A monument in Victoria, the province’s Capital, is being planned to honour all Japanese Canadians who were uprooted, dispossessed, interned, and displaced in the 1940s. The research to gather names is taking place at the University of Victoria and will be completed by January 31 2024, under the guidance of Project Director, Michael Abe.
The monument is a key initiative of the Japanese Canadian Legacies Society and will be managed through the Ministry of Citizens Services.
Thank you everyone for your valuable and important input to the Monument database project. Since the consultation with the community started on June 1, 2023 we’ve fielded input from over 900 community members. Our research team have been diligently researching each and every one of your enquiries and will continue to do so to the end of January when we wrap up the project.
We still need your help to ensure our list is as accurate as possible. Please review the database for spelling, omissions and locations and share this request with other JC relatives and friends.
The link to the website is https://hcmc.uvic.ca/project/monument/index.html
Ensure that you refresh any pages you may have visited before by holding the shift key and clicking the reload button in your browser.
We welcome English and Japanese forenames, provided they are legal names and not nicknames. Do not send any birth certificates, etc. just let us know that they appear on a legal document or on a gravestone, etc. You can send links to obituaries or scans of obituaries from newspapers if necessary.
We also ask that you review the area that your family was uprooted from. Often the custodian file reported multiple locations, please be sure to confirm with us where they were living at the time of the uprooting.
There are many people who had family in Japan at the time of the uprooting who couldn’t return. Because we do not have the ability to identify every single person who was in this situation, we are unable to produce a complete name list. We are working on a way to honour these people as a group but unfortunately we won’t add a partial list of names to the wall.
Send information that needs to be changed in the monument database to monument@jclegacies.com by January 23, 2024.
Please note that it is outside of our scope and resources at this time to make adjustments to the Landscapes of Injustice database.
Thank you,
Michael Abe, Project Director
and Monument Database Research Team
The dream and vision for the monument is that it will envelope the origin story of Japanese Canadians who settled in cities, towns, and villages, primarily along the coast. The tactile names on the wall will help to recognize individuals and families and where they lived before the forced uprooting, seizure and forced sale of assets, incarceration, internment, permanent dispossession, and two waves of displacement. We hope there will be a digital version of this project wherein people can search for the names and where they are situated on the monument.
– Susanne Tabata, CEO JC Legacies Society
Important update from the monument database research team
https://jclegacies.com/legacy-pillars/monument/
