Chapter One: First Contacts

During youth time it is positively necessary to view foreign countries.
– Emperor Meiji, 1871.

It was not until the restoration of the rule of the Emperor in 1867 that Japan, like Canada herself in the same year, entered upon a new era. The Emperor’s Charter Oath of 1868, stating that “knowledge shall be sought for throughout the world so that the welfare of the Empire may be promoted,” effectively punctured the chrysalis of Japan’s isolation and paved the way for mass emigration some years later. Yet, while Japan slept, the age-old need for new routes to the Far East and the discovery of the valuable maritime fur trade made the waters off the Pacific coast a zone of international competition. In 1780 Cook’s men had made a profitable sale of sea otter furs in Canton, obtained by barter at Nootka and Prince William Sound. Captain John Meares, planning to develop the fur trade from a land base, arrived in Nootka in May 1788 with a group that included about 50 Chinese artisans. As other employers of Oriental labourers were to find in later years, he discovered that the Chinese were hardy, industrious and worked for low wages, and intended to make them the nucleus of a new settlement, planning to import wives for them from Hawaii. His interesting scheme ended when the Spanish seized his ships and sent the Chinese back to their homes.

Thus the Chinese had long-preceded the Japanese into British Columbia. When gold was discovered on the sand bars of the Fraser in 1858, large numbers of Chinese flocked from California to join the rush, adding to the population in B.C. Not until the Western nations forcibly broke down the walls which had effectively ringed Japan from the outside world did the Japanese once again become conscious of an interesting world beyond their inland seas. However, it was not until ten years after Confederation that the first Japanese immigrant arrived in Canada. Behind this solitary act, which was to anticipate the arrival of increasingly large groups of immigrants, lay several centuries of events which coloured and shaped the overseas movement.

Japan’s first contact with the West came in 1542 when some Portuguese, on their way by junk to Macao, were driven ashore by a contrary wind on a small island off the coast of Kyushu. They were the first Europeans ever to set foot in Japan. The arquebuses, smooth-bore muskets which the Portuguese carried, caused no small excitement among the Japanese, and were probably valued more highly than the tidings of Christian faith carried by the Portuguese Jesuit, Francis Xavier, who arrived in 1549 at Kagoshima in Kyushu. Both weapons and Christianity were to be influential in the chaotic internal political and social disorder that prevailed at that time. One was to help bring the Tokugawa regime closer to reality; the other was to be a decisive factor in influencing the seclusion policy nearly a century later.

The art of the gunsmith spread throughout Japan and was of particular utility to Oda Nobunaga, a daimyo (territorial lord) of central Japan, who won a series of battles by equipping his foot-soldiers with muskets. His dream was to unify the country under a single, powerful authority, a wish finally realized under Iyeyasu, the founder of the Tokugawa Shogunate, who had himself appointed as shogun (military dictator) in 1603 and set up the capital at Yedo, the present Tokyo. The Tokugawas were to establish the rule of law and to control the country for the next two-and-a-half centuries, ending the protracted periods of feudal warfare in which contending factions had struggled for supremacy.

One major reason for Japan’s policy of seclusion involved the need to preserve her institutions from disturbing foreign influences. She had easily assimilated the musket into her culture, but the influence of Christianity was far more pervasive and “dangerous.” Out of a population of between 15 and 20 million, about 300,000 people of all classes had been converted to Catholicism by 1600, attesting to a remarkable influence on the part of the few Portuguese and Spanish missionaries who had followed Francis Xavier and his Jesuits. This growth was tolerated for a time. Since the whole of Tokugawa policy was designed to guard against revolt and to ensure the permanence of its rule, the presence of foreign missionaries and traders – Dutch and English as well as the Portuguese and Spanish – had a great deal of influence on this policy of seclusion which was formulated after 1637. Persecutions grew in intensity until an edict banning the Christian faith was issued in 1614 and enforced with severity. The Tokugawa family was determined not to permit any activity which might develop into a threat to their primacy. Claims that some Japanese Christians were plotting to overthrow the government with the aid of foreign troops were spurious, but these were coupled with the very real possibility that powerful and disgruntled fiefs might rise against the shogun and plunge the country once more into civil war. The foreign traders were also busily competing for trade privileges, quarrelling with one another and quick to reveal real or imaginary designs of their rivals upon the safety of the realm. These and other factors drove the shogun towards harsher measures and then ultimately to a policy of complete seclusion.

The 1614 edict not only ordered all foreign priests to gather in Nagasaki and then to leave Japan for good, but also ordered all churches to be demolished and native Christians to renounce their faith. Christianity was held to be wholly subversive: the foreign priests were accused of “longing to disseminate an evil law … so that they may change the government of the country and obtain possession of the land.”¹ By 1625 the persecution reached its peak, almost rivalling in its savagery the record of the Christian Church in Medieval Europe. After the middle of the seventeenth century, Christianity was either extirpated or driven underground: thousands of Japanese were stripped of property, imprisoned, or banished; others were sent to the stake or tortured to secure apostasy. The final tragedy took place in 1637 in Shimabara, near Nagasaki, when over 30,000 peasants, in a revolt which assumed a Christian character, rose against the oppressive measures of two daimyo and were massacred after three months of fighting.

This anti-Christian persecution was inspired, to some extent, by fear of foreign intervention in the domestic affairs of Japan, but largely from fear of the political power of the Catholic Church. The reunification of Japan had been achieved through a slow and painful process after centuries of anarchic division of the land among a welter of petty feudal lords. The Tokugawa principle was to retain power within the family. Domestic stability was essential; to achieve stability, change or the threat of change had to be eliminated. Spanish ships and traders had already been banned in 1624; the Shimabara uprising, which the Portuguese were accused of aiding, resulted in the expulsion in 1638 of all priests or traders of that country. English traders had already left Japan, mainly because of the mismanagement of their trading post. When a Portuguese ship did arrive from Macao in 1640, bearing presents for the shogun, in an effort to make the Japanese change their minds, all but thirteen of those on board were beheaded at Nagasaki and the ship set aflame. One official, so it is said, told the survivors:

You are witnesses that I even caused the clothes of those who were executed to be burned; let them [the citizens of Macao] do the same to us if they find occasion to do so; we consent to it without demur. Let them think no more of us; just as if we were no longer in the world.²

Only the Dutch were allowed to have any contact with Japan after 1641, and they were confined to Deshima, a small island in Nagasaki harbour, their activities placed under close surveillance.

Thus the country was virtually closed to foreign contact. An earlier general prohibition of overseas travel was further strengthened in 1637 by the imposition of the death penalty on any Japanese who should attempt to leave the country or, having left it, should return. An earlier edict in 1633 had even stipulated that “Japanese subjects who have resided abroad shall be put to death if they return to Japan. Exception is made for those who have resided abroad for less than five years and have been unavoidably detained. They shall be exempt from punishment, but if they attempt to go abroad again they are to be put to death.”³ In other words, Japan was not to be contaminated with the Christianity and other foreign ideas that those Japanese living abroad might bring back. Japanese who secretly returned home were indeed executed at once to show the strictness of the ordinance. The prohibition of Japanese ships from making voyages abroad was reinforced by a law which forbade the construction of any ship capable of carrying more than 2,500 bushels, a law which effectively prevented ocean voyages, as no ship of that size would be seaworthy. From 1637 onwards, then, the ruthlessly enforced seclusion laws prevented not only immigration but also emigration.

The Tokugawa policy also put an end to Japanese expansion abroad and broke up widely-scattered Japanese settlements. No longer was it possible to consolidate these gains or to found an overseas empire. By the time the Portuguese had floundered off the coast of Japan, there had already been a steady increase in Japanese maritime enterprise. Japanese ships had visited Java, Sumatra and Siam in the fifteenth century, and Japanese merchants and soldiers of fortune were to be found in most Far Eastern cities. Yet shutting themselves off from the rest of the world, the Japanese lived in peace for the next two-and-a-half centuries in a rigidly hierarchical society in which lack of order was synonymous with all that was evil. It was a period of unprecedented internal stability and peace in Japanese history, but Japan chose to cut herself off from the West at the very time when the Renaissance was in full flood over Europe, when voyages of discovery and movements of colonization were being made.

While Japan had been grimly preserving her political stability, the European nations, later joined by America, had been brawling their way to commercial and imperial expansion in almost every corner of the world. And at a time when European countries were sending out a great stream of people into the empty lands overseas, the Japanese government had done everything to keep its subjects on the home islands. When contact with the West was re-established, Japan was to find herself out of step with the rest of the world, a situation which was to have, in the long run, far-reaching results. Only when she realized that the population growth had over-burdened the country did Japan attempt to find ways of settling at least part of her people either in Japanese colonies or in countries where Japanese immigrants were accepted. And though Japan began to enlarge herself through expansion, she emerged rather too late as an empire-builder; apart from the small island groups of the Kuriles, the Ryukyus and the Pescadores, she was only to be able, through the years, to break off peripheral parts of the weak Chinese Empire: Korea, Formosa and Manchuria.

Beginning in the late eighteenth century, Russian, English and American mariners cruised the Japanese waters, attempting to open trade relations and searching for shipwrecked countrymen, as well as bringing Japanese castaways back for repatriation. Sometimes, but not always, they were given fuel and water, until reports of violent acts by an English crew stimulated the Bakufu (the central government) to issue an edict in 1825 called the Ni-nen-naku, or “No Second Thought” Expulsion Order. It enjoined all local authorities to drive away any foreign ship approaching the coast, and to arrest and kill any members of its crew who should come ashore. But this edict did not stop ships from attempting to enter; in 1837, the Morrison, chartered by American missionaries, sought to land some Japanese castaways, but drew fire from coastal batteries. Fear of reprisals, however, led to the relaxation of the policy to a point where more amiable reception was given to visiting ships, though they were “advised” to go away after being given supplies.

Finally, the United States decided on a full-scale effort to open the doors of Japan, and on July 8, 1853, Commodore Matthew Perry anchored his squadron at the mouth of Yedo Bay. His “black ships” – two driven by steam, a form of locomotion never before seen or imagined by the Japanese – presented a formidable argument. The treatment of shipwrecked crews by the Japanese had been a source of constant friction, as was the treatment of American ships trying to repatriate Japanese sailors whom they had picked up at sea. Perry was prepared to use force. Japan was powerless, at any rate, apart from the disparity between her power and that of the Western nation pressing upon her, for a hostile fleet could easily blockade the bay of Yedo and sink the flimsy vessels that brought food to the city. So on March 31, 1854, at a little fishing village called Yokohama, the Japanese signed the Treaty of Kanagawa which opened two ports to American ships for supplies and trade and provided for consular representation. Thus the period of seclusion was brought to an end. The American treaty was followed by similar agreements between Japan and England, Russia and Holland, pushing open the door still wider.

While negotiations with Perry were proceeding, many Japanese showed tremendous curiosity, asking questions and examining the mechanical equipment of the Americans, particularly their revolvers. Everything seemed to interest them, and when visits were permitted, they came to the ships in droves. Some of them secretly rowed out at night and begged to be taken on board so that they could get to America and learn about the world. Internal pressure, mainly by scholars eager to acquire knowledge of Western ideas, had long been exerted against the seclusion policy; some men even paid the death penalty for their “subversive” insistence.

The anti-foreign reaction, however, was enormously strong, and from the close of 1857 when Townsend Harris, the first American representative to Japan, forced the Japanese to yield extra-territorial rights and limited tariffs which greatly limited the autonomy of Japan, there ensued a ten-year period of tension and confusion, compounded by intrigue, assassination and bloodshed. The Shogunate had been discredited by its failure to put up a successful resistance to the foreigners; and the irresistible force of internal economic change had long been eroding its foundations. The phrase “Revere the Emperor; Expel the Barbarians” summed up the attitude of the militant critics whose motives, if not patriotic, were aimed at destroying the Tokugawa hegemony. Not only the prestige but also the power of the Bakufu regime was gradually falling to pieces. In 1866 it failed to deal effectively with the military opposition of several clans which had formed an alliance with other anti-Bakufu elements. The Choshu clan, one of the leaders of this opposition, had already fired upon American, French and Dutch ships in the Shimonoseki Straits in 1863, on the date supposedly fixed for a renewed attempt at the expulsion of foreigners. In the same summer, a British squadron had burnt Kagoshima to ashes to chastize the Satsuma clan for the murder of an Englishman, making war between Japan and Britain a possibility. As a result, the movement to revive the emperor’s supremacy gained strength very rapidly and in 1867 the rebels seized the reins of government in a relatively bloodless coup, in the name of a fifteen-year-old boy, known to posterity as the Emperor Meiji, whose ancestors had lived for some seven hundred years in majestic but powerless dignity in the ancient capital at Kyoto.

The anti-foreign sentiment of “Expel the Barbarians” was then abandoned, having served its usefulness as a unifying principle. The new government quickly began to encourage the adoption of Western ways in order to catch up with the technologically advanced nations of the West. Domestic and foreign policy were geared towards gaining equality with other countries, and not the least of Japan’s ambitions was the revision of the treaties she had made with the nations of the West. Not only were British, Dutch, French, German and American instructors, advisers and technicians employed by the Japanese government, but at the same time Japanese were sent abroad to the major capitals of the world. Foreign-style clothes and shoes became fashionable; in the 1870s, the practice of carrying swords and the traditional male hairstyle, the chonmage or “topknot,” were abolished. Perhaps the best indicator of the general attitude was a song composed for children called the “Civilization Ball Song” in which they were to count the bounces of the ball by reciting the names of ten objects considered to be most worthy of adoption, including cameras, steamboats and gas lamps. For the educated, there was a proliferation of translations of Western literature, including Robinson Crusoe, Pilgrim’s Progress and Romeo and Juliet, the latter offered as “A Flower and Moon Romance.” One of Japan’s outstanding educators, Yukichi Fukuzawa, who founded Keio University in Tokyo and had contrived to be taken on a voyage to America in 1860, wrote a book called Conditions in Western Lands. A simple account of Western civilization, it sold 150,000 copies in its first edition.

In order not to damage the reputation of Japan, even the conduct of tourists was carefully supervised. Under the title “Bad Behaviour of Japanese Tourists,” a leading newspaper in 1870 inveighed against the conduct of a tourist who, while on a Pacific Mail steamship, smoked in bed and chanted Chinese poems in a loud voice, to the distress of other passengers. Another miscreant had, while staying in a hotel in America, attempted to seduce the chambermaid and sullied the wall of his room with an “improper” sketch. The writer of this article reminded his readers that the actions of one businessman could cast shame upon the whole of the Japanese people.

But such trivia aside, Japan had decidedly passed into the modern age. In another part of the world, the British North America Act had united the Provinces of Canada, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick in the same year that the Emperor was restored, and John A. Macdonald had become the first Prime Minister of the new Confederation. On May 25, 1868, Victoria was proclaimed the capital of British Columbia, almost a year after Vancouver Island and the mainland were united into one colony. In Japan, the imperial court moved permanently to Yedo, now renamed Tokyo, in the spring of 1869. On the road to the city, as the imperial procession drew near, the regimental band of the British infantry detachment guarding the foreign settlement at Yokohama struck up “The British Grenadiers.” Canada had become a nation; the two colonies of British Columbia had united, and within a few years would join Confederation; Japan had re-emerged into the world. In the confines of a few months, then, a few curious coincidences had occurred in two countries separated by the enormous expanse of the Pacific. But not even those who plied the Orient route in search of trade, whales or knowledge, or even those who felt that the Pacific coast of Canada would soon command the trade of the vast regions of China, Japan and the Asiatic archipelago, could have imagined in their wildest fantasies the consequences of the inevitable contact between Japan and Canada.

Reinforcing and expanding the Charter Oath of 1868, in 1871 the Emperor went far beyond merely giving his endorsement to study abroad:

My country is now undergoing a complete change from the old to the new ideas …. Therefore, I call upon all the wise and strong minded to appear and become good guides to the government. During youthtime it is positively necessary to view foreign countries, so as to become enlightened as to the ideas of the world; and boys as well as girls, who will themselves become men and women, should be allowed to go abroad, and my country will benefit from their knowledge so acquired.⁴

Together with the Charter Oath, this edict advocated the policy of encouraging the Japanese to seek knowledge. But the idea of sending labourers, and more particularly the financially helpless but politically troublesome samurai, who had lost their political and social privileges by the abolition of the feudal regime, was not yet advocated.

Japan’s abandonment of her seclusion policy eased restrictions on free movement from the country, but it was nearly two decades before barriers to the emigration of labourers were removed. Certain groups, such as students and merchants, were allowed to travel in foreign lands; as a result, between 1868 and 1875, some 4,637 passports were issued to Japanese tourists, mainly for travel on the Asiatic mainland, but also to over 1,100 going to the United States and Europe. Emigration, however, was negligible because Japan was sensitive to what was happening to Chinese labourers on Hawaii’s sugar plantations. There they had become virtual slaves, yoked to harsh and unremitting toil. The same fate met 153 Japanese who were, in effect, pirated aboard the British ship Scioto which set sail for Hawaii in 1868 without permission from the Japanese government. A stream of proposals from businessmen in Hawaii, who were looking for a cheap supply of labourers, was firmly vetoed by Japan for the next seventeen years. The pitiful condition of the Chinese aboard the notorious Maria Luz, a Peruvian barque engaged in the slave trade, added to the apprehension when it entered Yokohama in 1872.

Japan looked closer to home for lands to which she could send some of her people. Political as well as economic motives prompted the Meiji government to embark on a rapid colonization programme on the northern island of Hokkaido, virtually a new frontier with its unexploited resources, an island which harboured a curious remnant of the Neolithic Age, the Caucasoid people known as the Ainu, primitive, light-skinned and hairy. A quasi-military settlement of former samurai and their families was launched very early in the Restoration period after the Japanese government realized the strategic importance of the island in checking the southward thrust of Russian expansion. Other settlers, drawn largely from the dregs and the rejected of the main islands, were given subsidies to reclaim land and to develop mineral resources. Nearly 40,000 soldier-colonists and 557,000 civilian immigrants settled on the island in the quarter century ending in 1900.⁵ But like the Japanese who moved to British Columbia, many of the Japanese went to Hokkaido for temporary employment and thus represented only a seasonal migration; others became discouraged with the frontier environment and returned home.

Even the substantial numbers who migrated to Hokkaido were not of great significance in solving Japan’s problem of increasing population pressure. In the fifteen years after Restoration, foreign emigration to other Asiatic countries amounted to only 15,416; emigration to countries such as Korea and China could only be self-defeating because of the low standard of living in these countries and general density of population. Because of the above factors, high-powered pressure from Hawaiian capitalists and the steadily growing confidence in her place in the world gradually influenced Japan into lifting her ban against emigration to countries controlled by the Western powers. In 1884 Japan signed a convention with the Hawaiian sugar plantation owners whereby they were permitted to import Japanese labourers under contract, and soon after, a law was enacted to permit general emigration of the working classes.

Thus overseas migration really began with the 943 farmers who came down the gangplank of the Pacific Mail steamer City of Tokyo at Honolulu on February 8, 1885. Clad in tight-fitting farmer’s trousers and Western-style underwear, they had left their prefectures of Hiroshima and Yamaguchi, lured by the offer of free passage, food, lodging and medical care – a virtual paradise to people on the thin edge of starvation. They were the first of over 28,000 to reach Hawaii on three-year contracts over a nine-year period beginning with the signing of the emigration convention, and the first of a total of 178,927 who entered Hawaii before 1908. They were also the vanguard of a movement to the United States, Canada, South America and Australia, places to which 91,740 Japanese came before 1908.

Australia, with her White Australia policy, closed her doors in 1901 to the Japanese,⁶ a move later to be envied by British Columbians. The Legislatures of New South Wales, Tasmania and New Zealand had attempted to exclude Asiatics from their territories and had passed bills to that effect, but before they were submitted for Royal assent, Britain’s Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain urged the Australians to adopt the “non-discriminatory” method of a literacy test in the English language, as contained in the Natal Act of 1897, to which assent had been given. The bills were accordingly amended; and after Federation in 1900, the literacy test was adopted by the Commonwealth Parliament and written into the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901. And by a “gentlemen’s agreement,” signed three years later, only bona fide students, merchants and tourists could enter Australia from Japan for a stay of 12 months without undergoing the dictation test.

Two decades elapsed since Japan re-established contact with the West before the first Japanese immigrant came to Canada. Yet Manzo Nagano, a 19-year-old sailor who opted to remain ashore in 1877 at New Westminster when his ship returned to the Orient, managed by several years to beat Japan’s relaxation of her ban against overseas emigration. Nagano was to spend the best part of 46 years in British Columbia before he finally returned to Nagasaki in 1923, and his successive activities – fisherman, longshoreman, businessman – reflect the occupational activities of those immigrants who were to follow him.

The exceedingly energetic Nagano first borrowed a boat and, with an Italian partner, fished for salmon on the Fraser. Three years later, he became a longshoreman in the Burrard Inlet, helping to load cargoes of lumber for markets in Australia, San Francisco, Mexico and the Orient. But still restless, Nagano sailed back to the Orient before returning to New Westminster in 1884 on a ship which was transporting 500 Chinese labourers from Hong Kong to Port Moody. He found that thirteen Japanese had come to the province in 1884, had settled in New Westminster and Steveston and were engaged in fishing. Nagano’s travels next took him to Seattle and back to Japan before he finally returned to Victoria in 1892, where he opened a store dealing in Japanese novelties and goods. A few years later, he expanded his activities to include the export of salt salmon to Japan, especially to Hokkaido, and realized a tidy profit. Eventually he brought a wife from Japan, enlarged his novelty store, opened a hotel, and organized a Japanese social club.

Before Nagano, there were likely other visitors, mainly businessmen and tourists. On board the brig Orbit, which carried Japanese goods such as lacquered boxes, trays and porcelain ware to be auctioned to the burghers of Victoria on September 15, 1860, was a special item cunningly merchandised as an “extra attraction.” The British Colonist carried an advertisement, a farrago of nonsense, yet well-contrived and lively enough to stir the imaginations of those who had read of happenings in the still-remote country across the Pacific:

Mr. McCrea [the auctioneer] will be assisted by a live Japanese dressed in the full costume of his country. Being only second officer in rank, he is only allowed, by the rules of his country, to put on two swords; but the greatest efforts will be made to make him wear ten. This young hero, whose name is Ah Kein, nephew to Prince Matsnic, and grandson to Prince Cab-hal-la-loket Hal-la-he, escaped from his country on board the brig Orbit, and should he return and be discovered by the authorities, he would suffer the following punishment: Hung by the hair of his head until his teeth fell out, then taken down and cut up into pieces about the size of a piece of putty; these pieces are fed to the vultures which infest that country. Should he survive this, he is restored to his wives, of which he has 14, all tamed by himself.⁷

A real Japanese? More likely a grotesque from a travelling circus sideshow, decked out with sword and top-knot. The still-raw frontier had seen camels used for a time on the roads in the colony, and although there were plenty of “Celestials” in the gold mining areas and in “Little Canton” of Victoria, a live Japanese was still a rarity in the 1860s, and even such absurdly false names could be appended with equanimity to this “Japanese” with his 14 wives.

Preceding the later immigrants and this makeshift Japanese were those rather unfortunate crews of Japanese ships which had floundered in the open sea and drifted on the Japanese Current to be finally shipwrecked on the coast of North America. They were really the first Japanese, dead or alive, to make contact with Canada. And those authentic cases of Japanese junks wrecked on the northwest coast, especially during Japan’s seclusion policy, could indicate the possibility of some survivors living for a time on the coast long before any man even knew that a continuous coastline extended northward from California to Alaska, long before a Franciscan friar on the Spanish ship Santiago caught the first recorded glimpse of the Queen Charlotte Islands in 1774.

It was during the later years of Japan’s seclusion that cases of shipwrecked Japanese came to be recorded. Plying the Pacific route at that time were ships which picked up the castaways, and increasing numbers of explorers and traders were beginning to travel along the North American coast. The grim edict which made it punishable by death to build ships above a certain burden in order to prevent Japanese from travelling out of home waters had an effect not taken into account by the Tokugawa authorities. A sudden storm could wash away flimsy rudders, and heavy seas loosen masts of the small, unseaworthy ships. They could be swept along the Japan Current northeast from Japan towards the Kurile and Aleutian Islands and then southward down the Pacific coast.

Some 60 Japanese wrecks were recorded on the North American coast up to 1875.⁸ Of these, several were found on Vancouver Island and the Queen Charlotte Islands, the others elsewhere along the Pacific coast from the Aleutians to Mexico. In 1805, survivors of a Japanese junk stranded off Alaska were placed by members of the Russian colony on an island which they called “Japonski” from which it was claimed that they returned to Japan by another boat built out of the wreckage. A more grisly episode involved the rescue of two Japanese survivors by men of the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1833 off Cape Flattery. The rest of the crew had died of starvation or disease, several dead bodies being “found headed up in firkins, in customary Japanese style, ready for burial.” A later wreck further demonstrated the kind of experience that Japanese fishermen suffered once their boats had floundered. Two bodies on a boat found on November 1, 1927 off Cape Flattery were “emaciated and mummified,” and the bones of eight other men were dismembered, which indicated that their flesh had been used as food. Details of the log revealed that the boat had left Yokohama eleven months previously; the crew had died of starvation at the end of the second month after the boat had been disabled and had begun its slow tortuous drift towards the Pacific coast of North America.⁹

Shipwrecked Japanese had to face the additional hazards of death or slavery at the hands of coastal Indians. One Japanese was said to have been found in 1808 working as a blacksmith for an Indian chief at the mouth of the Columbia River. A letter by a Captain Wyeth, fur trader in the northwest, described the circumstances in which he saw two Japanese:

In the winter of 1833, a Japanese junk was wrecked on the northwest coast, in the neighbourhood of Queen Charlotte’s island; and all but two of the crew, then much reduced by starvation and disease, during a long drift across the Pacific, were killed by the natives. The two fell into the hands of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and were sent to England. I saw them on my arrival at Vancouver, in 1834.¹⁰

These were the Japanese whom Ranald MacDonald, son of an Indian woman called Princess Sunday and of the chief factor of the Hudson’s Bay Company in Oregon, also saw at Fort Vancouver.¹¹ Making up his mind that they somehow sprang from the same racial stock as himself, he attempted to learn their language and decided to enter Japan. He persuaded the captain of a whaling ship sailing from Hawaiian waters in 1842 to let him off near Hokkaido. Surprisingly, he was allowed to remain for a time in Japan as a tutor in English, but only after being forced to trample on a cross as evidence that he was not a Christian.

The treatment of MacDonald was indeed lenient compared to the harrowing experiences of castaways who floundered off the Japanese coast, and of Japanese who attempted to return to Japan at the risk of death. Manjiro Nakahama, credited as the first Japanese to visit the North American continent after being picked up by a New England whaling ship in 1841 when his fishing boat had lost rudder and mast in a violent storm, was kept prisoner for thirty months when he returned to Japan from his sojourn in the United States.¹² His knowledge of English, acquired during his ten years abroad, was put to good use when he acted as an interpreter in some of the proceedings between Commodore Perry and the Japanese. The fate of others who survived shipwreck, starvation, enslavement and other dire hazards, and managed through enormous difficulties to reach Japan, was usually death or protracted imprisonment and punishment.

Theories abound over other “evidence” of Japanese contact with the northwest coast. Apparent similarities between Japanese words and certain Indian dialects led one commentator to assume that survivors of shipwrecks had intermingled with Indian tribes. Another postulated that Indians began to use iron after it was found strewn along the coast from wrecked Japanese boats. A Japanese sword that was buried 15 feet below the surface and encased in a wooden scabbard was discovered during excavation for a road in Nanaimo in the 1890s, provoking a theory that the sword was brought in “sampans” of exploring Japanese “long before Captain Vancouver visited the Gulf of Georgia,” somehow falling into the hands of the Haida Indians who left it in Nanaimo after one of their raids.¹³

Even after the edict against travel was lifted in Japan, a few hapless Japanese fishermen continued to be picked up in mid-ocean or wrecked on the Pacific coast. In 1883, the English barque Tiger, enroute to Victoria from Shanghai, picked up twelve survivors “of more than ordinary intellectual appearance” from a typhoon-battered Japanese fishing boat. In “horrible shape,” they had drifted 120 days at sea in the dismantled hulk of their boat, drinking rain water and eating a dwindling supply of rice. Captain John Newby took them to Victoria, where they probably became the first Japanese to visit the capital of the province. Newby fed and sheltered the crew for a time “with a nobleness which puts to shame local philanthropists and Dominion officialdom, who have not volunteered to provide for the ocean waifs to the value of a penny.”¹⁴ Customs collector Wymond Hamley’s “unaccountable” refusal to take charge of the Japanese was roundly execrated by the Colonist. Later, the provincial government “recognized them as belonging to the common brotherhood of man” and invited them to visit the Parliament buildings. They were asked to inform their countrymen that upon completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway, trade between Japan and Canada would increase and that the Japanese and British Columbians would become “better acquainted.” The Japanese were then sent to San Francisco and back to Japan. Newby, on his return to London, found he had been cited by the Emperor for his “noble and humane” action in rescuing the Japanese.

It was not until 1885 that immigration to Canada began in earnest, increasing from the small trickles of the early years to the larger clusters of the last few years of the century. Prior to July 1, 1896, no statistics were kept of Japanese arrivals in Canada; and not until 1901 were figures of actual immigrants recorded, as distinct from arrivals. From 1897 to 1901, a total of 15,280 Japanese arrived in Canadian ports, many of whom were transients who either remained for a season and returned home or travelled through to the United States. About 10,000 of these arrivals were indeed travelling to the western American states, for the census of 1901 recorded only 4,738 Japanese actually living in Canada of the many who had entered from 1885-1900. There were few immigrants in the first years of the twentieth century; indeed, from a probable figure of not more than 1,000 in 1900, immigration in 1901 dropped to six persons, and for the next three years, none was officially recorded, possibly because the actual number was so small that it was not worth tabulating.

The majority of the early immigrants belonged to the lower classes in Japan, those who had lived on the edge of poverty in poor farming and fishing villages in the thickly populated prefectures in the southern end of the main island of Honshu and the south island of Kyushu. After a long history of poverty and economic deprivation, the early decades of Meiji rule had not improved their economic status to any great extent. They were not far removed from the harshness of the feudal society of the Tokugawa regime in which, though they were far from the lowest of the four broad, rigidly divided and perpetuated social classes in the land – in descending order: warriors, peasants, artisans and merchants – it was the peasants who suffered most abominably from economic duress. Although largely supplanted by money as the means of exchange, rice remained the standard of value; and the peasantry, the most numerous class in the country, were almost completely drained of their produce by grasping or debt-ridden landlords and left with only what was sufficient for mere existence.

An indication of their state of affairs can be found in the words of one landlord who visited his holdings after an absence of ten years, only to find his tenants in well-built houses instead of the hovels he remembered: “These people are too comfortable. They must be more heavily taxed.”¹⁵ It was the policy of many landlords to tax the peasants to the point of exhaustion; they were allowed neither too much or too little, but just enough rice to live on and use for seed in the following year. Some of the official instructions were grim illustrations of the life of unremitting toil and bone-paring frugality: “Peasants are people without sense or forethought. Therefore they must not give rice to their wives or children at harvest time, but must save food for the future.” Instead of rice, they were to “eat millet, vegetables, and other coarse food.” Both husband and wife “must do night work after work in the fields,” and “however good-looking a wife may be, if she neglects her household duties by drinking tea or sightseeing or rambling on the hillsides, she must be divorced.”¹⁶

The typical peasant could not afford to feed more than a certain number of mouths; thus abortion and the custom of mabiki, literally “thinning out” as with young rice plants, but infanticide in the context of the times, were widespread. The rise of a capitalist merchant class, normally the lowest class in the feudal hierarchy with the exception of the outcaste eta, and the growth of urban society, made life more uncomfortable for the peasants; almost every class was raising its standard of living at their expense. To work harder and produce more was futile, for it merely meant higher taxation.

Submissive and long-suffering by tradition, the peasantry often absconded to less back-breaking employment in the towns where they usually became manual labourers and servants, or revolted when their misery became intolerable. Following the trend of the latter years of the Tokugawa Shogunate, there were at least 190 agrarian revolts in the first decade (1867-77) of the Meiji period. The enormous upheaval in the first twenty years of the Meiji restoration, in which Japan adopted Western methods in modernizing her industries, broke down class distinctions in 1869 and instituted compulsory mass education in 1872, but did not raise living standards for the peasants. Although the uprisings in the Meiji period were nowhere near the scope and violence of those in the preceding regime, they had become endemic and symptomatic of the peasants’ discontent.

The almost singleminded emphasis upon modernizing industry, shaped and dictated by Japan’s ambition to become a world power, was accompanied by a comparative neglect of agrarian interests. The new industrial developments, superimposed on a basically feudal culture, had little direct bearing upon the lives of the mass of the population, except insofar as the peasants had to bear the brunt of the taxation to pay for industrial development, since at least 70% of all households were engaged in agriculture as late as 1885. A new centrally-administered land tax in cash meant that the peasant proprietor had to pay a fixed sum annually according to the value of his land. Lean or bad harvests, for which no allowances were made, could result in many peasants falling into debt to money lenders who extorted very high rates of interest. Thus land-owning peasants increasingly became tenants, paying very high rent in kind to landlords, and ownership of land naturally fell into progressively fewer hands.

To be a peasant, then, was to be desperate. And adding further to their troubles, ironically enough as a result of the development of industry and medical science, was the rapid increase in population. The danger from famine and plague, which had devastated the countryside in the past, often contributing directly to the peasant uprisings, was reduced as food production was intensified, prices kept stable and distribution improved. Japan’s population expanded to close to 44 million by 1900 from approximately 35 million in 1872, accompanied by a rapid decline in mortality. The surfeit of mass humanity resulted in a surplus of labour in rural areas, which in the early years of Meiji could not be absorbed by factories in towns, but struggled or competed for work in the countryside. Thus there was congestion in the villages, and standards of living remained low. These conditions, of course, were to be powerful and compelling arguments for emigration.

Although the peasant population had little to lose from the sweeping changes of the Meiji restoration, they were inclined to suspect the new order. Ignorant if shrewd, they clung to their little plots and cherished their habits and attitudes. Nothing, for example, was so alarming to the simple countrymen who for centuries had been denied the right to bear arms, as fighting was the traditional occupation of the superior military caste of the samurai, as the announcement of compulsory military service by an edict in 1874. Since it compelled every male twenty-one years of age to undergo an examination for military service for a period of three years, the peasant felt that there was sufficient cause to emigrate to a foreign country until the maximum age limit of thirty-two had elapsed. Japanese subjects residing in foreign countries, except China, could thereby indefinitely postpone their examinations. And when the classification of eta (the pariahs) was abolished in 1872, there were violent revolts in many parts of the country, further demonstrating that the sense of class distinction, the feeling for social hierarchy, was deeply rooted. If the samurai objected to the conscription order because it deprived them of their standing as members of a privileged order, the peasants also wanted to maintain class distinctions. The fact that there was no longer any official distinction between the outcaste and the farmer aroused bitter anger. In one instance, some 5,000 villagers banded together in protest, burning and smashing property.

But essentially, though they complained about new regulations from dress to the adoption of the Gregorian calendar, the grievances of the peasantry arose from fear of their scanty earnings being shaved even further. A rising in the Tottori prefecture in 1873, when close to 2,000 men armed with bamboo spears and a few guns destroyed official buildings and schools, was provoked partly from fear that elementary schools meant an added increase in taxes. The government was able to appeal to a strong sense of national unity in coping with opposition of this kind; but the seeds of emigration lay in the general discontent and malaise of the depressed lower classes, who though they might have realized, no matter how vaguely, the enormity of the task their country had undertaken, could not see that in any way it was lightening their daily burdens.

The oppression of the peasants, indeed, was tantamount to slavery. Private ownership was established, but the land tax, which on rice land amounted to as much as 35% of the value of a normal crop, was a crushing load. Under an exploitive system of farm tenancy, the rich got richer, the poor got poorer. It was the unusual pressure of population on the land, the lack of alternative sources of employment, and the emotional attachment felt by a family towards the land which it had cultivated for generations that created an environment in which such a burdensome system of taxation and tenancy could have been imposed. The majority of the farmers were tenants who leased the land, paying rent of at least half or more of the crop. The landlord only supplied the land and paid the land tax; the tenant took all the risks and covered most of the expenses.

Like immigrants from Europe, then, the Japanese came to Canada because they hoped to find the economic opportunity that they could not find at home. They also looked, to some extent, for freedom of individual action; youthful as most of them were, emigration opened new windows upon a world no longer bounded and constricted by the horizon of the villages. The flair for adventure, which was part of the baggage of the immigrant, was shaped, in part, by the introduction of universal education and the multiplication of newspapers. They could read of new and strange worlds, and through the process of vicarious experience, new hopes and ambitions were stimulated. Living in the seclusion of their villages, in the warm matrix of an ingrown community life with its complex rituals and traditional codes, most of the people were securely anchored. Most of them – probably more so than immigrants of other races – depended upon group, as opposed to individual, consciousness or action. So it took more than the average initiative to overcome the cohesiveness, and inertia, of ingrained routines which held most people back, despite encouragement or inducement from the government.

The average immigrant, possessing little money, knowing nothing of the English language and entering a totally strange land, had to rely not only on his hopes and ambitions but also on a great deal of energy. The amount of money per capita owned by Japanese immigrants at the ports of entry in 1900 showed that each possessed an average of $39.59, which was second only to the Scots ($41.51) and higher than the English ($38.90). It was considerably more than, say, the $8.67 that each Jew possessed.¹⁷ The sum of $39.59 was probably more than what many had in their pockets, as it was the average levelled out by those of slightly higher material and social levels than the farmers or fishermen. Arriving with the latter group were those belonging to the upper layer of the working classes and even to the middle classes who, though they were not suffering the same economic hardship as the farmers and fishermen, felt their social positions deteriorating because of inadequate income, and therefore needed to look overseas to buttress position and bolster income.

With the emphasis on co-operation and other forms of group thinking that permeated village life in Japan, it was not surprising that the individualist was considered a dissatisfied misfit. Certainly the usual emigrant did not fit in with the rigidly-enclosed, still-feudal society of the village; and the commonest solution for such a man was to move to the cities or to emigrate, for he could not remain satisfied with the meagre rations that life in the villages could offer him. “Getting on” or “rising in the world” was often a laudable aspiration in the Meiji period, and was a matter of giving one’s best to the state in the position in which one was best fitted to serve it, or of bringing honour and wealth to the family. The new education, which by the end of the century was benefitting some 95% of the children, was the means by which everyone could theoretically gain self-improvement, and by improving himself improve the nation. Such motivating force often was the basis for the success stories of those who advanced themselves to higher places. Indeed, Risshin-shusse, “Getting on in the World,” like Bummei-kaika, “Civilization and Enlightenment,” was one of the catch-phrases of the period; individual enterprise and ambition were sanctioned by the moulders of the official morality, even if they ran counter to the old established ways of the backwater villages.

For the commoner, however, lack of capital prevented him from improving his status. He usually belonged to a family which held or rented an extremely small plot of land; to seek his fortune in the towns usually meant that he exchanged one form of labour for another. Rarely possessing either aptitude or the backing of a family which, through frugal savings, could send him to study, he could scarcely take advantage of the grandiose official exhortations to improve himself, but had to resign himself to the life approximating the lowly financial and social position of his forefathers. Emigration was often the only way he could hope to attain personal prestige, wealth and power – even to a limited degree. One of the most striking aspects of the early immigration of the Japanese, then, was that nearly all of them came to Canada with no other thought than to make enough money to return to the ancestral village.

From 1885 to 1909, most of the immigrants were unattached males, nearly all of them hoping to make quick fortunes within a few years. Seduced by the usual tales of riches, they succumbed to the blandishments of wishful thinking: “We can never become well off in Japan. There is no opportunity for anyone of the labouring class to become wealthy. But if we go to America, we are sure to get good jobs, and we can come back home to Japan within five years.” And the emigrants, at parting, were exhorted by relatives to “Come back home as soon as possible with your golden clothes.” Emigration, then, if it was scarcely for the purpose of attaining “Civilization and Enlightenment,” could be construed as the villagers’ typical response to “Getting on in the World.”

No single calamity, such as the murderous famine that spread across Ireland in 1846 and 1847, making emigration the only alternative to death, nor any desire for absolute political and religious freedom that largely prompted German emigration after 1840, motivated the Japanese. Different motives belong to different national groups, but what they all had in common was discontent with their status at home and the desire to improve that condition.

Villages in the south of Japan, especially the four thickly-populated prefectures of Wakayama, Shiga, Kagoshima and Hiroshima, supplied the largest number of immigrants to Canada.¹⁸ The majority of the immigrants from these areas were poor farmers and fishermen or struggling merchants; and after the early period of “settling-in,” they usually followed the same occupations in Canada: the fishermen and farmers of Wakayama settling in the fishing village of Steveston or the farming areas in the Fraser and the Okanagan, the commercial traders and farmers of Shiga and Kagoshima establishing themselves in small business ventures in Vancouver or on Fraser and Okanagan Valley farms. Other prefectures such as Gifu, Hyogo, Ishikawa, Nagasaki, Tochigi, Aichi and Kagawa contained, on the whole, more fertile lands or greater opportunities in industry and trade. Obviously, then, poverty, overpopulation and lack of opportunities uprooted villagers from certain areas; relative prosperity in other areas held back any larger exodus.

Surrounded by mountains which limited farming to only 13% of the area, and sloping down to the sea where fishing was poor because strong winds and reefs prevented the use of drag nets, the hamlet of Mio in Wakayama was a strikingly vivid example of a village whose inhabitants went out in search of a better life in Canada. The yield from its crops was lower than the average for the prefecture, and the entire labour productivity was about half the average for the country. Close to half of the villagers, moreover, were being supported by relief rice rations from the local prefectural government. In 1872, 1,221 people occupied the village, ravaged almost yearly by storms and tidal waves which ruined crops, washed away boats and levelled houses. A further blow crushed the village when over 70 fishing boats were thrown out of work after offshore fishing rights were lost to the fishermen of neighbouring Osaka-fu.

The turning point in the history of this isolated and poverty-stricken village came when a carpenter from Mio, Gihei Kuno, visited Steveston in 1887, where he was “overjoyed” at the sight of the salmon hordes. It was easy for him to visualize the possibilities for his fellow villagers in the fishing industry off the coast of British Columbia. Kuno was followed by most of the village’s youthful labour force; once established in fishing, they were able to send cash remittances back to the village, or, in a good year of high returns, return to the village in the off-season. Mio itself prospered, becoming known as “America-mura,” or America village. It even adopted, to a large extent, Western-style clothing, food and housing, providing a sharp and somewhat bizarre contrast to the other villages in the area. Prosperity lasted until Pearl Harbor when the village sank back to its former moribund condition.

By 1926, over 1,000 Japanese in Canada could trace a relationship back to Mio, having either been born there or being children of former inhabitants.¹⁹ Emigration to Canada had in fact drained the village of its labour force; work in the village could only be carried on by those too destitute to emigrate or those who were supported by overseas remittances. Not only did industry stagnate, but the structure of family life and interest in village government deteriorated, so intimately bound were the feelings of emigrants and their dependants and relatives who remained in the village. The economy of the village came to rely on its emigrants who had moved to Canada – a shaky state of affairs, for once the overseas aid stopped, the village was bound to revert to its original depressed state. Migrants from other villages had to be invited to farm the unrewarding plots left by the emigrants. Without doubt, the village was atypical in the manner in which emigration disrupted its life and the metamorphosis it had undergone, but nonetheless the movement sharply exemplified the motivation behind the exodus of villagers in southern Japan.

Feeling that they had “paved the way” for later arrivals and established for their children opportunities which they might not otherwise have had, the early immigrants came to look upon themselves, and indeed were so regarded by other Japanese, as “pioneers.” Since the Japanese tended to move in family groups, or in clusters of close friends and members of the same prefecture, the role of the “pioneer” was important: one individual moving to a new area or taking up some occupation could induce or encourage others to come. The spirit of mutual helpfulness often led to a feeling of obligation to help new arrivals from the same area establish themselves. These kunimono (people from the same prefecture) were drawn together by the common bond of local customs and dialect; consequently many kunimono lived close together and worked together or in similar types of jobs. Of all the groups in Canada, perhaps the Okinawans who moved to the coal mining areas around Hardieville and Lethbridge in southern Alberta best demonstrated this prevailing pattern. At the same time as they banded together to protect themselves from the hostility of the white population, they needed to defend themselves from possible social discrimination from the main body of Japanese immigrants.

Although the Japanese government had asserted that the island of Okinawa, annexed in 1879, was an integral part of the Japanese Empire, the Japanese had always looked upon Okinawans as “unsophisticated rustics,” as socially and intellectually inferior country cousins. As Japanese subjects, the Okinawans formed the largest minority group within Japan’s 47 prefectures. Physical isolation and corrosive social discrimination cut them off from the Japanese of the “home” prefectures; in Japanese eyes, they stood somewhere between the former outcastes, the eta of pre-Restoration days, and full-fledged membership in Japanese society. The problem of social discrimination was never overcome although the women added the feminine suffix ko to personal names, the men took distinctly Japanese names, and families adopted Japanese characters for their surnames and adopted Japanese habits of dress and speech.

Emigration to foreign lands and to Japanese colonies in the Pacific from Okinawa was easy to promote, for moving to Hawaii, the Philippines, Formosa, and North and South America meant improved living conditions and comparative prosperity. Moving to overcrowded prefectures in central Japan offered little attraction to the uneducated Okinawan peasant or fisherman living in impoverished villages. Organized emigration outside of the Empire began in 1899 when Matasuke Toyama led a party of 27 labourers to sugar plantations in Hawaii. Emigration to Canada and the United States began in 1902; by 1907, as propaganda urging emigration accelerated, more than 10,000 Okinawans lived overseas in places as varied and distant as Peru and Alberta. Although they began as unskilled labourers, the Okinawans came to specialize in operating cleaning and dyeing establishments in Argentina, or owning restaurants and poultry farms in Hawaii, with a few becoming extensive landholders and millionaires in the coffee plantations of Brazil.

The Okinawans who left the Ryukyu Islands for foreign settlements tended to preserve memories of the days when discrimination against them was most obvious and economic pressures most severe. They passed these memories on to their own children, resulting in a heightened sense of group solidarity in the new land. The cleavages between other Japanese and the Okinawans were generally accentuated in overseas communities; in self-defence, the Okinawans tended to organize among themselves and to resist official Japanese efforts to control and direct their interests. The Japanese in turn sought to make sure that they were not mistaken for Okinawans, the very name often carrying a derisive or contemptuous overtone, in memory of the time when Okinawans used pork as a main staple of diet as part of their Chinese cultural heritage and when they had established themselves in Japan as proprietors of piggeries, an occupation which placed them almost on a level with the despised eta, the butchers and tanners and shoemakers of the old days. Indeed, prejudice against the Okinawans displayed some of the fears and inconsistencies of Canadian prejudice against the immigrant Japanese; the social discrimination which was practiced against the Japanese was thus no less severe than that practiced by the Japanese against members of their own group.

Most Okinawans who settled in Canada went to southern Alberta and worked on section gangs for the Canadian Pacific Railway in the early 1900s. Not all of the Japanese working in Alberta were from Okinawa, for many non-Okinawan immigrants worked in the Prairie provinces for temporary periods in farms, mines and railway hotels, only to return to the west coast. Possibly the area might have attracted more settlers if a Canadian Pacific Railway scheme of 1907 to import 1,000 Japanese into the southwestern corner of Alberta for building an irrigation project had not met with hostility. Unlike the huge numbers who migrated to South America, the Okinawans formed only a very small pocket in a province that attracted few other Japanese before World War II. The opening of a coal mine in Hardieville and the sugar processing factories provided work for the early arrivals, and the prospect of buying farms lured others.

One early arrival, Tomosada Ohkutake, was sent to Canada to study, but later decided to settle in Alberta when he first saw the area after arriving as a bookkeeper for a group of 70 railway labourers that he had gathered together. When in Vancouver, he had scouted the boarding-houses to look for Okinawans who would go to Alberta with him. Except when he enlisted in the Canadian Japanese regiment during World War I, he remained, like the other Okinawans, a resident of Alberta, working in the mines and later buying a potato farm.

Social rejection of the Okinawans in Alberta has never been openly admitted, unlike those cleavages in Hawaii and elsewhere. It never really became a major issue because of the small numbers of Japanese – even by 1941 there were only 578 – resident in the entire province. Unlike the Hutterites and Mennonites, the small clusters of Japanese posed no special problems of social acceptance or rejection by the larger Okinawan groups. The Okinawans themselves were lost in the vast spaces of the province; the virtual homogeneity of most of the immigrants’ origins in the peasant class probably tended, to some extent, to blur distinctions and feelings of superiority. It is significant, however, that the Okinawans chose to live in a province physically isolated from major centres of immigrant Japanese communities, away from the usual settlements along the coast of British Columbia. They were well insulated from the likelihood of problems arising in an area where farms and houses of other Japanese were often separated by many miles.

Despite the hard life that was the general lot of the lower strata in Japan, there had to be some encouragement for most of the immigrants to endure an uneasy 4,000-mile trip in steerage across the ocean, to leave behind family, to face the thousand natural shocks, rigours, stresses and unknown terrors of a completely foreign country. The process of uprooting themselves and moving to another country, even if they felt it was only temporary, was obviously more difficult for the Japanese than it was for most of the other immigrant groups who at least belonged to a more or less common culture and racial stock with earlier settlers. The Japanese, like the Chinese and the Hindus who all converged in British Columbia, not only diverged culturally but wore a racial uniform of physical characteristics which sharply distinguished them from the rest of the population. That the dizzy gulf did not dismay or stop them was an indication of the remarkable combination of the qualities of courage and ignorance that compelled the early immigrants to break out of traditional, accustomed environments and work out new relationships and meanings to their lives, often under harsh and hostile circumstances. Perhaps the same spirit that impelled the peasants in their spasmodic and hopeless uprisings informed the overseas movement.

The movement of such early visitors as Nagano and Kuno was limited and involved few men. They happened to hit upon Canada by chance rather than design, and were enough of a novelty in the early days to rate items in newspapers such as the Port Moody Gazette, which on November 27, 1886, described the arrival of one Japanese passenger on the tea-barque Endora after he had stowed away on the ship at Yokohama. For the average villager, the cost of emigration was prohibitively high, the difficulties ominous; few had the energy and willpower to surmount such obstacles. In the first instances, then, the act of immigration was highly individual and sporadic: a few here, a few there, almost as scattered and haphazard as those of early cases of shipwrecked sailors, and quite unlike the organized and subsidized groups who went to Hawaii. But from these scatterings of men came letters, advice and offers of assistance. And across the Pacific, the slow accumulation of immigrants in British Columbia created a magnet that would for some years continue to draw relatives and friends from Japan. Immigrants would send back for their relatives or friends. Their letters were often eagerly read by the entire village, and soon scores or hundreds would decide to come to Canada.

Most later immigrants had relatives or friends in the province to welcome them or aid them in getting jobs. Even those who had neither kindred or friend could at least count on meeting fellow countrymen who spoke the same language and would offer assistance. A fairly typical example of this kind of experience is the following:

My father left my mother and four young children …, sure in the hope that he would soon return with plenty of riches. But he did not return for a long while, and when I was fifteen … my father, who was very lonely in this strange country, wished me to come to Canada to be with him …. Within a year, I sailed on the Kagoshima Maru on a voyage of sixteen days in the company of four other boys …. After arriving in Victoria, I met a friend of my father’s who helped me find the boat for Port Alice. I was the only Japanese on this boat and not understanding anyone, or having any friends, I felt thoroughly miserable. When I reached Port Alice, I met my father whom I had not seen for fifteen years and while I was very glad to see him, it did not help much to ease my loneliness. I attempted to get a position in the pulp and paper mill in Port Alice, intending to work there and become acquainted with my father. But I found I was not old enough and big enough to work there, so my father advised me to return to Victoria and spend the winter there, trying to learn to speak English.

I sailed for Victoria and finally obtained a position as a domestic servant in an English home on Cordova Bay. But because of the strangeness and peculiarity of this Western home, I could not help feeling very lonely and depressed, despite all the kindest efforts of both master and mistress to aid and cheer me. For two weeks, I struggled against my depression, but finally, unable to bear it any longer, I left my position and went to Vancouver where I thought I could be among some of my own people.

When I came to Vancouver, I went immediately to Powell Street and becoming acquainted with several people, was received with great kindness and courtesy, so that for the first time since I arrived in Canada, I felt at home.²⁰

Unlike earlier immigrants, these Japanese were spared the trying conditions of crossing the Pacific on slow sailing ships with the attendant evils of swift death from wreckage or slower death from dysentery or scurvy and general hunger and thirst. The Chinese who were imported to work on the Canadian Pacific Railway suffered enormously from being herded together; for example, two shiploads bound for work on the coast section of the railway in 1881 were kept below decks because of bad weather. They developed scurvy, and one-tenth were dying by the time they landed. Panic developed in Yale when more died there, the government agent scarcely able to keep up with the arrangements for burial. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, however, the steamship had considerably shortened the length of the journey, but the crossing was still a difficult process, and life in the often densely overcrowded steerage left its mark. Whereas the steerage may not have been the “loathsome dungeon” where “the steam rose and the stench was like a pig-pen,”²¹ as it was in the early nineteenth century in the ships carrying European immigrants to Canada, keeping clean was still difficult. Food on board was either inadequate or in short supply, as some Japanese experienced, if the steamer met with inclement weather; sleeping in bunks in dark, fetid quarters was acutely uncomfortable.

One writer, with a somewhat jaundiced eye, described the 960 Japanese on board the tramp steamer Milos just before they disembarked at Victoria on April 20, 1900, and scattered for California, the Fraser fisheries and the mines of the Cariboo:

A visit to the [Japanese] quarters … was sufficient to prejudice anyone against the Japs as a cleanly people, their filth filling the alleys and their noisome odours filling the air. No one needed to be told where the Milos was lying – she could be immediately located by the varied and nauseating smells.

Waxing to his task, he continued with a description of the “picturesquely offensive” immigrants:

The motley collection of stunted brown humanity furnished a curious and interesting study of the Japs half-converted to Occidental customs. For example, all or nearly all were garbed in what are broadly titled “European clothes” – incongruous examples of misfits suggesting that the emigrant Japs had ere they walked abroad at Kobe fallen into the tender clutches of some Baxter Street outfitter and been thankfully done brown …. Each man evidently regarded his make-up as quite the proper thing in swell tailoring – yet what samples of incongruity! There would be one with fancy, cloth-topped, patent-leather shoes, a flannel shirt, and shrunken cutaway coat; another with a barred summer shirt, celluloid collar, Prince Albert and white yachting shoes; a third with tweeds and a seaman’s stogas – but almost all with the headgear of the crop of ʼ75.²²

The smells and other conditions afflicting the steerage were, of course, part of the common atmosphere of any ocean crossing. Although most Japanese immigrants wore rough working class Western clothes, incongruity of dress was not uncommon. Even those Japanese living in cities could scarcely afford a complete foreign wardrobe, and it was not unusual for them to wear one or two articles of foreign clothing, such as trousers, combined with a kimono. Several Japanese were spotted working in a construction gang for the Canadian Pacific, shovels in hand, wearing frock coats and top hats, the incongruity making them somewhat more conspicuous so that, as they confessed, “they couldn’t be lazy.” The invective of the Colonist writer, however, reflected the growing hostility towards the Japanese which had mounted by 1900; a few years earlier, he might have viewed the immigrants’ costumes goodnaturedly.

Trans-Pacific shipping was increasing as trade with the Orient accelerated, especially with the completion of the Canadian Pacific to Vancouver. On June 14, 1886, the Abyssinia, the first passenger ship from the Orient, covered the voyage from Yokohama in 13 days and 14 hours, and her two sister ships, the Parthia and the Batavia, were capable of equalling the record. Prior to the more glorified cargo of tea, trans-Pacific mail and silk as well as first-class passengers which they now carried, these ships had once been used to transport Chinese coolies for work on the railway. More ocean liners berthed in the new seaboard metropolis of Vancouver: the first of the “Empresses” rounded Brockton Point in 1891; and not long after, the Nippon Yusen Kaisha (the Japan Mail Line), which had been established under Japanese government subsidy, inaugurated its regular trans-Pacific service. These ships, together with the growing number of steamers and freighters servicing the burgeoning trade between Japan and Canada, were to annihilate the lengthy time it took to cross the Pacific and to ease the rigours of the crossing.

The Japanese did not enter Canada willy-nilly, for the Japanese government kept at least a minimal control on their movements. Although emigrants could leave Japan under their own initiative, they had to apply for a passport, present a certified copy of the family register in which all the pertinent details of their lives were recorded, and undergo scrutiny by the local police authorities. When emigrants were sent to Canada by an emigration company, the company first applied to the Japanese Foreign Office for permission to send out a certain number, whereupon the government issued instructions to the governors of certain prefectures to allow a certain number of men to leave. The company agents then visited the districts and procured the emigrants. Under this policy, then, emigration from Japan could take place only with the consent of the government; moreover, the emigrant had to obtain securities among his relatives and friends as a guarantee that he would comply with the requirements. And upon his arrival in Canada, he was required to register with the Japanese consul.

The practical logistics of emigration were handled from the beginning, not by the Japanese government, but by “agents” at home and abroad who were aligned with sugar plantation interests in Hawaii. The government, seeking to prevent abuses, enacted an emigration protection law on April 12, 1894, compelling the “agents” to incorporate under the authorization of the Minister of Home Affairs. These companies took over the work, and the government made them responsible for the proper handling of emigrants. Until they were suppressed in 1908, with the exception of three companies which were subsidized to promote emigration to Manchuria and Korea, these companies proliferated for a time – 12 by 1900, 17 by 1907. Backing them were “men of influence,” financiers and politicians “and all sorts of men,”²³ and the business was “vigorously and aggressively” prosecuted through the personal soliciting of agents whose earnings depended on their zeal and tactics and who were eager to turn a quick profit. They often played upon the grievances and susceptibilities of the farmers and labourers in Japan, frequently inducing them to sell their holdings and belongings for the purpose of raising the necessary expenses.

The companies collected a commission of up to 25 yen a head from the emigrants for providing services such as assisting immigrants when abroad and promising a return trip in case of sickness or indigence. The obvious difficulties faced by the villagers in emigrating from Japan prompted the establishment of these companies into lucrative concerns. Even though they provided the means by which the more indigent could emigrate, they were still based on the profit motive. The emigrant who had little money for clothes, fare and the sum sufficient to prove that he would not become a “public charge” on the country in which he was allowed to enter had to borrow from these companies.

In order to accrue commissions, these companies often blatantly exaggerated the “favourable” conditions in Canada. They fed on the emigrant’s desire to go to the West and accumulate money and, more often than not, they were the creators, and certainly the nurturers, of the myth of the “El Dorado.” Newspaper advertisements, circulars, pamphlets and travelling solicitors were part of the paraphernalia of inducements. It was claimed during the Royal Commission proceedings of 1900 that emigration companies, agents of steamship companies, brokers and boarding-house keepers were all intimately connected in an unbroken chain to exploit the situation. If to the list were added the contractors and the gang “bosses,” operating in Canada to lead the men to work, then the “organized scheme” was further extended.

Theoretically, Japanese emigration regulations required emigrants to return within three years, for in the early stages the government apparently did not intend its people to migrate to the West on a permanent basis:

Under Japanese law every subject is registered in his native prefecture, which he may not leave without permission of the authorities and from which he, or she, must obtain their passport when they desire to emigrate. Inasmuch as the Government claims the perpetual allegiance of its subject, it grants a passport limited to three years, and … a large part of the emigrants who thus go abroad return to their native land sooner or later, and consequently few Japanese … come … with a view to remaining or making homes, the theory of their emigration system being for the promotion of emigration as an educational process and money-making investment for a temporary period.²⁴

Although emigration to Canada was seasonal and temporary for the most part, the time limit of three years was not strictly, if at all, enforced; after a time, emigration began to increasingly assume a more permanent nature. A curious anomaly in the entire system was that the Japanese government, so it claimed, had no control over the emigrant once he passed out of Japanese territory, as in the case of those who emigrated to Hawaii and then moved once again to Canada. Thus even those emigrants to Canada, once they had paid off their surety debts, did not need to comply with the regulations despite the presence of Japanese consuls in Canada.

With the demand for cheap labour, there was always some industry which these immigrants could enter as they slowly filtered into British Columbia between 1884 and 1900. For example, the few fishermen at the mouth of the Fraser River at the beginning of the last decade of the nineteenth century bounded to 1,955 by 1899 – an increase that was soon to cause enormous racial turbulence. This figure also mirrored the sharp acceleration in immigration at the turn of the century, drawn largely by the wealth and variety of fish resources in lower British Columbia and by an industry which was not yet fully exploited or organized.

More than 500 immigrants were finding work in the coal mines as well during this period. The first of them, a gang of 24 labourers, were brought to British Columbia in 1889 to work in the Vancouver Island mines at Cumberland; they were followed by 130 labourers in the early 1890s imported through agencies such as the Kobe Immigration Supply Company and the Meiji Imin Kaisha, most of them for Dunsmuir’s Wellington Collieries.

Lumbering was the third major industry that drew the Japanese. About one hundred were working in the Hastings sawmill in Vancouver before 1899 for “a dollar a day with board” and “shacks to live in.” But by 1900, especially after 1,000 Japanese moved into Canada from Hawaii, more immigrants found work in various lumber camps and pulp and paper mills in the province. In the three largest lumber mills, which exported over 80 million feet of lumber annually by 1900, 219 or 22.6% of the 968 employees were Japanese. They were swiftly ousting the Chinese as the main supply of labour, as they worked for considerably lower wages, an average of $1.00 per day as opposed to the general scale of $1.50 to $2.00. One out of four workers in the lumbering industry was Japanese, an alarming statistic to those who were talking of an ominous “takeover.”

By 1900, then, the Japanese were entering the major industries involving heavy labour and a modicum of skill. Railroad construction also drew Japanese in increasing numbers, and several hundred were imported as contract labour to work for the Canadian Pacific, Canadian Northern, and Grand Trunk Railways in heavy construction, maintenance-of-way and the yards, in station and hotel service and in the dining cars. And slowly, the fields of employment expanded. The six occupations which the Japanese entered prior to 1893 had included jobs as cooks, domestic servants, sailors and hotel boys, but by 1900 the field had expanded to twelve, including the operation of a pool room and a few confectionary and dry-goods stores.

Yet rough labour was the general rule in the early years, and often these were seasonal and “stop-gap” jobs, endured by many until they could accumulate enough money to pay off debts, send money to Japan, or to purchase farms or small commercial businesses. Indeed, their struggle for status was to force them, to a large extent, out of the major industries into new fields, particularly that of farming, the only primary industry into which they did not enter in significant numbers during the early years of settlement. Although most of the immigrants had arrived from farming villages in Japan, they obviously did not possess sufficient capital either to lease or buy farm land, and therefore had to work at whatever jobs that were available. Only a few men were able to immediately apply those farming skills they had learned in Japan to the somewhat different problems of the Canadian terrain.

Indeed, the early immigrant would often drift from job to job in various parts of the province. A fisherman would turn to lumbering in the off-season, or if he had managed to save sufficient capital, would return to Japan. Work in the mines was not particularly popular and depended a great deal on the expansion and recession of the industry itself. About two hundred Japanese who arrived by contract to work in the Union Mine at Cumberland in the early 1890s, for example, illustrated the rather nomadic nature common to the early immigrants when, youthful, single and spirited, they drifted about the province:

They came, and they went up to Cumberland, and they worked there for about two years; then the mine shut down. There was no strike; no disturbance; the market for coal was very poor. The Japanese miners had to find some work somewhere, so they struck out all over. Some went farming all around the country wherever they fancied; thirty went to the Caribou to spend a summer digging ditches for a pipe line for the Horsefly Hydraulic Mining Co.; others went fishing; some went to the logging companies. Some went making shingle bolts in small camps on their own account; some went to work on the railway; some went to the United States; anyway they all left the coal mine at Cumberland.²⁵

Not long separated from the settled way of life in Japan, the early immigrants demonstrated an astonishingly high rate of mobility, occupational as well as geographic, spending years without definite occupations, shifting from job to job, place to place.

Most of these labourers went to these scattered areas through short-term contracts arranged for them with employers, but often it was simply through word of mouth that the news spread about the employment potential of a place. An early arrival to the province, Yasukichi Yoshizawa, was credited with opening up fishing for the Japanese in the then remote northern waters of the Skeena. After resigning from the Hastings Lumber Mill, he set out with three other Japanese on April 8, 1891 to survey the northern coast. Relying solely upon rudimentary charts and maps, the men braved the long, tortuous route up the coast in a small rowboat, and after 42 days reached the mouth of the Skeena where the local inhabitants looked at them with some amazement, having never seen a Japanese before. After finding jobs in a cannery, they encouraged others to come to the district. Other Japanese claimed to have discovered various fishing grounds along the coast, such as the one found at China Hat in 1900 by a fisherman named Mukai.

Arriving with no intention of settling permanently, the early immigrants brought little with them from Japan other than their physical endowments and natural wit which were not, though they were literate enough, leavened with much formal education. If they did not possess $50 – the equivalent of 100 yen – for the cost of steerage on a ship, many of them had borrowed the money from relatives and friends, thereby mortgaging their future for months after their arrival. The passage money was a considerable sum in the strata of society from which the immigrants emerged, yet they were confident enough of paying their debts by means of frugal living and hard work, talents which had been honed in the penurious life in their homeland.

The early immigrant, almost exclusively male until 1907, expected few physical comforts and certainly found none. Since they had no wives they lived with their comrades in shacks and company bunkhouses in logging and railway camps and near the fishing canneries. In the winter they returned to the cities, especially to Vancouver, where they shared cramped rooms in squalid boarding-houses. They used scarcely any of their average daily wage of $1.00 for physical comfort or for improving their personal appearance. They intended to save as much as possible and to return to Japan as quickly as possible, or else they sent cash remittances to parents and family, and, in a few instances, to wives and children.

Agile, quick with their hands and physically fit, the immigrants encountered few difficulties with the work they found. The resiliency of youth was on their side, for the average age of the immigrants at the time of their arrival was 22.8 years, and over a quarter of them were between 15 and 19 years of age.²⁶ The very early immigrants, who were adolescents when Japan adopted universal elementary school education in 1872, had at least completed six years of compulsory education; only a few had no education at all. Among the later arrivals, 4.5% possessed a middle or higher school certificate. In all, 98% of the immigrants were literate;²⁷ and even if the standard of literacy was based only on a minimal education, it at least attested to a generally higher literacy level in their native language than that of the average immigrant of the time. But their knowledge of the English language, by comparison, was woeful, and did not improve to any significant degree for a long time. By 1924, when a reasonably thorough survey was taken, 73.8% were “unable to read, write, or understand English,”²⁸ even after having spent a number of years in Canada, and could only communicate by gestures or perhaps by pidgin English. Only a few in this group surveyed were ever to attain any high degree of fluency in the English language. Lack of association with English-speaking “natives” and the clannish conditions under which Japanese immigrants lived and worked were to seriously retard any progress in acquiring a verbal knowledge of English.

Almost completely ignorant of not only the language of their adopted country but also of its customs and mores, the immigrants faced a crippling handicap in their contacts with the wider community. For the most part, however, they found little need to speak English, as they were grouped together under a Japanese “boss” who acted as their intermediary with the employers. Again, their lack of desire to settle permanently in Canada, as well as the long hours of labour they had to undergo, stifled any attempt to study. Yet the language problem, serious enough in that it was a contributing factor in the consolidation of ghetto life and an overwhelming obstacle to “assimilation,” often had its humorous side. Retold in many versions, for example, was the following, probably apocryphal, story:

A certain Japanese immigrant, Yamamoto, by name, who knew no English at all, secured a job as a farm hand and chore boy on a farm owned by an Englishman. One of his duties was to feed the pigs every morning. One day, when he went out to do this task, he found that the sow had farrowed and had a litter of four. He was greatly excited at this discovery, but was at a loss how to inform the farmer of the event. He got a Japanese-English dictionary and hunted out the words ‘bacon’, ‘boy’ and ‘cry.’ Armed with this knowledge, he went to the farmer and attempted to tell him by exclaiming, ‘Bacon boy, cry, hee-hee-ee, hee, Bacon boy!’ trying to squeal like a pig and gesturing with his hands. The farmer, greatly mystified, but sensing something had happened, followed the Japanese to the pig-pen where he found the new born litter. After that date, so far as the farmer was concerned, Yamamoto’s name was no longer Yamamoto but ‘Bacon-boy.’²⁹

Another immigrant, exemplifying the almost total befuddlement of the Japanese with the language, related:

When I first used to ask for eggs at the store, I had to drop rocks from the region of my buttocks onto the floor and flutter my arms. The owner of the store kept on asking me to repeat this action because he thought it was so funny.

Fifty years in Canada and still unable to speak more than a few words of English, another later justified herself: “It never mattered in Steveston; living there was the same as being in Japan.”

It was not until the Japanese began to see their future life in Canada as more than a temporary sojourn and consequently started to establish a family life and moved into occupational activities which required a certain fluency in the English language that they made any effort to establish schools among themselves or to enrol in night classes. Yet even in the early years there were those “schoolboys,” domestic servants who worked for $5 to $10 a month in return for room and board, who were intent on obtaining an education, sometimes emigrating with that very purpose in mind. They exerted uncommon energy in attempting to gain more than a working knowledge of English. So complete was one “schoolboy’s” lack of English that he could not even answer the simple questions put to him by the principal regarding his age and the nationality of his parents; yet he studied until he could, as he put it, “at last think in English”:

My ‘profession’ was far from an enviable one, and it required constant struggles to hold fast to my ambitions. I rose at six in the morning on weekdays, prepared breakfast for the family, washed the dishes, and then set out for school. After struggling through five hours of school, I returned home and helped in the housework and preparing the dinner. After dinner, I rushed to the night school … where I once more renewed my struggle in the mastery of the English language, studying for an hour and a half. Then I rushed back home to wash the dinner dishes, and having completed that task, I was instructed in a certain amount of conversational English by my employer’s wife. After that, I had to study what I learned in both day and night school and to prepare for the following day …. For every winter of three years and then for all of the next three years, I strove to acquire a knowledge of the literature and customs of this country.³⁰

Generally the fishermen, miners, railroaders and lumberers worked together in groups at their seasonal or casual labour, having little contact with white workers. They assumed the menial, often petty and always laborious work such as, in the case of the mill workers, piling and stacking, loading and unloading, feeding the flume and clearing sawdust. At first, they worked in small, unorganized groups, but as their numbers increased, they soon became organized into “gangs” under Japanese immigrant leaders or “bosses” who were sometimes in the direct pay of the employers. Typically, the boss would take a group of his countrymen to a “bunkhouse” supplied by his employer after he had negotiated a single contract for the lot, assuming upon himself the expense of maintaining them, all the while retaining for himself a profit on the transaction. It was also the general practice for these “bosses” to take a commission of up to 10¢ a day from the men for each day’s work whenever he found work for them. This means of organizing labour sometimes became lucrative enough for the “boss” to become a subcontractor, building up gangs on his own initiative and recruiting members from his countrymen abroad.³¹

The boarding or lodging houses, to which many immigrants went directly after disembarking from their ships, also functioned as a convenient pool where “bosses” or labour contractors or Japanese-managed “supply” companies – another variant of the “boss” system but much more highly organized – would come for men. During the early years, the “bosses” or the contractors would offer the services of their gangs at rates well below prevailing wages: before 1900, the under-bidding of not only white but also Chinese labourers was widespread. And as immigration increased, Japanese employment agencies began to mushroom almost overnight in Vancouver and Victoria, making what they could out of commissions charged. A few prominent businessmen, it was claimed, gained their working capital by exploiting their fellow immigrants.

Since they were responsible for all hiring and firing, the contractors could easily exploit the situation in several other ways. They would provide the men in the camps – which were a collection of bunkhouses of the cheapest sort, old freight cars or dilapidated shanties – with supplies of food and clothing, a concession which they had obtained from the employers and for which they extracted a further commission from the men. The business was easily a burgeoning concern: one company, in the peak year of 1907, imported $15,000 worth of Japanese provisions in anticipation of a large profit. Sometimes a further charge of 50¢ a month was levied to meet possible hospital expenses, and the same charge was also made for handling mail. These charges were no mean dues in light of the meagre wage packet.

The cash nexus was usually more important for these contracting companies than was the welfare of the men; but at least they provided a workable system by which the raw recruits could secure employment, since they possessed no special skills and spoke no English. Guidance by the “boss” or contractor at least had the virtue of shielding the labourers against any excesses of the employers. In fact, employers often had no contact at all with the employees. As one noted:

When we buy fish from white fishermen we buy from them individually, but when we buy from Japanese fishermen we buy through Japanese bosses. We generally advance a little to them in the beginning of the season, and they are morally bound to sell us their fish. At the beginning of the season, the Japanese boss will come in and say he has so many boats, and on the strength of that we will advance him so much …. The Japanese boss may run the boats himself and hire the men. We simply let the contract to the boss.³²

Obviously the “gang” system provided security, a bulwark against an alien world, a warm communal womb where the same language could be spoken, the same food eaten and the company of compatriots shared. Indeed in the early years, as the immigrants stepped from boat to lodging house to gang, there did not seem to have been a real break from their homeland. They lived, for the most part, a completely isolated and self-segregated life; all their business affairs and most other interracial contacts were managed for them. In a very real sense, the immigrant was a chattel, open to exploitation not only by employers who merely looked at them as a source of cheap labour, but also by the contractors and “bosses” themselves. Some men discovered that this system was a new form of slavery; others, accustomed to such paternalistic arrangements, saw no cause for complaint. They became indebted to the contractors for their jobs, and when financially pressed, they could obtain loans, the payments to be deducted from later earnings.

Restless and itinerant, they were men without women and families, cut off from the normal restraints of the tight community and family controls that had operated in Japan. Seasonal labour often meant idleness during the winter months: when employment was high, the labourers could shift from job to job, place to place. Yet each industry had its seasons, peaks and troughs, and in spite of their mobility, periodic unemployment was not unusual. Each winter, many would spend their money in bouts of gambling and drinking. Carefree and irresponsible, they often succumbed to the new freedom and to the exuberance of youth, feeling that they would soon return to a regimented life in Japan. Some of them never recovered from this ceaseless cyclical round of unrewarding and trivial work and the pursuit of pleasure; others, soon to be ballasted by wife and children, were to walk a more straightforward, if less colourful, road.

“There were only three women in Steveston when I arrived in 1898. It was an otoko-mura (village of males), full of hotheads,” one immigrant recalled. “People used to come to see what a Japanese woman looked like,” said a woman who arrived in 1889 at the age of 17 to join her husband in Vancouver:

We used to live like beggars on an old scow, catching fish for our supper in the Burrard Inlet. When we opened a grocery store on Hastings Street to cater to the men working in the sawmill, I used to try to keep their money for them, hoping they wouldn’t use it for drinking as they usually did. But it was all to no avail. And we finally had to close the store because nobody paid their bills.³³

Unlike Honolulu, where organized gambling clubs and brothels flourished during the 1890s in the Japanese quarter, no similar attempts were made to exploit the unattached males in the communities in British Columbia, although a few prostitutes were being imported to Canada. Stories of Japanese girls being sent to Canada for “immoral purposes” and subsequently deported by provincial immigration officers as “not being suitable immigrants” were reported in the newspapers from time to time.³⁴ The Japanese themselves even claimed that prostitutes had preceded them in such widely separated towns as Kaslo, Slocan, Revelstoke, Nelson, Cranbrook, Edmonton and Medicine Hat. These women, it was said, were only for the non-Japanese; one immigrant ruefully lamented that those in Revelstoke would not accept Japanese clients.

But if the Japanese arrived, like most immigrants, with the dream of quick riches and a triumphant return to the homeland in their “golden clothes,” they were quickly disillusioned. As one boy of 16 wrote:

Just after arriving in Canada, I was heartsick with disappointment, loneliness, and nostalgia. This far-away country had not turned out to be the land ‘flowing with milk and honey’ that I had visioned, and I realized that there was little chance of my returning home to my mother, four thousand miles away in a few years as a rich man, as I had fondly believed.³⁵

Most immigrants were lonely because their surroundings were unfamiliar: strange people walked about them, strange sounds assailed their uncomprehending ears. They were nostalgic for a homeland, for a village, in which at least their place in the universe, however minuscule and cramped, was fixed, in which houses, fields, trees had a character and identity of their own, and by which they could fix their own identity and establish a sense of relationship. In British Columbia, the early immigrant was a transient; his dwelling places and his work had no relationship to him as a man. Working for an impersonal corporation or a shadowy employer, he could not retrieve the identity which even the poorest village or town in Japan permitted its inhabitants.

The history of the Japanese in Canada is really their history in Canada’s westernmost province – at least until the mass evacuation of 1942. Of the 4,738 Japanese in Canada in 1901, 97% resided in British Columbia. Of the 141 immigrants living outside of the province, only 18 resided in the prairies, 29 in Ontario, nine in Quebec and one in Nova Scotia. Eighty-four were listed as living in the Yukon. And as the years elapsed, this inordinately unbalanced concentration was to be maintained, consolidating itself in several populous areas of the province. Why did the Japanese not travel east of the Rockies at least to the empty farmlands of the prairies? Why did they remain in British Columbia, there to compete so fiercely in the major industries?

Immigrants of any race tend to cluster in or near their ports of entry, and the Japanese, who entered the province through its two chief ports, Victoria and Vancouver, hardly proved to be an exception. British Columbia was the closest province to Japan, and as they all intended to return to Japan, they naturally wished to remain as close as possible to their homeland. Most of them, too, having scraped together or borrowed the fare for their passage and a few dollars to sustain them for a brief period, had no money to squander on a speculative trip to Eastern Canada. And in British Columbia there were pockets of fellow countrymen to aid them in obtaining jobs, and since the Japanese, for the most part, arrived in periods of economic booms in the province, they were usually certain of employment.

They were predisposed to associate with other Japanese in their rudimentary communities in order to strengthen the bond which arose from traditionally cultural sentiments and the discrimination practiced against them. The eastern areas of Canada were settled by the time of their arrival, and the empty prairies afforded a bleak prospect. Thus a conspicuous characteristic of early Japanese life in Canada was that it was to be lived, with few exceptions, in well-defined, segregated communities in the lower mainland and on Vancouver Island. During the period in which they moved from the homeland, the immigrants arrived in the port cities and settled down at once in that port or in the surrounding areas and towns where ready work could be found or where there were opportunities to establish small businesses which would later serve the more recent immigrants. Settling in towns or rural areas, whether they worked in canneries, mines, sawmills or farms, the Japanese sought out their countrymen.

But like others before and after, they also succumbed to the manifest lure of the province itself, since its qualities were so similar in many respects to the homeland they had left behind. Arc-shaped, like a tightly strung bow, and comprised of a festoon of mountainous volcanic islands lapped by seas, Japan has been blessed with enormous natural beauty. Her rugged coastlines and island-studded adjacent waters, verdant forested mountains and a landscape softened by a pervading bluish haze certainly found parallels, for the nostalgic immigrants, in British Columbia’s often spectacular natural beauty. They liked the mild green climate, and entering through the Gulf of Georgia and docking at Vancouver, they were entranced by that dramatic combination of shore, mountain and sea. But among the differences, the most significant was the fact that Japan’s natural beauty was not combined with a plenitude of resources in the way that British Columbia’s was. Thinly populated, its natural resources only beginning to be tapped and exploited, the province could only be the right place for these immigrants.

Although the immigrants tended to cluster in the southwest corner of the lower mainland, they lived wherever they could find work. As the province’s natural wealth was scattered over vast areas – in mines, lumber mills, farms, canneries separated one from the other often by hundreds of miles – they soon learned about the vast size of the province. They also discovered the peculiar way in which the terrain, the “sea of mountains,” divided and isolated the people in different areas not only in terms of transportation and accessibility but also in terms of climate, soil and natural resources, blocked in by the solid, imposing range of the Rockies in the east and the mass of the Pacific in the west. Their seasonal wanderings took them not only to the mines, lumber mills and fisheries in Vancouver Island and the lower mainland, to Comox, Nanaimo, Cumberland, Port Alice, Chemainus, New Westminster, and scores of farming towns in the lower Fraser, but also to the dry inland plateau of the Cariboo, the lush valleys of the Kootenays and the Okanagan. And up the coast they went from Steveston to Woodfibre, Britannia Beach, Bella Coola, Rivers Inlet, the Nass and the Skeena until they could almost touch the Yukon from the remote mines of Atlin.

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Notes

1. Storry, R., A History of Modern Japan (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1960), p. 62; Sansom, G.B., The Western World and Japan (London: Cresset, 1950), pp. 180-8.↩
2. Storry, op. cit., pp. 64-5.↩
3. Sansom, G.B., A History of Japan (London: Cresset, 1964), p. 36.↩
4. Nitobe, I. The Intercourse Between the United States and Japan (Baltimore: John Hopkins, 1891), pp. 180-1.↩
5. Trewartha, G.T., Japan: A Geography (London: Methuen, 1965), pp. 319-27.↩
6. Charteris, A.H., “Australian Immigration Laws and Their Working”, in MacKenzie, N., ed., The Legal Status of Aliens in Pacific Countries (London: Oxford University Press, 1937), pp. 16-31.↩
7. Victoria Colonist, September 15, 1860.↩
8. Rickard, T.A., “The Use of Iron and Copper by the Indians of British Columbia”, British Columbia Historical Quarterly, 3 (January, 1939), p. 46.↩
9. Brooks, C.W., Japanese Wrecks Stranded and Picked Up Adrift in the North Pacific Ocean (reprinted from Proceedings of California Academy of Sciences, 1876). Cited in Rickard, ibid., p. 47.↩
10. “Wreck of a Japanese junk on the Northwest coast”, Appendix, Irving, W., The Rocky Mountains (Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard, 1843), 2, p. 246. For other contemporary references to the subject of these “remarkable and unintentional” ocean voyages, see Whympher, F., Travel and Adventure in the Territory of Alaska – and in Various Other Parts of the North Pacific (London: John Murray, 1868), pp. 249-51.↩
11. Warinner, E.V., Voyager to Destiny (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956), pp. 98-100.↩
12. For two accounts of Nakahama’s experiences both in America and Japan, as well as descriptions of the treatment given to castaways and returning Japanese, see Warinner, ibid., and Kaneko, H., Manjiro, the Man Who Discovered America (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1956).↩
13. Brooks, op. cit., p. 19, states that he met shipwrecked Japanese sailors who claimed they were able to communicate with Indians in the Aleutian Islands. See especially p. 48 in which he claims that among certain Indian dialects of tribes in Oregon and California were found Japanese words “either pure, as tsche-tsche, milk; or clipped, as hiaku, speedy, found reduced to hyack, meaning fast, in Indian; or yaku, evil genius in Japanese, similarly reduced to yak, devil, by the Indians”.↩
14. Victoria Colonist, April 13, 1883. See also Kermode, F., “Arrival of First Japanese at Victoria”, Colonist, November 20, 1932.↩
15. Sansom, op. cit., p. 29.↩
16. Ibid., p. 99.↩
17. Woodsworth, J.S., Strangers Within Our Gates (Toronto: Methodist Church of Canada, 1909), p. 221. Cf. Sumida, R. The Japanese in British Columbia (Master’s thesis, Department of Economics, University of British Columbia, 1935), p. 62: of 20 persons interviewed, four had $30, three had $35, two $70, one $125 and one $200. Average for the 20 was $59.↩
18. Sumida, op. cit., pp. 47-50: of 574 persons interviewed, 45% of the total came from these four prefectures.↩
19. For a concise analysis of the manner in which emigration transformed the village of Mio from 1872 to 1951, see Influences of Emigrants on Their Home Village – Report of a Survey of America-Mura (Tokyo: Population Problems Research Council, 1953). See also “Mio Mura – Japan’s Westernized Community”, The New Canadian, July 18, 1951.↩
20. Sumida, op. cit., pp. 37, 53. In a survey of 309 immigrants, Sumida found that 158 (51%) had relatives or friends in British Columbia prior to their emigrating.↩
21. Guillet, E.C., The Great Migration (University of Toronto Press, 1963), p. 72. For other accounts of steerage travel, see, e.g., Stevenson, R.L., The Amateur Emigrant (London: Nelson, 1895); Handlin, O., ed. Immigration As a Factor in American History (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1959); Handlin, O., The Uprooted (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1951), pp. 37-62.↩
22. Victoria Colonist, April 20, 1900. Cf. Guillet, op. cit., pp. 146-7, for description of a shipload of British immigrants enroute to Quebec in the early nineteenth century.↩
23. Goto to King, in King, W.L.M., Report of the Royal Commission into the Methods by which. Oriental Labourers Have Been Induced to Come to Canada (Ottawa: King’s Printer, 1908), p. 21. See Report of the Royal Commission on Chinese and Japanese Immigration (Ottawa, 1902), p. 415; and Woodsworth, op. cit., pp. 208-10, who discusses the malpractices of emigration companies operating in Europe and Asia.↩
24. Report of the Royal Commission on Chinese and Japanese Immigration, op. cit., p. 200.↩
25. Tadaichi Nagao to J.S. Matthews, April 16, 1942, Vancouver City Archives (private correspondence).↩
26. Sumida, op. cit., p. 55: in a study of the ages of 335 male immigrants on their arrival, 99 (29.5%) were 15-19 years old, 89 (26.6%) were 20-24, and 76 (22.7%) were 25-29. Cf. Millis, H.A., The Japanese Problem in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1915), p. 5: 22.6% of Japanese immigrants to the United States were under 20 years of age upon arrival, 53.2% under 25, 24.7% were 30 and upwards, 4.2% were 40 and over.↩
27. Education of Japanese in Canada (Vancouver: Continental Daily News, 1924-6), pp. 82-3. Of 3,747 persons questioned in a 1924 survey in British Columbia, 3,543 had elementary education (93.5%); 162 had middle school (4.3%); 6 had high school (.26%); and 76 had no formal education (2%).↩
28. Ibid. In a study of 3,480 persons, it was found that 2,562 could not read, write or understand English whereas 632, in varying degrees, were able to read and write. Only 286 were able to converse in English with some fluency.↩
29. Ariga, E. Development of the Japanese in Canada (Vancouver: Continental News Press, 1931).↩
30. Sumida, op. cit., pp. 114-5. Cf. Irwin, W., Letters of a Japanese Schoolboy (Toronto: William Briggs, n.d.) for a fictional account of “Hashimura Togo.” First published in Collier’s in 1907, these letters enjoyed considerable popularity on the West Coast, outlining the stereotype of the “Jap” as bucktoothed, sly, arrogant, bespectacled, and prone to saying “so sorry, please.” A more ambitious novel by Irwin, Seed of the Sun, appeared as a serial in the Saturday Evening Post in 1920 as part of the anti-Japanese campaign in California.↩
31. Cf. Ichihashi, Y., Japanese in the United States (Stanford: Stanford University Press), pp. 172-5, for a discussion of the operation of “bosses” among the immigrant Japanese in the U.S.; King, op. cit., pp. 12-13, 32, 49. Cf. Handlin, The Uprooted, pp. 66-70, for a description of labour “gangs” and “bosses” in the European immigrant milieu.↩
32. Frank Burnett, president of the United Canners Ltd., in Report of the Royal Commission on Chinese and Japanese Immigration, op. cit., p. 341.↩
33. Interview, Mrs. Uchida, Vancouver, 1959. She was then 87 years old, having lived 70 years in British Columbia. Her first child, Hatsuye, was the first Japanese girl born (1891) in Canada. Appropriately enough, Hatsuye later married the first Nisei boy, Katsuji Oya, born in 1889.↩
34. E.g., “Bad Character From Japan”, Victoria Times, May 22, 1907, which reports the alleged attempt of Keijiro Suzuki to smuggle five women into Canada; “Six Little Maids Who All Unwary”, Victoria Colonist, July 1, 1904.↩
35. Osterhout, S.S., Orientals in Canada (Toronto: Ryerson, 1929), p. 152.↩

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