Sunshine Valley’s dark history
Canada’s largest Japanese internment camp is remembered at a small local museum
Through the window of a moving car, the Sunshine Valley passes in a blur of white camping trailers.
Highway 3, which curves and climbs for much of the distance between Hope and Princeton, runs straight and flat through the recreational community dominated by a large RV campground.
Seventy-five years ago, a traveller passing through the valley would have also seen row upon row of tiny dwellings, said Ryan Ellan, a resident who has opened a small museum dedicated to a dark chapter in Sunshine Valley’s history.
The shacks housed more than 2,000 Japanese-Canadians who were forced from their homes on the coast and sent to Tashme, Canada’s largest Japanese-Canadian internment camp.
“Throughout my life, I wondered why more people didn’t know the story of internment,” said Howard Shimokura, who was four when he arrived at Tashme. “I think it was ignored until it dropped out of memory.”
That is slowly beginning to change. In April, the B.C. government announced 56 sites that will be recognized as historic Japanese-Canadian places, including Tashme. A highway legacy sign will be installed in a small park in the Sunshine Valley on Oct. 27.
During the Second World War, the area 160 kilometres inland from the B.C. coast was designated a “protected area.” In January 1942, all Japanese-Canadian men ages 18 to 45 were forced to leave their families, with many sent to road camps in the B.C. Interior.
Several weeks later, the federal Minister of Justice ordered all persons “of the Japanese race” to leave the coast. Tashme, the site of a large dairy farm and ranch, was chosen to house the families of men who were working on construction of Highway 3. It soon became a self-contained village, surrounded by forest and mountain. By January 1943, the camp’s population had reached 2,644.
Shimokura’s father was a doctor in Vancouver who was assigned to work in Tashme, which had a small hospital in addition to a school, bakery and barber shop. His family accompanied him.
“I remember it, but I didn’t understand what was happening,” said Shimokura. “The living conditions were very crude, but as a child, you don’t really know.”
The first winter in the camp was severe. The shacks were not insulated and there was no electricity or plumbing. Families, often two or more to a shack, struggled to keep the outside taps from freezing. On top of the physical hardship, residents were forced to deal with the emotional toll of being torn from their homes.
“There was so much uncertainty about the future,” said Shimokura. “People were caught up in asking ‘What are we going to do?’ The government was deliberately trying to get people to move out of B.C., to go east to Ontario or back to Japan.”
That push was partly successful. While Tashme closed in 1946, the coastal exclusion zone remained in effect until 1949, and many people moved east. Shimokura’s family settled in Alberta, finally returning to Vancouver in 1951.
“Most people did not come back,” he said.
When Ellan moved to Sunshine Valley several years ago, he learned he owned a building that had been used as a butcher shop at Tashme. Growing up in Steveston, he’d learned internment history from friends whose families had been affected. He spent a year restoring the barn and opened it as a small museum in August of 2016. He helped form the Tashme Historical Society a few months later, working with the Nikkei National Museum in Burnaby. In July, the society received a $25,000 grant from the Fraser Valley Regional District to expand the Sunshine Valley Tashme Museum and build a replica of one of the shacks.
“Every day the museum is open, someone walks through the doors with a connection to Tashme,” said Ellan. “It’s incredible.”
Last month, eight past community members visited the museum and site of the former camp. For many of them, it was their first time back.