Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Henry Shimizu Interview
Narrator: Henry Shimizu
Interviewer: Tom Ikeda
Location: Seattle, Washington
Date: July 25 & 26, 2006
Densho ID: denshovh-shenry-01-0038

<Begin Segment 38>

TI: But before we go all the way to New Denver, let's talk about the trip from Hastings Park to New Denver and how you got there.

HS: Oh, that was, that was... oh, we got there by -- 'cause the railroad, I mentioned before, the railroad came right into Hastings Park, so it was no problem to, for them to load us up onto it.

TI: Now, at that point, did you and the family kind of know where you were going?

HS: Yes, we did.

TI: And what were your, what were your thoughts and feelings at this point?

HS: Well, we didn't, it was, whatever it was, certainly my mother didn't express any, any thoughts to us. They, the parents in those days, they kept everything away from the kids. They would never talk to them about what was happening, because it wasn't our, it wasn't our business. They were gonna look after the situation for us. They were gonna do the best for you, that was generally the idea. There, if I was a little older, it might have been different. If I was eighteen, nineteen, you might have been involved in the decision-making. But I was at that time thirteen, and I was the oldest, everybody else was younger than me in our family, and it was, it was my mother's, my father's decision as to where, which camp we would go to. We, they had chosen that they wanted to go to New Denver. Other peoples, in fact, went directly from that New Denver area, they went to Alberta, to the sugar beets, and some to Manitoba, like the Mikis, they went to Manitoba to work on the sugar beets. Two things, the reason why they went there, was one of the thing is that they could get paid for working in the sugar beets. In other words, they were going to be on their own. They weren't going to be in any camp. Second thing, they could keep the family together, they were told they could keep the family together if they wanted to go to the sugar beets, and so they chose, a lot of the people from -- you know, this is all done sort of by word of mouth. And so some areas in... Steveston, large groups from Steveston would go to southern Alberta or to Manitoba. In fact, that's where a lot of those people came from and they would talk amongst themselves, and said, "Oh, this, we can keep the family together, we can also make money."

TI: So it sounds like, from the Canadian government's standpoint, as long as you were a hundred miles off the West Coast, and you could find a place to stay or work or do something, then they were, they were okay --

HS: More than happy. More than happy, if you chose to do it on your own. If you were willing to do all this on your own, that's fine, they'd be happy to assist you.

TI: Now, would you have to kind of go through a pretty formal process of apply and...

HS: Oh, yeah, apply and where you want to go.

TI: But if you did that, that was available to you. It could be even for students to go to college.

HS: That, providing you pay the way yourself. If you want to go to Toronto, fine. They might even, I forgot what they would do. They might even take you there, providing you're on your own, and they don't have to worry about you anymore. You're off their books. They might know you, they might know where you are, but other than that, they were... see, all of this was being done ad hoc. People, the B.C. Security Commission had the mandate, they had to get us out of that West Coast area. So the first priority, get us out of the hundred-mile protective zone as they called it. The second thing was they had to get us out of B.C. if possible because they, there was enough clamor from B.C. politicians, both local and provincial, city-wise, to get rid of us. And so they wanted us out of B.C., and as I mentioned before, part of it was economic, and part of it was racial. The other, and the other aspect is that they wanted us out of their hair, you might say, they didn't think, they kept thinking we were going to cause sabotage and whatever it was.

TI: Yeah, so of the 22,000, how many of those were able to actually on their own find kind of other things to do?

HS: Oh, almost, well, close to, I would say, a third of the people found things to do on their own. And about two-thirds went to the camps. I'm not exactly sure of the numbers, but Tashme, for instance, had something in the neighborhood eventually, I think had about five or six thousand people of Japanese ancestry there. The whole valley of New Denver, Slocan, that whole area, Popoff, Lemon Creek, probably had somewhere in the neighborhood of ten to twelve thousand Japanese people. So, you know, you ended up at, you had, of the 22,000, a good majority of them went to internment camps of one type or another. There was places like, there was a place called Greenwood, Grand Forks, these are small towns in the interior of B.C. where Japanese people are allowed to go, providing they would fend for themselves. In some cases, the government would give them money to build their own houses, and they would even build some of the houses for them just to get them out there, off their... 'cause they were what they called self-sustaining. They worked, they worked for the people, and they worked in lumber yards and stuff like that there, so they looked after themselves. Whereas the camps, the internment camps, there were ten, approximately ten... oh, nine, eight or nine internment camps, some of them really small, that were being administered by the B.C. Security Commission. And that was the majority. Probably two-thirds of the people were put in that situation. And then there was this whole group that went out to, to southern Alberta, and a whole group that came directly from, from the Mission, that lower Fraser Valley area that went directly to Manitoba to work in the sugar beet areas there. That way they could stay together, they could make some money, but it turned out, of course, that the sugar beet situation wasn't quite as rosy as they were, like everything else, they said it was going to be, "Yeah, you'll be able to do this."

<End Segment 38> - Copyright © 2006 Densho. All Rights Reserved.