Japanese Canadians during the Second World War were forced to contend with a decades-old torrent of racial discrimination that culminated in their internment and forced labor by the Canadian government. The treatment of Japanese Canadians during this period appears particularly cruel·even sinister·when one considers that of the nearly 23,000 Canadians evacuated from the Pacific Coast of Canada in 1942, 60% were Canadian-born and 15% were naturalized Canadian citizens (JapaneseCanadianHistory.net (JCH.net)). In the years that followed, not one Canadian of Japanese heritage was even charged, let alone convicted, of treason or disloyalty to Canada during the war (Quinn 38). It was thus Canadian war-time paranoia, coupled with an entrenched, systematically anti-Asian social structure that resulted in the sweeping mandate that would forever damaged Canada's relationship with its Japanese citizens. The treatment of the Japanese Canadian population during World War II begs the question: How was this horrendous evacuation, this purging of Japanese Canadians, allowed to come to pass?
Anti-Asian sentiment in Canada was not new in World War II. Canada's decision to declare war on Japan in 1941 simply exacerbated an already pervasive discriminatory trend that had been working against Asian Canadians for generations, particularly those in British Columbia, where the bulk of Canada's immigrants from Japan resided. Since the mid-1800s, Chinese and Japanese immigrants had been utterly disenfranchised and denied the right to own crown lands (Adachi 141-46); primarily useful to the Canadian government as manual laborers, once the Canadian Pacific Railroad was completed in 1885, the Canadian government began to take active measures (such as the Head Tax) to discourage Asian immigration (Boyko 42-43).
In 1907, a Vancouver MP announced, in no uncertain terms, that "British Columbia is to be white man's country. The majority of the resident...