s are utterly opposed to the present flinging wide the gates to Asiatics" (Adachi 77). The antecedents for racial strife in Canada had not merely been established, but sanctioned by the government itself, as evidenced by statements like these. However, the influx of Japanese immigrants to Canada would not be so easily discouraged.
Though lacking any political authority or influence, the Asian community·particularly the Japanese·had learned to make the best of their tenuous situation by the early 1900s. As Hal Quinn recounts in a special report to MacLean's in 1991, because Japanese Canadians were legally barred from "holding public office or entering the legal, pharmaceutical, teaching and accounting professions," they began to congregate "in the fishing and forestry towns along the coast, in the Fraser Valley and in Vancouver's Powell Street commercial area, known as Japanese Towna" (39). Thus, in spite of the structural injustices working against them, the Japanese Canadians had, by the time World War II began, managed to establish communities and institutions that were uniquely their own. This made them at once stronger communities unto themselves and easier to target by those that would discriminate against them.
Thus the stage had effectively been set for the discrimination that was to come, as white Canadians grew increasingly hostile to the tides of immigration that continued to bring Asians ashore and subsequently expand the Asian coastal communities. The Canadian government, however, had grown accustomed to responding in earnest to the suspicions the white population harbored for its Asian counterpart. In 1924 the British Columbia Legislature passed a resolution requesting that immigration from Japan and China be prohibited; by 1938 the federal Conservative government had agreed, and favored excluding all Asian immigrants from Canada (Adachi 141, 183). So openly suspicious of the Japanese was the Canadi...