Part two of a series.
Here’s Nanci’s story. Or perhaps, the story of her family, since she wasn’t born until 1946.
Nanci’s father, Eiji Kamikawaji, was born in Japan in 1906. In 1922, his uncle, already in Canada, sponsored his immigration, and he came to Golden, where he probably worked at the Columbia River Lumber Company, likely until it closed in 1926.
An article written by Nanci’s sister, Sally, says that “…he came from Japan at age 16 and worked at the sawmill in Golden, B.C. A few years later, his uncle returned to Japan, but Eiji decided he wanted to remain in Canada.”
I’m going to read between the lines a bit here, but I think we in Golden can see how this story fits into our local history. It appears to me that both Eiji and his uncle lived and worked in Golden until the CRL mill closed in 1926 as a result of the huge fire on the west bench.
Then, following the mill closure, the uncle returned to Japan, and Eiji went to Vancouver, where he worked as a ‘house boy’ in wealthy Vancouver homes, went to night school to learn English, and then got work in the sawmills in Vancouver.
Eiji got married in 1934 to a lady named ‘Sadako’ and their first child, a son, Dick, arrived in 1936, followed by two daughters, Sally and Minnie.
Now, just imagine this.
Imagine that you are Eiji or Sadako Kamikawaji. It’s 1942, it might be a Tuesday evening, supper is over, and you are starting to think about getting the kids to bed. There’s a knock at the door, and when you answer it there are two policemen there who tell you that you are being moved, tonight, to the interior of B.C.
You have two hours to pack, one suitcase per person. The policemen said they would be back, and they were. So you struggle with kids and baggage, wondering all the time when you’ll see your home again. As you leave, you see neighbours going into your house to steal things that you had left behind.
It would be months before you would learn that there wouldn’t be any going back. Loaded into trucks, it’s a long trip to Popoff, in the Slocan Valley, which would be home for the next three years.
It’s easy for us to imagine. But the Kamikawajis lived it.
Life in the internment camps was hard. Housing was provided, but was usually of very poor quality, either hastily renovated old mining houses, or shacks without insulation that had been thrown up quickly. Eiji was sent to work in a road camp with meagre pay checks, hardly enough for his family’s food and clothing.
Schools were provided at the elementary level only. Another daughter, Suzanne, was born in 1942 while the family was in the internment camp.
The evacuation to the Kootenays affected not only those of younger years who could possibly have been security risks, if there were any, but the elderly were also interned. So Nanci’s grandmother was also one of the folks who moved away from the coast. She and her husband had been in the fishing industry and owned three boats.
They provided employment for Nanci’s grandfather and some of his sons, Nanci’s uncles. All the boats were seized by the government and never returned, nor compensated for.
When the war was over, Nanci’s father responded to an employment offer from a lumber company in the Invermere area, made the move there and continued to raise their family. The discrimination, however, even from some official parts of Canadian society, wasn’t yet over.
The schools in Invermere would not accept the Kamikawaji children as students because of their Japanese ancestry. That led their employer, Simon Ronacher, also an immigrant, but he of German ancestry and the owner of a local lumbering business, to take up the issue with the local school board and, after a few months, the children were accepted.
He then made the same effort for other Japanese families not employed by his company, and their children were also accepted.
Following the family’s move to Invermere, Nanci and her brother, Harold, were born there in 1946 and 1950, respectively. All six of the Kamikawaji children are still living.
What a story! And what trauma to have to experience!
Mobility across our land has long been an accepted facet of Canadian life, everyone could live where they wanted to without any government involvement. But it wasn’t so for Japanese Canadians in British Columbia even after the war was over. Not until April 1, 1949, were Canada’s Japanese residents allowed to return to the west coast.
And discrimination wasn’t limited to any coast or any valley or any laundry or cookhouse kitchen. It was everywhere. Many years ago, while strolling through the old copies of the Golden Star, which I did often when we published it in the ’80s, I noticed some advertisements which we would, thankfully, never publish today.
Grab your copy of the February 11, 1943 Golden Star, and come with me to the back page. Near the top right-hand corner of the page, you will see an ad from the long-since-gone Monarch Hotel in Field, right there just below the food market ad of the respected Burns and Co. In clear, capital letters, the Monarch Hotel wanted people to know that at their hotel, there is “WHITE HELP ONLY EMPLOYED.”
It would be wonderful if we could say that discrimination and prejudice were gone forever. But in the case of the Japanese Canadians of the west coast of B.C., while it is much better now than in the 1940s, it has taken a long time. Nanci told me that all of her siblings have, at some point in their lives, experienced prejudice.
Canada has been a wonderful place for all Canadians to live. But equality and fairness have not been part of everyone’s lives every day. Like individuals, countries make mistakes, and it certainly did in the case of the Japanese Canadians of the 1940s. Prime Minister Brian Mulroney delivered a long-overdue apology to this community in 1988, and financial reparations were paid to each internment survivor.
Incredibly, almost all of the interned Japanese Canadians have remained in Canada. Some who were deported back to Japan even returned. Furthermore, it’s almost beyond comprehension how such an abuse of human rights could be met with such understanding by so many people in an adopted foreign land.
It’s also incredible that none of Nanci’s graduation classmates knew anything about her family’s history. There should be a space in our high school Social Studies program for this kind of story to be told.
Read part one of this story here.
Enjoy Duane Crandall’s writing? Read more here.
Duane Crandall is a former publisher of the Golden Star (1982-1986) and the Golden News (1992 – 2003). He served as MLA for Columbia River-Revelstoke from 1986 – 1991.
