More than a century ago, on a craggy, insignificant rock out in the Strait of Georgia, a cold, sleep-deprived and scared young man looked for an escape.
Tsunekichi Katsuyama was in his mid-20s and had only recently landed in British Columbia. Hired in the winter of 1900 to work as a servant at a remote lighthouse on Entrance Island, just east of Nanaimo, Katsuyama was part of the first generation of documented Japanese people working in B.C.’s emerging industries.
Far from his home country and isolated from his countrymen, Katsuyama began to find himself haunted by a series of unrelenting terrors. Ghastly faces in the window. The flash of a gun, a knife glistening. Deep, dark laughter, and threats to his life.
Now, as he looked out to the ocean before him, Katsuyama finally caught a break — a fishing vessel passing near the island.
Headline from the Province.
Lighthouses — with their proximity to the menace of dark, churning seas — are often associated with weird, supernatural happenings beyond human comprehension.
Ghosts and monsters probably aren’t real. But stories like Katsuyama’s reveal truths about humans, the ways we think and the things we do.
This 126-year-old story also reflects the times Katsuyama lived in and his experiences as a young Japanese man living and working at the turn of the century in British Columbia.
Video via BC Lighthouse Keeper on YouTube.
Yesterday’s lighthouse, today’s heritage site
If you’ve ever travelled in the inner passage between Vancouver Island and the Lower Mainland, you might have seen Entrance Island.
From the right flank of the ferry leaving Nanaimo, it’s barely there — a tiny, rocky island, more like an islet, with not much in the way of livability. On Google Maps, it doesn’t show up until you zoom in closely.
The original lighthouse was a simple, squarish tower perched on top of a gabled building roof, completed in 1876.
As coal mining became one of Nanaimo’s major industries in the 19th century, navigational aids became critical for the high volume of ships carrying cargo — between Departure Bay in Nanaimo and Horseshoe Bay on the Lower Mainland, as well as to other locations on the West Coast.
The lighthouse on Entrance Island was built, in part, to create a “triangle of light” between Entrance Island, Point Atkinson in West Vancouver and a “lightship at the mouth of the Fraser,” likely the South Sand Heads lightship.
“On Entrance Island, before the lights at Point Atchinson and Fraser Mouth are lost, the light will appear,” the Nanaimo Free Press described the upcoming project in 1875. “This light will clearly indicate the position of Nanaimo Harbour and also of Departure Bay. It will be a great boon to the shipping visiting both ports.”
But the construction of the lighthouse was marred by controversy. Before it was completed, three workmen died on the job and, twice, the businessmen contracted for construction left without paying workers and suppliers.
Aside from the roar of the Pacific lashing the island and the occasional sound of a passing ship, nights on the island are quiet. In the early days, the job of the lighthouse keeper could be quite lonely, and cold.
Historic lighthouse photo courtesy of Library and Archives Canada, PA-164795.
Once, in the winter of 1884, the Entrance Island lighthouse keeper, Robert Gray, went out in a small boat during a storm to get coal so that he could keep himself — and the light — going. If the lighthouse keeper didn’t frequently pour boiling hot water over the lantern windows, they could become encrusted with frost, and the light would not be seen through them, Gray told the Nanaimo Free Press.
Long before Tsunekichi Katsuyama arrived, strange happenings already seemed to be taking place near the island. At about half past 2 in the morning of July 28, 1897, a couple reported seeing a bright, powerful light swinging slowly or floating thousands of feet “above Entrance Island or in that direction.”
It was described by the Victoria Daily Times in supernatural terms, as “another specimen of the ‘ignis fatuus’” which means “foolish flame” in Latin. The term is also used to refer to the will-o’-the-wisp phenomenon.
Lighthouse keepers, from their vantage point, were sometimes trusted sources of regular shipping news and weather updates. And the Entrance Island lighthouse was used as a landmark and navigational aid, including for boat racers from Nanaimo and Gabriola.
Photo for The Tyee by Tyler Olsen.
Today, the original lighthouse is no more, replaced by a heritage-designated tower built in 1971.
The current “apple core” tower is still operational as a lighthouse but has been fully automated since the late ’90s. Workers are still employed at the site, according to a spokesperson for the Canadian Coast Guard, who said light stations today are “typically staffed with a principal and assistant keeper.”
Lighthouse keepers usually get on and off the island by helicopter, from a pad located near the centre of the island.
Clustered around the tower are six other salmon-coloured, gabled buildings of varying sizes, including “two dwellings, a radio/engine room, a boathouse, a winch house and an equipment building,” the coast guard spokesperson said.
What happened on Entrance Island
Much about what happened that winter on Entrance Island has been lost to the passage of time.
Katsuyama and his employer at the lighthouse are both dead, as are their children and most who knew them at the time. We can’t know for sure what was on their minds during this period, and we can’t ascertain intentions. But we do know some essential facts about what caused Katsuyama to flee the rocky outpost.
For many days and nights on Entrance Island, Katsuyama had been beset by dark and mysterious forces that seemed determined to do him ill.
After Katsuyama left the island and disembarked from the fishing boat in Nanaimo, he eventually found himself at the Yokohama restaurant on Victoria Crescent, where he had his “first sound night’s sleep” in over a week.
About 100 other Japanese men lived and worked in Nanaimo at the time, and when local newspapers arrived at the restaurant the following day, they found “the Japanese colony” — their description for locals of Japanese descent — listening closely to Katsuyama as he recounted his experiences “over and over again.” They had been up “the greater part of the night.”
As Katsuyama told his story, he referred to detailed notes he had written during his time on the island. He was described in the Nanaimo Free Press as “bright looking and intelligent,” and he did not “appear to be mentally unbalanced.”
In the presence of the newspaper reporters and others gathered, Katsuyama said he had been visited by something dreadful and ghastly while on Entrance Island, and he swore that he would never return.
It all started at about 8 p.m. on the evening of Feb. 26.
He had gone out for a bucket of coal when he heard a “rustle of garments.” He looked towards the sound. Suddenly before him, illuminated by moonlight, stood a tall man wearing some sort of mask over his face, and a woman, strikingly pale in complexion, both dressed in white.
The two figures stood there for about 15 minutes, Katsuyama told the Nanaimo Free Press, before disappearing silently into the night.
On another evening, to his alarm, the visitors returned. As he lay in his bunk, he heard a tapping sound at the window. When he looked, he found the figures gazing at him from the other side, a Province article reported.
“Sometimes, both a woman and a man showed themselves at his bedroom window, armed with gun and knife, and threatened him in sepulchral tones, ‘I’ll kill you Mr. Katsuyama, you killed my brother, I’ll kill you,’” the article said. “Sometimes the ghastly apparition groaned, and at other times gave vent to a deep ‘Ha, ha, ha.’”
The figures soon began to visit him in the day as well, and eventually they would be haunting him “at all hours of the day and night.”
The visitors often changed shape. They would hide Katsuyama’s clothes, open and shut doors and heave potatoes or coals at each other in the cellar.
And sometimes, as Katsuyama watched, the tall man would shoot at the pale woman with a gun that produced a visible flash, but no smoke and no smell of sulphur.
Katsuyama also recalled seeing something resembling a beast “with the horrible face like a monkey.”
The young man would arm himself with a poker but could never get close enough to the figures to investigate or land a blow. They kept him up for many nights, he said.
Headline from the Nanaimo Free Press.
After hearing Katsuyama’s story, members of the Japanese community in Nanaimo asked the police to investigate the matter, according to the Nanaimo Free Press.
The day after Katsuyama left the island, 55-year-old lightkeeper Montague G. Clark told the Province that it “was probably done by some practical jokers.” The province reported that Clark “never saw any ghosts or ‘spooks’ out there, and doesn’t believe in such phenomena.”
Katsuyama “was something of a dreamer,” Clark told the Nanaimo Free Press a week later. “Each morning he would regale the family with tales of the ghosts he had seen during the night. He never said anything about the clothes being carried away while on the island.”
Sometime later, a group of Japanese men went to the lighthouse, armed with guns. They were ordered off the island by the lighthouse keeper, who told them “there were no ghosts round these parts.”
By the end of March, the identity of the spectre haunting Katsuyama became clear.
M.G. Clark Jr., the lighthouse keeper’s son, eventually confessed. It seemed he “had a good time for a few days and nights,” the Province reported. With an accomplice, Jack Freeman, he would dress up with a sheet, mask and white beard and make appearances wherever Katsuyama and Freeman were. “Jack, who was in on the plot, would tremble at the sight of the ghost.”
Two years later, the lighthouse keeper, Clark Sr., was commended for saving two souls from drowning. But the lighthouse keeper also oversaw several other controversies during his long tenure at Entrance Island. Donald Graham’s Keepers of the Light: A History of British Columbia’s Lighthouses and Their Keepers described the alleged mistreatment of employees, unpaid wages, the disappearance of an assistant and investigations into complaints of the light being out or unmanned. Clark Sr. was eventually dismissed more than a decade after his son’s ghost prank.
Japanese in British Columbia
Looking back, we can see the shape of some of the larger forces that affected Katsuyama’s life.
The fortunes of Japanese workers in British Columbia at the time were often affected and paralleled by Great Britain’s relationship with Japan.
Closer ties between the two countries in the late 19th century and early 20th century allowed trade and immigration to become more regularized, and B.C.’s emerging mining, fishing and farming industries depended on an influx of labour and capital not readily available in the province.
Katsuyama was likely recruited from his Tokyo-area home by Japanese immigration agencies. The private companies promoted emigration and connected workers with employment abroad on commission after Japan ended its seclusion policy and allowed its people to leave the country.
But the growth in the number of working Japanese people in B.C. helped fuel a rise in domestic nativist politics, despite the modest numbers of immigrants and official reassurances by the Japanese government that the workers were not a threat to white workers.
The reaction wasn’t new. In 1885, more than a decade before Katsuyama stepped foot on Vancouver Island, the Canadian government implemented the Chinese head tax, a fee paid only by Chinese immigrants, in a racist reaction to immigration.
Public sentiment against Japanese workers began to build in the late 19th century, with some workers complaining to the government about being “supplanted.”
In 1895, the B.C. government banned people of Japanese descent from voting and restricted non-European immigration. (Much of the latter was outside the jurisdiction of the provincial government and so did not come into effect.)
In 1900, the year Katsuyama arrived at the lighthouse, the Chinese head tax was doubled to $100.
“Anti-Asiatic” riots broke out in cities and towns across the North American West Coast in 1907 and in the 1920s. Japanese immigration to Canada was restricted following the 1908 “Gentlemen’s Agreement” and further curtailed in 1928.
Throughout the early 20th century, Canada’s governments continued to further restrict the rights of people of Japanese descent, including their ability to work. There are some accounts of workers moving to Japan due to difficulties in finding jobs in B.C.
In Canada and British Columbia, the rights of people of Japanese descent were often “up for grabs and changeable over time,” said University of Victoria professor Jordan Stanger-Ross, who has worked on educational projects focused on the dispossession of Japanese Canadians.
Before the Second World War, people of Japanese descent weren’t prohibited from buying property, as they were in some American states, but they were excluded from the vote — even if they were Canadian citizens. The lack of voting rights was one of various forms of legalized racism that existed in Canada, passed through legislatures and heard in courts.
Restrictive and draconian measures quickly followed the bombing of Pearl Harbour in the winter of 1941. The federal government imposed curfews and impounded fishing vessels belonging to “persons of the Japanese race.” By the spring of 1942, the government had begun forcibly uprooting and confining the West Coast’s entire Japanese population in often remote internment camps. Their homes and belongings were sold through auctions, newspaper listings and real estate flyers.
As the Canadian public’s perception of legitimate state action developed in the face of the horrors of Nazi Germany, people of Japanese descent soon began to find allies in wider society who supported them against some of the violations they were suffering, such as the registering for expulsion of thousands of Japanese Canadians.
There was “a growing sense that Canadian citizenship should have clearer and more concrete meaning for all Canadian citizens, and that culminates in a citizenship act in 1946 that takes effect in 1947,” Stanger-Ross said.
Japanese Canadians pushed back against the various abuses, and the advocacy eventually culminated in 1988 with a formal apology from Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and a $300-million compensation package.
Photo via the Katsuyama family.
‘Ice Cream Charlie’
Staff at the Nanaimo Museum learned about Katsuyama’s story last year, curator Aimee Greenaway told The Tyee.
The museum had initially included the location of the Yokohama restaurant — the spot where Katsuyama described his experience — in a Halloween tour of spooky and historic downtown Nanaimo locations.
But the museum’s view of the story changed as they learned more about it. After reviewing the Province story in which Clark Jr. admitted to tormenting Katsuyama, Greenaway wrote in an email, “This story looks like workplace harassment, at minimum. Given the extent of the harassment and the power differential, this was not a harmless prank.”
Research was still ongoing when the museum first shared the story during Halloween last fall, Greenaway said, but with the updated information the museum had decided to remove it from their tour as “this is clearly not a ghost story.”
It’s not clear whether Katsuyama ever suspected what was happening to him or if he learned who was behind his ordeals. And it’s unclear how the experience affected him.
But through Katsuyama’s family and books written by people who knew him, we can piece together some details from his life after the events at Entrance Island.
His grandson Roy Katsuyama remembers meeting his grandfather briefly when he was 10 years old. Unfortunately, he said, it’s unlikely that there are any other living descendants in Canada who actually met his grandfather.
But Roy and his cousin, Mona Russell, did hear of the lighthouse ghost story when they were young from Mona’s mother and Tsunekichi’s daughter, Tomiko. Mona remembers how the story, of “a talking animal of some sort,” scared her back then.
At some point, Katsuyama left Vancouver Island and went to Alaska. He also travelled to the Yukon, where he worked in — and potentially ran — a restaurant.
He married a woman called Naomi Saju Buto, originally from the southern Japanese city of Kumamoto, and together they had seven children. He eventually settled in Port Essington, a small cannery town that was once the largest town on the Skeena River.
There, Roy’s father Isao, the third oldest sibling, was born.
In 1912, Katsuyama, now also known as “Charlie,” operated a restaurant on Dufferin Street, the town’s boardwalk. There, he baked bread and sold ice cream. He was very “business-minded,” his eldest son Yoshi said in an interview with Japanese Canadian author Roy Ito in Tokyo.
During the winters, after fishing season ended, Katsuyama often closed down the restaurant and moved with his family to Prince Rupert. They eventually permanently relocated there when the older children entered high school. Port Essington waned after the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway was built to Prince Rupert; a series of fires burned the remnants of the town in the 1960s.
Dr. R.G. Large, who knew the family when they lived in Port Essington, remembers Katsuyama in his book The Skeena: River of Destiny as “a thin wiry Japanese, invariably dressed in work pants and heavy woollen underwear, with a woollen scarf around his waist, while he performed the innumerable tasks of serving meals, and, in between, dishing out ice cream cones to the children clustered about the door. Kind-hearted as he was energetic, he brought up a healthy, happy family.”
In Spokeshute: Skeena River Memory, E.A. Harris, who was a classmate of Katsuyama’s eldest son, describes “Ice Cream Charlie” as “a good-natured man” who was “tolerant of kids.” He continued: “Many of us earned a free cone by helping to turn one of the freezers, even though we were probably more trouble than we were worth.”
In September 1931, Naomi passed away in Prince Rupert. A few years later, in the mid-1930s, Katsuyama moved back to Japan, where he would eventually die and be buried.
In 1935, Yoshi and Isao also migrated to Japan. There had been employment difficulties for them in Canada, as people of Asian descent were restricted from jobs in various ways, and they had been told by relatives in Japan that there were good jobs for them there. Their younger brother, Tomotsu, also went with them but soon returned to Canada.
When the war broke out, the Katsuyama family members still in Canada — Matsue, Tomiko, Tomotsu and Yukiko — were forcibly uprooted from their lives on B.C.’s coast.
Newspaper story archives chart the lives of the Katsuyamas and their family in the Japanese Canadian community in Scarborough and Toronto, and the larger family, now residing across Canada and the world, remains connected.
Of the few stories that Mona Russell remembers hearing about her grandfather, the one that stands out is when he ran the restaurant and café “where everyone called him ‘Charlie.’”
“He was baking bread one day and came home with all the rubies missing from his ring, so he was sure they were in the bread,” she wrote in an email to The Tyee. “Funny what we remember.”
With many thanks to the Katsuyama family, Masako Fukawa, the archives team at Nikkei National Museum & Cultural Centre, University of Victoria professor Jordan Stanger-Ross and Nanaimo Museum curator Aimee Greenaway. ![[Tyee]](https://thetyee.ca/design-article.thetyee.ca/ui/img/yellowblob.png){kind=small}
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