Redressing Canada’s Second World War Narrative

Abstract

In early 1942, 23,000 Japanese Canadians on the West Coast were forcibly relocated against their will to the interior of Canada after Japan entered the war against the Allies. This forced relocation left deep scars in that community. Decades later, Japanese Canadians mounted a redress campaign for an official apology and financial restitution. This provocation examines that campaign and explores how it has shaped Canada’s constructed memory of the Second World War.

Keywords:

• Second World War
• Japanese-Canadians
• forced relocation
• redress campaign
• Charter of Rights and Freedoms

Canada’s unlimited effort during the Second World War saw over a million Canadians in uniform from a country of eleven million, with the armed forces fighting around the world. At home, the country’s industries led to a massive output of war material. Canadians pursued victory like a crusade and in this all-out effort against Fascism there was little room for dissenters.¹

As part of Canada’s war effort, a 1975-strong force was sent to garrison the colony of Hong Kong. This deployment became a tragic focal point when Japan struck on 7 December 1941, with fierce fighting until the Allied defenders surrendered on Christmas Day. The British, Canadian, and other garrison survivors endured four years of hellish conditions in Japanese prisoner of war camps, where 254 Canadians died in captivity from all manner of violence, malnourishment, deprivation, and execution.²

On Canada’s West Coast, Japan’s entry into the war resulted in widespread fear that weak defences left the people of the province of British Columbia (BC) vulnerable to a Japanese invasion. Canadians expected an attack that was to include ‘fifth columnists’ aiding the assaulting force, as had been the case in most of the successive Japanese offensives in the Pacific.³ Caught up in this fear were almost 23,000 Japanese Canadians who lived on the West Coast, of whom about two-thirds were naturalised or Canadian-born.

These Canadians were viewed as a security threat by some, although racism was a stronger motivation in shaping a negative reaction to these ‘others’ living within Canadian territory. White British Columbian politicians at the provincial and federal level used their influence to remove thousands of Japanese Canadians from the coast forcefully and, with a goal to ensure that they did not return home, sold off their personal goods, houses, and businesses at low prices. After the war, there was only a limited reimbursement of Japanese Canadians for their losses, and this difficult history was buried by the state and many of the victims who found it shameful. But this marginalised history re-emerged in the late 1970s and led to an activist redress campaign. Japanese Canadians came together and mobilised different communities to strengthen the case for redress. After years of negotiations, the federal government formally apologised in 1988. From that point forward, this previously neglected history became a dominant narrative in the constructed memory of Canada’s Second World War. This provocation will briefly explore the wartime action against Japanese Canadians, the redress campaign, the movement of this marginalised history from the periphery to the centre, and how that reimagined history has shaped how Canadians have come to understand the Second World War.

Enemy Aliens

With the Japanese victories in the Pacific, President Franklin Roosevelt bowed to pressure and issued an executive order on 19 February 1942 that uprooted and moved 120,000 Japanese Americans from the coast to barbed-wire-enclosed camps where they were treated as prisoners of war. The Canadian cabinet followed the Americans and less than a week later it authorised the forced removal of all ‘persons of Japanese racial origin’ from the BC coast.⁴ The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) had already investigated Japanese Canadians and concluded they were no threat to national security, although this was not accepted by many white Canadians who lumped these ‘others’ in with the country that Canada was at war with in the Pacific. This was not the first time that Japanese Canadians had faced racism, and most had suffered persecution since the first immigrants arrived in 1877. Facing racist taunts and aggression, Japanese Canadians had banded together in isolated communities. Many did not speak English and this added to the perception by many white Canadians that they were not Canadian or of the British empire. In fact, 7,200 were Japanese nationals, who were not yet British subjects (there being no separate Canadian citizenship until 1947). While questions of citizenship were complex during the war, there was evidence to the civilian and military authorities after investigation that many of these Japanese nationals were sympathetic to the Japanese Emperor. The Japanese consulate in BC was also actively bolstering support for the Japanese war effort with some positive reception in the Japanese Canadian communities. At the same time, Canada’s military intelligence officers had a lack of Japanese language skills and therefore were quite uncertain as to what was occurring in that isolated community.⁵

In the immediate aftermath of the cabinet order, most Japanese Canadians – men, women, and children – were forcibly uprooted from their homes. They were moved to camps in the interior of BC, or even further west to beet farms in Alberta or to road-labour camps. The isolated camps were inadequate for housing, schools, and even basic sanitation.

The Canadian cabinet went even further than forcibly relocating Japanese Canadians and it labelled them as ‘Enemy Aliens’. Driven by influential Members of Parliament and Cabinet Ministers representing BC, the cabinet sought to use the war as a means to block the return of Japanese Canadians to the coast. This could not be done under existing Canadian law and so the cabinet created a Custodian of Enemy Property, which was empowered under the wartime act, to sell the Japanese Canadian-owned property in early 1942 that the state had forced the Japanese Canadians to abandon. Houses, boats, and businesses were sold at far-below-market prices. Meticulous records were kept of these actions, which would later become crucial in the redress campaign.⁶

Towards the end of the war, Canadian officials pressured the vulnerable Japanese Canadians in their isolated camps to accept dispersal or deportation. Journalists uncovered the story and raised uncomfortable questions about how the nation had fought tyranny overseas, only to bully the most helpless at home. Surprised by the mounting support for Japanese Canadians, William Lyon Mackenzie King’s cabinet referred the issue to the courts, even as it expedited the deportation of thousands of Canadians to war-ravaged Japan. Eventually, almost 4,000 Japanese Canadians left the country. The defeated Japanese were bewildered to have these boatloads of Canadians and Japanese nationals arrive to their shores, whom they categorised as ‘aliens.’⁷

Reclaiming the past

After the war, the story of the relocation of Japanese Canadians sank into obscurity, little highlighted in history books and buried within the Japanese community that did not address the hurt. While some Japanese Canadians fought for recompense, and there was a royal commission from 1947 to 1951 that investigated the sale of Japanese Canadian goods, most Japanese Canadians sought to leave the shameful episode behind them.⁸ But in the late 1970s, the children of those who were relocated to the camps began to uncover their family histories.⁹ Japanese Canadians came together in small groups to talk about the wartime injustice. Several histories were published around this time, based on the use of archival material and oral histories.¹⁰ They gave voice to the silenced, recounting the trauma of the forced relocation and the deep pain of survivors. A critically-acclaimed novel by Joy Kogawa, Obasan (1981), also helped to humanise the Japanese-Canadian wartime experience, drawing upon themes of remembrance and forgetting, of marginalisation and rediscovering the painful past.¹¹

By 1983, the National Association of Japanese Canadians (NAJC) emerged as an organised group to pressure the federal government to acknowledge the wartime actions and make financial restitution. This became known as the redress campaign. That same year, a US Commission investigating the internment of Japanese Americans recommended that Washington should offer a formal apology and compensation of $20,000 per person uprooted. In Canada, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau responded to the NAJC’s appeals by claiming it was not the government’s duty to revisit actions made under the law of the land, no matter how unpalatable.

In this ‘Age of Apology’, as one commentator has noted, many countries were struggling with how to deal with historic infringements on human rights.¹² In Canada, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was also increasingly forcing a reappraisal of past injustices. The Charter had been enshrined as part of the 1982 Constitution Act, and it empowers individuals to hold the government and authorities accountable courts of law for policies and actions that are discriminatory, racist or infringing on human rights. The NAJC continued to mobilise support, research in the nation’s archives, quantify the wartime losses from the sold-off goods, and seek an apology and compensation, all the while forcefully drawing upon language of the Charter to show how the rights of Japanese Canadians had been abused.¹³

Redress

On 10 August 1988, the United States’ Senate announced a compensation package for Japanese Americans that included $20,000 for each individual imprisoned, some $1.25 billion in total. Ottawa reacted quickly and, on 22 September 1988, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney rose in the House of Commons to apologise for the forced removal of Japanese Canadians from the coast and to offer $21,000 to each Japanese Canadian who had been affected, for a total of some $400 million. Additional funds were allocated for education and dissemination of the story.

The formal apology attracted widespread media coverage as a positive act to redress a hurtful past and within a few years almost every Canadian school history textbook included the narrative of injustice, which, as one historian has noted, is ‘usually in a way consistent with the redress movement’s telling of it.’¹⁴ Those few historians who tried to question the nuances of the relocation – primarily, that not all Japanese Canadians were British subjects and pro-Canadian in the war, and that while there was irrefutable racist-driven policies there were also justifiable and widespread fears of invasion on the West Coast – were aggressively attacked in print, their motives questioned as racist, and they even suffered threats of harm.¹⁵ After years of fighting for redress, the NAJC and supporters were well entrenched and ready to do battle.

From the late 1980s, the relocation of Japanese Canadians rapidly became a crucial part of the war’s constructed memory. This important reclaiming of the past for a marginalised group has been inserted into the broader narrative of Canada’s war effort as a cautionary tale of the state’s power. In fact, this narrative, when combined with the ongoing influence of the Charter in Canadian society, has shifted the Japanese Canadian relocation history from the forgotten past to a dominant strand of memory at the core of the country’s Second World War experience. The relocation of these Canadians and Japanese nationals is sometimes even presented in social discourse and historical discussion as a foil against the entire war effort overseas: the idea that Canada fought a war for liberal justice, to defeat tyranny, and to save the oppressed, but that it also conducted attacks on civil rights at home. The relocation nonetheless has gathered new meanings in modern Canada as it is remembered and taught through the powerful lens of the Charter of Rights of Freedom.

This layering of meaning onto an historical event occurs with each generation, but in this case it has amplified this dark story in Canadian history, while also leading to a new reading of Canada’s Second World War. The author wishes in no way to suggest that historians should only focus on the positive, uplifting, and heroic aspects of the war, but the relocation of 23,000 Japanese Canadians is not a counter-balance to the million who served in this just war. Nor is this act of victimising the helpless on any scale comparable to what was happening in almost every belligerent country during the war. There were no mass starvations, murders, or genocide in Canada. Events like the relocation of Japanese Canadians should act as a cautionary tale, but within a broader reading of the war effort, especially with an understanding of the massive intrusion of the state into the lives of Canadians in the pursuit of victory that included censorship, conscription, and the imprisonment of those seen as enemies of the state. So the act of reclaiming this marginalised historical event must now come with a continued duty by historians to understand the totality of the war effort and not simply the isolated outrages.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with a minor change. This change does not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tim Cook

Dr. Tim Cook is a historian at the Canadian War Museum, where he curated the museum’s First World War permanent gallery, and numerous temporary, travelling and digital exhibitions. He has authored 13 books, including Vimy: The Battle and the Legend (2017), The Secret History of Soldiers (2018), and The Fight for History (2020). Most recently he and J.L. Granatstein co-edited Canada 1919: A Nation Shaped by War (2020). Cook is a member of the Royal Society of Canada and the Order of Canada.

Notes

1 On the Canadian war effort: J. L. Granatstein, Canada’s War: The Politics of the Mackenzie King Government, 1939–1945 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990); Tim Cook, The Necessary War: Canadians Fighting the Second World War, 1939–1943 (Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2014) and Fight to the Finish: Canadians in the Second World War, 1943–1945 (Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2015); Andrew Iarroci and Jeffrey Keshen, A Nation in Conflict: Canada and the Two World Wars (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015).

2 On the POW experience: Nathan Greenfield, The Damned: The Canadians at the Battle of Hong Kong and the POW Experience, 1941–45 (Toronto: HarperCollins Canada, 2010).

3 Bradley St. Croix, ‘The Omnipresent Threat: Fifth Columnists’ Impact on the Battle of Hong Kong, December 1941,’ Close Encounters in War Journal 1 (2018), 1–18.

4 Order in Council PC 1486, 24 February 1942.

5 Dave McIntosh, Hell on Earth: Aging Faster, Dying Sooner, Canadian Prisoners of the Japanese During World War II (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1997), 104; J. L. Granatstein and Gregory A. Johnson, ‘The Evacuation of the Japanese Canadians, 1942,’ in On Guard for Thee: War, Ethnicity and the Canadian State, 1939–1945, ed. Norman Hillmer (Ottawa: Canadian Committee for the History of the Second World War, 1988), 103–6.

6 Library and Archives of Canada, Record Group (RG) 117, Records of the Office of the Custodian of Enemy Property.

7 Roy Miki and Cassandra Kobayashi, Justice in our Time: The Japanese Canadian Redress Settlement (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1991), 49.

8 Kaitlin Findlay, ‘The Bird Commission, Japanese Canadians, and the Challenge of Reparations in the Wake of State Violence,’ (MA Thesis: University of Victoria, 2017).

9 Audrey Kobayashi, ‘The Japanese-Canadian Redress Implications for ‘Race Relations’,’ Canadian Ethnic Studies, 24 (1992), 3–4.

10 Ken Adachi, The Enemy that Never Was: A History of the Japanese Canadians (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1976); Ann Sunahara, The Politics of Racism: The Uprooting of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War (Toronto: Lorimer, 1981); Japanese Canadian Centennial Project, A Dream of Riches: The Japanese Canadians, 1877–1977 (Vancouver: Japanese Canadian Centennial Project, 1978).

11 Sherrill Grace, Landscapes of War and Memory: The Two World Wars in Canadian Literature and the Arts, 1977–2007 (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2014).

12 Roy L. Brooks, ‘The Age of Apology,’ in When Sorry Isn’t Enough: The Controversy over Apologies and Reparations for Human Injustice, ed. Roy L. Brooks (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 3–11.

13 National Association of Japanese Canadians, Democracy Betrayed: The Case for Redress (Winnipeg: National Association of Japanese Canadians, 1984), 24; Roy Mike, Redress: Inside the Japanese Canadian Call for Justice (Vancouver: Raincoast Books, 2004).

14 Ian Radforth, ‘Ethnic Minorities and Wartime Injustices: Redress Campaigns and Historical Narratives in Late Twentieth-Century Canada,’ in Settling and Unsettling Memories: Essays in Canadian Public History, ed. Nicole Neatby and Peter Hodgins (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 382.

15 J. L. Granatstein, Saturday Night (November 1986) 32–4; 49–50; interview, J. L. Granatstein, 26 October 2018; Patricia Roy, J. L. Granatstein, Masako Lino, and Hiroko Takamura (eds.), Mutual Hostages: Canadians and Japanese During the Second World War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990).