The Sugar Beet Fields Again:
2025 Sugar Beet Wellness Tour
As a part of the Japanese Canadian Legacies Society’s intergenerational wellness program, Tonari Gumi will be organizing a Sugar Beet Wellness Tour during the last week of August in 2025.
Between 1942 and 1949, some 22,000 Japanese Canadians were unjustly removed from the B.C. West Coast. From within this group, more than 4,000 Japanese Canadians likely spent some time during this period working in the sugar beet fields of Southern Alberta. For many, it was an indescribably traumatic experience. Over six days, tour participants will be able to visit where the sugar beet fields were located, talk with individuals who went through this experience, actually see a sugar beet field and where sugar beet workers lived. Through this experience, we hope that the participants and their family members might better understand what happened during this period, have a chance to share their feelings and heal together.
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The 2025 Japanese Canadian Sugar Beet Wellness Tour is scheduled to take place between Saturday, August 23rd and Friday, August 29th in 2025. The 2025 Tour is being led by David Iwaasa who was born in Southern Alberta and led a previous sugar beet tour in 2019 (see the documentary about that trip at https://youtu.be/xbRjYGqEMxQ). Patti Ayukawa will participate as our Healing Circle Facilitator, the same role she had for the 2024 Nikkei National Museum internment camp tour and the 2024 Vancouver Island Obon Tour.
This tour will start and end in Calgary, Alberta and will travel via a bathroom equipped highway coach bus from Calgary to Lethbridge and Taber, with stops in Raymond, Picture Butte, Iron Springs and Coaldale. Accommodations will be at 3-star hotels with breakfast included. In addition to visiting the various locations, meetings and gatherings with local JC’s and knowledgeable researchers and historians will be organized along with healing circles and discussions in Lethbridge and Taber.
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In order to encourage inter-generational participation, a limited number of partial subsidy scholarships for descendants of sugar beet survivors are also available on a first come, first serve basis. Full details are still being finalized but currently the adult tour cost from Calgary (including, bus, hotels and most meals for 7 days and 6 nights) is expected to be about CA$1,800 per person. Total number of participants will be about 50 individuals.
How to Sign Up:
In order to secure a spot on the tour a CA$50.00 deposit (fully refundable until after the final detailed tour costs are announced on March 31, 2025) is being requested.
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Any questions about the tour should be directed via email to:
taka.iida2025@tonarigumi.ca
