Brian Lee
In recent issues, Gladys McNutt’s 1956 column on the history of Egmont (p. 32) pokes an all but lost bit of local history. Japanese pioneers played a significant role in the development of Egmont prior to their forced removal in 1942. The Hatashita family purchased a general store and fish-buying station in Egmont in 1921. Soon after, two other Japanese families, the Takais and the Maedas, opened another store "almost immediately in front of theirs."
Between the two businesses, they owned at least four fish packers and regularly ran mail and fish to Vancouver while returning with supplies. By the 1930s, George Hatashita’s daughter Kay ran the business. She focused efforts to make the previously ignored store successful so it wasn’t primarily a fish-buying station. Kay brought in a large selection of goods and worked hard displaying it.
McNutt hints of an arranged marriage in Kay’s future, "After a time, a young man was sent up to help her.
"This was Ted Hyashi."
If it wasn’t for Pearl Harbour (and some institutional racism), the descendants of Kay Hatashita and Ted Hiyashi might still live here. Instead of burgers, we might expect donburi on Egmont Day. But it wasn’t to be.
On March 15, 1942, 129 Japanese Canadians on the Sunshine Coast received notice they were to be evacuated.
"About 2 a.m. one morning, something crashed into our float," wrote McNutt.
It was Hiyashi — the Japanese were told to be ready with what they could carry by the next morning. He was asking customers to clear up their bills before his 8 a.m. departure. But this was during daylight savings time, something McNutt wrote many Egmonsters still ignored (DST was only adopted in 1918 — 24 years earlier).
Hyashi and Hatashita were gone by the time they arrived in the morning. It may serve as the first recorded casualty of the phenomenon known as "Egmont Time."
A 2014 research article by the Sunshine Coast Museum’s Kimiko Hawkes suggests there were six Japanese Canadians living in Egmont at the time. At least another 10 Japanese lived in Pender Harbour, most likely clustered in Gerrans Bay. My grandfather told me it was the saddest day of his life when he watched the Japanese fishermen’s boats getting towed out of Pender Harbour. In an interview included in the Women of Pender Harbour, Lewella Duncan recalled the families Kihara, Kawasaki and Ikeda:
Everybody in the Harbour went over to the steamship when they took the Ikedas away and everybody was crying, it was just terrible. I know the family went to a camp in the Interior and my friend Bessie Ikeda lost a baby there. This affected them terribly.
McNutt never learned what became of the Egmont families except that Ted and Kay were married and "in the photography business back in Ontario." It’s no surprise now that if you Google "Japanese Pender Harbour," you will find links to Mama’s Japanese Kitchen and little else.
That’s the problem with local history — it gets lost if you take away the locals and, sadly, not one of the families ever returned to live here. For 76 years this month, it has been our loss too.
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