The history of Japanese Canadians in Grand Forks is drawing the attention of researchers from Japan as they toured the city and region studying family links between the two countries.
Several members of Japanese Canadian families that have been in the city for generations joined the Boundary Historical Society for a special gathering and reunion and to meet four research scholars from Japan studying the family links between families with members in both Canada and a small fishing village in Japan.
The group met at the Station Pub on Saturday after a morning tour of the Grand Forks area’s historical points of interest, specifically locations of homes of Japanese Canadian families and Doukhobor historical sites.
The purpose of the gathering was to exchange ideas and share family knowledge with each other and the scholars, who are gathering information for their own research and for publication in a book on the history of Japanese Canadians and their links to the fishing village of Mio, Japan, which became a major emigration corridor for several families in the late 1880’s.
They were also looking at variables, such as the evacuation and relocation of families during 1942 in B.C., and how that influenced family dynamics and community building.
The researchers working on the project are Takae Mio, director of the Canada Museum; Norifumi Kawahara, Department of Geography, Faculty of Letters at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto; Sachiko Kawakami, professor in the Department of Global Tourism, Faculty of Global Engagement at Kyoto University of Foreign Studies and Masumi Izumi of Doshisha University.
Speaking through Kawakami to translate, Mio explained she has been working on researching the history and people of the village as its population ages and the risk of it disappearing grows.
She was given a photo album a few years ago from a man she knew, which she described like a “going away” gift to a person leaving Grand Forks that included the names and photos of dozens of families, leading her to discover most of these families migrated out of the village to B.C.
“This was made by the Japanese Association in Grand Forks in 1946,” she said. “There are 56 families listed in the book, with 300 individuals listed. “After receiving this photo book from her friend, she looked through it and discovered two-thirds of the names listed are actually familiar names she knows from Mio. So we came to Grand Forks to discover the history of Immigrants from Mio, because we learned from this picture book many people from Mio lived in Grand Forks during the war.”
This isn’t just about gathering hard facts and dates, but how people perceive the memories and stories of past family members. Izumi pointed out that several people that spoke to her had kind memories of their experiences, even during the evacuations and for some, internments. Despite the inherent racism that occurred with these policies, families and children were treated well.
“In English, they may want to tell their children a different way because they want them to be proud of being in Canada because there were few people like them in Grand Forks,” she said. “It’s true there was discrimination in Canada before the war and early on in the war, and there was still discrimination in the later part, but there were changing attitudes.”
What they learned was before the war, families didn’t know very many Japanese Canadian people in the area. Once Japanese Canadian families arrived through relocation and interacting with the residents of the city, understandings and friendships were formed, as well as they learned about each other’s cultures, which in turn created another layer to the city’s landscape.
Yoko Nishi, whose family name is Kondo, was a driving force behind the gathering with the hopes this would help not just inform the researcher’s studies, but honour their own culture by passing on memories and knowledge of the past generations.
Her family was among those who came from Mio. However, she wasn’t aware of the scholars’ studies until a few years ago. She explained she met with them to share her family’s experiences, including this past May at a symposium focused on the history of the village of Mio.
This is important for herself and many others because so little is known about the history of Japanese Canadians in Grand Forks.
To demonstrate the length of time in her family’s history, Nishi explained she’s been back to Mio.
She was born in 1941, just a few months before Japan entered The Second World War, so she’s been learning her own family history through others.
“You can see the length of time since we talked about or discovered things,” she said. “What’s happened in the last few years is the elders of the family have started to pass away and we started to lose information. My two brothers have told us a lot. A lot of the information I have from my family isn’t what I remembered on my own, as I was only a couple months old when I arrived in Grand Forks. It’s what I’ve heard from the stories from others. So I’ve bene doing a lot of my own research.”
The hope is not just to get help with that research, but add to the overall body and have a permanent record with the scholars’ help.
Les Johnson, past-president of the Boundary Historical Society, said he was of course proud to be helping to host these researchers, as well as helping families to get together and socialize in the spirit of exchanging memories and reconnecting.
Eventually, these stories will be published in a book and available to the public, Kawakami said.
