About the list of names

Initial sources

The project started from the work undertaken by the Landscapes of Injustice (LOI) project, which sought to confront the difficult history of mass dispossession of Japanese Canadians in the 1940s. LOI’s archival team compiled a dataset from evidence in the digitized microfilm of the case files of the so-called Custodian of Enemy Property, obtained from Libraries and Archives Canada. Every Japanese Canadian who was 16 years or older at the time of uprooting had a case file, almost all of which survive on microfilm.1 Beginning in 2019, the LOI team worked through these files and extracted basic information to create a metadata record and a very short biography of each person with a case file. This information, along with PDFs of the case files themselves, was first published in 2021 in the Landscapes of Injustice Archive (LOI Archive) and has since been republished several times with corrections.

The case files are problematic in a number of ways. Most of the key information appears in forms completed by the Office of the Custodian and in reports completed by the RCMP. These forms were filled in by officials with varying levels of interest, diligence, and competence. Details are often inconsistent; the same name is spelled in different ways, and information on other family members is incomplete or inaccurate. Sometimes original documents were damaged or missing, or they were poorly photographed. Most importantly, children under 16 did not have their own case files; information about these children is captured only in their parents’ files. Children’s information was also often incomplete and inconsistent; for example, there might be differences between listings in the mother’s file and in the father’s file.

People mentioned in the case files who were not uprooted (because they lived outside the designated areas or were in Japan at the outbreak of war) are not included.

Monument project research

In late 2023, the JCLS-sponsored Monument project began the process of compiling a list of all Japanese Canadians uprooted from their homes in British Columbia in 1942. The first step was a systematic review of the LOI Archive. The team carefully checked and corrected the metadata in the LOI Archive. Taking the British Columbia corrected subset as their starting point, they undertook new research that enabled them to confirm, correct, and augment data in the LOI Archive and to create new records for all the children.

Through the acquisition of additional lists from public records and from the Nikkei National Museum & Cultural Centre (NNMCC), the team began to transcribe each list to make it searchable. These lists were not official lists; they were often compiled by residents or former residents of the internment camps. They included lists of Angler POW camp 101, Bay Farm, East Lillooet, Grand Forks, Greenwood, Kaslo, Lemon Creek, Bridge River, New Denver, Popoff, Rosebery, Slocan, Tashme, and sugar beet farms in Ontario. Several of these lists were from a database created by Audrey Kobayashi, and one list was compiled by Tom Tamagi for Bay Farm, Popoff, Slocan, Brandon, Lakeview, and Johnson Farm. It is important to note that these lists were used only to verify identity; it was not in the scope of the Monument project to record the destinations to which uprooted people were sent. The team’s remit was to identify people eligible to appear on the Monument; anyone on these lists was eligible.

The team transcribed lists of people in pre-war sites such as Cumberland, Deep Bay Logging, Marpole, Mayo/Paldi, and Ucluelet. Again, these lists were not complete but gave us secondary information to help verify names.

Using lists from the Canadiana Héritage website, the team transcribed the over 10,000 names and information on the repatriation list as well as the ship manifest that carried almost 4,000 Japanese Canadians and Japanese nationals to Japan in 1946.

In addition, the team consulted Ancestry, Find a Grave, Newspapers.com, BC Archives, and other open sources to confirm name spellings, birth and death dates, and resolve other ambiguities.

A team of researchers transcribed the 1941 directory from the Chung Collection, 加奈陀那人々名録, an all-Canada directory of Japanese Canadians published in 1941 by 大陸日報社編纂, the Vancouver-based Continental Daily newspaper publisher. This work included translating the name of the family head and their home prefecture and transcribing the address at which they resided in 1941. Because Japanese kanji characters may have multiple pronunciations, this full transcription remains unfinished, with many of the names indicated by two options (e.g. Toyota/Toyoda).

Early in 2023, the team began talks with Library and Archives Canada to discuss the possibility of accessing the 1988 Federal Redress records. After more than two months of discussion, the project was permitted access to the redress records with very strict guidelines. Team members were allowed to collect only a prescribed list of information from each record; an Access to Information and Privacy (ATIP) officer reviewed the data at the end of each day.

The project director, Michael Abe, and four research assistants were stationed in Ottawa for seven weeks working full time to extract specific information from the 19,000 redress records. This information allowed the team to create the supplementary panels of names of people born between the time of uprooting to the lifting of restrictions on March 31, 1949.

Another team of four Nikkei students at the University of Victoria (UVic) started transcribing the 24,000 index cards of the Office of the Custodian of Enemy Property. Many scans of the index cards were unreadable, so this task was quite time consuming and remains incomplete. The collection is accessible on the Canadiana Héritage website.

The research team assembled all the information for each individual person in a Master Consolidated List (MCL), with one line for each source of information. In the final stages, one individual might have had 4-5 lines of information, which enabled the team to compare common information to verify eligibility, settle on a spelling, and confirm the person’s place of origin.

When the first draft of the Monument dataset was available, the team invited members of the Japanese Canadian community to review their family information. Community members then contacted the researchers to identify family members who were not accounted for, correct names, and supply missing forenames. These updates were recorded and verified by the research team.

The team began to proactively engage the community through consultation sessions in Alberta, Ontario, and the Powell Street Festival in Vancouver. Information about how to access the dataset was publicized in The Bulletin and the Nikkei Voice and shared with communities across Canada. Other consultations took place in Lethbridge, Calgary, Edmonton, Nikkei Matsuri, Montreal, Ottawa, Hamilton, and Toronto, with many locations having two or more sessions.

Consultation was open from June 1 to September 30, 2023, and the team received over 200 submissions in the first two weeks. All available research assistants worked on communicating with the community via email, carefully documenting and updating the MCL. In total, the team received 630 inquiries by the end of September 2023.

After the initial community consultation closed, researchers spent October and November ensuring all the input was resolved. JCLS released the public monument dataset on November 14, 2023. The main phase of the work was finished by February 2024, but error correction and disambiguation continued into 2026.

Places of uprooting

The primary area from which Japanese Canadians were uprooted covered the entire coast, extending inland one hundred miles. In addition, other “protected zones” were established, in particular around Cranbrook and Nelson on the mainland, bordering the US.2 Japanese Canadians were also uprooted from other areas; in Kamloops, for instance, a protected area was established.3

The list of names is organized into groups according to the place someone was believed to be living at the time of uprooting based on analysis of the primary source documents. One effect of this organizational method is to demonstrate the scale and breadth of Japanese Canadian communities across British Columbia. There were hundreds of communities all along the coast and inland, with many consisting of hundreds of individuals. However, labour was often highly mobile, and the place shown as someone’s last residence prior to uprooting may not be the place where they spent most of their life. Men often worked in remote locations while their families stayed in more central, urban areas such as Powell Street in Vancouver. If they were to be recorded as having been uprooted from the same location as their family, the whole family would appear together on the same Monument panels, but doing so would effectively diminish the importance of the Japanese Canadian community in the more remote location. Therefore, the team has tried to select the last location each individual was recorded as living for their place of uprooting.

Places of residence were also recorded in a variety of ways in the case files, which can make it difficult to distinguish between them. For instance, some records have Skeena River, while others have Skeena; the river is of course a river rather than a single location, and there is no settlement called simply Skeena. It is not clear whether there is a difference between these two places, but the whole Skeena River area was home to several hundred Japanese Canadians fishing and working in the canneries there. Similarly, one individual is unambiguously recorded as having been uprooted from Jedney, but the only place now called Jedney is over a thousand kilometers to the north of the man’s workplace; most likely, the interviewer misheard Dewdney as Jedney and transcribed it wrongly. Nevertheless, the official record says Jedney, and the team cannot be sure there was no settlement bearing that name, so this form of the name has been retained.

Caveats and limitations

As noted above, many of the primary source records contain errors and inconsistencies, since they were usually completed by native English speakers who had little familiarity with Japanese names and cultural norms. Subsequent research has been able to correct some errors and clarify some ambiguities, but it is unfortunately inevitable that there will still be some errors and omissions in the list.

Why are names only in roman characters?

The list of names that appears on the Monument panels, and the names that appear on this website, are exclusively in roman characters, not in Japanese kanji/hiragana. There are two reasons for this. First, this is a list of Japanese Canadians; their legal names in Canada, and therefore the names appearing on all relevant primary source documents, were in the form of roman characters. Secondly, there are few sources from which the Japanese forms of names can be recovered, and without a reliable source, it is difficult to know what actual kanji are used to write any given name. The surname Nagamori, for example, might be written 永守, 長森, 永森, 永盛, or 長盛.4 In addition, several competing systems for romanization of Japanese were in use in the 1940s, so even converting the names as they appear in Latin characters into hiragana would be unreliable, especially with regard to long versus short vowels (an important difference that was frequently unheard or ignored by native English speakers filling in records).

For anyone wishing to do further research on the Japanese forms of names, there are two Japanese-language directories that can provide some information: 加奈陀那人々名録, an all-Canada directory of Japanese Canadians published in 1941 by 大陸日報社編纂, the Vancouver-based Continental Daily newspaper publisher, which is available in PDF in the LOI Archive, where it has also been partially transcribed; and the June 1941 ビーシー州日本人 directory, also available in the LOI Archive, and transcribed in sections for Nihonmachi (the Powell Street area in Vancouver), Haney, and Steveston. However, these directories tend to include only heads of families and businesses, so only a fraction of the names could be recovered from them, and these would be strongly biased towards adult males.