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The Centre features beautiful gardens

Founded to assist in the survival of internees

The Kyowakai Society was founded in 1943 by the New Denver internees to assist them in their survival and to negotiate on their behalf with the BC Security Commission (BCSC). The BCSC was the provincial civil committee authorized to implement the removal of Japanese Canadians from BC's Pacific coast. The NIMC first opened its doors to the general public in July of 1994 and displays three original internment shacks and the original internment Kyowakai Society community building set in a memorial garden designed by a world renowned master Japanese gardener who was interned in the area. The centre is entirely self-supporting and its operations are administrated on a volunteer basis through the Board of Directors of the Kyowakai Society. The NIMC season is from May through September. School tours are available by appointment once the snow has melted in early April.

At the time of the internment New Denver's population had dwindled to 300 people. Approximately 1,500 Japanese Canadians were interned in the New Denver camps. During the war every camp had a "kai" (association) which managed the day-to-day challenges of survival. This Kyowakai Society is the only wartime Japanese-Canadian internment organization still in operation. The senior members of the society initiated the creation of the Nikkei Internment Memorial Centre to establish a place of memory for future generations of Nikkei and to provide a public site through which the complex story of the Japanese-Canadian internment might be told.

At the end of the war, in 1944, while Japanese-Americans were being freed from their internment camps and permitted to return to their settlements along the Pacific Ocean coast of the United States, Japanese-Canadians faced a second massive uprooting. Their coastal homes and possessions were confiscated and sold and the BCSC ordered the exile of "those persons of Japanese race" out of British Columbia and prohibited them from returning until 1949. This is known within the Canadian Nikkei community as the Second Uprooting.

New Denver played a significant role in the Second Uprooting. At the end of the war all the internment camps were closed except for the 'Orchard' site. It was one of five internment camps situated in the New Denver area. In 1943, a tuberculosis sanatorium was built in the Orchard to serve the internees. During the Second Uprooting those whom the BCSC deemed "TB cases, incurables and the very old without children to look after them" were moved to the Orchard from the outlying camps. These people and their families, numbering approximately 1,200, were assigned to the buildings vacated by those who were forced to leave. They would remain under the authority of the BCSC for the next twelve years. It was not until 1957 that the commission was dissolved and the shacks and property were deeded to the several hundred surviving Japanese Canadians. The process and length of the Second Uprooting destined New Denver to having the only sizeable post-war Japanese Canadian Internment community in British Columbia and the Kyowakai Society stays active to serve the small number of remaining New Denver Nikkei to this day.