Monument
Joint Initiative with the BC Government
A monument in Victoria, the province’s Capital, is being planned to honour all 22,000 Japanese Canadians who were forcibly uprooted and displaced from their BC coastal homes. The monument will be overseen by the BC Ministry of Citizens’ Services through proper procurement protocols.
The dream and vision for the monument is that it will envelope the origin story of Japanese Canadians who settled in cities, towns, and villages, primarily along the coast. The tactile names on the wall will help to recognize individuals and families and where they lived before the forced uprooting, seizure and forced sale of assets, incarceration, internment, permanent dispossession, and two waves of displacement. We hope there will be a digital version of this project wherein people can search for the names and where they are situated on the monument.
– Susanne Tabata, CEO JC Legacies Society
Database of Names
In preparation for the project, a research team at the University of Victoria under the direction of Michael Abe has developed a database of names from 14,500 Library and Archives Canada case files in addition to multiple databases. This research has been ongoing from January 2023 through January 2024. This list of names contains Japanese Canadians who were uprooted and displaced. An additional list of those born in captivity from 1942 to 1949 is also being developed.
Important Message from the Database Team
Thank you everyone for your valuable and important input to the Monument database project. Since the consultation with the community started on June 1, 2023 we’ve fielded input from over 900 community members. Our research team have been diligently researching each and every one of your enquiries and will continue to do so to the end of January when we wrap up the project.
We still need your help to ensure our list is as accurate as possible. Please review the database for spelling, omissions and locations and share this request with other JC relatives and friends.
The link to the website is https://hcmc.uvic.ca/project/monument/index.html
Ensure that you refresh any pages you may have visited before by holding the shift key and clicking the reload button in your browser.
We welcome English and Japanese forenames, provided they are legal names and not nicknames. Do not send any birth certificates, etc. just let us know that they appear on a legal document or on a gravestone, etc. You can send links to obituaries or scans of obituaries from newspapers if necessary.
We also ask that you review the area that your family was uprooted from. Often the custodian file reported multiple locations, please be sure to confirm with us where they were living at the time of the uprooting.
There are many people who had family in Japan at the time of the uprooting who couldn’t return. Because we do not have the ability to identify every single person who was in this situation, we are unable to produce a complete name list. We are working on a way to honour these people as a group but unfortunately we won’t add a partial list of names to the wall.
Send information that needs to be changed in the monument database to monument@jclegacies.com by January 23, 2024.
Please note that it is outside of our scope and resources at this time to make adjustments to the Landscapes of Injustice database.
Thank you,
Michael Abe, Project Director
and Monument Database Research Team