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.
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 here). 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, with stops in Raymond, Magrath, Cardston, Waterton Lakes National Park, Picture Butte, Iron Springs and Taber. Accommodations will be at premium 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, Raymond and Taber.
About the Tour:
Tour begins in Calgary at 12:00 noon on Saturday, August 23rd and ends in Calgary at 1:00 pm on Friday, August 29th. Travel to and from Calgary can be arranged upon request and paid separately.
Tour fee includes: all travel in a washroom equipped highway bus coach, six nights of premium hotel accommodations in Lethbridge and Taber, six breakfasts, seven lunches, all entrance fees and five full course dinners (dinner on Aug. 25th in Lethbridge is open), meetings with local residents and experts, visit to Waterton Lakes National Park and wellness and healing sessions with professional facilitators.
This tour will include healing and wellness activities as an integral part of the tour, led by trained facilitators. These sessions will seek to address for the first time the collective historical trauma and intergenerational impacts created when between 1942 – 1949, some 4,000 Japanese Canadians were forcibly uprooted from their homes along the West Coast and moved to the sugar beet fields of Southern Alberta.