Chapter 6. The War Years, 1914–45
6.17 Japanese Canadians in the Second World War
Jordan Stanger-Ross (University of Victoria) Pamela Sugiman (Ryerson University) & the Landscapes of Injustice Research Collective
The Second World War internment of all “persons of the Japanese race” serves as a powerful reminder to all Canadians that the rights of citizenship can be legally revoked and that the history of our country is not one of racial harmony.
In September 1946, a Japanese Canadian woman named Tsurukichi Takemoto wrote officials to protest what she had experienced since Canada’s entry into the war in the Pacific (7 December 1941). Alongside many others in her community, Tsurukichi had been interned in Greenwood, a former “ghost town” in the interior of British Columbia and one of several similarly isolated sites used by the federal government.
For roughly 22,000 Canadians of Japanese descent, regardless of social class, sex, age, and generation, it turned out that race superseded citizenship. Angered by the violation of her rights, in two letters dated 5 September 1946, Tsurukichi forcefully reminded government officials, “[w]e are not Japanese Nationals.” With outrage, she explained:
I did not answer until now because your letter just made me mad enough not to answer . . . Isn’t the method you’re using like the Nazis? Do you think it is democratic? No! I certainly think you’re just like the Fascists confiscating people’s property, chasing them out of their homes, sending them out to a kind of a concentration camp, special registration cards, permits for traveling [sic]. Don’t you think this is the method used in dictatorship countries[?] Democracy means no racial discrimination, or is it the very opposite[?][1]
What historical conditions precipitated Tsurukichi’s anger? Did her charges hit their mark? What prompted some Japanese Canadians to liken their treatment at the hands of the Canadian government to those enacted by the most brutally racist regimes of the era? These questions remain troubling today.
The Government’s wartime treatment of Japanese Canadians was supported by hundreds of legal enactments, most of them made possible by the War Measures Act. The War Measures Act gave the cabinet of Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King the power to regulate all persons “of the Japanese race” through Orders-in-Council: that is, declarations of law that bypassed debate in the legislature and proved resistant to judicial challenge.
Such policies had dramatic consequences for all Japanese Canadians. Property owned by Japanese Canadians was stolen, looted, destroyed, and neglected. What survived was sold without the consent of its owners. While they received some compensation for these sales, owners had no opportunity to challenge the (often highly unfavourable) terms of exchange and they lost the right not to sell. Further, the proceeds of these sales were doled out as allowances to Japanese Canadians who were struggling to support themselves