Around ten years after my grandma died, I was visiting her family’s cemetery plot and was struck with the realization that I didn’t know any of the names on the gravestones.
It was a strange feeling, standing at the cemetery that day. I’d always felt somewhat unmoored, ethnically and culturally; I’m very much mixed and not especially connected to any of my backgrounds for one reason or another. But the other parts of my heritage—Hungarian, African American, colonizer Canadian—have stories, stories I can use to ground myself in my family’s history.
I never had that with my Japanese family. I never had the chance to meet most of them, and they’d apparently been pretty tight-lipped about their pasts; if anything was passed down to my grandma, she didn’t tell my mom, who in turn had limited stories for me. We knew that they’d lived in British Columbia before World War II and been interned after Pearl Harbor. But everything else—how they got to Canada, where in B.C. they’d lived, what happened between internment and Ontario—was a mystery.
I’d never realized how little I knew until that time at the cemetery, looking down at the gravestones I’d brushed, washed, and left flowers on. I took care of those stones because those were the people I came from, but who were they really? How did their lives and experiences vanish so quickly upon their death? It unnerved me, standing there over a handful of names with no stories or relationships attached. Even though it was a sunny day, warm enough to begin drying the rinsed gravestones before I left, I felt like a hole had been scooped out of my gut. Like I was missing something fundamental.
* * * * *
The hole went from an odd, squeamish feeling that I could ignore to a persistent itch that demanded scratching.
I really did try to ignore it at first. I’m a glutton for information, especially the obscure kind, and this lack of knowledge on my family beckoned me like a siren song. I knew that once I started looking into it, I wouldn’t be able to stop until I found something satisfactory. And I didn’t have a lot of faith that I’d find something satisfactory.
I didn’t have time for a wild goose chase. I was at the end of my freshman year of college, struggling after a year of sickness and living alone for the first time, and I needed my grades bumped up by exams.
After exams, though, I couldn’t push it aside any longer. I moved back home with my family, needled my mother and grandfather for information, and began plugging names into searches on Google and Ancestry.
Ancestry bore little fruit. I didn’t even consider shelling out for a $100-$300 membership on my measly college student budget, and feared forgetting to cancel a free trial. Any interesting leads ended before they began. Google didn’t give me much either at first, which didn’t surprise me; most of these people had been dead for over fifty years. It’d be stranger if they did show up in internet searches.
Eventually, though, I got a hit.
Anyone who’s looked into Japanese Canadian history—specifically the Slocan City internment sites—might have heard of Greg Nesteroff before. He has a blog about the history of the area and a section on the site specifically about Japanese Canadians. I hadn’t known about him, but I hadn’t known anything other than what the Ontario public school system taught me about Japanese Canadian history: they were in Vancouver, they were interned, they rebuilt elsewhere. (It’s a little embarrassing to admit how little I knew, but that’s a story for later in the series.)
One of my Google searches about my great-grandaunt’s husband pulled a page from Greg Nesteroff’s website, the Kütne Reader, and I pounced. I was desperate for anything, even if it was about someone married into the family. I’d planned to skim the page, but was struck by the first paragraph and image.
The article is about a man named Usaku Shibuta, one of the few Japanese Canadians permitted to serve in World War I. He’s the only one who died during service and has a grave in Canada. The bit that made it pop up in my searches, though, was the mention of his son, Minoru Shibuta, born in Canada but sent to live with relatives in Japan after the death of his mother.
Minoru Shibuta, in my family tree, was one of the few Japanese Canadians I had any information about, because he’d died only ten years before I was born. He wasn’t related to me by blood, but I’d heard of him before, which was more than I could say for almost everyone else in the family.
I emailed Greg Nesteroff immediately, explaining who I was, what Minoru—Uncle Min, my grandmother and mom had called him—got up to after internment, how this was practically all I’d found about my entire family. We exchanged information, he updated the original article, and I got a much-needed boost of motivation after so many dead ends. There was surely more out there; I just had to get creative with how I looked.
It was time, I decided, to do the free Ancestry trial.
* * * * *
I hadn’t known at the time, but I signed up for the free trial a month or two after the release of the 1931 Canadian census, so something finally came up when I plugged my family’s name into the search bar. It took a lot of sifting through results because, as I’d quickly learn, there are tons of ways to misspell Takiguchi (especially when everything is handwritten in the early 1900s), but I finally got a hit.
‘Risu Tekigchu.’ Not quite the Hisa Takiguchi I was looking for, but clicking on the census record (and zooming in real close) revealed the entire family of six. Mother, father, three daughters, one son. It was and still is the only record I’d seen of them all together. There was no sign of them in the 1921 census, even though I knew they’d have been in Canada by then, but there they were in 1931, living just outside Vancouver.
I was thrilled, buzzing with energy, calling my mother in the middle of her work shift to tell her that I’d found them. They hadn’t been lost to time, but existed right there in a New Westminster apartment in 1931. Instead of riding the high of uncovering something, though, I copied the misspelled name, opened a new tab, and pasted it into the search bar.
And finally, finally, I made it to Landscapes of Injustice.
Anyone interested in Japanese Canadian history likely knows Landscapes of Injustice. It’s a massive project that studies and shares information on the properties taken and sold by the government during internment. In my circles, it’s best known for the extensive digital database of internment records and protest letters, and my Google search with the misspelled name retrieved exactly that. Suddenly, I had dozens—hundreds—of pages of documents detailing exactly where my family lived, when they left, and what happened to their belongings.
I remember feeling a little faint as I opened one of the PDFs under my great-great-grandmother’s name and saw 123 pages; I’d gone from practically no information to a veritable wealth in seconds. Court transcriptions, photos of the farm, handwritten letters; they’d all been right under my nose, eluding me because of a single typo.
I didn’t start reading this time, though. Instead, I pinned the tab and closed my laptop. My usual hunger for knowledge was there, but something else was, too, something adrenaline-filled and nerve-wracking, like I was about to jump into something I couldn’t come back from. For the first time since I’d started looking into my Japanese family, I remember realizing that I might be getting into something bigger than just me and my genealogy.
© 2025 Ava Sakura
