This 25-by-64-inch horizontal panorama documents Bay Farm Internment Camp in the Slocan Valley of British Columbia—one of several sites in this remote mountain valley where the Canadian government imprisoned Japanese Canadians during and after World War II. The five-foot-plus width captures the landscape setting that contained forced relocation to this isolated region.

Created in 1996, the work documents sites where the Canadian government established “self-supporting” camps—a euphemism for forcing imprisoned families to pay for their own detention. Japanese Canadians in these sites were required to work and contribute to their upkeep, their labor subsidizing their own incarceration. Bay Farm and similar Slocan Valley camps operated under this exploitative model.

The Slocan Valley’s remote location served government purposes: isolated from coastal areas where Japanese Canadians had built communities, distant from population centers, and difficult to leave even if permitted. The mountain landscape that Hayashi documents was simultaneously beautiful and imprisoning—natural beauty surrounding constitutional violation.

The horizontal format captures the valley landscape that defined daily life for those imprisoned at Bay Farm. The photo collage technique fragments the scene while revealing the spatial relationships between camp infrastructure and mountain surroundings. The natural setting contrasts with the unnatural circumstances of imprisonment.

Canada would not formally apologize for Japanese Canadian internment until 1988, the same year the United States issued its apology. This panorama documents the physical sites of that violation, preserving evidence of incarceration that both nations sought to forget.