Some Canadian history

In Canada as in the US, people of Japanese origin were sent to internment camps during the second world war - "a black mark on the history of a nation that prides itself on its ethnic diversity, its tolerance and its multicultural policies", says the Japanese Canadian history website.

In the BC lower mainland, the main Japanese communities were on Powell Street in downtown Vancouver, and the fishing village of Steveston. There's a Japanese History Museum in Burnaby; hope to be able to visit it; the cannery museum in Steveston isn't open in winter. But it's possible to read more about it.

School photographs in the museum in the little farming town (as it was then) of Pitt Meadows show several Japanese children in the years before the war, but none afterward. After the war Japanese Canadians were encouraged to move east of the Rockies.

In 1949 all restrictions were lifted and Japanese Canadians were given full citizenship rites, including the vote. They were allowed to return "home" but their property had been seized and sold off long ago.

After reading David Gutterson's Snow Falling on Cedars, I was interested to visit the town of Greenwood (pop.200, then), where 1200 Japanese were sent. A hotel used for internment has a commemorative plaque; many families on each floor would be sharing limited cooking and sanitary facilities. Other buildings were adapted in the same way.

At first many men were sent to work in road camps; some families stayed together by working on sugar beet farms in Alberta, where labour was in short supply. Anyone who resisted internment was rounded up by the RCMP and sent to a barbed-wire prisoner-of-war camp in Ontario. We didn't learn about this when I was in school, but it's taught now.

Designer and artist Norman Takeuchi has made full-sized kimono out of paper, named after internment camps; here's Slocan: