Hastings Park

Stretching out from Vancouver and flooding through every village and town from Vancouver Island to as far north as Stewart, BC, next to the Alaskan border, the Security Commission acted like some gigantic whirlpool sucking in all the "enemy aliens" along the coast and sweeping them in the Hastings Park Manning Pool of the Pacific National Exhibition Grounds. They had now announced that all Japanese within a hundred-mile security zone along the coast were to be "evacuated" - as a temporary measure.

It wasn't enough most of the Japanese-Canadian able-bodied men had been kidnapped in the night, torn away from their families. They wanted all of us now. We were like some cancer to be cut out of the precious body of the BC coastline. The government had gone back on its word.

The "Pool", Hastings Park, was the staging area; it consisted of about twelve buildings, some former livestock buildings, enclosed by a chain link fence and guarded twenty-four-hours a day by armed sentries. The men's and women's dormitories were cavernous, each reeking of quicklime and animal excrement. For most, the trauma of the journey ending with the sight of row upon row of open cots, their new homes, or of empty horse stalls with their contents barely swept out, underneath the heavy smog of throat-grabbing ofodours, was too much. Mrs. Tamaki from up Woodfibre way was there. Mrs. Hashimoto was there. And the Washimoto family was there. Exhausted and depressed women fell to their mean beds often with their children or babies wailing on top of their silent, still bodies.

- from The Three Pleasures