About the Book

Behind the narrative of internment

In this collection of photos and stories, Masako Fukawa brings to vivid voice the lives of Japanese Canadians as they moved from nineteenth-century Japan to coastal BC, and then from wartime internment to postwar reconstruction.

Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, the Canadian government forcibly removed Japanese Canadians from coastal areas to internment camps. Their homes and possessions, fishing boats and farms, were seized and either sold cheaply or left to vandals.

Respected Nikkei historian Masako Fukawa takes the reader behind the narrative of Japanese Canadian internment and dispossession during World War II to recount the impetus for immigration in Japan and the pre-war immigrant struggle to establish a place in British Columbia.

Kiri Shinde and family, 1906 — Kiri Shinde, in western clothes, before her departure for Steveston, BC in 1906. Her mother (seated) and her siblings.

Beginning with the story of her own paternal grandfather, Yoshimatsu Shinde, who arrived in Canada in 1893, Fukawa follows her family and community members through five generations — from hard-luck Japanese village life to the establishment of Steveston, and the place’s re-establishment after the devastations of the war.

Based on personal narratives gathered over many years from documents, photographs, oral interviews, written memoirs, government archives and research trips to Japan, Stories of Nikkei Canadians is an important addition to British Columbia’s historical record.

Behind the narrative of internment

Drawn from the record itself

Book details