Japanese-Canadian soldiers’ names added to Richmond cenotaph

Two new names have been added to the Richmond City Hall cenotaph.

Hikotaro Koyanagi and Kazuo Harada were Japanese-Canadian soldiers who fought — and died — in the bloodiest battles of the First World War.

Descendants and family were on hand for the official rededication.

“Hearing that the past matters, that these events do matter… I think that was really vindicating,” said Tanya Ferry, Koyanagi’s great-grandniece.

“That was great for me to hear, to see people be like, ‘this was a real event.’ That these people really did exist. They’re just not fragments from the past.”

The two were part of a Japanese-Canadian volunteer battalion formed in B.C., which offered itself for the war effort.

“And the local politicians in British Columbia wrote letters to protest that they did not want an all-Japanese Canadian battalion, and eventually the Prime Minister wrote back to say, ‘thank you, but no thank you,’” said community historian Debbie Jiang.

But many of those men didn’t take that lying down. Determined to serve, they travelled to Alberta — which was desperate for more recruits — and enlisted in battalions there.

“They were hurting for numbers. It was right after the Battle of the Somme, and so any able-bodied man who volunteered was welcome,” Jiang said.

“So this is how the disbanded Japanese-Canadian Battalion of Vancouver, British Columbia, moved over to Alberta and joined the ranks.”

The legacy of Japanese Canadians in the Great War has long been obscured by anti-Japanese sentiment before, during, and after the Second World War. The detainment, expropriation, and subsequent exclusionary policies against Japanese-Canadians weighed heavy on those families.

“Knowing that her uncle died and then knowing that this happened right afterwards, I think, was challenging for my grandmother, and so it left an unspoken legacy that no one ever talked about,” Ferry said.

“You know, you talk about the war. You talk about the family history. There was this hushed silence where is was, ‘it’s the past.’”

Now the two names being added to the cenotaph serve as a recognition of two Japanese-Canadian war heroes in the community where they lived.