harbor attacks, Sumire Tanaka’s father Tokikazu was abruptly removed from their home by RCMP officers; Sumire was home when her father was taken away.  Tokizaku Tanaka was one of the first of 40 Japanese men to be hauled away by the RCMP because they were community leaders.  He was the official interpreter for Japanese people in BC.  He was sent to the Petawawa and Angler prisoner-of-war camps in Ontario.  Tokikazu Tanaka stayed at Angler until the camp was closed because he was the spokesman for the prisoners.  The Tanaka family didn’t see him again for at least five years after the RCMP took him away.  The family was reunited in Chatham, Ontario.

Sumire, her mother and sister spent the three years of internment living at the Kaslo Hotel.  Her teenage brother was separated from them, living in another location.  The Kaslo Hotel was crowded, and she would see cockroaches in the building.  She remembers her mother receiving heavily censored letters from her father, who was in the POW camps.  Japanese words were blacked out and cut out of his letters.

Sumire said the internment was harder on her parents and two older siblings than on her.  None of the Tanaka siblings attended university because their family had lost everything during the internment.  

When Paul Yamaguchi’s family was being interned, his father Roy arranged for tenants to occupy the family home over their family’s barbershop in New Westminster.  The tenants stole most of the furniture belonging to the Yamaguchi family.  During the family’s internment, the Yamaguchi’s home was sold by the Custodian of Enemy Alien Property without their consent, as was common to most of the internees. 

Florence Takahashi, the sister of former student Teddy Takahashi, said that while interned at Kaslo, their parents lost their home, which they had just built before the internment.  They left all their valuable possessions in the house because the government said they would eventually be allowed to return to Vancouver.  They never returned to British Columbia and there was nothing left to return to.  By the time the government offered compensation in 1988 to former internees, both parents had died.  

Jim Miyazaki said, “It must have been very hard for our parents.  They didn’t live long enough to hear the Canadian government apologize and they didn’t get to spend the redress money”.

Do you know any of the students?

Do you know the names of the students in the class photographs who have not yet been identified?

There are several students whose names are known, but whose pictures have not yet been found among the photographs.  These include Yoshiyuki Shinmoto, Harumi Shinmoto, May Moriyama, Gene Moriyama and Edward Mizuguchi. Please contact the editor of this publication (Bulletin or Nikkei Voice) if you are able to help.

Acknowledgements

Funding provided by the Japanese Canadian Legacies Society (JCLS) is gratefully acknowledged.

The hard work of curator Brent Bukowski of the Langham Cultural Centre in organizing, assembling and publicizing this exhibit is sincerely appreciated.

Ted Shimizu’s video of the wartime internment camps was displayed during the exhibit. Ted also identified many of the people in photos displayed in the exhibit.

The Kootenay Lake Archives helped with the identification of buildings and provided scans of the children’s drawings and valentines.

Ewan Craig provided photographs and general assistance.

Also essential to this project has been the help of the following individuals, who provided interviews, photographs, identifications and contact information for former students and teachers.