Chapter Eleven: Exile

HERE YOU ARE FREE!

Free to live and work in peace and comfort. Free to
dream, free to plan your future. Free from cruel
decrees. Free from confiscation, from suffering,
from wanton imprisonment without cause.
Yes, you are free, in Canada ….

SPEED THE VICTORY. BUY VICTORY BONDS.

– advertisement, Oct. 23, 1943

Here in this beautiful spot is one long span of bliss. No noise, no disease, no war, no trouble, no money …. Come, gentle pilgrims, come, or else go to Paradise. It is the only rival to the town in which this paper dreams away its life.¹

But while a summer holiday, even a protracted one, was one thing, actually living there was another. All of the interior camps were psychologically deceptive places in which to live. The magnificence of the outdoor setting and the echoes of a romantic past were but candy wrapping, hiding a grim reality.

By the winter of 1942, these camps came to be labelled by government administrators as “interior housing centres,” “relocation centres” or “interior settlements.” But these almost reassuring descriptive terms, suggesting a cosy picture of a tranquil, sequestered life in the Kootenay Valley, were simply euphemisms for what many Nisei and others preferred to call “internment” or “concentration camps.”² At the peak of their habitation in the spring of 1943, these camps held 12,177 men, women and children, forcibly detained and confined without trial, exposed to life under primitive and austere conditions and facing an unknown future, where the humiliation of evacuation was compounded by a regime which ignored citizenship rights and the amenities which might have made existence more palatable. To call them “concentration camps,” however, after the pattern of Dachau or Treblinka or even the ten camps in the United States, or to label them “prison camps” after the pattern of prisoner-of-war camps in Europe or Asia would be a gross exaggeration. But they were definitely institutions which bred a prison complex; what all the official euphemisms glossed over was the inescapable fact that the evacuees were being held involuntarily. And they belonged, at least spiritually, to the unspeakable horrors of the countries with which Canada was at war, countries in which all the tenets of freedom, equality and the democratic tradition had been violated.

At first, the Security Commission intended the interior camps to house only some 7,500 women, children and the elderly. The “fatigue party” of Nisei and Issei men sent on April 21 to Greenwood to assist in the work of repairing vacant houses was the first of the advance detachments of labourers who preceded the rather haphazard intake of evacuees. Four days later, a group of 70 women and children from Steveston began the exile of the Japanese in the interior when they arrived in Greenwood. On May 11, a group of 150 men from Woodfibre, Britannia and New Westminster left Vancouver for Kaslo, the second of the former ghost towns to be designated as a “housing project.” By May 21, a total of 1,021 men, including carpenters, plumbers and electricians, were preparing the five ghost towns of Greenwood, Kaslo, New Denver, Slocan City and Sandon for habitation.

It was not until June 24 that the Security Commission announced that three-room, two-family units, each designed to house eight people, would be constructed in the Slocan Valley and Tashme; and a week later, finally announced that it would rescind its controversial policy of the separation of families and allow married men, then in road camps, to be reunited with their families by winter.

Beginning as a trickle in the late spring of 1942, the movement to the camps was in full flood by the end of summer. Special CPR and CNR trains carrying upwards of 250 evacuees left Hastings Park, Vancouver and the Fraser Valley daily, bound for one of the camps. For those evacuees bound for Slocan, the tortuous 465-mile trip on the ancient day coaches with their hard, wicker seats took at least 24 hours. People heading for New Denver, 20 miles north of Slocan City, had to travel the last leg of the trip on trucks, over the winding, narrow roads skirting Slocan Lake.

Each adult was allowed to take 150 pounds of baggage and children under 12 years of age 75 pounds. The total baggage allowed per family was not to exceed 1,000 pounds, including “personal effects, kitchen utensils, blankets, clothing, mattresses.” Evacuees were advised to take pedal sewing machines, small cooking stoves as well as “provisions for three to four days.” The Security Commission provided $1 per head to pay for food, and special clearance and payments had to be made for excess baggage.

At their peak, the six interior camps housed a population approximating that of the pre-war Japanese population in the Vancouver area. On April 1, 1943, the Slocan Valley area, with its satellite “towns” of Bay Farm, Popoff and Lemon Creek, housed over one-quarter, or 4,764, of the total camp population. Tashme housed 2,624; New Denver (including Roseberry) 1,701; Greenwood 1,203; Kaslo 965, and Sandon 920. A year later, the total population had declined by only 812, despite the policy promulgated in December, 1942, by George Collins, appointed General Supervisor of the Security Commission, that “relocation” to the Prairie provinces and Eastern Canada would be “pushed” beginning in 1943. In fact, towards the end of 1944, movement east of the Rockies was to decline to a trickle, and the large group remaining in the camps appeared increasingly determined to sit out the war without moving – until the federal government’s repatriation programme settled the issue. In January, 1946, the camps still sheltered 9,658 people, declining to 5,595 by the summer. In 1947, the number had been further reduced to 900, nearly all of them residing in New Denver, mainly people who were aged, infirm or ill with tuberculosis.

As in the early days of Hastings Park, the evacuees found themselves once more hapless victims of the Security Commission which had not properly prepared the camps for habitation. People were moving in too fast – much too fast for the carpenters and plumbers and administrative officers. Rows of shacks were being quickly raised or thrown together, but not quickly enough to shelter the refugees streaming in from the coast. Seven families totalling 21 persons, for example, were crammed into a six-room building in Slocan City. In one room, a family of six slept on straw-filled mattresses on double-decked single and double bunks. These seven families shared a 9-by-12 foot kitchen which contained a wood-burning stove and sink. A partitioned section allowed some of them to gather for their meals while the others used their beds as dining tables.

But these people in Slocan City, as in the other ghost towns, had it relatively easy. Even in mid-October of 1942, 1,200 people had been living for weeks in tents on the outskirts of Slocan City or in Popoff, 1½ miles away along the Slocan-Nelson highway, or under the leaking roof of a dilapidated hockey rink, “roasting in the heat of the day,”³ coping with damp bedding at night and sometimes having to sleep with rain capes over their heads. They had no electricity or running water and had to bear with crude toilets and chaotic mess-hall conditions. Seven miles away, at the abandoned farm site of Lemon Creek, water had to be trucked daily to each family from the nearby creek. And to take baths, the evacuees had to undergo a long journey to the community bath house in Slocan City. Long queues and “heavy scum” on the water discouraged many of the bathers who refused to make further trips until their own ofuro was constructed.

By mid-November, with practically all the Japanese removed from the coast, the housing situation was relieved with the completion of the two-family units. All the mess houses, save those for single men, were closed down and some semblance of “normal” domestic life was restored to the hundreds of families who were adapting themselves to the routine of lamps and candles, water from outside taps, double-decker beds, green fuel, damp walls, rustic general stores and community baths.

Where once orchards or grazing land stood, row upon row of jerry-built houses blistered the eye. The exterior walls and roofs of the houses were made of rough shiplap; there was no insulation. Outside were the inevitable privies with their pungent odour of lime. No furnishings were provided except for stoves, tables, mattresses and chairs. And while small garden plots were assiduously cultivated, the monotonously uniform row houses were ugly blots dotted against the majesty of the natural background. The houses measured 14 by 24 feet and were partitioned into three rooms. Each of the two families, usually total strangers to one another, ranged in size from two to six persons. In either type of dwelling – “renovated” houses and old hotels or new shacks – the problem of congestion was uppermost. And only by the mid-winter of 1943 were the shacks covered with tar paper as insulation against snow and rain. New Denver residents were given cedar shakes to shingle their roofs.

The six camps were chosen by the Security Commission for their isolation and because the sparse local white population and their dignitaries – unlike other areas in the province and in Canada – were generally delighted that the influx of evacuees would revitalize their depressed economy. Mayor W.E. McArthur of Greenwood, for example, found that only four of his town’s white populace of 150 people were antagonistic to the Japanese. They were quickly won over when he went on record as saying the Japanese could stay “for the duration only” and that they would be “repatriated” to Japan after the end of the war.⁴

Larger cities in the interior, like Kelowna in the Okanagan Valley, were violently opposed, despite serious labour shortages in their orchards and farms, and hinted at the probability of mob violence.⁵ Local politicians, like Agriculture Minister K.C. MacDonald, voiced the recurrent theme: “the Japs cannot be assimilated and, once in here, it will be a much harder task to get them out.”⁶ “We Don’t Want Japs” said a headline on a front-page story of the Grand Forks Gazette. Signs saying “Get Rid of Japs” were posted on one farmer’s gate in Okanagan Mission after he had employed two Japanese labourers. Pre-war Japanese residents were pointedly advised to stay off the streets in downtown Kelowna and to restrict their visits to Mondays. Mass protest meetings were held, and wires were sent off to Ottawa asking the government to declare the Okanagan Valley a “protected area.” Hard-pressed farmers later employed hundreds of evacuees in their orchards, but the virulent racism in the Okanagan Valley never really died down, and the city of Kelowna remained its hotbed.

Kelowna, in fact, symbolized the hostility in many localities across Canada – Edmonton, Calgary, Lethbridge, St. Catharines, Oshawa, Toronto – which either evicted evacuees or resisted a further intake. Kelowna refused to co-operate in a programme which was interpreted by the city as an attempt on the part of the government to “dump” upon them “potential saboteurs” or “undesirable enemy aliens.” The city would take the evacuees only if they were placed in concentration camps and would allow them to work in the fields only if they were placed under armed guard. When 141 Japanese from the coast moved to the Okanagan Valley in April, 1942, the Kelowna City Council threatened to cut off electricity and water unless they moved out. One family, which was merely making an overnight stop in the city, was given 12 hours to leave. Said the Kelowna Courier, which spearheaded the anti-Japanese agitation:

Their presence is an insult and a stench in our nostrils and no technical, legal or economic considerations should be allowed to stand in the way of complete expulsion.⁷

Chinese farmers also thought it “insulting” to hire Japanese workers: far better to lose their entire crop of onions.

The abandoned ghost towns, then, were almost ideal from the standpoint of their isolation and relative lack of racist opposition. The old frontier town of Sandon, halfway between the Selkirk and Purcell Mountain ranges, about 500 miles from Vancouver, had drowsed in isolation since the 1890s. The once-rich silver-lead workings had been abandoned, and the town was accessible only by a narrow mountain road with a sheer drop of a thousand feet and by a spur line of the CPR, a relic of a lively race between the CPR and the rival K. & S. narrow gauge railway company to connect Sandon with the outside world. The town itself, which once had 20 hotels and bars, sustained by two breweries, an “opera house,” several brothels and one general store, nestled in a canyon two miles long and almost two blocks wide, all enclosed by towering mountains. The townsite had been further narrowed through the years by snow and landslides endemic to the region. Carpenter Creek, a roaring torrent of water, was flumed over by planks on the main street and provided a natural sewage system. And when gangs of Japanese workers first came there to renovate the 55 buildings still extant, long bars, with expensive plate glass mirrors – scenes of past riotous and more hilarious times – still stood intact where once 7,000 frontier town inhabitants swaggered and poker games in which $10,000 to $15,000 changed hands were not uncommon. Electric power was abundant because the power plant installed in 1896 and its two original dynamos were still in working order, run by 78-year-old Johnny Harris, one of 20 white “originals” living in the town. A mile away stood a 23-acre farm, the only means of self-support for the evacuees.

This relic from a Hollywood Western movie set, where the only “ghosts” were those figures from the hell-bent mining past or the hino-tama (ball of fire) which evacuees imagined floating over rooftops, carrying the soul of the dead to Nirvana, was a shock to the reluctant refugees who had heard whispers, back in Vancouver, of a “land of perpetual night, a mere ravine caught between steep mountain precipices, where men dared not to breathe, lest their very breaths turned to ice.” The first group of 70 Sandonites stepped off the train on June 10, sat on their suitcases and cried in rebellion and dismay: “O God, what a hole! What a hole, O God!”⁸

But obviously no two first impressions of the camps could be the same, though the topography of the towns did not vary greatly one from another. One Issei, writing to friends in Vancouver, could say:

This place is so nice that we do not feel upset, but bring Japanese food like salt fish and fukujinzuke [pickles], for the stores here do not have them.⁹

An Issei woman in Greenwood:

Children are ever so happy, romping about …. The older ladies go for long walks, sometimes picking wild flowers …. But I often wonder about the girls in their late teens, with their quick spontaneous smiles – so many ambitions tucked carefully away.¹⁰

One Issei woman, arriving in the Kootenay Lake town of Kaslo, exhausted by the journey and without friends and relatives to greet her, simply went berserk in the train station.

On the whole, life in the interior camps was not unbearable. What was not so bearable lay much deeper than mere physical isolation. It was seen on the face of a gnarled Issei farmer from Surrey. It was seen on the face of an Issei grocer’s widow from Victoria. It was seen on the face of a nubile Nisei teenage daughter of an Ocean Falls pulp mill worker. It was seen on the face of a Nisei fisherman from Tofino. The overwhelming question was: Why? Why? What is all this?

The least isolated of the camps was Tashme, 14 miles southeast of the village of Hope and less than three hours’ drive from Vancouver.¹¹ Three main rail lines as well as the Cariboo Highway passed through Hope, which was adjacent to the boundary of the 100-mile “protected” coastal strip. Tashme itself, surrounded on all sides by the mountains of the Cascade Range, was situated on the A.B. Trites Farm, whose 600 acres were leased for $500 a month for the duration of the war. Unlike the other camps, Tashme was devoid of white residents except for administrative staff when the first large group of evacuees arrived on September 8. New row housing, 350 shanties in 14 dingy rows, was built and large barns renovated into 38 “apartment” units, housing eight people each. The name of the camp was derived by combining the first two letters of the last names of the Security Commissioners, Taylor, Shirras and Mead.

At the outset, Tashme was designed as a camp for 500 families of the men who were employed on the Hope-Princeton Highway. Since most of these men were Japanese nationals, and in light of its proximity to the “defence zone” and to lines of major transportation, and in light of the avowed intent of the federal government to evacuate the Japanese for “national security,” it was a curious place in which to build a camp.

Given the isolation of the camps and the rugged nature of the terrain, no barbed wired compounds or watchtowers were set up. Each camp, however, was guarded by a detachment of the RCMP which controlled traffic into and out of the camps. No one could leave or enter without permits. The RCMP enforced the “security” regulations, including the registration of each person of the Japanese race reaching his 16th birthday. They were issued cards, containing a serial number, thumbprint and photograph – a regulation that did not lapse until January 23, 1947. Children under 16 had to be registered on the records of their parents.

The original Security Commission’s Order No. 36 prohibited any travel whatsoever without a permit from the RCMP or a Security Commission officer. “Less stringent” regulations, which came into effect on August 1, 1943, permitted temporary visits within certain limits and required evacuees to obtain an RCMP permit when entering (1) a “protected area” of Canada; (2) crossing any provincial boundary; (3) changing residence; and (4) travelling, “for any purpose whatsoever,” a distance of more than 50 miles in British Columbia from place of residence or for a period of 30 days or more.¹² Permits had to be surrendered to the nearest RCMP office at the end of the trip so that the RCMP always had complete records of the location of every Japanese.

From time to time, other regulations were added in order to meet certain contingencies. When single men working in road camps were given a two-week leave to visit their families in January, 1943, they were ordered to return “promptly and peaceably” at the end of the visit. But while they were in the interior camps, the men were banned from marrying lest they remain with their new wives.

Because of the hasty and slapdash construction of the new houses and the rather perfunctory renovation of the old buildings, the evacuees had a difficult winter ahead. For most of the evacuees who had lived for decades in the mild climate of the west coast, the climatic change in which temperatures dipped 25 below zero came as a shocking trial. The snowfall in the first winter was one of the heaviest in years, and people in the Slocan Valley, for example, often woke up to find five-foot drifts of snow piled up against the sides of their houses. These houses built of green, rough lumber were scarcely adequate to ward off the extreme cold and moisture; green firewood, only recently chopped from the surrounding mountainsides, provided fitful warmth. Heating was provided only by the cooking stove in the communal kitchens.

Water pipes froze, moisture seeped from the green shiplap and congealed on walls. Further repairs were made by the following winter, but the level of housing remained primitive. And if improvements were made, it was through the efforts – and expense – of the evacuees themselves. The problem of overcrowding was also eased to a certain extent as people trickled out of the camps to Eastern Canada, but space and privacy for individual families always remained at a premium.

Ideally, the Security Commission should have had a complete set of operating policies drawn up and ready to go into effect when the first contingent of evacuees arrived in the camps. What was the Security Commission to do with the evacuees once they had come under its supervision and control? Should it keep them all confined and under guard for the duration of the war? Should it open the gates wide and give them complete freedom of movement once they had been removed from the “defence zone”? Or should it attempt to steer some middle course between these two extremes?

Certainly the government agency hoped that the evacuees would “relocate” east of the Rockies to self-supporting jobs and, in fact, tried to induce them to do so. Yet at the same time, it hedged such movements with so many restrictions that going East was tantamount to being prisoners on probation, enjoying none of the rights of citizenship such as acquiring or leasing property and launching businesses. The “relocation” policy was not one that was envisaged by the original members of the Security Commission but one which evolved slowly, beginning in the spring of 1943. The problem of managing the camps and establishing a future policy was so unprecedented, complex and unpredictable that the process of policy formulation continued, with shifting emphasis and priorities, throughout the war years and after.

The general policy established in March, 1942, under Order-in-Council P.C. 1665, was that the Security Commission would “provide for the housing, feeding, care and protection” of the evacuees. Later, Labour Minister Humphrey Mitchell, replying to demands by British Columbian members of Parliament that all Japanese be promptly interned under military guard, said he would uphold “the true traditions” of democratic principles in his handling of the evacuees. But the federal government had no intention of fully supporting them, of making life so comfortable in the camps that the evacuees would drowse through the duration of the war as complete wards of the state.

Permanent detention was never a policy proposed by any government agency nor was there any attempt made to justify it officially as a matter of “national security” – the basis on which evacuation was premised. It was a stopgap solution until some other course of action could be improvised. Detention, at the time, was considered to be “protective” custody, the only solution to the dilemma posed by total evacuation when most of the evacuees were physically, emotionally, economically, culturally and demographically incapable of finding jobs and homes in other areas, especially in light of the experience of some 2,000 people who had voluntarily left the coast only to find no surcease from hostility.

Detention or incarceration in camps, then, evolved – under these circumstances – into a “transitory” phase between removal from the coast and relocation or resettlement in other areas in Canada. But this policy was not made clear to the evacuees.

At first, the Security Commission formulated tentative plans designed to provide evacuees with a substitute for the life, work and homes they had given up, plans which called for the organization of “agricultural communities” which would in time become self-supporting,¹³ and thus lessen the burden on government funds. But such ambitious schemes, never really thought through, were doomed to an early failure. The evacuee work crews who were employed in renovating or constructing houses and cutting thousands of cords of fuelwood for use in the camps, employed in maintenance as electricians, carpenters or plumbers, staffing hospitals, schools and welfare offices, may have been considered to be “self-supporting,” but they were, nevertheless, paid from government funds. The “agricultural community” in the Slocan Valley, for example, at best employed only about 100 farmers in the whole of 1943. Timber limits were leased by the Security Commission and several sawmills erected to provide work for about 900 men in Kaslo, Tashme, New Denver and Slocan. Almost half of the production in the winter of 1943, 23,248 cords, was shipped to cities in the province which were facing a critical fuel shortage, but this project also petered out in the following year.

In spite of the physical hardships and deprivations, most evacuees in the beginning, co-operated with directives issued by the Security Commission and seemed to feel that a “good life” could be established. The “settling in” process tended to push feelings of injustice and persecution into the background. But before many months passed, latent hostilities and frustrations flared into the open as it was clear to the evacuees that employment in the camps would be purposely reduced.

The Security Commission provided medical care, fuel, housing and education for the children through Grade 8. Construction and maintenance men, fuel cutters and other outdoor labourers were paid hourly wages from 22½ to 40¢ an hour. Professional and “inside” employees were paid monthly rates ranging from $30 to $75, with the exception of doctors and dentists. Out of their wages, the evacuees bought their own food and clothing from local shopkeepers, usually at much higher prices than elsewhere – provoking parents to complain bitterly that they were unable to provide an adequate diet for their children.

Rates for “maintenance” for people who were unemployable, such as the aged and the physically unfit, were fixed on provincial relief rates, based upon the number of people in the family. A family of three, for example, received $29 monthly, out of which it paid for food and clothing. Such help was limited to people who had absolutely no resources, either from earnings or savings; others who had some income were given “partial” relief. About 26% of the entire evacuee population in the camps required one or the other level of assistance, but within the next two years the figures had inflated by a further 20%.¹⁴ Savings had become depleted, work projects had been abandoned, the early construction work was no longer necessary and some of the more skilled evacuees had left the camps.

In pre-war days, of course, it was considered disgraceful and humiliating by the Japanese to accept relief, but now the evacuees naturally felt such help was owing to them. Welfare administration thus became a difficult task and was the basis for a considerable number of complaints among the evacuees, many of whom had become genuine hardship cases.

In the first two fiscal years, the government spent a net total of $4,291,505.17 on all aspects of its evacuation programme. The next year, the total was $2,598,567.44, with costs “dipping” to $1,992,246.45 in 1944-45. By April 1, 1945, then, with the end of the war in Europe and the Pacific in sight, the government had spent $8,882,319.06 on its programme. And the next two fiscal years added another $5,061,836.49,¹⁵ including $1,131,731 in repatriation costs. These were modest sums when viewed in light of the billions it was costing Canada for her war effort; in fact, the annual amount spent during the war on the evacuees was roughly .001% of Canada’s annual wartime national budget. But obviously the money spent in evacuating the Japanese, of building and administrating the interior camps – which had virtually no salvage value – and of relocating the evacuees elsewhere could have been spent more usefully. No one could possibly have believed it would have cost the government more to have had the RCMP investigate and segregate the potentially disloyal among the Japanese than to evacuate the whole lot. The total bill for Canadian taxpayers to evict, detain, resettle and “deport” some of their own citizens was $15,256,403.55.

Evacuees protested over the severity of the wage scale, which forced many to dip into their own resources. People worried about the extent to which savings were being spent on items which they felt the government should have provided for them. Such savings had been painfully accumulated through frugal living in pre-war days and they had been considered a safeguard for the future. The policy of self-support in a situation which was none of their own doing doubly intensified evacuee resentment. And if they had not lost faith in the “democratic” process, already scarred by the arbitrary sale of the fishing boats, worth $3 million early in 1942, then the decision of the government, by Order-in-Council P.C. 469, January 19, 1943, to liquidate all their property, which they had understood to be under “protective custody,” was the telling blow. The decision, coming as it did in the period when evacuees were having acute problems of readjustment, was bound to exacerbate attitudes of hostility and non-co-operation.

Resentment did not burst into open rebellion as it did in the American evacuation camps of Manzanar, Poston and Tule Lake, but it expressed itself in simmering, negative and emotional maladjustment and a deep-rooted sense of outrage. Ironically, funds from the enforced sale of property became available and were required to be used for self-support after being credited to the owner’s accounts in the Office of the Custodian of Alien Property in Vancouver. Up to $100 monthly could be drawn by evacuees for living expenses, with the condition that $260 per adult and $50 for each child be “reserved” for “post-war contingencies.”

Two of the major ironies of the issue of self-support and employment arose in February, 1943, when the B.C. Crown Timber Act was suspended, an act by which Japanese had been prohibited by provincial legislation from working in Crown timber lands, and the decision by the federal government to apply the rules of National Selective Service to Canadian-born and naturalized citizens. In the first instance, the shortage of logging and sawmill workers had become so acute in the province that lumbering interests – suspending the prejudice which had kept the Japanese from working in such lands – gained permission from the federal government to use Japanese labourers. Ottawa’s move overrode the objections of the provincial legislature which spoke darkly of “the fire hazards that might result” if Japanese labour was used.

In the case of National Selective Service, the federal government failed to recognize the impropriety of asking people, who had been evacuated on the basis of race rather than nationality, to accept the proposition that, as Canadian citizens, they should help alleviate a wartime labour shortage in Eastern Canada. Order-in-Council P.C. 946, February 5, 1943, gave Labour Minister Humphrey Mitchell power “to require, by order, any person of the Japanese race in any place in Canada to proceed to any other place in Canada at such times and in such manner as he may prescribe,” and thus the Department of Labour could apply NSS to unmarried Nisei and naturalized Issei. The same order-in-council gave Mitchell the power “to determine from time to time the localities in which persons of the Japanese race may reside.”

While employment on Crown timber land was eagerly accepted by men in camps since it did not involve prolonged separation from families, co-operation with the NSS plan was vigorously resisted, not only because of its inherent “injustice” but because it would mean leaving the haven of the camps for the unknown East. When the compulsory job placement regulations were extended to men in the interior camps, together with the announcement that single men would not be allowed to take jobs in the province, some men tore up their NSS certificates and embarked on a house-to-house evasion of the RCMP. Only two groups of Nisei, numbering less than 40, were persuaded to leave for logging work in Ontario.

Mass meetings were held in the camps and petitions wired to Mitchell and other federal officials. One of these petitions clearly outlined the evacuees’ position:

(1) We were evacuated as members of the Japanese race without regard to our citizenship. Now you claim that we are Canadian citizens; (2) There is employment in B.C. Why are we not allowed to take this work? (3) Why cannot we be allowed to choose our own jobs in the East? (4) Cannot these regulations be withheld until our status as Canadian citizens is clarified?

One Nisei phrased his objections more succinctly: “Sure, we’re Japs, but only Canadians when it’s convenient for them to consider us Canadians.”

The curious paradox in which Issei aliens, in theory, were in a “safer” and “securer” position in Canada than were Nisei and naturalized Issei was not lost among the protestors.¹⁶ Not only were aliens under the blanket of the “protective power” of the Spanish government, which through its consul in Canada saw to the interests of Japan in its citizens, as well as the International Red Cross, but they were, of course, exempt from NSS. Nisei argued that while evacuation was premised on “national security,” the NSS regulations interfered with a basic right of citizenship – to work and live where one willed – and that “military necessity” did not exist outside of the “protected zone.” Thus, contrary to expectations of camp administrators, many Nisei defined NSS as a penalty rather than a reward.

In December, 1943, the Department of Labour lifted its ban on single males taking jobs in the province, indicating that the federal government’s plan to enforce resettlement on the basis of NSS was a failure. Early next year, it was decided that the compulsory feature of NSS would not be used but that job offers would continue to be posted in the camps. A “relocation officer” was appointed to interview willing resettlers and the Department of Labour established offices in Winnipeg, Fort William, Toronto and Montreal, to facilitate resettlement.

There is no record anywhere that it disturbed the conscience of policymakers that a Canadian citizen, having been confined as a security risk, should be compelled to serve in the NSS. Federal officials were never articulate about the nature of the camps and what they could and could not become. They expressed no sense that it was the obligation of the government, since it had uprooted the evacuees, to find more normal and natural places in which to live, wherever that should be possible in Canada and that resettlement must be unaccompanied by restrictions. Men without prior contact with Japanese, which might have made them competent to act in their best interests, made or followed arbitrary decisions about future courses of action and then asked for co-operation in accomplishing what they had decided. The evacuees, composed largely of Canadian citizens, had not given a mandate to the Security Commission or the Labour Department to represent them. Policies formed were at odds on fundamental points and could have been reconciled only through an exchange of ideas. The paternalistic attitude of government agencies never changed, never evolved with the accretion of experience and insight, through all the years of camp life.

Government officials claimed “conspicuous improvement” in the health of all evacuees, particularly the children, during their sojourn in the camps, but cited no evidence¹⁷ except to claim that there were no epidemics during those years. That is, there were no mass outbreaks of typhoid, scarlet fever, smallpox, diphtheria and whooping cough! The government felt it imperative that no evacuee die of medical neglect or care and therefore give no cause for the Japanese government to retaliate by imposing hardships on Canadian citizens or prisoners-of-war under its control. Hospitals were either constructed or refurbished in Tashme, Greenwood, Slocan and Sandon, and a 100-bed tuberculosis sanitorium was built in New Denver. But complaints and misgivings among evacuees over the adequacy of medical care, the competence of local white doctors and the lack of modern equipment and facilities were part of the anxieties of a group which was suddenly preoccupied with personal needs and sought a focal point for their diffuse insecurities and repressed hostility.

Education for the children was another contentious issue, as an education programme was woefully slow in being established, and no one wanted to take responsibility for it. When evacuation began in the late spring of 1942, children from outside Vancouver were forced to leave their classes and were placed in makeshift schools at Hastings Park, staffed by untrained volunteers. Most of the children of Vancouver residents managed to complete the school year but since they were expected to be shipped to the camps before the winter of 1942, nearly 1,000 children were turned away when the new term opened in the city in September. For the first time in 50 years, Strathcona Public School, which in 1941 had 600 Nisei students, closed its doors to the Japanese. “It would cut your heart to see those youngsters turned away. I’m sure many of them do not understand the real reason we are not taking them,” said one teacher at Strathcona.¹⁸ Perhaps a September 1 headline in the Vancouver Province summed it up best: “City’s Strangest ‘First Day.’” Since the Security Commission had not offered any directives to the contrary, parents had understood that their children would be admitted as usual and allowed to remain until evacuated. But the Vancouver School Board declared that enrolling the Nisei “for only a month or six weeks” would mean that an additional 25 teachers would have to be employed, shortly thereafter to be dismissed – “a highly impractical” procedure.

Education, under Section 93 of the British North America Act, was a provincial responsibility – which the Department of Education categorically disclaimed in the matter of the evacuees. The Security Commission, in turn, felt that since the evacuees were still residents of the province and were being merely shifted to another area, it was incumbent upon the province to assume at least a share of the costs of continuing education for some 5,500 Nisei in elementary and secondary schools. It was never suggested that the evacuated Nisei students would flood local schools in the interior or that local ratepayers would have to assume the burden. No agreement, however, could be reached; in fact, H.G.T. Perry, the province’s Minister of Education, proposed that the legislature should amend the School Act in order to legally prohibit Japanese from the province’s school system.¹⁹

The province’s not unexpected recalcitrance forced the federal government to assume responsibility. But even in the late stages of the evacuation, as construction of housing proceeded in the interior camps, no school houses were being built. As with other problems, the Security Commission’s approach was to attempt to solve each crisis as it arose – not to anticipate it.

Education for Nisei was restricted to the eight elementary grades and the entire teaching burden was placed squarely on the evacuees themselves. High school students were left to fend for themselves through correspondence courses – at their own expense – until the Roman Catholic, Anglican and United Churches decided to staff and finance high school as well as kindergarten classes. The churches eventually operated eight high schools, which were attended by about 1,000 students. Classes were held in a variety of buildings, including converted bunkhouses in Bay Farm and Popoff and a barn in Tashme normally used as a recreation and community hall.

Bachelors actually had to be evicted from the bunkhouses in Bay Farm and Popoff before classes for public-school children could begin in April, 1943, the men complaining that the Security Commission ought to build a new school. The delay in opening the schools meant that most of the pupils had missed up to a year of formal education. A year later, most schools still had a shortage of textbooks and even blackboards.

High schools were not opened until much later. In New Denver, 50 Nisei resumed classes in September, 1943, in the local United Church, the only empty building that could be found. One teacher wrote:

Partition curtains were put up, lumber for tables ordered …. When 25 Grade 9 students came in from the Elementary School, they could not possibly be accommodated in the church, so the Commission decided to make the Recreation Hall available during the school hours. And ping-pong tables made excellent desks …. One mother sold her sewing machine rather than ask for help to buy books for her children.²⁰

Finding and training teachers was another problem since the profession, in the pre-war period, was not one which offered an opportunity for employment. In fact, for the 2,348 children enrolled in the camp public schools, there were only two Nisei who actually had teaching certificates. Hide Hyodo became supervisor, assisted by the second teacher, Teruko Hidaka; the two women had to take on the task of building up a staff from Nisei university and high school graduates who would be willing to become temporary – and at first unpaid – teachers. Fifty young Nisei, nearly all girls, had taken a five-day course in Hastings Park when the provincial legislature announced that it would renege on its educational responsibilities and in the summer of 1943, about 125 Nisei attended a four-week course in New Denver, instructed by staff members from teacher-training schools in Vancouver.

The whole atmosphere of the camps was so abnormal, however, that even with the best of personnel and equipment, an adequate educational programme would not have resulted. Notwithstanding the dedication of these untrained Nisei, the calibre of teaching was obviously not of the highest. The students themselves were subject to the isolation of camp life in which Japanese invariably was the only language spoken in the home and Nisei, as a result, tended to fare poorly in those subjects in which a good command of English was vital. Although secret Japanese-language classes were held nightly in the camps, loss of fluency and literacy in the Japanese language was also accelerated during this period.

Parent-Teachers Associations, which proliferated in the camps, usually made up of Japanese-language teachers who formerly enjoyed prestige and influence in the pre-war communities, also tended to be a divisive influence on the harassed Nisei teachers. These associations had a “demoralizing effect”²¹ on the Nisei staff, the busybodies among them criticizing everything from the personal background to the moral character of the young girls who made up the bulk of the staff. But the early problems were gradually worked out and some PTA groups, such as the Lemon Creek association which bore the full cost of building a two-room high school, assumed a more constructive role.

Ambitious plans for the older adolescent group, calling for the establishment of vocational classes in cooking, carpentry, painting, tinsmithery and dressmaking to help Nisei “to take useful work in private employment”²² were but the fancies of the author of the Department of Labour’s Report on the Administration of Japanese Affairs, 1942-44. This report, along with its two companion volumes, was officialdom’s whitewash of unrealized government policies. Some of these classes, indeed, got off the planning board but soon foundered because funds and facilities were not provided. Still, educational spending was raised to the point where the Department of Labour allocated $100,000, excluding salaries, for the 1944-45 term, almost double that of the first year. But in the enclosed world of the camps, where their fellow students and playmates were all Nisei, the personality development of the young generation was affected by the transferred hostility of their parents towards Canada and the “democratic” process, and the feelings of persecution and the intensification of the pre-war generational conflicts.²³

No plans were formulated for moving either the 60 university students who had been enrolled at the University of British Columbia, or the rapidly growing numbers who had reached university age to institutions across Canada. Moreover, the record of the universities during the wartime period reflected the racism of the public sector, for few accepted Nisei students. The University of Toronto rejected an application from a Nisei girl in the fall term of 1942, and when six students arrived in Kingston after receiving written permission from Queen’s to begin the term, they found their enrolment was “under consideration” and they were ultimately turned down. McGill University, despite protests by its student body, did not accept Nisei until the fall of 1945 because “vital war research” was being pursued there.

This academic bigotry prompted novelist Pearl Buck to complain in Time magazine that “for all practical purposes,” Canadian Nisei cannot enrol in any college or university and that McGill in particular bars them “on the frank contention that serfs of an inferior race deserve no education.”²⁴ Universities in Canada simply reflected provincial and municipal prejudices, though some of them based their rejection on the fact that Nisei were not eligible for military service. By 1945, fewer than 100 evacuees were “relocated” in universities or business colleges; in the United States – even accounting for that fact that the total of Canadian evacuees was less than one-fifth of the American – over 4,000 evacuees were studying at some 534 institutions of higher learning.²⁵

Meanwhile, complaints to Ottawa, to the International Red Cross and the Spanish consulate over conditions in the camps prompted Ottawa to appoint a Royal Commission to investigate the situation. In announcing the probe on December 21, 1943, Labour Minister Mitchell also noted that his department had received complaints “that the provisions made [for the evacuees] are, if anything, too generous.”²⁶ He gave instructions that the Royal Commission must, above all, consider that “the settlements represent temporary relocations only and have not been administered as permanent relocation centres.”²⁷

The four-man committee, headed by Dr. F.W. Jackson, Deputy Minister of Health and Public Welfare for Manitoba, began its work by inspecting some former homes of evacuees in the fishing village of Steveston and the Little Tokyo district of Vancouver, and then made a whirlwind five-day tour of the interior camps during the first week of January, 1944. The Commission received deputations and briefs from various Issei committees and individuals, which in themselves were haphazardly presented and amounted, as one Nisei commented, “to nothing more than man-on-the-street complaints.” The Commission also arranged to have over 1,000 children in Kaslo weighed, and compared results with pre-war records. Two weeks later, it submitted its report to Mitchell, the entire process taking less than three weeks. The commissioners, for example spent only a day in the length of the Slocan Valley, the largest of the areas, housing 4,351 evacuees at the time. That day was spent in Lemon Creek and Slocan City, provoking evacuees to complain that the commissioners “just drove up and down the street.”

Some naive hopes for improvement in camp conditions were raised but they were quickly dashed, for the Royal Commission’s report, tabled in the House of Commons on March 20, 1944, expressed the “unanimous opinion” that, having in mind the proposition that the camps were a “temporary means of meeting an emergency,

the provisions … for the welfare of Japanese in the interior settlements … are, as a wartime measure, reasonably fair and adequate.²⁸

The report praised the work of the Security Commission and the federal government in the operation of the camps and the commissioners recommended that the housing congestion could be alleviated by accelerating the movement of evacuees to self-supporting employment and endorsed the policy of forcing evacuees to use proceeds from confiscated property for their own support. It turned down increased expenditures for education and dismissed complaints over wage scales, food, medical care and recreational facilities. The only gain for the evacuees was an increase of 10% in maintenance rates for the unemployables and dependants, which was to be granted at the discretion of the Welfare Department. For the evacuees, the Royal Commission probe and report was simply another example of their now-ingrained belief that the government would not do well by them.

The curfew that dismayed the Japanese communities on the coast was lifted in the camps, but censorship was imposed on all incoming and outgoing mail, in either Japanese or English. Not only did censorship delay delivery of mail – letters from Eastern Canada to the camps often taking 10 days to a month – but also served to restrict freedom of expression or at least to restrain one of the simplest means of privately releasing frustration. The Canadian Postal Censor in Vancouver had issued strict instructions including:

(1) Write in English. If in Japanese, it should be confined to essential news and information, avoiding inconsequential gossip. A concise letter gets first consideration; (2) Do not slow up the Censor’s reading by using unusual [Japanese] symbols; and (3) Do not enclose in envelopes addressed to Occidentals correspondence to be passed on to Japanese nationals. This places upon the Occidental the duty of reporting your action to government authorities.²⁹

Obviously, censorship as imposed on the evacuees inhibited free discussion, between friends and family members, of important problems such as resettlement and repatriation. Together with the lack of privacy in their crowded homes – often the source of bitter friction between sharing families – censorship tended to increase the frustration of the evacuees with their camp life, adding to bitterness over past injustices and the realization that the federal government had set very narrow limits within which they could plan for any readjustment.

The contents of The New Canadian, which was now publishing in Kaslo, also had to be approved by the censor before going to press. There had been strong demands from time to time by provincial politicians such as Mayor Cornett of Vancouver and by groups such as the Vancouver and Royal City Loyal Orange Association which stated that the paper “exercises a subversive influence and breeds dissatisfaction among the Japanese,”³⁰ that it be suspended, and that editor Tom Shoyama be interned.

The Justice Department took no action, presumably feeling that the newspaper’s value as a vehicle for information and announcements outweighed the nuisance of its criticisms, and that censorship was an adequate safeguard against excesses. The New Canadian’s editorial policy of championing relocation and attacking the inertia of the evacuees in the camps was also an attitude which happened to coincide with the government’s hazy relocation programme. Of the influence of censorship, Shoyama explained:

We are necessarily hedged about with … restrictions. It is not always possible to present facts, nor can views and opinions be as freely expressed as in pre-war days, nor even as forthrightly as in the Nisei press today [in the U.S.]”³¹

Even the use of cameras in the camps was not allowed until April, 1944.

The longer the evacuees remained in the camps, the greater was the increase in group or racial identification. Many Issei, whose sentimental ties with Japan were strong, could feel satisfaction with the first flush of success of Japan’s military advances. And even in the later stages, when Japan was patently losing the war, they clung to the idea that Allied claims of Japan’s reversals were not to be believed. In such a condition of daily existence, it was not unexpected that an anti-Canadian attitude would develop among Issei, many of whom felt that compensation for their deprivations and losses would be gained by a Japanese victory. Those who claimed that Japan would lose the war began to be threatened with beatings and called atama no kuroi keto (“black-haired white trash”). This attitude was absorbed by many Nisei, who heard parental outbursts of hostility against the government and predictions of ultimate Japanese victory in their homes and in the community bathhouses. When an old newsreel, showing the Pearl Harbor bombings, was screened during one of the weekly film nights as a trailer to the inevitable Ginger Rogers-Fred Astaire musical in Slocan City’s community hall, the Nisei audience responded with spontaneous shouts of Banzai!

There was a tacit belief among evacuees that government officials were “enemies of the people,” who were, as many said, “trying to shove us around again.”³² The fact that white officials supervised the administration of the camps led inevitably to a caste and racial distinction and a basic cleavage. Nisei who worked in administration offices, even though their duties were usually limited to clerical tasks, were therefore considered as inu (dogs) of the Security Commission and were distrusted and ostracized. Nisei who read about the work of the War Relocation Authority in the United States correctly felt that it was a powerful rallying point and a friend of the American evacuees; they couldn’t feel that way about the Security Commission and its officialdom. The American Nisei press kept a careful eye on WRA’s national director Dillon Myer, noted the courage with which he stood up to his belief in the Japanese Americans against public hostility and admired his ability to mould and influence policy. Few Nisei in Canada were likely to express even a grudging respect for the Security Commission’s Taylor or Labour Minister Mitchell.

Issei committees, often made up of pro-Japan members who organized the welter of complaints and militated against relocation very early in the evacuation, once again proliferated in the camps after a hiatus in the critical evacuation period. When the crisis first hit the Japanese community in Vancouver, Issei leadership on which the Japanese had leaned for years was wholly wanting. It was disunited, confused, short-sighted, autocratic. The Issei were simply not prepared mentally. Since the outbreak of World War II, in view of the pressing issues which loomed before them, Issei preferred to look back to the past or were worried about their present status and prestige in the community, or what was on the menu for the evening supper. Said one Nisei:

Had it not been for the pig-headed pride and impossible vanity of certain Issei leaders – and the weak-kneed cavilling of others – much of the tragic disunity and internal conflict which marred our record during the evacuation might well have been avoided.³³

In the crisis, the Nisei had pushed to the forefront, perceiving that the old men were wrong; but when the issues, such as the threatened breakup of families, were settled, community leadership in the interior camps reverted to those Issei and their self-appointed committees. They could now once more concentrate on the day’s physical needs, while the Nisei retreated into the more familiar social and athletic round and the young intellectuals and the more “assimilation-minded” among them made a break for the East.

Generational conflicts did not polarize in the camps as they did in the crises of the early evacuation period. The JCCC leaders, who had opted for full co-operation with the evacuation orders, had been scattered, and many of their chief rivals to leadership, the members of the militant Nisei Mass Evacuation Group, languished in internment camps in Ontario. And unlike the WRA the Security Commission never at any time contemplated giving evacuees even a limited form of self-government, even as a “sounding board” or as a liaison group between administration and evacuees. No special group, therefore, among the evacuees in any of the camps ever assumed prominent leadership.

It is doubtful, however, that the JCCC could have taken on the role as an effective leadership group, as the WRA soon discovered in respect to the Japanese American Citizens League:

The attempts of the JACL to claim leadership … has been almost universally repudiated. This repudiation is based on the belief that the JACL leaders were in large measure responsible for the decision to evacuate and that they sacrificed members of their national group for their own selfish interest. This distrust of the JACL is held not only by the alien group but also by a large contingent of citizens.³⁴

Leaders and active members of the JACL were accused of having betrayed the whole Japanese community and some of them suffered savage beatings from their fellow evacuees. In the camps in British Columbia, a “leader” often seemed definable as a man who had committed himself publicly against relocation; and people who decided to resettle usually left quietly, rarely revealing their plans because they felt their action would be condemned.

In the camps, there was an outward patina of acceptance and reconciliation, even enjoyment, of settlement life. Frustrations and anger, though always present, were repressed. Conflict was always potential but rarely realized. In the United States, men branded as collaborationists and inu were beyond the pale; revolt against camp administration took the form of mass strikes or minor work stoppages and in two camps, Poston and Manzanar, it assumed the proportion of riots. In Manzanar, martial law was declared, and a machine-gunner fired upon the evacuees, killing one and wounding several others. A number of JACL leaders and so-called “collaborators” were hastily removed from the camps and resettled elsewhere. Tule Lake became the hub for evacuee disturbances and had to be guarded by a full battalion of soldiers and an array of tanks.

Leading the violence in Tule Lake was an extremist, uncompromising pressure group, made up mainly of American-born, Japan-educated Kibei, who openly espoused the Japanese way of life to the point of fanaticism, indulging in military drills and flag-waving. In contrast, camp life in British Columbia was relatively peaceful and almost without incident.³⁵ The Kika Nisei, the counterpart of the American Kibei, was too small a group in Canada to play a significant role.

The sectional or regional rivalries between evacuees in the interior camps usually evolved around competition for the better jobs. For example, people from the Skeena River district, who were among the earliest to arrive in the Slocan Valley, reserved jobs offered by white farmers for themselves, and later arrivals from Vancouver immediately found themselves at a distinct disadvantage. The fact that many of the later arrivals had to live in tents also resulted in competition for available housing, some of which were felt to be more desirable than others. Jealousies and arguments abounded and in many cases, people made emotional appeals to one another, saying “we are all Japanese together – we are all in the same boat and we should stick together.”

But while the evacuees had been subjected to an extraordinary series of experiences and a multitude of mental strains, they manifested no overt mass resistance to white authority, nor did they release their frustrations in intra-group violence. The cumulative resentments tended, in the main, to resolve into passive resistance, characterized by the determination to “sit out the war” and reject appeals to resettle. People in the camps, even along the same “street,” constituted a heterogeneous lot. Although the “street” may have contained a few persons from Vancouver or Prince Rupert and although it might have consisted of dozens of families, each of whom had known each other before the evacuation, they often had little in common. They might be poor strawberry farmers from the Fraser Valley, itinerant labourers, a few city shopkeepers, possibly a dentist – people who had lived according to widely different economic standards, who belonged to different churches. Every street had a background of differing class, religious and family behaviour. Antipathies sprang up, adjustments had to be made. There were also sharp differences in social and “cultural” behaviour between, say the fishermen from Steveston, the city folk from Victoria or the loggers from Vancouver Island. They all exhibited a marked variation in attitudes towards assimilation in the “Canadian way” of life, often exemplified in the prevalence to which some regional or occupational groups tended to speak only Japanese. But they rarely exceeded the bounds of initial antagonism, which often manifested itself in – and were often solved by – intense rivalries on the sports field.

The camps had their share of gamblers, thieves, whiskey distillers and juvenile delinquents, but these “lawless” elements were certainly no more typical of the communities than they were of an average small village. There were no reported cases of murder or rape, no serious crimes of any nature. In fact, the problems of internal security in the camps, for the administrators and the RCMP, were more simple than for the ordinary police department in a village with a population of 2,000 to 4,000 because they were dealing with a group of people who had achieved a high degree of intra-group discipline.

There is no doubt that, unlike the desert locales of the American camps with their 125-degree heat, swirling dust storms and maggots, the charm and serenity of lakes and woods and the changeless mountains of the interior helped to foster the inertia of the evacuees, insulating them against the insecurity and gnawing problems of the future.

The cumulative effects of camp life were only dimly perceived – if perceived at all – by the majority of the evacuated people. Generalizations about the social and psychological consequences of camp life, in terms of the evacuees as a group, could be misleading for the evacuation obviously did not have the same effects on everyone. Still, with every passing month and year, more camp residents were losing initiative and self-reliance. They were becoming progressively disaffected and maladjusted and turning into “wards” of the government in the fullest and most disturbing sense of the word. And, in fact, they were demanding their “rights” under that concept and militating for a maximum of compensating personal security.

To those evacuees, the camps provided a haven from the storms of race prejudice and the disruptions of war. They became communities in which a man merely had to go through the routines of work, in which he could divest himself of many of the responsibilities of his previous life – even if it meant personal discomfort, low wage scales and a drain on his financial resources. In the minds of many Issei, it was the government’s duty to maintain the camps; it was compensation for the injustice of the evacuation and compulsory sale of their property. They eventually came to feel they had a genuine stake in these camps and that the government had no moral or “legal” right to take this refuge away from them. After the camps had been established, there was never really any time when it was completely impossible to leave them – providing, of course, that their decisions conformed to federal regulations – and so detention in the camps was really only technical and temporary.

For many Issei, life in the camps provided their first real vacation from their previous strenuous life. Some attempted to take part in the rather feeble cultural revival of certain Japanese arts, crafts, folkways and mores, or at least indulged in typical forms of recreation such as go (checkers) and shogi (chess). For the young Nisei, the opportunities for social and athletic activity were unlimited. Gone were the dreary days of daily Japanese-language classes, forced upon them by parents, learning a difficult language by rote, cringing under the slaps of martinet teachers. Dances and concerts and drama nights flourished. They were the years of Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, Frank Sinatra, jitterbugging, juke-box Saturday nights and the Hit Parade. Every camp had its baseball teams, often manned by popular veterans from pre-war sandlot leagues. Hockey became a new activity, even if equipment had to be improvised. Softball matches with local Doukhobors became strange spectacles matching two much maligned groups, both isolated in the Kootenay and Slocan Valleys from the rest of Canadian life. Wrote one Nisei of his fellow evacuees:

All of the Nisei were out for fun and they got it. They all seemed happy and contented with all the social life and they didn’t look very bitter to me. I think they had more fun there than they ever had in their lives.³⁶

Mary Oki, a Tashme high school student, could write in 1944:

My life today? I can honestly say I enjoy it. We have pieced together the scattered shreds of our lives, and built a home, makeshift and crude though it may be. We have gained as much security as possible in the present day turmoil …. I must admit that in a certain way, there is a sense of freedom in this confined mountain hermitage.³⁷

The outdoors provided ample opportunities for hiking and swimming; the surrounding hills were rich in wild mushrooms and huckleberries, and people went on long searches for the elusive Chosen ninjin, a vegetable reputed to be a toothsome delicacy and to have unequalled healing qualities. In the summer, teenaged Nisei earned pocket money in the Okanagan orchards and came into a wary contact with white society in the cafes and milkshake bars of Vernon and with bemused storekeepers in Oyama and Coldstream.

As compared with the distraught, angry and fearful agglomeration of people who came into the camps in the summer and fall of 1942, the 12,000 people in the six camps had become outwardly settled and calm. Anxiety about the future was just as strong as it had been before, but the future was set a little distance away. The antagonism to the federal government and its administrators had been channelled into set phrases and attitudes. The peacefulness of the camps was based on a postponement, not on a resolution, of the questions which had remained unanswered since 1942. The surface calm overlaid thousands of individual and family problems with which men and women went to sleep at night and with which they woke up in the morning.

The state of mind of the evacuees had its roots in the process of disorganization that had been proceeding since Pearl Harbor. The question of the future loomed in terms of: Will we be forced to go off somewhere to re-establish ourselves? Will we be confined elsewhere? What treatment can we expect from the government? Can we count on the camps as our home for the war? Will we all be deported after the war? Each new event in the uprooting process, as it shattered long-established ties and old bases of life, created new questions about the future. And these questions had gone unanswered for years, leaving the evacuees in a state of limbo, between a shattered past and an uncertain future.

For the Issei, life in the camps had become accepted as a bearable interlude in acts of their real lives. Life in the camps lay nowhere in particular; Issei were waiting for the future. Nevertheless, the time could be passed pleasantly, as one Issei, writing from Slocan, expressed:

From every chimney, smoke rises to the sky in a way that warms the heart of everyone …. On New Year’s Day, with many sighs, we gathered around the stoves and exchanged tales from the lives we had led on the coast before evacuation. The women folk brought out their hidden and precious treasures of small beans, mochigome, kanpyo and made shiruko and sushi. With grateful thanks, we received a gift of mochi from our neighbour …. After the New Year, it suddenly became cold …. The hardest part was the coldness we suffered in our homes. No matter how furiously we burned our stoves, it was cold. Towards morning our faces were so cold that it was impossible to remain in our beds. Icicles dripped between the windows and nails inside the house were coated with frost. Unless we hit the door with a hammer to loosen the ice, it would not open. The moisture dripped in every room, among the shelves, inside the boxes and beneath the bed. The bottom of the mattresses became green. A kimono present from our grandmother became spoilt and the sight of my wife quietly sobbing over the ruins was heartbreaking.

But spring is here now. Gardens are being joyfully prepared. We are making bread, we are making shoyu, we are making tofu, we are making konnyaku …. Slowly after one year we are becoming settled. This has become our home. I would like to rest for a while.³⁸

Indeed, the Issei could feel that they had earned a “rest” after a lifetime of hard toil and frugal living, a lifetime in which everything they had gained had later been lost. They repressed their worries, they shunned discipline, they indulged suppressed desires. Some became involved in community affairs and made haphazard efforts to guide the activities of the Nisei. But most Issei did not have such opportunities or shunned them deliberately as they arose. A complete revaluation of work and working habits took place, for the economics of camp life were vastly different to those of normal life as they knew it. Fishermen, farmers and storekeepers who had worked long hours in the past and were proud of “pioneering” in their fields were not going to use the camps as places in which to turn their traditional industry into channels laid out for them by white bosses – not for 25¢ an hour. They could accept the objective of immediate comfort in the present aspects of camp life; beyond that, the Issei generally did not feel any obligation.

The Issei took unimportant jobs – not that they had much choice – that carried no responsibility. Former hard-working storekeepers and farmers puttered around in carpentry and chopped wood. Initiative and the will to succeed were becoming lost in the microcosmic world of the camps. In their abundance of free time, many merely sat around in the community baths, speculating on Japanese and Allied military strategy in the Pacific, spreading rumours about what the government was going to do or not going to do. In the evenings and weekends, many of them watched baseball games, while others devoted their time to indulging interests for which they had never before had sufficient leisure.

Life in the camps was also an escape from the tensions of making a living in a hostile white world. It was an enforced retirement into Issei communities where speaking English was no longer required, where they were able to act and express themselves in ways that would not be misunderstood. Evacuation destroyed the Little Tokyos of the west coast, but it also established little racial islands in the interior of the province. In the camps, there were Issei all around, Issei of different backgrounds and views to be sure, but Issei whose words and whose thoughts were part of the continuum of their own. The older people were, however unconsciously, taking the most thoroughgoing vacations that they had ever had since coming to Canada.

For some of the older Nisei, many of them caught in mid-career, the camps had no such meaning. And through the spring of 1943, a vanguard of Nisei trickled out of the camps for domestic work and factory jobs in Eastern Canada. But many stayed on, unwilling to make the hurdle to the “outside world,” to leave aging parents or unable to persuade parents to let them leave. The adolescent Nisei often drifted about the camps in gangs, not taking their classroom work seriously and developing a sense of futility, enveloped in boredom. Slocan Valley boys loafed about when not in classes or playing sports, and some of them began to get into trouble, stealing a little money somewhere, pilfering books, magazines, candy and even food from Graham’s general store or the Green Light Restaurant, beating up another boy from a different region, breaking up Reverend Nakayama’s Anglican Sunday School sermons. It was mild juvenile delinquency but it was expressive of the aimless, dead-end atmosphere of the camps.

Many people talked about the Nisei becoming “Japanese,” but there was little evidence that any Japanese cultural revivalism was taking hold. The magazines and books that Nisei read were those that other young people in the larger community were reading. The movies that they saw were American movies, their music was jazz and the dancing was jive. They were hearing more Japanese spoken than ever before, but the major effect was merely to produce a peculiar dialect combining Japanese and English terms.

The camp way of life, in family, social club and sports was a quiet one, in many ways richer than life had been in pre-war communities. At its core, however, lay insecurity, ennui, emotional atrophy and suffocation. One Nisei, upon visiting Slocan, wrote:

The scenery was breathtaking, the calm lake at the foot of the towering mountains tipped with snow – it was just as I had thought …. All the worries and fears seemed to disappear as I heard the familiar voices around me, which I had wanted to hear for so long ….

The first few days were full of fun and excitement with reunions and parties, but as the days wore on, I began to notice the dullness in the life of the people in this town. I began to feel more than disgusted with the social and economically unbalanced life to which these people had become the victims …. No longer did I feel as if this life of the ghost town was for me.³⁹

By the summer of 1944, the people who had adapted to this way of life were ceasing to find satisfaction in it but, at the same time, they were determined to avoid a threatened second evacuation to an “outside world” that they had every reason to believe would treat them with hostility.

Certainly, there was no lack of evidence. In July, 1944, for example, the House of Commons passed Bill 135, Section 5, which disqualified persons of the Japanese race who had moved from British Columbia after Pearl Harbor from voting in federal elections. If the franchise, as a symbol of equal citizenship rights, had been even a remote inducement for relocation, it was now removed, and it actually penalized those 4,300 who had relocated east of the Rockies by that time.

The evacuees could easily conclude that this latest move by the Liberal government, with the federal elections looming, was but another example of the racism inherent in the entire evacuation programme. It bore no reasonable relation to “military necessity” or “national security” and ought to have been utterly repugnant to the ideals of members of Parliament. Prime Minister Mackenzie King’s philosophy of civil rights was clear to everyone:

The intention was not to take away a right from any one who had the right but to see to it that rights were not given to persons who had not previously enjoyed them, particularly when they were of a race with whose country we are at war.⁴⁰

A few weeks later, King rose to his feet in the House of Commons to make his first major policy statement on the Japanese since 1942. In it, he announced his “reconstruction” policy of permanent post-war dispersal of the Japanese throughout the country and also made provision for

a quasi-judicial commission to examine the background, loyalties and attitudes of all persons of Japanese race in Canada to ascertain those who are not fit persons to be allowed to remain here …. The government’s intention would be to have these disloyal persons deported to Japan as soon as that is physically possible. Prior to deportation, British subjects, falling within this class, would be deprived of their status as such.

Almost as an aside, King noted:

It is a fact that no person of Japanese race born in Canada has been charged with any act of sabotage or disloyalty during the years of war.⁴¹

He also could have added that no alien Japanese or naturalized citizen had ever been found guilty of the same crime.

The entire speech was a cautiously worded compromise between two opposed views and committed King to nothing precise. King gave no indication of how the government was to probe into the minds and hearts of the evacuees on the matter of “loyalty.” It was a political axiom attributed to King that the way to overcome a hurdle was to wait for it to fall. His speech was tragically inconclusive and indecisive but was typical of the man, who often liked to compare his personal travail and difficult decisions with Christ’s passion. King wanted to move gradually – that much is clear – and he wanted to leave his options open. Yet in the summer of 1944, with the tide of war running full flood in the Pacific for the Allied side, King could have afforded to be more conclusive, if not generous. People in the camps, who had already been uprooted once, now faced a second evacuation to satisfy the notion that enforced dispersal of Japanese across Canada would solve the “Japanese problem” once and for all.

As King made no indication of when the investigation would begin, the settled, day-to-day routine of the interior camps, which had enjoyed, in 1944, the least disturbing summer since evacuation, once more abounded with rumours of the wildest sort imaginable. While the United States War Department, “because of the favourable progress of the war in the Pacific,” announced on December 17, 1944, that evacuees could return to the coast, King added no details to his programme of dispersal and segregation of the “disloyal.” Meanwhile, Deputy Minister of Labour Arthur McNamara confirmed that wartime controls and restrictions would stay in effect to control movement of the Japanese and suggested that it would be some years after the war before the ban on return of evacuees to the west coast would be lifted.

And while a tentative trickle of American evacuees returned to their former Pacific coast homes early in 1945, like Indian scouts moving warily into another tribe’s territory, Labour Minister Mitchell announced that all persons of Japanese race 16 years or over must report to the RCMP to signify their intention concerning “repatriation” to Japan. His statement, posted in all the camps, also indicated that those who did not opt for repatriation must “co-operate” with the government, as evidence of their “loyalty to Canada,” by moving east of the Rockies.

The choice, as it developed, was extremely complex, involving least of all King’s odd concept of “loyalty” or “disloyalty.” But it presented a bitter challenge, once more, to the people in the camps and elsewhere in the province. And whatever the decision, yet another uprooting lay ahead.

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Notes

1. New Denver Ledge, 1898. ↩
2. E.g., McWilliams, W.R., “What the Government Has Done”, in Reconciliation (Toronto: Fellowship of Reconciliation, 1944), p. 6; Takashima, S., A Child in Prison Camp (Montreal, Tundra, 1971); Boswell, A.R., America’s Concentration Camps (New York: Bantam, 1968). ↩
3. The New Canadian, August 12, 1942. ↩
4. Vancouver Province, July 15, 1942. ↩
5. Kelowna Courier, January 22, 1942. ↩
6. Kelowna Courier, January 29, 1942. ↩
7. Kelowna Courier, February 3, 1944. See also Kamloops Sentinel, June 11, 1942. ↩
8. The New Canadian, February 16, 1957. ↩
9. The New Canadian, May 23, 1942. ↩
10. The New Canadian, June 24, 1942. ↩
11. Evenden, L.J., and I.D. Anderson, “The Presence of a Past Community”, in Minghi, J.V., ed., Peoples of the Living Land (Vancouver: Tantalus, 1972), pp. 41-66. ↩
12. Department of Labour, Report on the Administration of Japanese Affairs in Canada, 1942-1944 (Ottawa: King’s Printer, 1944), p. 33. ↩
13. The New Canadian, July 8, 1942. ↩
14. Department of Labour, op. cit., p. 18. ↩
15. Department of Labour, Report on the Re-establishment of Japanese in Canada, 1944-1946 (Ottawa: King’s Printer, 1947), p. 26. See also annual reports, Department of Labour, Public Accounts, 1941-42 to 1950-51. ↩
16. The New Canadian, November 6, 1943; November 13, 1943. ↩
17. Department of Labour, Report on the Re-establishment, op. cit., pp. 9-10. ↩
18. The New Canadian, September 2, 1942. ↩
19. When the British Columbia Legislature was asked in 1938 to consider a Vancouver city charter amendment designed to eliminate business licences held by Japanese, Perry had vigorously opposed any such action. “We would be doing the same thing by law as Hitler is doing in Germany …. Where are you going to stop? We allowed the Orientals to come here. Surely we’re going to allow them some human rights?” Quoted in MacInnis, G., and A., Oriental Canadians: Outcasts or Citizens? (Vancouver: Federationist Publishing Co., 1943), p. 13. ↩
20. The New Canadian, November 13, 1943. ↩
21. The New Canadian, October 23, 1943. ↩
22. Department of Labour, Report on the Administration, op. cit., p. 12. ↩
23. LaViolette, F.E., “Social Psychological Characteristics of Evacuated Japanese”, The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, 11 (August, 1945), pp. 420-31. For a study of the psychological problems of confined Japanese Americans, see Leighton, A.H., The Governing of Men (Princeton University Press, 1945). ↩
24. Pearl Buck, letter to the editor, Time, April 9, 1945. Miss Buck also added: “racism in Canada is even more virulent and vigorous than in the U.S.” ↩
25. O’Brien, R.W., “Evacuation of Japanese from the Pacific Coast: Canadian and American Contrasts”, Research Studies of the State College of Washington, 14 (June, 1946), p. 119. ↩
26. The New Canadian, December 25, 1943. ↩
27. For details, see Department of Labour, Report of the Royal Commission Appointed Pursuant to Order-in-Council, P.C. No. 9498, to Enquire into the Provisions made for the Welfare and Maintenance of Persons of the Japanese Race Resident in Settlements in the Province of British Columbia (Ottawa, 1944). ↩
28. Department of Labour, Report on Administration, op. cit., p. 22. ↩
29. The New Canadian, August 22, 1942. ↩
30. The New Canadian, July 22, 1944. See also issue of July 1, 1944, in which Vancouver Mayor Cornett is quoted as urging Justice Minister St. Laurent to suppress the newspaper because an article on June 10 suggested that he “blows a Nazi tune” in urging deportation of all Japanese in Canada. ↩
31. The New Canadian, January 9, 1943. ↩
32. It was revealing of the persecution complex that muddled the thinking of evacuees that many of them petitioned for the recall of Austin Taylor, the original chairman of the BCSC, from his advisory post to active direction. Groups seeking his return stated that the administration of the camps would be carried out “more efficiently and considerately” under his direction, but the real motive for desiring his recall was that, under his jurisdiction, the BCSC had merely supervised the removal of the Japanese from the Coast and made no policies as to resettlement. George Collins, who replaced him in November 1943, was unpopular simply because he advocated resettlement. On the other hand, see Leighton, op. cit., p. 84: “To the stereotype-minded staff members, the evacuees were Japanese first and people secondarily …. This conception of the evacuees varied little from one staff member to another, some leaning more to hostility and suspicion than others, but for each individual it remained pretty constant no matter what kind of evacuee he was dealing with.” ↩
33. The New Canadian, February 13, 1943. ↩
34. U.S. Department of the Interior, Community Government in War Relocation Centres (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1944), p. 16. ↩
35. There were, of course, isolated incidents of violence, but these do not indicate any pattern. For example, on Dec. 30, 1942, a Tashme Issei, Yasutaro Sugiyama, was held on a charge of assault when he wounded another man with a butcher knife after he defied a community-imposed regulation banning the operation of private profit enterprises in the camp. Sugiyama objected violently to an angry mob which had gathered to protest the opening of his vegetable store. A New Westminster court found him not guilty on Jan. 23, 1943. A Slocan Nisei was sentenced to one month in Nelson jail after he pleaded guilty to common assault on Jan. 22, 1944, against Fred Aydon, a BCSC assistant supervisor in Slocan Valley. ↩
36. Thomas, D.S., The Salvage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952), pp. 193-4. ↩
37. The New Canadian, July 1, 1944. ↩
38. The New Canadian, April 3, 1943. ↩
39. The New Canadian, July 1, 1944. ↩
40. Canada, House of Commons Debates, 1944, p. 5025. ↩
41. Canada, House of Commons Debates, 1944, p. 5913. ↩

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