Local Japanese community honours ancestors
Dick Nakamura, left, and Tsugio Kurushima, Victoria Nikkei Cultural Society president, visit one of the markers their group installed to commemorate the 150 people of Japanese descent buried before the Second World War.
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Public welcomed on tour of early settlers' graves
Yoshitaro Muneyama was 26 when he fell off the mast of the ship Penelope, docked in Victoria’s inner harbour in 1887.
A doctor arrived to help, but the young worker died and became the first Japanese migrant buried in the city.
"He came to this city from San Francisco two weeks ago," reads an account of the death in an issue of the Daily Colonist. "Not being able to secure work, he offered his services to the captain of the Penelope, who found him so useful that he was to have been employed permanently."
Today, 152 people of Japanese descent are buried alongside him in Ross Bay Cemetery -- most before 1942 when the government forcefully uprooted the whole community and resettled them in other parts of Canada.
With no descendants in the city left to care for the graves, many were left unattended.
Decades later, volunteers through the Victoria Nikkei Cultural Society set out to discover the names and locations of those buried and place headstones where none existed. Historians Gordon and Ann-Lee Switzer compiled many of their stories, such as that of Muneyama, through cemetery records and newspaper accounts.
These days, members of the society meet at the cemetery every August to celebrate Obon, a festival to pray for the souls of one's ancestors and to clean their graves.
Many of the deceased were young children, so members place little toys by their graves, said society president Tsugio Kurushima.
This year's festivities take place Sunday, Aug. 9.
Bishop Fujikawa from Vancouver will lead a service at 2 p.m.
Afterwards the public is welcome to join the Old Cemeteries Society for a tour of the graves.
For anyone wanting to learn the stories, enter the cemetery at Arnold Avenue west of Fairfield Plaza. Walk toward the water and stop at the large, black granite monument, called the Kakehashi memorial stone.
rholmen@saanichnews.com
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