By Ruby Pratka
Local Journalism Initiative
About 20 Japanese-Canadian families who were sent to Farnham after the end of the Second World War could soon have a memorial in their honour in the town, Mayor Patrick Melchior has said. The town council voted to provide “moral support” to the project in December, and further commitments could come in the next few weeks, he said.
The memorial project is spearheaded by Julie Tamiko Manning – a Montreal-based playwright and theatre producer who was born in Cowansville and grew up in Farnham – and a core group of volunteers from the Quebec chapter of the National Association of Japanese Canadians (NAJC) determined to bring a nearly forgotten chapter of the town’s history to wider attention.
More than 22,000 Japanese Canadians, mainly living in British Columbia, were forcibly sent to internment camps during the Second World War.
“If you lived within 100 miles of the coast or on any of the islands, you were interned, because the government believed you were a spy,” said Manning, a grandchild of internment camp survivors who has done extensive research on the history of internment in Canada and written a play about her family’s experience. Thousands of Japanese Canadians were imprisoned in Vancouver’s Hastings Park for months before being sent to camps in remote interior B.C., she explained. Her own grandparents were interned in Tashme, 200 kilometres east of Vancouver. In 1946, after four years of internment, the family was allowed to leave, but could not leave right away because Manning’s grandmother had just given birth.
“My assumption is that my family would have gone elsewhere, but because they left the camp so late, a lot of cities weren’t accepting Japanese-Canadian [ex-internees] anymore,” she said. “Farnham is where people were sent who didn’t have family or sponsors or a job offer in Montreal.”
She explained that 11 families, including her own, were moved into a large two-story house on Rue Principale, with an additional six or seven families housed on the nearby military base. Most of the families drifted away to move closer to relatives or into seniors’ residences, but her grandparents had bought a house outside of town as soon as they were able, and they stayed there.
“My grandfather continued to do manual labour and my grandmother was busy at home, raising nine kids,” Manning said. “I wonder what that was like, especially for her – she spoke no French and didn’t really speak English either.” They didn’t speak about their experiences, and Manning and her siblings, who didn’t speak Japanese, didn’t really ask.
Even as a third-generation Townshipper, Manning said she “never felt welcome” in the overwhelmingly white region. “I had never lived anywhere else, but I always felt like we were foreigners. In Montreal, I never felt that, but in Farnham I felt it all the time.” Manning said she believed the memorial project, the details of which are yet to be determined, would help “break down barriers” and familiarize people in the region with their own history.
Melchior, for his part, said he had heard vague stories about “refugees” coming to Farnham around the Second World War, but wasn’t aware of the details before Manning reached out to him. “I am a newcomer to this story and I’d like to learn more. We owe ourselves to learn more and share it with the population. We have an obligation of memory.”