Remembering Strangers
Updated: Sep 9
A multitude of strikingly colourful trees and plants, traditional Japanese artifacts at every turn, an island encircled by a pond and accessed by an arched wooden bridge, secreted spots for moments of reflection, and so much more—Mayne Island’s Japanese Memorial Garden is a Southern Gulf Islands wonder. The garden, a true haven of peacefulness, was created to honour and remember the families who emigrated from a small village in Japan and settled on Mayne Island between 1900 and 1942. Visitors will enjoy it again and again. I do.
Table of Contents
Photographs, videos, audio, and text Copyright © 2026 Richard Philpot/SGIOUTSIDE.ca.
A Great Blue Heron statue, nearly invisible next to the pond’s southern shoreline, keeps watch over the garden’s centrepiece island, surrounded by the spectacular colours of spring (042026).
MAYNE ISLAND’S JAPANESE MEMORIAL GARDEN
Mayne Island Parks & Recreation Commission (MIPRC)
Richard Philpot’s Most Recent Visits: April 20, June 2, July 7, and September 9 2026
Overview
A pilgrimage along the meandering paths in this 17th-century-replicated Japanese stroll garden takes you through a plethora of vibrant-coloured and meticulously maintained plants, past varied homeland elements, and around a central pond and island. Intentional features include a traditional Japanese charcoal pit kiln, a Japanese peace bell, lanterns and ornaments, an arched red bridge over a pond to an island, a waiting pavilion and other structures, a karesansui (dry landscape garden), and a Zig Zag bridge. These elements are revealed as you wander about on the crushed gravel footpaths.
Benches spread throughout the remembrance garden permit guests to sit a moment and contemplate the memory of those who once made Mayne Island and Canada their home, immigrants who were embraced by their new community, only to have their properties, livelihoods, and possessions taken from them (never to be returned).
Resident-Mayne Island volunteers service the 1.3-acre garden on Tuesday mornings, tending to the profusion of blossoming plant species during spring and summer, many of which are common to Japan—from Japanese Cherry, Maple, and Black Pine trees to Japanese Primrose, hostas, rhododendrons, and hydrangeas. The volunteers’ extraordinary yearlong commitment concludes when their work is lit for the holidays during the Holiday Light-up at the JMG.
Mayne Island’s Japanese Memorial Garden is a VERY special place—to quietly enjoy, and where present and future generations can remember and acknowledge past British Columbian and Canadian history.
Mayne Island’s Japanese Memorial Garden is a VERY special place—to quietly enjoy, and where present and future generations can remember and acknowledge past British Columbian and Canadian history.
Mayne Island’s Japanese Memorial Garden FACTS
Established: Construction began in 1987; completed/dedicated in 2002
Garden Size: 1.3 acres
Best time of year: Anytime, year round; but it’s prettiest late April through July when the plants and trees are in bloom
Special Event: Holiday Light-up at the JMG, 5-7pm, mid-December through early January
Difficulty Rating: EASY
Trail Type: Loop
Time Allowance: 20 minutes to walk, but it deserves at least one hour
Dogs Permitted: Yes, leashed
Amenities: Japanese Memorial Garden—Bicycle rack, resting benches; Dinner Bay Park—Beach access, covered picnic shelter (The Lions Adachi Pavilion), washrooms, picnic tables, disc golf course, synthetic putting green (with complimentary putters and golf balls), horseshoe pit (with complimentary horseshoes), baseball diamonds, senior’s fitness circuit, children’s play structure, Ed Williams Memorial Trail (EASY, access from Dinner Bay Park)
Parking: End of gravel road next to baseball diamond or on Williams Place
Travelling to the Japanese Memorial Garden: By vehicle (motorized or bike)—1.8 km (5 minutes) from Village Bay Ferry Terminal (right on Dalton Drive, right on Mariners Way, left on Dinner Bay Road, right on Williams Place to gravel driveway before senior’s fitness circuit and children’s play structure; On foot—Car stops at Village Bay Ferry Terminal, Mariners Way at Dalton Drive, and Dinner Bay Park at Williams Place; Paddling—land and launch from the northern part of the beach at the head of Dinner Bay
Garden Coordinates (Dinner Bay Park, off Williams Place): 48.833658, -123.317748
YouTube: Japanese Gardens on Mayne Island | History & Serenity in BC’s Southern Gulf Islands
Make a DONATION
Entrance to Mayne Island’s Japanese Memorial Garden is free. However, maintaining and improving the garden is costly. Donations fund maintenance and expansion costs. A donation box is situated just inside the garden fence gate. Donations can also be made by e-transfer to: MIPRCtreasurer@crd.bc.ca (indicate “G donation” in the comments field). A tax receipt for donations of $50 or more can be requested from MIPRCtreasurer@crd.bc.ca by submitting a tax receipt form within 5 days of making your donation.
Japanese peace bell
Some of the attractions and plant life found in Mayne Island’s Japanese Memorial Garden.
See more pictures of the garden’s plant varieties at the Mayne Island Japanese Memorial Garden Facebook page.
Remembering Strangers
IT’S BEEN TWENTY YEARS since my first visit to Mayne Island’s Japanese Memorial Garden. What drew me there on a grey, drizzly day in January 2005 was a visit earlier in the day with Jonathan Chilvers, then-owner of the Oceanwood Country Inn across the street. I’d asked Jonathan if he could assist me in finding some springtime Japanese Memorial Garden photographs. I needed a handful of colourful, in-season images for a new Southern Gulf Islands outdoor magazine I was publishing (i.e., Exploring The Best). Jonathan immediately picked up the phone and called Alan Cheek and Brian Haller. While he conversed with Cheek and Haller, my eyes were drawn to the view out his office window of Navy Channel and North Pender Island, then to the family pictures on the wall, including several of a younger Chilvers with his wife, Marilyn.
I don’t think Jonathan Chilvers caught me glancing at his printed and framed memories, but when he hung up the phone, his first words were about Marilyn, his wife of 36 years, who died in 1998. He remarked that he’d dedicated a bridge in the Japanese garden to her memory.
MAYNE ISLAND’S JAPANESE MEMORIAL GARDEN was created to honour and remember the Japanese families who settled and worked on Mayne Island between 1900 and 1942. In contrast to the racial prejudice and persecution that Japanese-Canadians experienced in the rest of Canada, the families who had emigrated from the small village of Agarimichi in the Tottori Prefecture in western Japan and settled on Mayne Island were quickly embraced as friends and neighbours, as equals in the Southern Gulf Island community.
These new islanders worked as fishermen and farm labourers. It wasn’t long before some were operating their own successful farms. By the 1930s and early 1940s, these immigrants were running half of the island’s herring fishery and Active Pass Tomatoes & Cucumbers (run by the Active Pass Growers
Association cooperative), the largest hothouse tomato operation in the British Empire. The produce was shipped to market via Canadian Pacific Railway’s steamship, the SS Princess Mary, which docked at Miners Bay three times a week. Herring salteries were also operated by Japanese-Canadians on Galiano Island and North Pender Island.
Japan’s World War II attack on Pearl Harbour changed everything. British Columbia’s Japanese-Canadian residents were now viewed as a threat to national security, triggering a Royal Canadian Mounted Police roundup of all Japanese aliens. The Mounties loaded every member of every Japanese-Canadian family living on Mayne Island, ironically, onto the SS Princess Mary, transporting them to internment camps in the BC interior and southern Alberta. Their only crime? Being Japanese.
By the end of April 1942, every one of Mayne Island’s Japanese families was gone—one-third of the island’s population. Islanders looked after their immigrant friends’ homes, farms, and businesses in anticipation of their return, but the Canadian government declared such action illegal. And anyone caught hiding a friend’s possessions would be jailed.
Racist fears by federal politicians led to the establishment of anti-Japanese settlement laws, prohibiting the evicted residents from returning to their homes. After the war, their homes and businesses were sold at fire-sale prices at government-led “enemy-alien property” auctions. Many of the buyers were Canadian war veterans. For unknown reasons, the Nagata Dinner Bay farm property remained unsold. Most of the families removed from Mayne Island never set foot on the island again.
Ei Kadonaga, born on Mayne Island in 1908, said: “We worked really hard for what we had. Then we had to start all over again.“
In 1987, the Mayne Island Parks and Recreation Commission (MIPRC) devised a plan to use the Nagata Dinner Bay property to honour the island’s Japanese settlers. The intent was to build a commemorative garden. However, it wasn’t until the late Don Herbert (MIPRC Commissioner at the time and “Mr. Gardener”), a new garden committee chaired by Alan Cheek, and a group of volunteers took control of the project in 1999 that the vision started to take shape. Every hour, dollar, material, and plant was donated.
A classic Japanese torii and a plaque (on the large rock) mark the garden entrance (070726).
Plaque designer Alan Cheek made a deliberate error on the metal tablet in recognition of the Japanese belief “that when perfection is attained, it can only be downhill from there on.”
FOR YEARS, A CLASSIC JAPANESE TORII (gateway) built by Mayne Island resident Hans van Tongeren and a plaque mounted on a large rock have marked the entrance to the garden, the threshold between everyday and something sacred. But twenty-plus years of wood buried in damp earth took its toll on the torii’s uprights; they required a facelift. In Spring 2026, volunteers restored the vermilion-coloured torii gate and remounted its “legs” on metal support brackets sunk in concrete. The plaque remains affixed where it’s always been, and still briefly tells the story of Mayne’s pioneering Japanese families, showing the locations of some of their farms. Plaque designer Alan Cheek made a deliberate error on the metal tablet in recognition of the Japanese belief “that when perfection is attained, it can only be downhill from there on.” Cheek also included the Yasumi symbol on the plaque, a nudge to visitors to rest and relax . . . and reflect. In Japanese, the noun Yasumi is defined as meaning: rest, recess, respite; vacation, holiday, absence, suspension; dormancy (of a silkworm prior to moulting).
I asked a born-and-bred Japanese friend, Megumi (now a Kiwi), to translate the symbols on the torii. Apparently, you read these symbols from top to bottom and right to left. Megumi’s e-mail reply was: 和(わ) Harmony and peace; 親睦(しんぼく) Friendship, formal; and 友情(ゆうじょう) Friendship. There are no spaces in Japanese writing. I don’t profess to understand much else of Megumi’s message, but I gather she used the three Japanese writing systems in her translation. My takeaway from her effort is that the welcoming memorial garden torii tells us that this is a place of harmony and peace, where past and present friendships are celebrated.
Beyond the torii, plaque on a rock, and English Japanese Memorial Gardens sign, a short path winds through a ground cover of Salal and Sword fern and under a canopy of Douglas fir and Western redcedar, past a carved-wood eagle head (5th tee box of the Mayne Island disc golf course), to a six-foot fence and KAN-GEI (WELCOME) above the fence gate. The fence protects the garden’s foliage from hungry black-tailed deer. A small sign screwed to the gate says: Attention Dogs, Please Keep Owners On A Lead. A clever reminder.
Inside the grounds proper, a second torii designed and built by Mayne Islander Dennis Marcotte bears multiple plaques memorializing Mayne Island’s Japanese settlers and the individuals behind building the garden, and recognizes project volunteers and patrons. On a metal plate recessed in one of two stone benches, Tottoriken Dosh Kai thanks Mayne Island residents. Across the main path, a replica Japanese charcoal pit kiln is tucked in the garden’s northwest corner.
The principal path passes several Japanese stone lanterns, then splits. A large, covered peace bell designed and built by Mayne Islander Ed Hunter, “In Loving Memory of Shigekazu Kamachi (1919-1995),” beckons you to turn left. A few strides beyond the bell, a marble bench on the edge of a sandstone patio faces a small pond. It offers a “secret” quiet spot to contemplate history to the sound of recirculated water trickling down the rocky streambed to the central pond from where it originated. The path continues through a lattice-walled arbour over a short, arched bridge to a second junction. The footpath to the right follows a Shinto-inspired Zig Zag bridge. Folklore says that traversing a Zig Zag or Yatsuhashi bridge “will divest you of any evil spirits, as they can only follow you in straight lines.”
The tiny island heart of the garden is connected by the Marilyn Chilvers bridge (042026).
An arched, red wooden bridge with safety railings, its posts topped with black finials, beckons you to come its way first; the Zig Zag option can wait. The red bridge connects to a tiny island, transporting visitors to the heart of the garden. A tarnished brass plate on the bridge’s handrail reads: “In loving memory of Marilyn Chilvers.” It conjures thoughts of Jonathan Chilvers’ loss, and the loss of my mom (she loved this place). Japanese culture says that crossing the bridge symbolizes a spiritual journey from our earthly world into nature’s paradise, including the purging of one’s troubles; as well, the bridge summons us to slow down and seek some inner peace by immersing ourselves in the quietude and beauty of Mother Nature.
The memorial garden’s island is a sight to behold. Just off the bridge, watch for the driftwood alligator lurking near the water’s edge. Twenty-five stone steps lead past one resting bench and a multi-tiered Pagoda to a second stone bench with an orca etched in the seat. Can you spot the Great Blue Heron nestled among the cattails and next to Giant rhubarb? I wonder how many marriages the statuesque heron has witnessed from its vantage point (the island is a popular wedding venue).
Retracing your steps up and over the bridge, hang a right at the Japanese Black Pine with hanging rocks. Hanging rocks? Some Japanese gardeners tie rocks to a tree’s branches to reshape the tree. Reaching the east side of the garden, where another brook tumbles under the pathway to the central pond, you’re provided the option to explore the north side of the grounds, the highest point of the garden. Bronze plaques engraved with one or more names are mounted on each of the eight-foot fence sections, honouring a memory or recognizing a contribution to the garden. A couple of meditation shelters break the continuity.
A MAYNE ISLAND JAPANESE GARDEN dedication plaque fixed to a boulder and a Japanese waiting pavilion welcome visitors to the east side of the garden’s pond. The tidy pavilion is a place of memory for at least one person other than islanders of Japanese heritage. A black-on-gold metal plate tells us that hockey player Jeff Butler died far too young. Just south of the structure is the meticulously raked-gravel karesansui (dry landscape garden). There’s the Great Blue Heron again, still standing watch over the island and pond masterpiece, backdropped by the Marilyn Chilvers bridge.
There are plants everywhere. The visually intoxicating array includes Katsura trees, flowering crabapple and plum trees, Japanese cherry trees, hostas, hydrangeas, rhododendrons, irises, and magnolias—more than 100 varieties in total, most donated by island residents and Japanese-Canadian families like the Nagatas and Otzukis. Name tags on many of the plants recognize these generous contributions.
Heading west, back toward the entrance brings you to another fork in the road: left under another torii to a series of Japanese lanterns, or straight ahead to and over the Zig Zag bridge and the completion of your loop around the island and pond. Stepping back through the arbour, past the “secret” quiet spot and hanging peace bell, brings you to yet another lantern. Veering right leads to the Japanese Memorial Garden gate.
I SAT FOR MORE THAN AN HOUR on that chilly January 2005 afternoon, lost in thought in the quiet solitude. Fast-forward to 2026. I’ve just returned from paddling to Dinner Bay for my umpteenth visit to the Japanese Memorial Garden. A lot and little has changed: Jonathon Chilvers no longer lives on the island, Don Herbert has passed away, but the garden itself is mostly unchanged from my first visit. It’s as beautiful, well-maintained, and tranquil as ever. A spot for reflection and recalling memories.
On each of my two or three or four annual visits to Mayne Island’s Japanese Memorial Garden during the past two decades, I felt both dismayed and inspired . . . saddened by how we have treated and continue to treat others, but encouraged by Don Herbert, Tosh Saito, Alan Cheek, and the many volunteers who have created a place where we can remember courageous strangers.
ABOVE: The Japanese Memorial Garden’s Zig Zag bridge (042026).
BELOW: Special memories of my Pender Island family’s visit to the garden in June 2005 (061005).
Learn more about Japanese gardens:
Learn more about Mayne Island’s Japanese families:
On the back side of The Lions Adachi Pavilion in the northwest corner of neighbouring Dinner Bay Park, information boards provide details and pictures of The Japanese Canadians of Dinner Bay and The Japanese Canadians of Mayne Island
Some history of the Japanese Families on Mayne Island: Japanese Families on Mayne Island; Cheek, Alan; c. 2004(correspondence by Mayne Islander Alan Cheek with multiple people)
It didn’t just happen on Mayne
The dispossession of Japanese Canadians on Saltspring Island (Abstract from University of Victoria’s graduate student Brian Smallshaw’s 2017 thesis about the uprooting of Japanese Canadians from their homes on Salt Spring Island during World War Two):
“During World War Two, 77 Japanese Canadians were uprooted from Saltspring Island, and eleven properties were taken from them and later liquidated. The largest belonged to Torazo Iwasaki, and was purchased by the agent for the Custodian of Enemy Property, Gavin Mouat.
“In contradiction to the widely held view that Japanese Canadians were stoic and accepting of the injustice they faced, a number of Japanese Canadian Saltspringers fiercely resisted what was being done to them. The Iwasaki family launched a court case against the government in 1967 that went all the way to the Supreme Court, and in the face of continued racism the Murakami family returned to Saltspring to rebuild their lives. This thesis investigates the position of the Japanese Canadians in the settler society on Saltspring and how racisms were manifested within it, the government’s decision to liquidate Japanese Canadian properties, and the resistance and resilience of some of the island’s Japanese Canadians.
“Racist politicians, including the MLA representing the island, were calling for the removal of Japanese Canadians from the west coast. They led the drive to ethnically cleanse British Columbia, but their success depended on the cooperation and acquiescence of many others. This microhistory explains how this process took place on Saltspring Island, while examining the larger story of the decision to liquidate and challenging the legality of the government’s actions. Seventy-five years after the uprooting, a frank acknowledgment of past injustices will be necessary for the full reconciliation of Japanese Canadian survivors and the Saltspring community.”
Read more about Japanese settlers in the Salt Spring Island Archives: Japanese Canadians of Saltspring Island
More SGI History: Japanese Charcoal Pit Kilns
Restored or replica Japanese charcoal pit kilns and archaeological traces of charcoal-making pits are found throughout the Southern Gulf Islands: on Mayne Island in the Japanese Memorial Garden (replica pit kiln); on Galiano Island in five locations; on Salt Spring Island in Mouat Park; and on Saturna Island, Pender Island, and Prevost Island.
Two men, using only a shovel and an axe, took a week to build a pit kiln. They lined the pear-shaped pit with rocks to absorb and radiate heat. A small fireplace, with a chimney and two air holes or flues, was positioned opposite the pit’s narrow opening. Six large logs were laid along the bottom of the pit, spaced so the air would be drawn to the fireplace and chimney. Smaller 15-20 centimetre logs (approximately 6“-8”) were placed across the larger ones, and this base was then packed with several cords of logs, stacked vertically. The logs were covered with a layer of branches and leaves, with a final blanket of soil or sand clay. Birch, poplar, and alder were the main woods used. The average charcoal pit measured 5 metres long (approximately 16 feet), 4 metres wide (approximately 13 feet), and 1.5 metres deep (approximately 5 feet).
Users started a fire at the front end of the pit using twigs and small branches. Once the fire was well established, smoke would pour out of the “chimney,” and the wood would begin to smoulder. The burning lasted three to five days. Controlling the air intake so that the wood wouldn’t be totally consumed required skill. A tub of water was used to cool down the smouldering process. When the smoke turned a translucent purple, they covered the flues, cutting off oxygen to the fire. Once cooled, the kiln was opened to reveal between 450 and 900 kilograms of charcoal (approximately 1,000-2,000 lbs).
The charcoal was essential to the local explosives industry (gunpowder used in dynamite is 15% charcoal), and to local soapmaking and salmon canning businesses where it was used as fuel.
Learn more:
Japanese Charcoal Pit Kiln (The Galiano Club); these charcoal pit kilns were modelled after those used in Japan’s Wakayama Prefecture
BELOW: A replica of a traditional Japanese charcoal pit kiln in Mayne Island’s Japanese Memorial Garden (060226).
