The Japanese communities of Cumberland, British Columbia 1885-1942: portrait of a past
Date
2021-06-01
Authors
Thomas, Cheryl Maeva
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Abstract
This study is about a group of Japanese immigrants and their families who lived in Cumberland, a coal mining centre on Vancouver Island, during the first four decades of this century. Specifically, it is about a Japanese village society--people from many regions of rural Japan, most of whom were strangers to each other. While they had a common cultural background, in the new and foreign surroundings of the frontier mining town they forged a new social group. Their common cultural background, while constantly being modified by new experiences, was a unifying force in their adjustment to a new social environment.
This group of settlers includes the first immigrant generation, its second generation children, and the beginning of a third generation--grandchildren of the immigrants. The second and third generations, born in Canada, are Canadian citizens, although many of them were also registered in Japan by their parents and, thus, have held dual citizenship. The few first generation immigrants who are still alive are in their mid-eighties and nineties. Generally, their children have passed retirement age, having survived the Depression in their teen years and having passed several of the war years in government-established communities for those people of Japanese descent.
The Cumberland Museum and Historical Society's Glass Negative Project--a collection of 786 historic photographs representing a portion of the collective work of two, probably three, Japanese photographers, and spanning a period from 1913 to 1930--has provided a unique opportunity to work with the living subjects of these photographs in recreating the history of Japanese Cumberland. Combined with archival research and fieldwork in the Japanese Canadian community, the memories of aging informants have served to document the way of life of the Japanese people of pre-war Cumberland and have revealed some of the character of the two small, relatively isolated communities known as Number One and Number Five.
A picture emerges of the Japanese community of Cumberland and the Japanese communities of Cumberland: the former, perceived by those outside the community to be a homogeneous population and the latter, perceived by members of those communities to have specific and separate identities. While boundaries were created by the geographic relationship of the two Japanese communities and white Cumberland and affected communication and cultural exchange, internal political decisions regarding economic relationships and religious systems influenced the identity and created boundaries between the two Japanese communities.
Research shows that each village was characterized by strong internal solidarity and mutual support and, yet, was unique to itself: distinctiveness affected by physical distance, communication differences, internal and external economic relationships, and predominant religious beliefs. Common customs and language, despite dialectic differences, were enhanced by institutions such as the Japanese school and served to strengthen the boundaries between white and Japanese society. As an exercise in salvage ethnography, this project provides a descriptive framework which not only provides new information for the historical record of the settlement of British Columbia but also contributes a body of data which should support further exploration of cultural identity amongst immigrant peoples.