Japanese hall named National Historic Site
Credit to Author: John Mackie| Date: Mon, 11 Nov 2019 19:12:31 +0000
The Japanese Hall is one of the last remnants of Japantown, a once-thriving community of 8,000 centred around Oppenheimer Park in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
Japantown was decimated when the federal government ordered Japanese-Canadians to leave the West Coast during the Second World War. Infamously, the government then sold off Japanese-Canadian property and assets.
But one prominent building went unsold: the Japanese Hall at 475 Alexander St.
“It was taken over, but the property title was never transferred,” said Laura Saimoto, head of community relations for the hall. “It was never sold.”
Why? The ownership was too complicated for the federal custodian of enemy property to deal with.
“It was a non-profit, so it was owned by the community,” said Saimoto. “The board of directors were all interned in different internment camps, or in Alberta. So they could not have a board meeting.”
The Department of National Defence occupied the building during the war, and the hall wasn’t returned to the community until 1952.
It was in rough shape, but it had great bones: the handsome 1928 building was designed by Sharp and Thompson, the architectural firm that did the Burrard Bridge. The community fixed it up and reopened the Japanese school in 1953. In 2000, a five-storey addition was added. Today it operates a language and culture division for 400 and a daycare for 160.
And on Nov. 13, 78 years after the federal government killed the neighbourhood that built it, the Japanese Hall is being named a National Heritage Site.
“It’s a powerful symbol of community resilience, and the power of community,” said Saimoto. “The commitment to our historical legacy.”
The first graduating class at the Japanese language school in the Japanese Hall at 475 Alexander St. in Vancouver, 1929.
Aki Horjii is a living example of that legacy. Born in 1931, he attended Japanese school at the hall for five years in the late 1930s and early ’40s.
“We would attend Lord Strathcona (School), and after three o’clock we’d come home, change books and walk to the Japanese Language School on Alexander Street in Japantown,” recounts the 88-year-old. “Then we’d study for an hour-and-a-half, learning Japanese.”
Strathcona School had 1,300 students, and 630 of them were Japanese-Canadian. When Canada went to war against Germany in 1939, they all pitched in for the war effort.
“As part of being patriotic and contributing to the war effort, we were taught how to knit socks,” said Horjii. “We made beautiful quilts and they were sent overseas to England to help the poor kids. We bought war stamps and this-and-that.
“As a child aged 10, I thought I was a Canadian. I was born in Vancouver, and we were being patriotic. But suddenly the war breaks out with Japan, and we’re different.”
Growing up at 368 Heatley St. in Japantown, Horjii had never experienced racism.
“I never heard the racist term Jap against us, because we grew up with Niseis (second-generation Japanese born in Canada),” he said.
Bur this changed when Japan bombed Pearl Harbour on Dec. 7, 1941, and “the next day we all had to quit school.”
Twenty-two-thousand Japanese-Canadians would be forced to move from the coast in 1942. Many wound up in internment camps or ghost towns in the B.C. Interior. Horjii’s family ended up in a “self-supporting camp” across the Fraser River from Lillooet.
“We took a Union steamship from Vancouver to Squamish, then boarded a Pacific Great Eastern train and got off in Lillooet,” he said. “When I got off the train we were surrounded by mountains. Coming from Vancouver it was a shock. I thought, ‘Oh my God we’re going to be living here?’
“Then I saw the town and I thought, ‘Oh well, it won’t be too bad living here.’ But to my shock we were put on the back of a truck and taken two miles up the river, across a suspension bridge and two miles across from the town.”
There were eight people in the Horjii family, including five boys 10-and-under. And they were all crowded into a “tarpaper shack” built by the Japanese internees.
“There was no insulation whatsoever,” he said. “They were using raw shiplap (for material). As the boards shrank there were cracks, and in the wintertime the nail heads inside the house were frosted over. The first winter was one of the coldest winters, 1942. Then they put tarpaper around the shack to give it a little bit of insulation.”
Japanese seniors sit with young children in front of the Japanese Hall at 487 Alexander St. in Vancouver on Oct. 15, 2018.
The “menfolk” built a two-room school for the kids, and anyone with a high school degree was conscripted to become a teacher. But racist attitudes softened after a couple of years, and Horjii was able to attend high school in Lillooet.
Still, Japanese-Canadians weren’t allowed to return to the West Coast until 1949. About 10,000 did, but few came back to Japantown.
“It was just a wreck, it was unbelievable,” recalls Horjii. “Skid row. It just degenerated.”
Horjii enrolled at the University of B.C. in 1949, but the next year dropped out.
“My family was still up in East Lillooet, they didn’t have the finances to move back to Vancouver,” he said. “So I quit school for two full years and became a commercial fisherman (like his father). The family was having a rough time, so being the oldest, Japanese custom was the oldest son has to help the family. So every penny that I made I gave to my parents.”
In 1952 he returned to UBC and in 1960 earned his MD degree.
“I interned in Toronto, came back here and practised for 48 years as a family physician in Vancouver,” said Horjii, who had four kids with his wife Hamako. “I retired about 10 years ago.”
One of his patients was an old acquaintance from Japantown.
“Right on the northeast corner of Jackson and Powell was a tiny confectionary store — I can still remember it, right across from the United Church, on the north side,” he said. “It was run by a couple, Mr. and Mrs. Matsumoto. My grandfather spoiled me, he would stop into that store and buy me Japanese buns with bean curds inside.
“When the war broke out I had no idea where everybody went — they went to the ghost towns and so on, I had no idea where Mr. Matsumoto went. But when I started practising medicine in 1961, Mr. Matsumoto became one of my earliest patients.
“He was coughing and having trouble breathing. Only then did I find out that he was a First World War veteran, and suffered from inhaling poison gas that damaged his lungs. I looked after him till he died.”
Matsumoto had volunteered to fight for Canada in the Great War.
“There were 222 Japanese immigrants, Japanese males, who decided to fight for their new country,” explains Horjii. “They tried to enlist in the Canadian Army in Vancouver and were refused because they were Orientals. So they travelled by train to Calgary and Lethbridge and were taken in by the Canadian Army and served overseas. Of the 222 men, 55 were killed in action.”
The Japanese-Canadian community erected a monument to them in Stanley Park. But the Canadian government sent many of the veterans to internment camps during the Second World War.
An early class at the Japanese language school in the Japanese Hall at 475 Alexander St. in Vancouver, 1929.
Principal Sato and students in a classroom at the Japanese Hall, 474 Alexander in Vancouver, circa 1929.
The Japanese Hall at 475 Alexander in 1929. Stuart Thomson/Vancouver Archives AM1535-: CVA 99-2469.
The Japanese Memorial in Stanley Park, April 9, 1920. Stuart Thomson/Vancouver Archives AM1535-: CVA 99-2420.