VANCOUVER, CANADA—CBC News reports that Bob Muckle of Capilano University and his colleagues found traces of three Japanese settlements dating to the first half of the twentieth century near British Columbia’s North Shore Mountains, in a protected area known as the Lower Seymour Conservation Reserve. The structures include 14 small houses, a small shrine, a garden, and a water storage reservoir. Personal effects, including pocket watches, alarm clocks, clothing, leather boots, and fragments of Japanese porcelain, were also recovered. Muckle thinks the sites were occupied until February 1942, when people of Japanese descent were sent to relocation camps and were only able to take what they could carry with them. Small pieces of a camera, found in the stone foundation of a structure used as a bathhouse, may have been hidden by a resident before the departure. “They just essentially closed the door behind them and left,” Muckle said. For more on recent discoveries in Canada, go to "World Roundup: Canada."
