Beautiful British Columbia: Our September 2024 Holiday, Part Six

New Denver's claim to fame so far is, sadly, that it was one of many sites far away from the Pacific coast where thousands of Japanese-Canadians were interned, as supposed enemies of war, starting in 1941.

Entrance of the Nikkei Internment Memorial Centre,
New Denver, Canada. September 2024.

The Nikkei Internment Memorial Centre was set up in the 1990s, encompassing three original houses that were built in the 1940s to hold the displaced Canadians, and a community centre. A garden with maple trees and cedar shrubs, ferns, a flowing dry gravel stream, and other features, designed by a former internee, runs amongst the houses and to the street's edge.

The Hastings Park Exhibition Grounds in Vancouver,
where Japanese Canadian internees were held.
There even seem to be bunk beds in the bleacher seats.
As a Berliner, the view reminds me disquietingly of the asylum seeker accommodations
at the former Tegel Airport.

The internees at "The Orchard" had likely been summoned to large halls in, or near, the towns or cities where they lived, with a few suitcases. They were forced to leave homes, businesses, and cars behind; these belongings were 'held on their behalf' and — more often than not — sold, without their consent, for bargain prices. (While the Holocaust went further, the profiteering of a fellow citizens in Canada from racist prejudice against a minority group does feel shamefully similar to expropriation of Jewish Germans' possessions in Nazi Germany.)

After being held, the Japanese-Canadians were shipped off into remote inland villages. The first winter in New Denver was freezing, and the Memorial Centre doesn't leave much to the imagination about conditions: a tan-colored tent like the ones in which many women and children were left to sleep is set up in the museum, with a small oil-fueled heater and a blanket, as a black-and-white photo shows the real 1940s tents steeped in snow.

It was only in the following winter in the 1940s that the cabins were finished. The houses that survive in the memorial centre have thin cedar shingle walls. Tar paper seemed to do most of the remaining work of insulation and waterproofing. Outhouses with washrooms were a later addition. Over time, the houses were customized and improved, but they don't look much more winter-proof.

To make things worse, families were sometimes separated again after the original deportation. Over 1,000 Japanese Canadians were sent to Ontario to work. Women were sent off to work as domestic servants; a sign in the Centre suggests that the women's wages were garnished to pay for their family members' internment. Men were sent to Ontario as well, as labourers to build highways, farmers or foresters.

A few men, at least from other British Columbia camps, were kept in the province but sent to fight forest fires: at the entrance to the museum garden, a section of tree trunk that was found again much later by a logging company shows the names of Japanese-Canadian firefighters from Lemon Creek Camp, engraved into the wood during a mission in 1945.

In the modern day, the houses in the Centre are furnished roughly as they might have been like in the 1940s: beds in rooms that are barely large enough to hold anything else, a few wooden shelves sticking out from the walls, and modest piles of adult and children's clothing, as well as comforts like handheld paper fans. A radio in the entrance, perhaps, and a dining/entrance/kitchen area with a dense throng of waste pail, old-fashioned iron stove on four legs, broom, pots, and cooking ingredients. Then one or two rooms that hold Japanese-Canadian nostalgia: cosmetics and newspapers with Japanese writing, a large rectangular tin labelled "Japanese Crackers." A few of the artifacts are post-war, as the camp was fully dissolved later, in 1957.

Table in one of the cabins at Nikkei Internment Memorial Centre.

Despite the stressful conditions, the exhibits record a sense of community: the community hall amongst the family houses is a literal example, and the building still hosts a Buddhist shrine and a bath house. Photos also capture annual celebrations like a Christmas concert. In the Centre's gardens, a vegetable patch or two shows the gardening skills of many Japanese Canadians who had been farmers in British Columbia before the war, and later grew crops like broad beans in the internment camp. 

At the end of the war, the government — far from recognizing its injustice — told Japanese-Canadians that they were no longer wanted in British Columbia. One or two exceptions were made, but most former internees were ordered to Japan or to Eastern Canada. I was wondering if this banishment was ordered because their Canadian neighbours were ashamed, didn't want to give back the possessions that they had stolen, or still genuinely feared a Japanese invasion, were too steeped in racist stereotypes, or felt resentful of Japan's military actions during the War. Regardless of motivation, the order was revoked in 1949, but I am guessing a lot of damage had been done by then.

A plaque signed The Village of New Denver at the entrance of the Memorial Centre now says, "It is a humbling reminder of the courage of the Japanese Canadians interned during World War II and their contributions to the social and cultural character of the area."

The Nikkei Internment Memorial Centre is not the only site in New Denver that commemorates the detention of Japanese Canadians. A few private homes in the village are left over from the internment camp and can be identified based on their shape and size, although internment camps were generally bulldozed after the war. Besides a garden was laid out at the water's edge.

I seem to remember the Kohan Reflection Garden was, like the Centre, co-funded by Japanese Canadians. From its shoreline we admired the flights of two remote-controlled model float airplanes over Slocan Lake, the swishing waters on the pebbled lakeside, the wood-shingled red and black tea house, a gardener's work, and the trees and bushes (rhododendrons, hydrangeas, bamboo, ...) and ornamental stone lanterns and bridge of the garden itself.

I wondered why the Japanese Canadians who had been interned didn't just spit in the eye of the oppressor after the war, but instead created beautiful things. Still, I guess they took the wiser path.