West Coast women at work
In this excerpt from Sylvia Taylor’s 2017 book Beckoned by the Sea: Women at Work on the Cascadia Coast, Japanese-Canadian heritage advocates Mary Kimoto and Ellen Crowe-Swords share memories of West Coast fish-packing plants, the Japanese-Canadian evacuation of 1942 and the bonds of friendship shared with Ucluelet First Nations dating back to the 1920s.
Awoman sits in the window of her modest yellow cottage filled with the memorabilia of generations of the Kimoto family’s life on the west coast of Vancouver Island. Her devoted niece sits by her side. At her back, the mighty Pacific Ocean heaves itself into Barkley Sound. At her front door, Spring Cove slumbers in the autumn sun. The air and land and sea are as dense with memories as her home: a whaling summer camp 5,000 years ago, a trade location 200 years ago, an airforce firstaid base 75 years ago, a Japanese-Canadian resettlement fishing community 65 years ago.
For 95 years, Mary Kimoto has helped weave Japanese-Canadian history and heritage into the tapestry of B.C. Ucluelet’s beloved “Ma Mary” still chronicles the lives of generations of west coast fishers and their families through her tireless work with the local historical society.
“I was born in Vancouver. My parents emigrated from Japan. My mother had a little corner confectionery store near Commissioner and Victoria right by the waterfront and sold candies and a bit of groceries. Most of the people we call ‘first generation’ didn’t speak English, but my mother managed to speak a little, so that’s why she had the store and was able to relate to the white people.
“My father passed away when I was 14 years old, so we all had to quit school and go to work. I had a brother. And then I was the second. And my sister was the third and so she stayed home and helped my mother with the store. We did have a big family, but some of them passed away and so it was just the three of us.
“I came to Nootka to work in the Nootka Cannery in ’37. They were looking for workers to process the pilchards — they’re sardines. I wasn’t 15 yet, but my mother lied about my age and put me into this group that was going. I was the youngest.
“We went on the Princess Maquinna from Port Alberni. I didn’t know the first thing about fish, but I seemed to manage ’cause I didn’t get fired and sent home. Mother had said we have to go to work, so I didn’t get homesick or anything like that. I was just busy and working with the girls and that kept me occupied.
“Because we were very young, they put me on to canning the fish. Young girls were the most prized on the line. There were two shifts going steady, 24 hours a day, and we lived in a bunkhouse. I guess because we were young, standing for 12 hours didn’t seem to matter. They had a gutting machine and so we just had to lay the pilchards on the line and the machine would cut the heads off, then they went down the line to where the girls would can them.”
“At Nootka there was a firstaid man named Jock. He had the store and of course all the girls would get paid and go shop and spend their money. But my girlfriend and I, we didn’t do anything like that. We were the only two who brought home the full pay for the whole season.
“We went up in April and came home when the season ended in October. Shortly after, another cannery opened up in North Vancouver so we went to work there, and we brought home all of our earnings then, too.
“Pretty soon after, the war and evacuation came, and we moved to the Okanagan in ’42, I think, before the mass evacuation. My mother decided that, and because we were teenagers we could go to work in an orchard or something. Because we left early, we didn’t have a hard time like some families did.”
“During the evacuation, I got married to my husband, Tom, whom I had met earlier at a fish plant, and we went back East. If you got married you couldn’t stay in B.C., you had to go out east of the Rockies. So we landed in Toronto because my husband’s sister was there and we found a place and a job. As soon as the ban was lifted in ’49, we came back here to the coast because my husband wanted to get back fishing. We weren’t able to vote at all till it lifted, so as soon as we could, we voted right away.
“We came back to Vancouver in November of ’50 and came to Ucluelet in ’51. My husband was a fisherman from Tofino and he just wanted to come back and start up in the roots that he was used to. So when I arrived here, it sure changed my lifestyle.”
Ellen Crowe-Swords, Mary’s niece, adds insight about the Japanese-Canadian presence in the B.C. fishing industry: “There were so many people successfully fishing in the Fraser River out of Steveston in the ’20s that the government decided that they had to control the local licences and send some of the people somewhere else. Some went up north to Skeena and some to Bamfield or Ucluelet. In the ’20s and ’30s, there were 3,000 Japanese-Canadian fishermen between Bamfield and Tofino, most of them single. They also set up a law that you had to be a resident of the west coast to fish there, so that’s how the Kimotos came to Clayoquot near Tofino in ’22 or ’23.
“When they landed in the Tofino area, they were not welcome on the European side of the inlet, so they went over to the First Nations side. They looked after the Japanese families that first winter. There is still a strong bond between the Japanese-Canadian community and the First Nations community. My uncle Tom, Mary’s husband, used to take part in the potlatch ceremonies at New Year’s, bringing rice and things to thank them for their goodness back then.”
When the Kimotos arrived in 1951, Spring Cove, south of Ucluelet, had few roads, no electricity and no water, and was only accessible by boat. A gravel logging road was finally put through to Port Alberni in 1959, then paved in 1972. Mary and Tom purchased property with other family members in Spring Cove, which had been an air force firstaid base during the war, and moved into some of the buildings still standing. Mary’s new home was the old recreation building.
Ellen gives an account of the discovery of the millennia-old history of Spring Cove: “When our family was putting in a subdivision on our property near the point here, the excavator hit a burial site with human bones, so the whole thing came to a shuddering stop.
“My brother called someone from the reserve across Ucluelet Inlet in Itacu. Vi Mundy was chief at that time and she came and took a look. We hired a team from the University of Florida and they came. I was married to an archeologist and I’d been on lots of digs and I knew it was a midden, which is basically the garbage dump of a settlement. They did a dig in an area one metre square.
“Vi came over here one day and we drank tea and she told me about the property. And then we got an archeological report from the University of Florida based on their dig and they carbondated it back 5,000 years. We are going to put that report into the local archive for the new museum.
“Later Vi came back with some of her people and they blessed the site. They told us to look after the site and carry on. They said: ‘We like the Kimotos. You can stay on our land.’ It was a blessing from Chief Vi Mundy to take care of her people.
“Vi and Mary have known each other for years and work together at the historical society. Mary is the longest serving member of the Ucluelet Historical Society, since around ’89. She kept the historical society alive, actually. If it wasn’t for her, they’d be long gone. She’s a director on the board of the historical society. They call her Queen Mary around here.”
Mary is an invaluable resource for the history and stories of the approximately 20 Japanese families who thrived in what became known as Hakoda Bay.
“For the museum, first of all we were collecting pictures. Then we were getting lots of stories. We had a committee of younger girls doing that. I have about four albums of Japanese pictures. One of our relatives is a photographer stationed in Toronto and he was doing the same thing, so if there were any pictures pertaining to the West Coast, he would send them to me. I know lots of families lost their pictures when they had to move out. We have some pictures that even the families don’t have.
“I remember when we could come back home. We drove from Toronto in November to get back. It was snowing, so we went down to the south and then when we came to the Rockies, Tom got so excited when he saw those mountains. It’s hard to explain how Tommy was so excited. He hollered out loud.”
“They were fishermen, so they came back,” says Ellen. “It didn’t matter what had happened. They got boats and they were on the sea and they just started all over again.”