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“In the Vancouver area, where we are, in the 1920s and ’30s there was pretty explicit racism against both Chinese and Japanese, so this would’ve been an escape from that.”

Here they lived, with the men commuting into Vancouver for work, Muckle suspects, until February 1942, when they would have left for internment camps, a policy put in place during the Second World War that relocated families from the B.C. coast.

The evidence for the timing, and reason, for the camp’s abandonment, even in the absence of clear artifacts from the 1940s, is that the departure seems to have been reasonably orderly. Everyone there just walked away, leaving behind clocks, watches, pocketknives, dishes and stoves. There are about 1,000 artifacts in total: beer bottles and teapot pieces and evaporated milk cans, suggesting the presence of children.

“I think (internment) explains why we have so many personal items left behind,” Muckle said. “The dishes tend to be in really good condition, which you wouldn’t expect if people were normally abandoning their site.”

Photo by Bob Muckle

And, some items were hidden, such as a valuable stove secreted away off-site and parts of an early-1900s camera that were inside the walls of the bathhouse.

“I’m thinking this is probably my last season there,” he said. “I’m going through the process right now of figuring out what’s going to happen to all the artifacts.”

Certaintly, some of them are going to go to Kajiwara’s museum. For her part, she’s heard from a number of people about the settlement, as it has received more press, including someone from Japan. “It’s really been quite remarkable that the word has gone out sort of far and wide,” she said. “We’re starting to slowly collect names.”

“That whole generation really didn’t talk about the experience for decades and it’s only now, it’s only recently, that the stories have started to be revealed or shared,” she said. “It will be interesting to see if we can track down any of the descendants.”

• Email: tdawson@postmedia.com | Twitter: tylerrdawson