Saturday, February 13, 2010

Canadian-Japanese Internment Camps

Most Americans do not even know about the thousands of Japanese-American who were forced into interment camps during World War II which were actually more prison than anything else. I knew about them, but I had never heard of Japanese-Canadian camps in that country, but I suppose it would have made sense that they had them as well.

Yesterday, I was reading an article about Brian McKeever, a partially-sighted Canadian who will be competing in the Vancouver Winter Olympics. he has been training for the 50 K Cross Country Ski Race (held the last day, Feb. 28th).

He has been training in Sandon, British Columbia in the Canadian Rockies, near where his grandparents were interned in 1942. They had emigrated from Japan to Vancouver and were running a berry farm. After Pearl harbor and Japan's entry in the war, Canada did like the US and forced nearly one thousand Japanese-Canadians living near the Pacific Coast to Sandon, which essentially by then was an abandoned silver mining town.

Said McKeever, "I guess it was a prison camp because it was in a remote valley in the middle of nowhere."

I'll have to do some more research on Japanese internment camps and this one in particular.

A Sad Occurrence, But, Under the Auspices of War.... --Cooter

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