SEVENTY years after his family was uprooted from their Pitt Meadows farm and transported thousands of kilometres to what amounted to a work camp in Manitoba, Toshio Suzuki heard the provincial government say something this week that had once seemed unimaginable: It was sorry.
Suzuki, a retired engineer who now lives in North Delta, was one of a handful of honoured guests who were on hand in the legislature Monday to witness an official apology for the internment of thousands of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War.
The 72-word motion, tabled by North Vancouver-Lonsdale MLA Naomi Yamamoto and approved unanimously, was the first time the province had gone on the record to express regret for the role it played in implementing one of the most destructive social policies in Canadian history.
"It was a very moving experience," said Suzuki, speaking to the North Shore News Tuesday. "I'm still dealing with it this morning. . . . I was just overwhelmed."
Suzuki, 77, was seven years old when the government confiscated his family's 16-acre strawberry farm and their newly bought truck, and forced him, his parents and his two sisters into years of backbreaking labour on a Manitoba sugar beet farm. They stayed there until well after the war, when, virtually penniless, they were finally allowed back to the coast. His father then worked at the Britannia mine and in other industrial jobs until he could afford once again to buy a farm.
"My personal experience was as an internee has always weighed on me," he said. "It comes up in conversations with friends, and it's surprising how little people know about what happened."
The Suzukis were among thousands of Canadian families of Japanese decent who were forced to move under the federal War Measures Act, a piece of legislation that was activated in 1942 in response to fears spawned by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour.
The act established a 160-kilometre exclusion zone along the West Coast and allowed the internment of some 21,000 people - the majority of them born in Canada - in camps in B.C.'s interior and on the prairies. The government seized the victims' property, promising to return it at the end of the war, but ultimately sold it at auction, giving the rightful owners a fraction of its value at best.
Japanese Canadians didn't regain their voting rights or the right to live on the coast until 1949.
In 1988, the federal government delivered a formal apology and paid $21,000 to each of the 13,000 survivors, but British Columbia never officially acknowledged its role, despite having been an active player.
The provincial government of 1942 had actually lobbied Ottawa to enact the internment and to confiscate Japanese Canadian fishing boats - over the objections of senior members of the RCMP and the military, who insisted they weren't a threat.
"My dad is 85 years old; Tosh is probably getting up there as well. (Offering this apology) seemed like the right thing to do," said North Vancouver's Yamamoto, whose Canadian-born father was also interned during the war. "I had the honour being the first Canadian of Japanese descent elected to the provincial assembly. I feel like I had that responsibility."
For Yamamoto, one of the most poignant parts of Monday's event came in the evening, when she received an email from her usually stoic dad.
"He said: 'I'm proud of you,'" said Yamamoto. "That made me kind of teary."
