Description of Historic Place

Tashme consists of a few remaining traces of a large, purpose-built Japanese Canadian internment camp located on a former farm in Sunshine Valley just east of Hope, B.C. Tashme is accessed from Hope via the Hope-Princeton Highway, and the Sumallo River flows through the site. The historic place includes the remains of several small buildings, two large barns, silos, and other agricultural structures that were re-purposed for use during internment, and a museum dedicated to the history of the place housed in the former butcher shop. A campsite is located where the rows of internment dwellings once stood.

Heritage Value

Tashme has historic, spiritual, and cultural value as an enduring symbol of the internment, dispossession, forced relocation and exile to Japan and eastern Canada faced by Japanese Canadians in B.C. during World War II.

Constructed in 1942, Tashme is significant as one of the largest of the internment camps, its location selected for being an accessible 23 kilometres east of Hope, yet still just outside the 100-mile Protected Area from which all Japanese Canadians were excluded from 1942 to 1949. While notable for being a hastily constructed, purpose-built camp, with almost 350 new dwelling shacks, the Canadian Security Commission took advantage of the existing agricultural buildings on a 600-acre leased farm, adapting them for such uses as apartments, offices and a general store. Its rapid construction is tied to the Hastings Park incarceration site, where already-interned Japanese Canadian men were recruited to build "this place called Tashme."

Tashme is socially and aesthetically valued for being an artificially constructed, self-sufficient community, consisting of municipal and commercial buildings, a hospital, schools, a sawmill, church, farm, vegetable fields and gardens, bath houses and a soy sauce and miso factory. Yet housing was primitive, consisting of wood-frame tar papered shacks laid out in rigid rows of ten avenues, thirty houses per avenue, with no insulation and accommodating one or two families with a shared centre room. There was no running water or indoor plumbing, and limited supplies of food, clothing and other essentials.

Initially administered by the BC Security Commission which provided employment at the camp, Tashme is important for its later governance model in which the camp was run jointly by the federal Department of Labour and the Shinwa-kai, a committee formed by Japanese Canadian residents, in which it established and operated schools, organized and managed municipal services and took part in the self-determination of the camp.

Cultural and social value is found in the ability of the Japanese Canadians to organize a social community that made life bearable as they overcame the hardships of confinement and difficult living conditions. The community established and organized social activities such as sports, cultural events and recreational activities that helped hold the community together.

At the time of internment, access to Tashme consisted of only the single-lane former Dewdney Trail. The present-day Hope-Princeton Highway, built by forced Japanese Canadian labour as one of the province's road camp projects, roughly follows this former trail, with Tashme becoming the place of residence for some of the indentured workers, connecting the site to the wider context of internment.

Tashme has significance for its association with the second uprooting of Japanese Canadians after 1945, functioning as the collection and departure point for those from other camps being deported to Japan. Individuals and families gathered at Tashme to board trains to Vancouver, where ships waited to take them to Japan.

Tashme represents the forced removal, internment and dispersal of an entire group of Canadian citizens based on their racial origin. Their freedom and civil rights were suspended, and they lost their livelihoods, possessions and entire way of life which could never be fully restored.

Today, only a few remnants of Tashme remain, including two concrete silos, a small kindergarten building, the former butcher shop and the large barn complexes that served as apartments, now re-purposed into a community centre for Sunshine Valley. These traces are representative of the abandonment, dismantling or re-use of the wartime internment camps after 1949, leading in part to an erasure of this devastating history. The legacy at Tashme is symbolic of these disappeared places of Japanese Canadian historical significance.

Character-Defining Elements

Not applicable.