A new online exhibit is celebrating more than a century of Japanese-Canadian history in Revelstoke.
Supported by funding from the Japanese Canadian Legacies Society, Revelstoke Museum and Archives has added a page on its website dedicated to the stories of dozens of labourers and families with Japanese background who called the city home in the 20th century.
The exhibit, titled Japanese Legacies, comes thanks to hours of research by project manager Harumi Sakiyama into archives for Revelstoke and surrounding communities dating across 125 years.
“Archival sources have revealed a significant Japanese Canadian population in Revelstoke from 1900 to the late 1930s, including families such as the Hashimotos and the Takahashis, and a large, sometimes transient, labour force of men who worked in sawmills and on the railway,” museum curator Cathy English told Black Press Media by email.
READ: Mystery remains for murdered Japanese Canadian’s life in Revelstoke
Local heli-skiing guide Tomoaki Fujimura also contributed historical findings from his investigation into the 32 Japanese-Canadian victims of the 1910 Rogers Pass avalanche, and his research into men sent to labour camps between Revelstoke and Sicamous during the Second World War.
English said the new exhibit will feature 24 stories of Japanese-Canadian families who settled in Revelstoke. Some arrived as early as 1910, while others were forced to find a new home there in 1942, when the federal government declared war on Japan and removed Japanese-Canadian residents from the B.C. coast.
“The vast majority of the men, who were paid 25 cents per hour for road construction work, were young adult Canadians whose parents had been born in Japan and who came to Canada to provide a good life for their families,” English added. “Many of these young men would have been going off to university, starting careers and families, or even signing up to fight for Canada, the country of their birth.”
Locals formed a Revelstoke chapter of the Japanese Canadian Citizens’ Association, which held community events and successfully pushed the Revelstoke Golf Club to overturn a seven-year ban on letting Japanese-Canadians play.
Online, the exhibit uses subcategories to unveil content such as four new oral history recordings presented by former Revelstoke residents Tom Sakamoto, Eleanor Hashimoto, Yoshi Hashimoto and Jennifer Fujino Anderson.
It also offers deeper dives into the early years of Japanese-Canadian labour in the local railway and lumber industries, life in confinement at the internment camps west of Revelstoke, and 14 families that became deeply integrated in the community. These families have donated various photos for the exhibit.
READ: New Revelstoke museum gallery honours 41-year curator
“Just two or three years ago, the museum held only about a dozen photographs relating to the Japanese Canadian community,” English said. “That number has now expanded to a few hundred, and several of them are featured within the pages of the exhibit.”
A formal celebration for the new exhibit takes place at Revelstoke Museum and Archives at 2 p.m. Friday, Jan. 16, and can also be attended by Zoom.
Explore the exhibit at revelstokemuseum.ca/japanese-legacies.