Last week was the 75th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Amid commemorations of the Americans killed in the attack, as well as the brutal war that followed, also came a solemn remembrance of how the United States interned coastal Japanese-American populations that it wrongly believed were a dangerous fifth column.
A similar tragedy, of course, played out in wartime Canada. In a country with an established tradition of respecting civil liberties, wartime hysteria led to 21,000 people of Japanese descent being forcibly removed from a 100-mile “defence zone” along the British Columbia coast.
But that’s only part of the story. The National Post has combed through archives across the country to unearth these rare photos of one of the darkest hours in modern Canadian history.
Beginning in March 1941 — eight months before the attack on Pearl Harbor — Japanese-Canadians were required to obtain these identity cards, which have been recently featured as part of the exhibitionRegistered, currently at Calgary’s The Military Museums. Something to note on these cards is that issuers felt the need to stamp them with the words “Canadian born.” It would have been understandable for the owners of these cards, both of them Canadian citizens, to see that stamp as a kind of insurance policy in case of war with Japan. But ultimately, 75 per cent of those interned were Canadian citizens, including many who could not speak Japanese or had fought for Canada in the First World War. With no similar mass internments taken against Italian- or German-Canadians, it was clear to them that this was motivated by a belief that Japanese were racially incapable of loyalty. As U.S. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson summed it up, “their racial characteristics are such that we cannot understand or trust even the citizen Japanese.”
‘DEMOCRACY IN ACTION’
This photo was taken on Dec. 8, 1941, the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor. It actually has nothing to do with internment; this is a Vancouver police officer escorting two Japanese-Canadian children across a busy intersection, as he would do with any child. It ran in Canadian newspapers under the headline “Democracy in Action.” While authorities were rounding up “enemy aliens,” this photo was meant to assure readers that “naturalized or native born Canadian citizens” would eke out the war with their rights intact. The winter would not be over before these children would be forced onto trains evacuating them from Vancouver.
TAKING AWAY THE FISHING BOATS
One of the first overtures of what would become internment was the immediate mass seizure of any and all vessels owned by Canadians of Japanese heritage. The reasoning at the time was that disloyal fisherman could form the vanguard of a Pearl Harbor-style attack on Canada. The legality of the move likely would not have stood up in court, but fishermen complied and turned over their livelihoods, often with tears in their eyes. “A lot of them I knew personally and those fellows hadn’t ever seen Japan. Some were veterans of World War I. They wore their tunics when they brought their boats in, and all their badges,” one naval volunteer reported later. This photo was taken on Dec. 10, only three days after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
‘I THOUGHT EVERYONE TOOK VACATIONS BY LEAVING HOME IN A RAILROAD CAR’
As a child, Star Trek actor George Takei was interned along with his family in Arizona. His parents, stoically hiding their own trauma at the experience, told Takei they were simply going on vacation. “It was an adventure. I thought everyone took vacations by leaving home in a railroad car with sentries, armed soldiers at both ends of the car,” recalled the actor in a 2014 interview. Similarly, it was not until much later that many children could fully grasp why some of their formative memories had come from a resettlement camp. This photo from Canada’s Lemon Creek Interment Camp shows interned children gleefully posing with pictures they’ve drawn for Christmas. (The photo, from a private collection, was obtained by Michael Kluckner, author of the book Vanishing British Columbia.)
‘VERY GOOD CITIZENS’
This photo shows a certificate of honour, issued to buyers of victory loans, posted in the window of a Japanese-Canadian shop left vacant by internment. Before they had their assets seized, Japanese-Canadians would buy at least $300,000 in war bonds. It’s hard to overstate the utter nonexistence of any threat posed by Japanese-Canadians. There were no Pacific Coast spy rings uncovered by the RCMP. There were no rallies down Granville Street in support of Emperor Hirohito. Royal Canadian Navy insiders admitted that, despite suspicions, Japanese-Canadians were “for all intents and purposes, very good citizens.” Maj.-Gen. Maurice Pope, vice-chief of the general staff in Ottawa, famously said: “From the army point of view I cannot see that they (Japanese Canadians) constitute the slightest menace to national security.”
‘A VERY DIFFICULT POSITION’
In this photo from December 10, 1941, a smiling member of the Royal Canadian Navy Volunteer Reserve is chatting up a smiling Japanese woman as the navy completes their round-up of fishing vessels. Sources from the time universally note that Japanese-Canadians were completely cooperative as their rights were progressively dialed back in the weeks after Pearl Harbor. “It will be recognized that Canadian citizens of Japanese race have been placed in a very difficult position,” Prime Minister Mackenzie King told the House of Commons in 1942, adding “they are being asked to bear with patience inevitable hardships and losses.” But despite King’s plea that there should be “tolerance and understanding” for the Japanese-Canadians they were interning, the next question in the parliamentary record was whether anybody had remembered to seize the internees’ radios.
FIRST THE BOATS, THEN THE CARS
As with fishing vessels, Japanese-Canadians were also soon ordered to turn in their cars. These trucks are parked alongside what is still Vancouver’s Hastings Racecourse, and many would have represented the proudest possession of a family. Buying a truck was a unique marker of financial success, particularly after the Great Depression. But here again, the cars were turned over with surprising cooperation, likely with the mistaken belief that they would be returned once the war was over. But the cars were auctioned off by the government at fire-sale rates, and the money put towards the cost of internment. Japanese-Canadians were forced to pay for their own imprisonment, with one figure putting monthly “rent” at $22.50.
This is an image of a Japanese-Canadian road crew during internment. It’s published here courtesy of Chris Hope, whose grandfather Ken Okura took the photo with a smuggled camera, as all cameras had been seized by authorities due to suspicions of espionage. Internment saw men separated from their families and assigned to work camps where they were paid roughly half the going rate for a free B.C. labourer. The government’s reasoning was that, with Canadian soldiers overseas, it would be bad PR to pay anything but rock bottom wages to “enemy aliens.” And indeed, there were still complaints in the House of Commons about the high cost of construction projects employing interned Japanese-Canadians. The hands of interned Japanese-Canadians still lie on the Canadian landscape, including the Hope-Princeton Highway and portions of the Trans-Canada Highway around Revelstoke, B.C.
‘SHIKATA GA NAI’
Mere weeks ago, the people in this photo could have held out hope that B.C.’s anti-Japanese hysteria would blow over, and that the extreme measures being touted by B.C. politicians would never receive federal approval. Now, here they are in the back of a government truck being driven to parts unknown in the remote B.C. interior. Internment camps were largely established in B.C. ghost towns. Or, if Japanese-Canadians were wealthier, they found their own way to self-supporting communities in the B.C. interior or elsewhere in Canada. What we often forget in looking at historical photos is that the people in this image would not have been able to know what lay in their future, or if they would ever be free again. Among the Japanese-Canadian community, several phrases have become common parlance in describing how adults tried to cope with the shock of internment. “Shikata ga nai” (it cannot be helped) and “gambare” (do your best).
‘WE … KNOW THAT WE ARE CANADIANS’
The term for Canadian-born Japanese is Nisei. Like second-generation immigrants to this day, many Nisei had spent their whole lives trying to distance themselves from the alien world of their immigrant parents. They were embarrassed to speak Japanese in public. They had white friends from school. They were frustrated with the uptight, foreign norms of their parents. Then, overnight, Nisei saw their neighbours and government treating them no differently than the Japanese soldiers raping Nanking or massacring their fellow Canadians in Hong Kong. This letter, by the hastily convened Nisei Mass Evacuation Group, isn’t trying to talk Canadian officials out of interning them. They’re merely asking that families not be broken up. “The answer is that we are by law Japanese nationals and we have to do what we are told and go where we are sent,” they write. “We however know that we are Canadians and that we are going to continue all efforts to get what we feel are our rights.”
This is a young David Suzuki, along with his two sisters, photographed during relocation. Suzuki’s last ties to Japan were through his grandparents, who had come to Canada in the early 1900s. He was thus two generations removed from Japan when he was interned on suspicion of being part of a Japanese fifth column. And even when the Japanese surrender was signed, B.C.’s Japanese-Canadian animosity did not abate. ”When the war came to an end, British Columbia said ‘we don’t want any more Japs in this province,’” recalled Suzuki in an interview last month. His family, like all internees, were given two choices: Go to Japan, or stay out of British Columbia. The Suzuki family chose the latter option and moved to Leamington, Ont.
THE OTHER INTERNEES
Several demographics of people spent the Second World War behind barbed wire on Canadian soil. Jewish refugees, as former German citizens, were interned as enemy aliens. Communists and fascist sympathizers were also rounded up. And, of course, Canada was host to several camps housing German prisoners of war. This photo depicts German POWs in a classroom at a camp in Sherbrooke, Que. Notably, their Canadian guards even seem to have turned a blind eye to the Germans’ posting swastikas above the blackboard. Japanese-Canadians—particularly those serving with the Canadian Armed Forces—bitterly knew that their families back home were getting exactly the same treatment as men who had fought for Nazi Germany. But with one notable exception; the Germans didn’t have to pay for their imprisonment.
A GRASSROOTS POLICY
One of the most troubling aspects of internment is that it wasn’t simply a top-down measure by out-of-touch bureaucrats or paranoid military commanders. It was a policy that came firmly from the political grassroots. Vancouver city council passed a unanimous motion to clear the B.C. coast of what they called the “enemy alien population.” Petitions poured into Ottawa from B.C. communities demanding an immediate round-up of their Japanese-Canadians. “We therefore do earnestly petition the government of the Dominion of Canada to take immediate steps to eliminate all possibility of subversive acts by the resident Japanese in this province,” read one early 1942 petition, signed by 1,100 residents of Victoria. Meanwhile, even if they could not stop the tide of internment, B.C. also had plenty of figures who suspected that history would judge them harshly for this. “It was a war emergency. You always have to remember that. It wasn’t a normal situation…. We had nothing in the world against them, but they had to be evacuated,” recalled Grant MacNeil, who served as the CCF MP for Vancouver-Burrard in 1942.
THE ‘SCHOOL YEARBOOK’ OF MICHIKO AYUKAWA
This is a rare candid photo taken inside an internment camp. It’s from an album, now in the hands of the Canadian War Museum, created by Michiko “Midge” Ayukawa, who was interned as a teenager at Lemon Creek. Ayakawa’s images capture internees trying their best to establish some semblance of normal life. Internees organized plays, staged music revues, and Lemon Creek even organized a baseball team that won the Slocan Valley Baseball Championship. The Canadian War Museum noted that the album surreally resembled a “school yearbook” with its many autographed portraits of friends. “Many of them added sentiments such as ‘miss you’ or ‘hope we meet again,’” wrote the museum in a statement.
This is the Vancouver Forum, the future home of the WHL-era Vancouver Canucks. Like many large Canadian public buildings, it briefly served as a way station to Japanese-Canadians being “evacuated” to the interior. Specifically, it was converted into a men’s dormitory where internees slept on burlap sacks filled with straw. The building remains in virtually the same state as it was in 1942, and is still earmarked by the City of Vancouver as a place to process large numbers of evacuees in the event of a natural disaster. To this day, visitors to the Pacific National Exhibition sit in the same chairs that were occupied by worried parents wondering where their family would be taken next.
THEY NEVER CAME BACK
A pair of unidentified children, who would now be about 80, gaze into the window of a Japanese-Canadian shop left vacant by its interned owner. Internment did permanent damage to what was previously a thriving Japanese-Canadian community in B.C. From Steveston to Cumberland, Japantowns existed alongside Chinatowns in logging and fishing communities all along the Pacific Coast. When internment ended, any refused to return to the province they saw as having betrayed them. Indeed, that may have been the plan all along. “It is my intention, as long as I remain in public life, to see they never come back here,” Ian Mackenzie, the MP for Vancouver Centre (the riding now held by Hedy Fry), declared in April, 1942.
A CRITICAL POPULATION
In this image, a Royal Canadian Navy officer confiscates the fishing boats of two fishermen. Pearl Harbor didn’t just mark the beginning of the war between Japan and the United States. Japan also attacked Britain’s Pacific territories on December 7, 1941, prompting Canada and the United Kingdom to declare war against the Empire of Japan. In any military conflict, a key advantage is knowing the enemy’s culture and language. And it just so happened that the Japanese-Canadians in British Columbia were the only large population of fluent Japanese speakers in the entire British Empire. Internment was justified as a policy of military necessity. In reality, all it had done was alienate one of the most critical demographic groups needed for the war effort. And yet, when military service was opened up to Japanese Canadians in 1944, internees still enlisted — sometimes in defiance of their parents. “If I join the army and can wear a uniform with Canada on the shoulders, like my hakujin (white) high-school buddies have, then we’ll have a much better chance of being accepted out here,” was how Second World War veteran Frank Moritsugu remembered his thinking before he enlisted as a Japanese translator with the Canadian Army Intelligence Corps.
For the average white British Columbian occupied with news of the ongoing war, it could have been easy to miss Japanese-Canadian internment. The camps were far from urban centres, and some internees making the trip by train were instructed to draw the curtains at stations so bystanders couldn’t look inside. For many on the West Coast, one day Japanese-Canadian shops and homes were simply vacant and Chinese Canadians were now suddenly wearing special badges reading “I am Chinese.” British Columbians would also have seen the advertisements above. These are two newspaper ads for a blowout sale at Yamato Silks, located near what is now Vancouver’s Waterfront Station. Left unsaid is why Yamato Silks’ owner was in such a hurry to sell off the stock.
LOSS OF TRUST
It is not known why this man smiled for the camera as he and his baby walked through the Pacific National Exhibition grounds enroute to internment. It would not be until April 1, 1949 — more than three years after the end of the Second World War – that Japanese-Canadians would again have the freedom to live in any part of Canada they wished. The children and grandchildren of former internees often found that their relatives never spoke of the 1940s, and that the unspoken shame of internment was a dark cloud over the household. Even as they began rebuilding their postwar lives in Canada, many former internees never shook the feeling that they could never again trust their neighbours or government. Even an old age pension is an object of suspicion when the issuer once arbitrarily stripped you and your family of your wealth and freedom.