New sign pays tribute to sacrifices of Japanese
Workers ordered to help build B.C. highways
An old photo of a dozen men sitting by a work truck in rural B.C. is marked with a scribble dating it to June 1942, about six months after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and brought the U.S. into the Second World War.
What happened to over 22,000 people of Japanese descent living in B.C. after that military strike is a well-known part of Canadian history that was commemorated last year on its 75th anniversary.
Japanese-Canadians were declared a threat to national security and called “enemy aliens,” even though the majority were Canadian citizens by birth. It was a move for which the federal government would issue a formal apology in 1988.
But at the time it allowed Japanese-Canadians to be forcibly removed them from their homes on the coast and sent to internment camps in the Interior of B.C. Some went to work on sugar beet farms desperate for labour in the Prairies in exchange for keeping their families together. Others who protested or resisted being detained were sent to prisoner of war camps in Ontario.
As this was going on and continued for years during the war and after, less well-known is that some 1,700 Japanese-Canadian men were ordered to so-called road camps so they could be used as labourers for building highways, including the Hope-Princeton (Highway 3), the Revelstoke-Sicamous (Highway 1) and the Yellow-head-BlueRiver (Highway 5).
Last year, the B.C. government started recognizing 56 places in B.C. that have historical significance for Japanese-Canadians, including language schools, churches and former internment centres.
On Friday, members of a Japanese-Canadian legacy committee and the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure recognized the first road camp to be included on this list with a sign on Highway 3 about 10 kilometres east of Hope.
It acknowledges the contributions of these labourers who worked under tough conditions. Without access to mechanized equipment, they mostly used shovels and other basic hand tools to grade and blast roads from Hope to Princeton. Many of them were young, single men, but later, married men — whose families were being held at the large Tashme Internment Camp — also worked on the highways.
“We often take for granted those who built our great highways and who maintained them for us to get around the province,” said organizers of the event in a statement, which included the old photo of one crew of workers on the Hope-Princeton highway, taking a break to pose for their place in history.