S3 - Galt Archives

Courtesy Galt Archives.

Oto Kanashiro in a 1988 photograph. Oto Kanashiro was born in 1906 and grew up in Yomitan, Okinawa. In 1930 she married Bokujin Kanashiro who was from Hardieville, Alberta. It took a few years for her to get permission to immigrate but Oto arrived in Hardieville, Alberta in 1933. The Okinawan community in Hardieville at the time included 50 families. When the mine closed in 1935 Oto and her husband moved to BC, but in March of 1942 the Canadian Government forced all Japanese people living near the coast to be relocated, and Oto and her family were sent back to southern Alberta to work on sugar beet farms. The family eventually settled in Lethbridge in 1959.