B.C. Japanese community afraid of losing access to online history

With physical copies difficult to obtain, members of B.C.'s Japanese community are worried they will lose access to a newspaper collection spanning decades after a local university announced it was wiping it from its online library.

The New Canadian was first published in Vancouver in 1938 by second-generation Japanese Canadians and ran until 2001. It covered historical moments, including the internment of Japanese-Canadians during the Second World War. 

It is currently available through Simon Fraser University's (SFU) library website, but the library says it has to remove it as it migrates its collection to a new system. 

Larissa Kondo is a fourth-generation Japanese-Canadian and she created a petition earlier this month to keep the newspapers online to ensure the preservation of access to public historical and cultural information.

As of Friday, there were 780 signatures on the petition. 

"I was concerned that the average Canadian was going to lose online access," said Kondo. "Even though [physical copies] are open to the general public, it's hard to get there, or they might not be able to manage the volume that they could online." 

Without digital access, researchers and readers can only find the archives in person at the Nikkei National Museum and Cultural Centre in Burnaby or at the Multicultural History Society of Ontario (MHSO) in Toronto. 

"When you have digital access, you can just do searches by keywords. That's a luxury of the digital world. And when you're going analog, there isn't the same type of speed. So it is more of a manual process," said Sherri Kajiwara, director of the Nikkei National Museum and Cultural Centre. 

According to SFU's website, the publications are being taken offline is to migrate "to a more modern and user-friendly website mid-2024." 

Currently, SFU is home to digital copies of The New Canadian and 28 other community papers — all of them to be removed once they have found a new home.

The university says as part of the move, the library reached out to the original content owners and stakeholders to review the newspapers and collections. 

MHSO says in an email to CBC that the library made the decision to take the newspapers down without its consultation. However, the university says it will continue to store the archives until the owners can find an online alternative. 

It is expected the newspapers will no longer be available as of the fall. 

"It was a source of identity. It was a source of social news. During the wartime period, it was the only Japanese Canadian community paper that was allowed to publish," said Lynn Kobayashi, president of the National Association of Japanese Canadians. 

Kobayashi's grandfather was the Japanese editor of The New Canadian. 

SFU said in an email that due to financial pressures the university library's move to a new hosting platform must be done within its current budget, and "continuing to host resources owned by other organizations is unsustainable for the SFU library." 

Keeping these documents online is important to Kondo, not just for herself but to preserve their family's history. 

"My grandfather and brothers protested when they were supposed to be sent to road camps to do basically forced labour," Kondo said. "As a result, they were sent to prisoner-of-war camps in Ontario where they were housed with captured Nazis." 

The Multicultural History Society says it is working towards a solution to keep The New Canadian and the other 28 papers available online. 

It says it will make an announcement when a formal agreement has been reached with a new host and the society's board has reviewed and approved the agreement.