Treatment of Japanese Canadians
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The treatment of Japanese Canadians during the World War II period appears particularly cruel ·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 Can
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up Japanese Canadian families and subjected them to third-world living conditions (DiBiase & Yancey). Japanese Canadian men were evacuated to either to road camps in the British Columbia interior, to sugar beet farms in southern Alberta, or to Prisoner of War camps in Ontario (DiBiase & Yancey). Women and children were transported to inland British Columbia towns that were created for them; living conditions were, according to the University of Washington:
so poor that the citizens of wartime Japan even sent supplemental food shipments through the Red Cross. During the period of detention, the Canadian government spent one-third the per capita amount expended by the US on Japanese American evacuees (DiBiase & Yancey).
The message to Japanese Canadians had sounded loud and clear. In the words of British Columbia MP Ian Mackenzie: "Let our slogan be for British Columbia: No Japs from the Rockies to the seas" (Quinn 39).
The aggressive measures taken by the Canadian government against its Japanese population seem extreme, particularly when one considers how harsh these measures were in contrast with those taken by the Americans regarding their own Japanese "problem". Indeed, in a spate of legal actions that stemmed from a
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Approximate Word count = 2335
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)
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