The Galiano Club

Honouring Galiano’s Japanese Heritage
Heather C. Martin (Island Tides September 22nd, 2011)

Those of us who live on the Gulf Islands have each had to piece together in our own way the still largely untold story of the Japanese presence on these islands. The Japanese Canadian population on Galiano was once substantial, as is made dramatically clear by the school photographs hanging in the north end hall, once a schoolhouse. Until 1942 there are several Japanese students; afterwards there are none.

When I first moved to Galiano Island in 1978, to a tiny cabin with a cold-water sink tucked up against Mount Galiano, I’d often walk down the road to the little cemetery overlooking Active Pass and wander around the graves, trying to imagine the lives of those buried there from the inscriptions on their tombs. Two of them stood off by themselves, hoary and moss-covered but beautifully carved in ancient Japanese characters.

In 1978 remains of Japanese-Canadian industry were still scattered around the island, including pilings from a cannery at Saltery Bay that mysteriously burned down the year the Japanese were interned, and abandoned structures on Gossip island. I’m told people are still finding broken glass in the woods on Mayne Island, remnants of extensive Japanese greenhouses from a time when they supplied tomatoes to much of the Pacific Northwest. On the beaches of Galiano we still occasionally find shards of fine pottery that the Japanese Canadians themselves destroyed in 1942 before they were ignominiously rounded up and interned, first for six months at Hastings Park in downtown Vancouver, the current site of the PNE, and then in the interior of the province.

On an abandoned property right beside my cabin way back then I came across a mysterious, teardrop shaped, rock-lined pit half buried in the woods. It was clearly man-made, but when, by whom, and for what purpose no-one seemed to know. A couple of years later my brother-in-law Steve Nemtin inherited my cabin. Steve is a great outdoorsman and dedicated amateur anthropologist who quickly made the whole of Mount Galiano his own. He too was fascinated by the rock-lined pit next to our cabin, and soon discovered several others scattered around the island.

Some people told Steve they were garbage pits, others said they were remnants of Native pit houses, but eventually Tony Kingscote, who was born on Galiano and sent to boarding school on Salt Spring in 1906, told him they were Japanese charcoal pit kilns. He knew this because the schoolchildren were warned not to go near the pits because of the toxic smoke they generated. He told Steve two pits on Salt Spring had been owned by the Tesaka family.

Because Japanese-Canadians were not allowed to return to the West Coast after the war, the Tesakas eventually resettled near New Denver, where Steve tracked down Ty Tesaka, then 84. Ty was one of seventeen children; his job as a young boy was loading charcoal into empty rice sacks which his family sailed over to a soap factory in Victoria; his sister Omi, whom Steve visited in Vancouver, told him that her job was to sew up the “rabbit ears” on the rice sacks after they were filled. The Tesakas received $60 per burning, which was very good money in those days. Charcoal was prized in many industries, including the canneries, where it was used for soldering the cans after they were filled. The Tesaka land with its two charcoal pits, which like their boat and holdings were unceremoniously sold off, is now a park outside Ganges.

How the charcoal pit kilns actually worked remained a mystery; there simply was no record anywhere of this industry, even among Japanese-Canadian historians. An immigration census from 1900 of Gulf Islanders, which listed occupations, made no mention of charcoal production, likely because the census official simply didn’t know enough to ask. Steve Nemtin worked as a counselor at the Galiano school, and he started taking schoolchildren to one of these kiln pits to teach them about the history of Galiano. With their help he began the process of restoring it, learning as he went.

By now Steve had immersed himself in the history of charcoal making, which in Japan goes back to 3000 B.C. It was hugely important to the development of Japanese industry: the high heat generated by charcoal was crucial to everything from smelting precious metals, including the steel used to make samurai swords, to the development of Japan’s fabled ceramics. Steve tried to make contact with the Japanese community in Vancouver to share his findings, but was initially rebuffed.

Meanwhile, in the early 1980s Dorothy Livesay, a distinguished poet who’d retired to Galiano, invited Mary Ohara, a Japanese Canadian born at Alcala Point on North Galiano Island, to read one of Dorothy’s poems at a poetry festival; the poem celebrated the memory of those displaced by the war. Mary had not set foot on Galiano since she and her family had been interned when she was fifteen. Dorothy took Mary to the cemetery and showed her the Japanese graves. Mary, who couldn’t read Japanese, made paper rubbings of the inscriptions and sent them to relatives in Japan. Eventually she discovered that one of the two men buried there was a relative; he had died in a logging accident in 1899, when he was just nineteen.

Mary Ohara heard about Steve’s work on the charcoal kilns and, in the 1990s, came to visit him with a friend who was an anthropologist in Asian Studies at Cornell University. They were astonished by the amount of research he’d collected on charcoal kilns, much of it still in Japanese, and by the size of the kilns themselves, and urged Steve to write an article on his findings for a historical journal. They also introduced him to the Steveston Japanese-Canadian Buddhist community, most of whom, like Mary herself, were originally from Japan’s Wakayama Prefecture.

A delegation from the Wakayama Kenjin Kai in Steveston now came to visit. They lit incense and performed Shinto prayers first at the cemetery and then at the charcoal pits to honour their pioneer ancestors. When they discovered sand at the bottom of the pits, there was a great “ah ha” moment—binotang! The charcoal made in Wakayama was among the most prized in Japan because, instead of sealing their pits with a mixture of clay and dirt, the charcoal makers mixed clay and sand, which they carefully watered, creating a type of ceramic seal on the kiln which allowed it to reach the highest temperatures. This was binotang, famous for making the best samurai swords and the finest porcelain. Here in the wilds of the Gulf Islands Japanese settlers had recreated, with shovels, rock, alder and sand, the great binotang kilns of their home province.

By now Steve had discovered a pit kiln on public land in the middle of Bluff Park, and had received permission from the Galiano Club to restore it; the Wakayama Kenjin Kai agreed to pay for a commemorative stone and plaque when it was done. Steve has done a magnificent job. His own ah-ha moment was discovering the Galiano settlers had changed their technique slightly, adding an additional air vent flue, one on each side of the central fireplace, so they could control the heat and smouldering of the kiln better.

On September 16, 2001, sixty people from the Steveston community, accompanied by Mary Ohara and Susumu Tanaka, then Deputy Counsel-General of Japan, travelled to Galiano. The Galiano Club and our Museum Society jointly hosted a lunch at the hall, and then the party travelled up to Bluff Park for the dedication of the site. One elderly woman, like Mary, was born on Galiano; she had not been back since. Lots of tears were shed; everyone took pictures and tiny handfuls of charcoal as a keepsake. For the first time, the shame they’d felt at their banishment was replaced with pride at the remarkable accomplishment of their ancestors.

The restored charcoal pit kiln continues to generate interest. In 2002 our Lieutenant-Governor, Iona Campagnolo, who was also born on Galiano, returned with Mary Ohara and Jim Tanaka to unveil an information board and shelter on the site, which Steve Nemtin also built. . A group from Mayne Island came to study it in order to make a replica for Mayne’s Japanese Gardens. Our MP Elizabeth May visited the site this summer, and began musing about the possibility of turning it into a national historic site.

Most recently, Dr. Mark Johnson and a group of students from UBC's Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability, who had heard about the Japanese charcoal industry from Steve’s article in British Columbia Historical News, came to study the soil. Their specialty is biochar, and they were intrigued by the opportunity to study local, man-made charcoal that’s over 100 years old. One professor with the group was from Brazil, which is increasingly using charcoal to increase soil production.

For Steve Nemtin, discovering, studying and restoring two of these pits was, he says, like digging for buried treasure (go to “youtube.com/watch?v=iFPFTqo_gks” for a lovely video featuring Steve’s story.) It was also very emotional, honouring a way of life that was abandoned so quickly and tragically, and that has been so unjustifiably forgotten, and witnessing the tears of joy when the Steveston community returned to honour their ancestors.

Mount Galiano

The Mount Galiano Nature Conservancy Area is 200 acres (81 hectares) of forest, steep cliffs, and rocky peaks. The Nature preserve includes the highest point of land on Galiano Island. The land is a prime example of the rich diversity of flora and fauna that may be found on Galiano Island.

The land was purchased in May 1991. The Galiano Club spearheaded a massive, whirlwind community-wide fundraising drive and through a lowering of the price by MacMillan Bloedel the land was acquired.

Bluff Park

Bluff Park is 317 acres (128 hectares) of forest, Cliff and meadow ecosystem in the heart of the South end of Galiano Island. The look out parking lot is accessible from Bluff Road East and Bluff Road West. From an elevation of 300 feet the viewpoint looks out over Active Pass, Helen Point on Mayne Island and down Trincomali Channel to the San Juan Islands. On a clear day one can see the towering, snow capped, Olympic Mountains of Washington State.