Kitty Lloyd, naturalist and conservation consultant

Throughout Haida Gwaii (formerly known as the Queen Charlotte Islands, off the Pacific coast of northern British Columbia) there are reminders of the waves of people who have come from far-away places to extract the rich natural resources of the area and leave, usually taking large profits and leaving behind mine tailings, industrial debris, and clearcut hillsides. On a visit to Haida Gwaii in July 2007 Kitty Lloyd uncovered a story that puts a human face on an earlier era of industrial exploitation.

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I had always wondered about a lonely but well-tended grave near the site of an old Japanese abalone cannery in Haida Gwaii. Just off the shore, in the midst of a wild and tangled forest of spruce and cedar, it is surrounded by a neat picket fence and there are still a few shards of Japanese pottery nearby. The grave is further marked by wildflowers that the ubiquitous browsing deer can’t reach inside the fence. This is the grave of a young Japanese woman, Taniyo Isozaki, who died there in 1913. Her epitaph was handpainted on an oar blade that serves as her grave stone. Who tends this remote gravesite, I wondered, a sad relic from a short-lived era of canneries that once dotted the BC coast?

On a recent trip to Haida Gwaii aboard the Island Odyssey, I heard the story of Taniyo Isozaki’s grave. During the heyday of the herring roe fishery in the 1980’s, several fishermen who regularly stayed in this bay took an interest in tending the lonely gravesite. At one point someone found an old bottle there with its cork stopper sealed shut with wax. Inside was a tightly rolled small package that turned out to contain strange contents: a cache of fingernail clippings carefully rolled in a cigarette paper. Investigation into Japanese customs revealed that mementos from a surviving loved one were often buried with the deceased. Archival research by the fishermen eventually led them to the descendents of the woman in Japan, and they later made a pilgrimage there to present the family with the bottle and its unusual contents. The family was very grateful to receive this time capsule from their relative who died so long ago and far from her home.

So the mystery of who has been tending this solitary grave in the remote wilderness of Haida Gwaii was solved. It was these fishermen who were the thoughtful ones that made a new grave marker out of tight grained yellow cedar, and engraved it with the original inscription that is now getting hard to read on the old oar. While all around there have been trees uprooted and blown over by the wild winter storms that regularly ravage the area, the new picket fence keeps guard and protects Taniyo Isozaki’s grave, now almost 100 years old.

Beneath her name is a poem that serves as her epitaph:

Sayonara since it must be

But the word is hard to say

Sayonara since it must be

We will hope to meet some day

Where the people never say

Sayonara

(Kitty Lloyd, July 2007)

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