The Nikkei Internment Memorial Centre
Nik•kei (日系): people or a person of Japanese heritage. Commonly used in Japan to refer to people of Japanese ancestry that are living abroad as citizens of other countries.
The NIMC’s purpose is to collect, preserve, conserve, research, exhibit, and interpret objects which represent the life and condition of the Nikkei living in the New Denver and West Kootenay camps between 1942 and 1957. The collection’s focus is on the social rather than the political aspects of life for the Nikkei during and after the uprooting.
In 2012 the Village of New Denver, working with the New Denver Kyowakai Society and the Burnaby-based Nikkei National Museum and Cultural Centre began a digitization project to provide online public access to photos of all the items in the NIMC’s artefact and archival collections. The digitization project occurs for a few months of each year and is grant-dependent.
The collections from the Nikkei National Museum (Burnaby), Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre (Toronto), and the Kamloops Japanese Canadian Museum & Archives can also be searched though this database.
Please take a moment to look at the photographs of the collections by visiting: http://nikkeimuseum.org/index.php
In 2018-2019, we have also partnered with the UBC Okanagan to make our photos available online at the British Columbia Regional Digitized History site: https://bcrdh.ca/.