On April 15, 1942, over one-third of the students at the elementary and high school in Cumberland were suddenly absent from class. They would never return to their desks, as almost 600 Japanese Canadians from the Comox Valley were forcibly removed and incarcerated.

Stolen Bases is a new exhibition opening at Cumberland Museum & Archives that shares Japanese Canadian stories of building and nurturing home bases in the Comox Valley, and the intergenerational echoes of being treated as an enemy at home.

From the early 1890s, Japanese Canadian families built communities in Cumberland, Royston, and surrounding townsites, establishing businesses, operating the Japanese Canadian owned Royston Lumber Company, founding language schools, and forming baseball teams that dominated local play.

“Baseball was a great social pastime for Japanese Canadians and non-Japanese Canadians as youth and adults,” says Janet (Ogaki) Sakauye, whose family was from Cumberland. Baseball diamonds became lively hubs for community gatherings and competition.

In 1942, these communities were dismantled. Under the War Measures Act, Japanese Canadians living within 160 kilometres of the Pacific coast were dispossessed, forcibly relocated, and incarcerated. More than 75 percent of those incarcerated were Canadian-born or naturalized citizens.

Even in the face of legislated racism and incarceration, baseball remained an important source of connection. “It kept children busy in the internment camps when there were no schools for a while,” Sakauye explains. “After relocation to the east, it also helped ease Japanese Canadians’ acceptance into cities like Toronto, which originally did not allow them to settle after the Second World War.”

Despite prejudice, dispossession, and forced displacement, Japanese Canadian families carefully nurtured community. Stolen Bases shares these stories through film, letters, objects, photographs and contemporary art, featuring the works of artists Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa, Megan Kiyoko Wray, Kellen Hatanaka and SD Holman.

As Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa reflects, “a story shared plants seeds of healing connection.”

Cumberland Museum & Archives invites the community to the opening of Stolen Bases from 6 to 8 p.m. on March 23, 2026. The exhibition will be open until February 1, 2027.