Description of Historic Place

The Protected Area is comprised of British Columbia's geography and landscape that extends east from the B.C. coast inland for 100 miles. The southern boundary is marked by the B.C./Washington border located along latitude 49 degrees north, the northern boundary by the B.C./Yukon border located along latitude 60 degrees north, and the southern tip of the Alaskan Panhandle. The Protected area also includes all of the islands lying off the Pacific coast of B.C.

Ownership and/or jurisdiction of the lands encompassed by the Protected Area is shared by the Federal government (national parks), the Province of British Columbia, First Nations, Regional Districts, cities, villages, municipalities and private-land owners.

Heritage Value

No other landscape, place, area or community is more important to the history of Japanese Canadians than the Protected Area. A large-scale landscape of social injustice from 1942 to 1949, the Protected Area is considered to be one of the most significant places associated with the history of Japanese Canadians in B.C. This is because of its connection with every Japanese Canadian in the province living within or outside the Protected Area, the scale of the impact on Japanese Canadians economically, spiritually, traditionally, socially and personally, and because of the all-encompassing legislative intent of Order-in-Council P.C. 1486, which triggered the forced evacuation and internment of 22,000 Japanese Canadians from an area 100 miles inland from the entire B.C. coast.

The Protected Area is important for representing internment, an event which had a traumatic impact on the Japanese Canadian community in B.C. From urban centres, Fraser Valley farming communities, fishing villages and pulp towns along the coast, and in fruit-growing, mining and lumbering areas within the 100-mile limit, Japanese Canadians were uprooted from their livelihoods, businesses, homes, culture and language and sent to internment camps and road camps in the B.C. interior, or to sugar beet farms in Alberta, Manitoba and Ontario.

The Protected Area is significant because it represents in part B.C.'s long social and political history of anti-Japanese sentiment, which exploited fears of competition and conspiracy from Japanese Canadians. It was enacted swiftly, in part due to this anti-Japanese bias, and because the Japanese Canadians were for the most part compliant, offering little resistance.

While exclusion from the Protected Area was pronounced a temporary measure, government actions such as the confiscation of all Japanese Canadian land, property and possessions - ostensibly held in trust by the Custodian of Enemy Property - and its swiftly authorized disposal at a fraction of their worth without notifying the owners indicates an intent to remove Japanese Canadians from the B.C. coast permanently.

The Protected Area is important because of its lingering post-war impact. It represents the social and economic cost of Japanese Canadian efforts to rebuild their lives after 1949, only permitted to return to the coast a full five years after the end of the war, with the cost of rebuilding their lives, re-establishing social connections and re-investing in farms, fishing boats and businesses. And while the next generations of Japanese Canadians began to enter professions such as medicine, teaching, accounting and engineering, from which they had been excluded, the shadow of the Protected Area resulted in persistent racial discrimination against professional and other workers well into the 1950s and 60s.

Source: Province of British Columbia, Heritage Branch

Character-Defining Elements

Not applicable