Destinations
The Steveston, B.C., waterfront has two National Historic Sites. Museums exhibit modern design, Chinese culture.
I’m immersed in a jumble of smiling tourists at Fisherman’s Wharf, with the proprietors of fishing boats hawking every stripe of seafood. As I’ve learned, few places retain memories of the past as well as Steveston, B.C., a suburb of Richmond south of Vancouver where the rich Fraser River delta meets the Pacific Ocean. Although life here has long been dominated by fishing, the community’s spirit and success have been determined largely by its JapaneseCanadian population.
The Musqueam First Nation originally occupied the Steveston area, where they followed the life cycle of salmon. As Europeans arrived, the exploitation of this natural resource grew, and in the late 1800s the Fraser provided the richest salmon catches anywhere.
To learn more, I cycle along the dyke path to Harold Steves’ farm, where I speak with the long-time Richmond city councillor. “This farm once belonged to my great-grandfather Manoah Steves, the first white settler in Richmond in 1877, after whom Steveston is named,” Harold said. “The houses were on stilts because the dyke wasn’t built until 1908.”
It was Manoah’s son, the visionary and entrepreneur William Herbert Steves, who got Steveston rolling. He built an opera house in 1890 and started the
Enterprise newspaper in 1891. The village grew as the teeming river attracted fishermen.
Many Japanese fishermen immigrated to Steveston at that time. AntiAsian attitudes were strong in the rest of British Columbia, but Steveston allowed the Japanese to come and to
practise their own culture — and their population steadily grew.
By 1900, Steveston had become one of the largest suppliers of canned salmon, sending it to virtually every major port on the globe. The fishing season transformed the town from a sleepy outpost of four hundred residents to a boisterous, action-packed centre of ten thousand. Money, jobs, and success were like magnets for all kinds of business activities, some of them unsavoury. Shortly after 1900, the town boasted saloons, opium dens, seventeen gambling houses, and — looking totally out of place — the opera house.
Built in 1894, the Gulf of Georgia Cannery was the largest cannery in the area and came to be known as the “monster.” Fortunately, it was preserved and is now a National Historic Site.
Speaking to re-enactors in period costume, I learn that earlier working conditions were far different from those of today. Along the cutting and packing line, the re-enactors explain the poor safety practices and describe the long hours and child labour employed by the facility. Particularly alarming, they say, were incidents when screams of pain echoed through the building because a finger had been chopped by a sharp knife or a machine. Panic would follow as some people attended to the injured person while others frantically searched for the lost digit before it got canned.
Chinese, Indigenous, and Japanese workers were given the hardest jobs at low pay and were segregated both at the cannery and in their bunkhouses. To battle discrimination, the Japanese Fishermen’s Benevolent Society and the Japanese Hospital were established in the 1890s.
Steveston is fortunate, for it has not one but two National Historic Sites. I next visit the Britannia Shipyard — a sprawling site that includes fourteen restored buildings, some of them constructed as early as 1885. I tour the Murakami Boatworks, with a long slipway that sent finished boats into the water. At a Chinese bunkhouse I sit at a small table and sip tea as a guide explains how Japanese “picture brides” arrived to marry Japanese fishermen. I can imagine how tentatively the women must have approached the strangers to
whom they had been promised.
Disaster struck the area in 1913 when a landslide on the Fraser decimated the salmon runs for many years. The Depression followed, further affecting the canning industry.
Then the world was turned upside down by the Second World War. In 1942, shortly after the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, all Japanese Canadians in British Columbia were forced to move one hundred miles (160 kilometres) inland from the coast — despite many families having lived in Canada for generations. This edict hit Steveston hard, as its 2,600 Japanese Canadians then formed about two thirds of the population. They had their belongings confiscated, including hundreds of fishing boats, and this severely harmed the town’s economy.
In 1949 Japanese Canadians were allowed to return, but few did. By 1953, however, thanks to special initiatives, almost 1,500 had come back to Steveston. Slowly, the town rebuilt itself and its main industry, fishing. Catches began to grow, and by the 1960s the town was thriving again. In the 1990s, however, salmon stocks dwindled, and increased mechanization resulted in the consolidation of canneries. The last operating cannery closed in 1997.
Steveston is now thriving once again thanks to tourism and fishing. While the fishing fleet has been reduced to six hundred boats, it is still the largest in the country.
I meet with Jim Kojima, a judo master and a member of the Order of Canada who explains that Steveston’s resilience owes much to Japanese Canadians. He describes how their commitment to community has continued — with the one major interruption — since the 1890s.
Today there are many JapaneseCanadian organizations, such as the Steveston Judo Club, which is recognized as one of the best in Canada. “Steveston has the oldest Japanese history in the country,” Kojima says proudly.