This is part of an ongoing series entitled ‘Vacationing with Death: What I did this Summer’.

When I set out on our Sandon ghost town day visit, I had no idea about its darker historical involvement with Canada’s internment of Japanese residents and citizens during WWII. Neither did my family members who had visited Sandon years earlier. On our way to Sandon, we stopped in New Denver, a few short kilometres way. We visited the small but impactful Nikkei Internment Memorial Centre (306 Josephine St., New Denver, BC, https://newdenver.ca/nikkei/ ). I’ve visited concentration camps in Europe and are still moved to silence today by the memories of those visits, but this visit took me out of my skin. The beauty of the gardens, the well conserved (but few remaining) buildings and the smiling faces in the photographs (so many photographs) mask the traumas and tragedies that our mid-20^th C government inflicted on over 22,000 Japanese-Canadians.

The two photographs above feature one of the immaculate gardens and a typical building that housed 2 families, with as many as 16 people in a 14×28 foot space. Toilets were a communal series of outhouses serving up to 50 people. There were as many as 200 of these ‘shacks’ in the area known as the Orchard. Official records state 1,500 men, women, and children were forcibly removed from their homes, businesses, and schools, and confined here. Older internees chose to remain in New Denver, rather than move yet again to places unknown after the interments ended. They lived in newer buildings (built in late 1950s, but not much more than the original shacks) until the 1980s.

In both New Denver, and Sandon, we learnt of the harsh realities of being forced to live in such a desolate place, with few comforts or access to proper necessities of life. Sandon, however, was different – it’s houses, many abandoned years earlier were livable, and a newspaper report in The New Canadian (Vol. V, No.57) dated June 24, 1942, mentions the arrival of the first of nearly 970 Japanese internees to Sandon. The article mentions how Sandon avoids “some of the difficulties which have arisen in other towns” because it came with its own hydro-electric generator station, and “sanitary facilities”. The paper goes onto note that the main street with storefronts were being refurbished, and to quote “as store after store and service after service is again opening up to enjoy the new life of the town”.

Historical documents such as these, combined with the photographs could lead one astray, into believing that life here was good, and the people were happy, possibly because they smile into the camera (but who doesn’t ‘smile for the camera’? That’s rhetorical). The Nikkei Internment Memorial Centre displays letters, and official correspondents between Internees, their representatives, and government departments that tell a different story. One of loss, pain, fear, and indignities.

One example from the many thousands of digitalized artefacts, letters, photographs, audio recordings, films, and official documents found at https://nikkeimuseum.org/index.php

SIDENOTE: Nikkei Museum online is a remarkable accessible online resource – in the search window under Item I typed ‘new denver’ and found 880 digital items. https://nikkeimuseum.org/www/item_detail.php?art_id=A34550

The injustices inflicted upon Japanese-Canadians is, in part, responsible for Sandon’s continuing existence. The internees’ stories are visible, if we are willing to look for and listen to them. As an art historian with an interest in thanatology, I am further intrigued by the conflicting interpretations surrounding the remains of Sandon’s deceased internees. Reports claim 14 died during the interment in Sandon. A report entitled The Sandon Cemetery Restoration Project, dated 1996 and prepared for the Sandon Historical Society + BC Heritage Trust, goes into great detailed speculation about an area outside of the northern boundary being used for Japanese internee burials.

Once I read that I thought, wait, Japanese funeral customs is for cremation, not burial! The Nikkei Museum digital collection has an example of a Buddhist shrine, a large butsudan and butsugu (accessories) ­­­­­­­that includes a small red cloth covered book, possibly owned by Tamiko Nakamuro, and on the fifth page in English is written ‘The Buddhist Sutras compiled by Rev. R Hirahara, Sandon, BC and Rev S. Ikuta Raymond Alta Published by the Raymond Church Alberta’. This indicates that Buddhist practices were being followed, however, there are also a couple of photographs of funerals from the early 1940s in New Denver with mourners surrounding wreath covered caskets. I am not alone is wondering about this. Greg Nesteroff (https://gregnesteroff.wixsite.com/kutnereader/post/written-in-concrete ) questions the Sandon cemetery speculations as well. His own research found that between 1942 and 1979, of the 239 registered Japanese-Canadian deaths in New Denver and area, only 10% were buried. Between 1942 and 1944, the first three deaths in Sandon were cremated, the remaining 11 were cremated in New Denver. There are no burials reported. More research will have to be conducted, and if anyone knows more, please kindly share.

SOURCES:

https://nikkeimuseum.org/index.php

https://gregnesteroff.wixsite.com/kutnereader/post/written-in-concrete

https://www.historicplaces.ca/en/rep-reg/place-lieu.aspx?id=15382

https://www.sandonmuseum.com/

http://www.sandoninthekootenays.ca/

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