Heritage Preservation
BC Heritage Sites
Japanese Canadians began arriving on the coast shortly after BC joined Confederation in 1871. Unable to vote and barred from many professions, many turned to the resource sector, finding work in forestry, mining, farming and, notably, fishing, establishing communities, homes and livelihoods throughout the province, wherever they could find work.
Wherever Japanese Canadians settled up and down the west coast, retail/mercantile enterprises, lodging houses, language schools, churches and temples sprang up to create community, underpinning the vibrant economic life and culture of Japanese Canadians throughout the province. There were thriving farms on the coastal islands, in the Fraser Valley, the Okanagan and elsewhere. Steveston was a well-known fishing/boat-building/canning centre, one of many coastal communities of Japanese Canadians, including Prince Rupert and communities even further north.
Japanese Canadians contributed greatly to the economic growth of the province up until late 1941, with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Almost overnight, entire communities disappeared, livelihoods destroyed, families torn apart, schools half emptied. All property, homes, businesses, vehicle and boats were confiscated and later sold at bargain-sale prices. Nearly 22,000 men, women and children of Japanese heritage, regardless of birthplace or citizenship, were ordered to leave a 100-mile coastal protected zone, taking only what they carry, sent to road camps and internment camps in the interior of BC, to sugar beet farms in the prairies.
As the war drew to a close, a second uprooting erased Japanese Canadians almost entirely from the province, exiling almost 4,000 Japanese Canadians to Japan in 1946, and pushing the rest east of the Rockies. Mass dispossession continued for a decade, into the early 1950s. The community was effectively broken apart, those who remained in Canada scattered across the country, forced to start over from nothing.
BC Heritage Sites is a key program of Japanese Canadian Legacies, developed to assist local communities in British Columbia in promoting public awareness of pre-war Japanese Canadian history through interpretive heritage projects at sites of ancestral communities and other places of historical significance including sites of wartime incarceration.
Together with Legacy Community Projects, BC Heritage Sites make up Place of Memory, tangle links to the pre-war and wartime communities that Japanese Canadians called home prior to April 1, 1949, when Japanese Canadians were given full rights of citizenship, including the right to live anywhere in Canada. These projects help make some of these now mostly invisible sites visible to new generations of British Columbians so that they may learn to appreciate the lasting legacy of Japanese Canadians in British Columbia.
Mapping Places of Memory
BC Heritage Sites Directory
Northern BC
Port Edward Historical Society
Ocean Falls Improvement District
City of Prince Rupert
Lower Mainland
Maple Ridge CEED Centre Society
City of Maple Ridge
Vancouver – Japanese Canadian War Memorial
Vancouver Japanese Language School
Vancouver – Mountain View Cemetery
City of Mission
City of Surrey
Heritage Abbotsford Society
City of Richmond
Bowen Island Museum & Archives
Vancouver Island & Gulf Islands
Galiano Island – Galiano Club
Gabriola Historical & Museum Society
Mayne Island Agricultural Society
Japanese Garden Society of Salt Spring Island
City of Nanaimo
Ucluelet & Area Historical Society
Village of Cumberland
Chemainus Festival of Murals Society
Internment-era Sites
Sandon Historical Society
Kaslo – Langham Cultural Society
Sunshine Valley – Tashme Historical Society
City of Greenwood
Hope Mountain Centre for Outdoor Learning – Hope Station
District of Lillooet – Miyazaki House
Sites were chosen based on their significance to the prewar and wartime communities, also taking into account the infrastructure in place to maintain them.
Says JCLS CEO Susanne Tabata, “For Japanese Canadians, it is important to our community, and to our collective healing that we preserve these stories and acknowledge the places that, prior to uprooting, the Japanese Canadian community called home – the places where we flourished and raised our families and built our businesses, and the places where we experienced and overcame adversity. Commemorating and celebrating our historic places — most of which remain under-recognized and under-served — is long overdue. It is at the heart of our community’s work to reclaim our history and rebuild connections to our heritage in British Columbia.”
We thank co-coordinator Linda Kawamoto Reid who led the four-month research and discovery phase, bringing decades of knowledge to the program. A huge debt of gratitude goes to the assessment team of Nao Seko, Mike Aoki, Mike Matsuo, Kim Kalanj, and Yasushi Oki, who for over three months assessed feasibility and risk management of all applications. Thank you to Jeff Masuda, Sherri Kajiwara, Sachiko Okuda for reviewing draft guidelines written by Eiko Eby. The Heritage Sites Team of Susanne Tabata, Linda Kawamoto Reid, and Lane McGarrity looks forward to sharing the progress of these important sites so that we can begin the process of reclaiming our unique history and narrative.
BC Heritage Sites Team
BC Heritage Sites Assessment Team
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