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Kiyo Domai has little or no memory of his family being one of around 2,000 ordered to vacate the city before April 1, 1942.
Even so, there was one painful, emotional vision, etched onto his mom's memory and passed onto him, that lingers when asked about the Japanese internment of the Second World War.
"We had German neighbours, who, I'm told, we were very friendly with," said Domai, now 74.
"My mother remembered telling the German family we had to leave and everyone was crying. I don't know what happened to them. That part was strange."
To this day, that irony - a family originating from the country the world, including Canada, was at war with being allowed to continue with their lives, while the Japanese, in the wake of the infamous Pearl Harbor attack of Dec. 1941, had to ship out - is not lost on Domai.
And although he's not even remotely bitter - something he thanks his father, Nobuo, for - he often wonders what life might have been like if the Domais, including his mom, Hisae, and newly-born and slightly frail sister, Toshiko, were never frog-marched from their idealic home in the former Eburne community, where the River Rock casino now stands.
"We had our own house, a detached one I think, which was rare at the time," said Domai, whose fisherman grandfather, Kyujiru Domai, immigrated to Steveston from Mio village, near Wakayama, at the turn of the century, followed by Kiyo's parents around 1930.
"My father was a gardener, while all of our relatives lived in Steveston, in company homes for the cannery.
"We had a big yard with an orchard. We grew cherries, plums, apples and flowers, and wealthy people on their way to the racetrack at Lansdowne used to stop and buy the fruit and flowers from a stand my dad set up. I guess we had a pretty nice life."
That charmed life, however, was turned upside down - as it was for the 21,079 Japanese-Canadians in B.C. (around 2,000 from Richmond) ordered to evacuate the coast - when Canada declared war on Japan and Japanese-Canadians were deemed a threat to national security.
The Domai family, including Kiyo's grandfather, was packed off to a near abandoned, former mining town, Sandon, in the Kootenays, while Kiyo's father was sent to work on the road camps along the Yellowhead Highway from Kamloops to Edmonton.
The winters of north-east B.C. were, of course, harsher than anything Richmond could throw at the Domais. In the first winter, Kiyo's grandfather died of pneumonia.
"It was a godforsaken place; only seeing daylight for about four hours a day," he said.
"(My grandfather) was used to living his life on a boat. He found it tougher than us."
Now with their father back by their side - he was allowed to return for the grandfather's funeral - the Domais moved in 1943 onto a more permanent internment site at Lemon Creek, in the Slocan Valley, before the displaced families were given the ultimatum around 1945 to move back to Japan or shift even further east over the Rocky Mountains.
"There was a lot of emotion at that point for families; it tore people apart," said Domai.
"We went to live and work in Alberta on a sugar beet farm in Taber, near Medicine Hat. The winters there were even more severe, though."
It was there that a third and fourth child was born into the Domai family: another
daughter Hiroko and a second son, Koji.
"We learned very quickly how to farm and how to survive out there and my father also worked at the local vegetable cannery and became the cook there; my dad could take on anything," said Domai.
The Domais saw out the rest of the '40s in Alberta, still in exile. But, with the war long over, Japanese-Canadians were allowed in '49 to roam freely once more and Domai's father embarked on a scouting mission in 1950 back to Richmond.
Despite failed attempts to buy back the confiscated, former family home in Eburne, Domai's father made the call to settle back in the city that they were unceremoniously punted from eight years previous.
""I think that was tough for my dad, not being able to get the house back," said Domai. "Instead, we moved into a two-storey home on stilts on the water at Garry Point Park, near where Pajo's concession stand is today.
"But my dad was not the kind of man to be bitter and if he was, he didn't show it.
"I'm grateful to him for that, because we would've carried that around with us for the rest of our lives. It can poison your mind."
Domai's mom lived to 96, his dad to 93. Both lived in Steveston for the rest of their lives, while Domai went on to attend Richmond High School, UBC and became a lifelong teacher in Surrey before retiring.
He now sits on the Steveston Buddhist Temple executive and volunteers much of his free time there.
Asked about feeling a sense of injustice from the internment, Domai said, "The only kind of negative emotion I feel is that I never got a chance to really know my grandfather.
"When I reached 61, that was the age he died, that was a big moment for me."
It's just 12 letters - "Shikata ga nai." But its meaning - often used by Japanese-Canadians when summing up internment - captures the spirit of a people caught in the crossfire.
Its translation: "Can't be helped," or "there's nothing that can be done about it."
Despite losing her mother to cancer and 15-year-old sister to rheumatic fever while interned in Alberta, lifelong Richmondite Alice Kokubo, 84, offers up "shikata ga nai" when reliving internment.
"What the government did to us, it was because of the war, it had no choice. That's what we mean by 'shikata ga nai,'" said Kokubo, older cousin to Kiyo Domai.
And given that some among the mass evacuation of Japanese-Canadians were given only 24 hours' notice - cars, cameras and radios were also confiscated for "protective measures" and a curfew imposed - only makes their "shrugging of the shoulders" attitude all the more remarkable.
Born to Steveston fisherman father Ken Sakiyama and mother Aiko Atode, Kokubo was 12 when the internment order was made.
Her family enjoyed a carefree life in Steveston, all living on her grandfather's fruit and vegetable farm on Railway Avenue.
"Father went fishing, my grandfather and the women worked on the farm; everything was very easy," said Kokubo, who attended Lord Byng school.
"I was in Grade 6 at the time, I had lots of friends," Kokubo said.
Like her younger cousin Kiyo, Kokubo and her family were shipped off to Sandon, where they stayed for two years.
A few years living in Lemon Creek and then, when the war was over, a similar path as the Domai family was beaten - further east into Canada and to Taber, Alberta.
In December 1949, the Kokubos moved back to Richmond, but the farm she grew up on had been confiscated.
"My father went back to being a fisherman. I was 19 by that time," said Kokubo, who still lives close by at No. 1 and Francis roads.
"We rented a home on No. 1 Road and Steveston Highway. It was very strange moving back, it wasn't the same Steveston I remembered as a child."
If Ihei and Yae Hirata harboured any bitterness about having the life they'd worked hard for ripped from them, they managed to bottle it up and put in on a high shelf, well beyond the reach of their son, Hap.
"Mom and dad never really talked about it," said Hap, who was interned aged three, along with older brother Kazuo, 18, a local fisherman like his father, and sister Hatsyou, 19, who worked in the cannery.
"I would try to talk to (my father) and ask him, but if he was feeling angry or whatever, he never showed it. He would say, 'just carry on,' or 'it's all water under the bridge,' or 'what's done is done.'
"Maybe deep in people's hearts there is (some bitterness). If there was, my parents must have buried it and used it to make them work harder and be stronger."
Forced to abandon their "nice and large" two-level home at the end of No. 2 and Dyke roads - which Hap's father built himself - the Hiratas were "lucky" in that they got to choose their exile location.
"It was a very sad situation and a very traumatic time for so many people," said Hirata.
"We chose to go to Alberta and work on a sugar beet farm. The only thing I remember was this being one big adventure. I got to go on the train!" And, like the irony that befell Kiyo Domai and his family, Hirata found himself surrounded by Germans while in Alberta.
"I remember most of my friends in my class were German," he said.
"And the farm we lived on was owned by a German family."
In 1950, the Hiratas moved back to Richmond, after Hap's father heard there was a move to bring the fishermen back to Steveston. "My dad had no problems moving back. He went back with my sister to get things set up," said Hirata.
"The cannery offered a house for very low rent. They spent a month there getting things ready for the rest of us.
"Dad did go back to look at our old house, but he never tried to buy it or anything."
Hirata, now 75, has spent the rest of his life growing up in Steveston, attending Lord Byng and Richmond High.
"There was more discrimination there than there ever was living in Alberta," he recalled.
Now, a retired sales manager and well-recognized volunteer in the Steveston community, Hirata teaches judo at the Steveston Judo club, which was started in 1953 by 10 Japanese fishermen. He was one of the club's first students.
