Jean McKeever was named Hisae Yokoyama in 1944 when she was the last person born in the Japanese Canadian internment camp in Sandon, B.C.
In 1944, while she was still an infant, the government closed the camp and moved its residents to other camps in the West Kootenay.
On July 19, McKeever returned to Sandon to attend the opening of a permanent exhibit entitled Window to the Past mounted under glass on the outside of the Burns Building. The exhibit consists of photos and stories from the two years of the internment camp.
"I was just a couple months old, so this is why I don't know much about Sandon," McKeever said. "And Mom and Dad, they didn't talk much about Sandon because, as they say in Japanese, 'It can't be helped.'"
The family was moved to Rosebery where she grew up, going to school in New Denver. She still has a summer cabin in Rosebery. McKeever said she came to the exhibit opening after a friend persuaded her that she had special status as the last baby born in the internment camp.
At the exhibit opening, Susanne Tabata, the CEO of the Japanese Canadian Legacies Society, said her family was interned in Kaslo and Midway.
"The Japanese Canadian community came through Sandon in a fleeting moment, and that moment is part of our collective history," she said.
The moment was fleeting because the Canadian government considered the location temporary due to the harsh winters and difficult terrain.
The internees agreed. When they first arrived and saw their future involuntary home they were shocked. In the book Dispatches: Chronicling the expulsion of the Japanese Canadians from the West Coast 1942-1949, Roy Sato describes Sandon as a "narrow sunless valley almost like a gorge," with the town built over a creek.
"It was no place to live unless one was a miner. To see the sky, one had to look straight up. A strong-armed youth could throw a baseball from the south side of the valley to the north side."
Despite this, the 900 internees formed a community there, with sports teams, a school, social events and a clinic.
In its mining heyday before 1900, Sandon had a population of 5,000, with saloons, hotels, banks, breweries, brothels and an opera house. But during the early part of the 20th century, landslides, fires, floods and labour problems reduced Sandon to almost a ghost town by the time the internees arrived.
The 88-year-old Slocan Valley visual Tsuneko Kokubo, with musician Paul Gibbons, performed at the exhibit opening with Kokubo dressed as a ghost.
"It was really important to do this for ghosts of this valley," she said. "Not just this museum, not just the internment site, but everything that went through this valley, flooding and fires. It's always been a very dark valley, and lot of internees I talked to, it was really a dark part of their history."
Kokubo was not interned during the war. Perhaps anticipating what was to come, her family sent her to Japan to live with her grandparents.
"The history (of the internment) should be remembered," she said. "Forgiven, but remembered. And it is very, very, very important for younger generations to feel and remember what a tough time (Japanese Canadians) had, but they just kept on going forward. And it is really important to have this museum for these educational purposes."
