The white survivor was named, the Japanese victims were not: the story of Burnaby’s 1909 railway disaster

A hundred and thirteen years ago, disaster struck in Burnaby.

On November 28, 1909, Metro Vancouver was living through a ferocious rainstorm. Newspaper du jour, The Vancouver World, called the storm “the worst in years.”

A train, filled with mostly Japanese labourers, was on its way to the Fraser Valley at 6am in the midst of the storm so that the workers could conduct track maintenance on the Great Northern Railway.

As the train’s locomotive passed over Kilby Creek (now called Lost Creek) on the north shore of Burnaby Lake, the culvert beneath suddenly gave way. The dark, rickety boxcar carrying the Japanese labourers plunged into the ravine below.

A flatcar behind it followed and sliced right through the boxcar—killing 23 men, some instantly. Fifteen others were injured.

The heavy rains hampered rescue efforts throughout the day.

Dangerous conditions for racialized workers

“The papers described how the work crew had suffered all the casualties, and how the engineer and caboose crews had jumped to safety upon feeling the crash. No one in the boxcar had been able to escape the calamity,” reads a booklet on the tragedy by the BC Labour Heritage Centre.

“Score of Japanese met death in wreck,” ran the headline in The Province the following day. “One white man badly injured.”

The white man, George W. Kemp, was named in the newspaper and his injuries detailed. The 23 dead Japanese Canadian labourers were not.

But that’s not surprising, given the rampant anti-Asian sentiment in BC at the time. The early 20th century in BC was not, as the Labour Heritage Centre put it, “a friendly place for workers from Japan.”

In fact, the provincial government had recently prohibited many railways from hiring Asian workers—and the ones that did hid them away on quiet stretches of track, where they were less likely to be noticed by the general public.

While this railway disaster affected Japanese Canadians specifically, racialized workers from many parts of the world had similar experiences in BC.

“They would get less pay, and they were often assigned some of the most risky work, … the risk being that there’s more injuries, there’s more deaths, a lot of it doesn’t get reported, or you don’t hear the stories about it,” said Lorene Oikawa, president of the National Association of Japanese Canadians (NAJC).

“So when this anniversary comes up [and] we post information about it on the NAJC social media, for example, there’s so many comments, and we get so much feedback saying ‘I’ve never heard about this before.’”

Oikawa attributes that to a historical lack of interest of mainstream media in reporting stories that mostly affected racialized people and workers.

Parallels in BC today

She says it’s important for us to look back on these incidents—not only because they are part of our history in BC, but because there are many modern parallels that continue on today.

“For example, farm workers have been crammed into a truck that doesn’t have proper seating or protection for them, and then workers are killed. That’s not that long ago,” she said.

“We have seen that now. It’s that adage, right, about if we don’t know our history, we’re doomed to repeat the mistakes.”

In 1909 in Burnaby, the Japanese labourers were crammed into an unsafe boxcar and unable to escape when disaster struck, while engineers and others located up in the caboose were able to escape.

Oikawa pointed out that, even today, in 2021, racialized Canadians are more likely to work in lower-paying, higher-risk jobs—including as migrant farm workers, but also in the front-line positions more at risk during the pandemic.

There’s also been an alarming increase in anti-Asian sentiment in BC during the pandemic, with startling parallels to the situation a hundred years ago.

Here in Burnaby, RCMP reported a 350% increase in anti-Asian hate crimes reported to police between 2019 and 2020. Of all hate crimes reported in Burnaby, 63% involved anti-Asian hate—and many hate crimes go unreported to police.

Oikawa said that while much of that racism has been directed at Chinese Canadians, Japanese Canadians have been caught in the crossfire—in some cases, bringing up more historical trauma.

In one case, an elder from the community who was put in an internment camp for Japanese Canadians when she was a child was screamed at by a woman in a park who said “go back where you came from, you’re the one that’s killing us.”

“It really shook her, because she said it was like a repeat of that whole time during the 1940s, when people were screaming at Japanese Canadians, even though they were loyal Canadians and lived there for how long,” Oikawa said.

“And the people were saying ‘you’re the enemy.’ And she said she gets really scared.”

The aftermath

In the days that followed the Great Northern Railway Disaster, mainstream newspapers noted how lucky it was that the work train had been caught in the washout—preventing a passenger train from Seattle from encountering it later that day.

Japanese language newspapers confirmed the identities of the 23 victims of the railway disaster and chronicled their funeral proceedings. Many of the men were buried at Mountain View Cemetery in South Vancouver.

“The Continental News further explained that some of the workmen had earlier heard that the track was dangerous and unstable, and great care should be taken to watch for problems. Even a few whites agreed that the railway company owed the workers that consideration,” the Labour Heritage Centre wrote.

“Another Japanese work crew was sent to Kilby Creek later that day to clean up the wreckage. Conditions were so difficult and gruesome that the crew was paid twice their usual rate. A few days later, the remaining members of the Katsuda gang were asked to get back to work. Not surprisingly, no one was motivated to do so.”

An inquest held the week after the railway disaster found that while the boxcar wasn’t designed for safety, blame for the accident couldn’t be attached to any person because it had been caused by the rainstorm.

110 years later, the City of Burnaby and the Labour Heritage Centre installed a plaque along the Central Valley Greenway near the site of the tragedy to remember those who lost their lives in the railway disaster.

The names of those who died are as follows: Chuzaemon Mizoguchi, Wakakichi Kawabata, Kaichi Katsuda, Toyoki Miyaura, Fukusaburo Murakami, Tatsubei Maeda, Kaneyoshi Murakami, Kyujiro Narita, Tougoro Niiguma, Senkurou Miyazaki, Genshiro Osono, Senkichi Sakai, T. Takido, Kokichi Watanabe, Unzo Takaoka, Kitaro Takeya, Kijiro Tosaka, Usaku Yamashita, Yuji Hirano, Hanzo Horimoto, Torakichi Saida, J. Kawabata, and Suehiko Sumida.