Eighty years ago, the Canadian government began detaining and forcibly moving people of Japanese descent who lived within 160 kilometres of B.C.’s coast.
Less than three months had passed since Japanese warplanes attacked Pearl Harbor. Those events of Dec. 7, 1941, ignited war in the Pacific and long-simmering racism in B.C.
Decades-old anti-Japanese resentment and fear exploded. There were reports of flaming torches flung into rooming houses, bricks thrown through windows, and people attacked or spat on in the street because they looked Japanese.
Asian Canadians living in B.C. were already forbidden to work on Crown lands, on roads or in mines. They couldn’t vote in provincial elections, and that meant they also couldn’t vote in federal or municipal elections or practise medicine, engineering, law or other licensed professions.
Excluded from mainstream Canadian society, Japanese Canadians lived in their own communities and developed their own social, religious and economic institutions.
Despite being excluded from high-status work and positions in the larger community, Japanese British Columbians still succeeded. They ran successful businesses serving their communities, they formed co-operative associations to market their produce and fish, and they set up community and cultural associations for self-help and social events.
As a result, they had better credit ratings and could negotiate better loans and deals with banks and suppliers.
But in 1942, the situation deteriorated. Even though top RCMP and Canadian military officials determined that the Japanese Canadian population posed no threat to the defence or security of Canada and opposed punitive measures, many B.C.-based officials, business leaders and others felt otherwise.
Canadian Pacific Railways fired its Japanese-Canadian workers, and other businesses and industries quickly followed suit. Japanese-Canadian fishermen in B.C. were ordered to stay in port, and 1,800 fishing boats were seized by the navy.
Anti-Japanese hate speech was trumpeted on the streets, in corridors of power, and even in the House of Commons.
In Ottawa, Ian MacKenzie, a senior federal cabinet minister from Vancouver, and many of his B.C. colleagues pushed the Canadian government to act.
Mackenzie was a known anti-Asian racist. As a B.C. MLA in the 1920s, his motion to ask Ottawa to amend the British North America Act to permit the province to deny Asians the right to acquire property or engage in provincial industries won unanimous approval.
“Economically we cannot compete with them; racially we cannot assimilate them; hence we must exclude them from our midst, and prohibit them from owning land,” the Victoria Daily Colonist reported him saying in 1922.
The statement sums up the resentment and envy at the root of B.C.’s anti-Japanese racism.
On Feb. 24, 1942, federal cabinet bowed to the pressure from B.C. and agreed to move all Japanese inland under the War Measures Act.
British Columbia Security Commission officer G. Ernest Trueman, employed by the federal Department of Labour to help Japanese Canadians from B.C. settle in Toronto, later said: “The reason for the mass evacuation was not because of the Japanese but because of the whites. The problem was one of mass hysteria and race prejudice.”
Overall, some 21,000 to 23,000 men, women and children — more than 90 per cent of Japanese Canadians — were forced to leave their homes in B.C. Three-quarters of them were Canadian citizens.
They were allowed to take one suitcase each.
Shipped eventually to civilian and prisoner-of-war camps, road camps and sugar beet farms in the B.C. interior, Alberta, Manitoba and Ontario, they often were housed in shabby, thrown-together accommodations without insulation or plumbing.
Back on the coast, their homes, farms, fishing boats, businesses and personal property were confiscated and held in trust. Then, in 1943, the government began liquidating the assets at discount, then compelled the internees to use money from the forced sales to pay for their own internment.
Even when the war ended, the targeted government-condoned racism continued.
Few Japanese Canadians were allowed to return to the coast. About 4,000 were deported to war-ravaged Japan — including 2,000 elderly first-generation Japanese Canadians who had lost everything, and 1,300 children under age 16.
Another 3,500 or so who had spent the last years of the war in the Interior needed RCMP permission to change their residence or move further than 80 kilometres away. And if they moved away from B.C., they couldn’t return.
It wasn’t until April 1949 that the legal restrictions lifted. By then, few Japanese Canadians had the means or were inclined to return.
