“Knowing this history protects all Canadians. Memory is our defense against injustice.” 

Beginning in 1942, nearly 22,000 Japanese Canadians living on the west coast of British Columbia were uprooted, permanently stripped of their homes, property, and businesses, and relocated to internment camps and other sites outside coastal BC, with some exiled to Japan. The majority of the uprooted Japanese Canadians were born in BC.

This little known chapter in Canadian history, the culmination of decades of discriminatory government policies, reveals inconvenient truths about the country’s nation-building narrative and demonstrates the fragility of democracy. 

JapaneseCanadianHistory.com is a resource developed by BC-based educators to support teachers and students K – 12 through meaningful engagement with this history.

The study of the internment of Japanese Canadians is recommended in Social Studies 10 classrooms by the BC Ministry of Education and Child Care and can be integrated into the Grade 5 Social Studies curriculum and other grade levels.

About the site

A  Teacher Resources Committee was formed in response to a callout. 17 BC-based teachers from the K – 12 education sector, many with Nikkei heritage, formed a team to develop drafts for three outputs: reference library; resource archive; and a teacher course. Mike Perry-Whittingham lead the cohort for three years.

The JCLS communications and content team has worked with the draft materials to produce a simple, highly navigable resource for K – 12 teachers and students. The team is led by Susanne Tabata, with John Endo Greenaway, Raymond Nakamura, Kaitlin Findlay. Additional design and content are being developed to further build out the contributions made by the teacher team.