Japanese Settlement - Raymond, Alberta
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T0SHEA
N 49° 27.902 W 112° 42.569
12U E 376135 N 5480557
Along Highway 52 less than a klik west of Raymond one will find this Alberta Heritage Marker at a pullout. It relates a bit of the history of early immigrants of Japanese descent
Waymark Code: WMM22V
Location: Alberta, Canada
Date Posted: 07/05/2014
Views: 1
Being an Albertan living in British Columbia, I have visited some of the wartime internment camps set up to imprison the coastal Japanese in Canada. It was a brutal and extremely austere existence that they were forced to endure through the war years. Thankfully that time is long past.
Most of the first Japanese to reach Alberta were contract or temporary workers on railway and irrigation projects. Others worked in the sugar beet fields near Raymond. By 1906, however, a few Japanese had settled permanently in Alberta. The largest early Japanese settlements in Alberta were at Redwater, Raymond and Hardieville, a mining community north of Lethbridge. After 1914, some Japanese women joined their husbands in Alberta or married Japanese men from Alberta, though the community remained very small. At the outbreak of World War II there were just 540 Japanese Canadians living in Alberta.
The war transformed the Japanese community in Alberta. In 1942, people of Japanese descent were prevented from living within 160 kilometres (100 miles) of the Pacific coast. Many were forced into internment camps or to resettle in southern Alberta. After the war, some returned to British Columbia, but others stayed. Together with new post-war immigrants from Japan, they have become one of Alberta's most dynamic cultural communities.
From the Alberta Heritage Marker
