For three decades, the Japanese tea house and gardens in Gorge Park had been a fixture of Victorian life. In 1907, Hayato Takata and Yoshitaro Kishida opened the gardens, designed by Kishida’s father, Isaburo, who later developed the Japanese section of Butchart Gardens, a national historic site in Victoria. At the centre was a tea house with an open dining room and grand views. Throughout the gardens hung hundreds of Japanese lanterns, lighting wisteria trellises and cherry trees. Bamboo bridges crossed streams, and paths wound through a mixed landscape of local and imported plants. Alongside the tea house were a dancehall and amusements, including the popular “Japanese ball game,” where visitors could win prizes imported from Japan. For one Victoria resident, “it was music to my ears to hear my mother say ‘we will all go to the Gorge for the day.’”

By 1942, when they were forced to leave, Kishida had long since sold his share of the business to Hayato Takata’s brother, Kensuke, and the two Takata families were living at the gardens. This achievement had been hard-won. The province barred them from dozens of fields of employment and forbade them from voting. Their creativity and perseverance allowed them to support their multigenerational family and build a home in British Columbia. (After regaining their freedom following the war, the family would leave their life’s work behind, relocating to Toronto.)

Today, the Township of Esquimalt is acknowledging its past while building for the future, recognizing the roles of local residents and officials in the destruction of the tea house and working to correct the erasure caused by these acts of uprooting and dispossession. In 2018, the Victoria Nikkei Cultural Society began a campaign to convince the township to create a building in the park to honour the Japanese Canadian history there. University of Victoria researchers joined the initiative. Dillon Takata — Kensuke’s great-grandson and the first member of the family to call Victoria home since 1942 — also joined, along with his wife, Lisa. The campaign gained broad public support, convincing many in the region that this history needed to be honoured and told.