Description of Historic Place

The Village of Cumberland and the community of Royston are the settlements in the Comox Valley that, from the 1890s until World War II, featured a thriving Japanese Canadian community drawn to the area by an economy based on mining, fishing, logging, farming and lumber milling.

The historic place includes houses and places of business once owned or operated by Japanese Canadians, as well as cultural places and burial grounds.

Heritage Value

Royston and the Village of Cumberland together have historic, cultural and social value for having remnants of coal mines, residential enclaves associated with Japanese Canadian mine workers and their families, and places of business and culture that reflected the development of Japanese Canadian commercial economy and cultural life in the Comox Valley area prior to their forced removal from the Coast in 1942 and the associated dispossession of their property.

Cumberland's coal mine sites are valued for representing early provincial industry that offered employment to arriving Japanese immigrants. Japanese Canadian mining camp sites - now called #1 Japanese Town and #5 Japanese Town - are valued for their rare remaining Japanese Canadian houses and remnant domestic landscapes and cultural institutions, and for being tangible evidence of race-based mining camp segregation that reflected late 19th and early 20th Century racialist Canadian society. Remaining houses in these enclaves are also historically and culturally valuable for their association with particular Japanese Canadian families and their life stories, when the physical traces of most such houses and institutions have disappeared and their cultural history and family histories erased.

Royston is valued for having places that were once Japanese Canadian religious and cultural facilities, and sites that were once major centres of employment for the Japanese Canadian community including the Japanese Canadian-owned, managed and operated Royston Lumber Company logging and sawmill operation that employed Japanese Canadians displaced by the dwindled coal mining operations in nearby Cumberland.

The Royston Buddhist Church, built in 1930 to serve the Japanese Canadian community in the surrounding areas of Cumberland, Courtenay, Union Bay and Comox, is testament to the once-large, growing, and prosperous Japanese Canadian community in the Comox Valley up till 1942, and the interest in nurturing their Japanese religious and cultural heritage in B.C.

The Royston Buddhist Church is important because it marks the site where Jodo Shinshu Buddhism had its beginning on Vancouver Island and served the 60 or more Buddhist families. It was the site for regular Sunday services and special events as Hanamatsuri and Obon. It also housed the Japanese Language School whereby Rev. Osuga (the first minister of Royston Buddhist Church) and his wife taught both elementary and high school students Japanese. The building is also important for becoming a Cultural Centre for the Japanese in which festive and cultural events were regularly held.

Cumberland and Royston have social value for recent actions taken to remember the presence of the Japanese Canadian community prior to their forced removal and detainment away from the coast in 1942. These actions include the identification of Japanese Canadian mining camps, houses, businesses and cultural facilities once owned by Japanese Canadians, and the repair and maintenance of the Japanese Cemetery in recent decades following earlier racist desecration.

Character-Defining Elements

Not applicable.