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During the Second World War, the Japanese Canadian population of coastal British Columbia was divided and resettled across the Canadian interior.

The Japanese Canadians did not concentrate anywhere. There were no resettled communities, only families and individuals. They did not live close to one another. They did not make new communities, out of a fear that they might once again become public enemies.

A few thousand left for Japan after the war was over. Those who stayed in Canada did not usually return to their homes in the Pacific exclusion area, which had been sold by civilian authorities at a profit.

The resettled families did not keep their language. They did not keep their culture. They kept friends among themselves, but they did not do it in public, and they did not pass it on to their children. Their children went to Anglophone schools. They made Anglophone friends.

And as the older generation died, it forgot. Their children grew up in a community that was not their own.  But, for those children, it was different. This was their home now. This was their community.

Almost. They felt apart from it, somehow. Sometimes, by a word or a look, they felt as though they did not belong. They felt as though there was something missing. Sometimes they felt as though they did not know where they had come from. Sometimes they felt as though they did not know who they were.

They felt as though their parents had taken something from them. They had done it out of fear, or out of hope. The children had not understood what they were missing. Their parents understood it much too well.

As adults, they talked to one another, those with the same skin, with the same names, about that feeling of absence. Not often, but sometimes.

But they forgot those feelings, and those moments, most of the time. They lived and worked in a world that told them this was their community, and these were their people, and this was where they belonged.

Until it isn’t.

Until, suddenly, they remember.