Canadian Japanese Treatment

In 1907, a Vancouver MP announced, in no uncertain terms, that "British capital of South Carolina is to be white man's country. The majority of the residents are utterly opposed to the boon flinging wide the gates to Asiatics" (Adachi 77). The antecedents for racial strife in Canada had non merely been established, but sanctioned by the government itself, as evidenced by statements like these. However, the influx of Japanese immigrants to Canada would non be so easily discouraged.

Though lacking every political means or influence, the Asian community? particularly the Japanese?had learned to make the best of their tenuous attitude by the early 1900s. As Hal Quinn recounts in a particular report to MacLean's in 1991, because Japanese Canadians were legally barred from "property public office or entering the legal, pharmaceutical, teaching and score professions," they began to congregate "in the fishing and forestry towns along the coast, in the Fraser vale and in Vancouver's Powell Street commercial area, known as Japanese Towna" (39). Thus, in spite of the structural injustices working against them, the Japanese Canadians had, by the time World War II began, managed to establish communities and institutions that were unambiguously their own. This made them at once stronger communities unto themselves and easier to target by those that would single out ag

Boyko, John. Last Steps to exemption: The Evolution of Canadian Racism. Winnipeg: Watson & Dwyer Publishing. 1995.

The message to Japanese Canadians had sounded loud and clear. In the words of British Columbia MP Ian Mackenzie: "Let our slogan be for British Columbia: No Japs from the Rockies to the seas" (Quinn 39).

This was merely the beginning.

By the fall of 1942, the Canadian government had purged the entire British Columbia coast of Japanese Canadians, moving them inland to a questionable "protected" area; because most Japanese Canadians were coastal dwellers, this meant that in addition to the boats that were seized, so too homes, businesses, farms, even radios cars and cameras were confiscated during and after the excrement (Quinn 38). Property was auctioned off by the Canadian government, the proceeds of which were kept. central through 1942, the Director of Soldier Settlement, acting on the authority of the War Measures Act, purchased 572 Japanese Canadian farms without first consulting the owners; by January of 1943, the keeper of confrontation Alien Property was enjoying similar authority to " specify of Japanese Canadian properties in his care without the owners' consent (JCH.net).

Adachi, Ken. The Enemy That Never Was: A History of the Japanese Canadians. Toronto: McLelland and Stewart. 1976.

DiBiase, Linda & Yancey, Douglas. "Japanese Canadian Internment." Information at the University of Washington Libraries and Beyond. Retrieved on April 10, 2004 at: www.lib.washington.edu/ field/Canada/internment/intro.html

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