Chapter Twelve: The New Frontier

Let our slogan be for British Columbia:
‘No Japs from the Rockies to the seas.’

– nomination speech by Minister of Pensions
and National Health Ian Mackenzie, September 18, 1944.

If the evacuees were seeking a secure haven east of the Rockies, they were to be rudely disillusioned. Like the Issei who had crossed the Pacific to emigrate to Canada, only to find the dream of riches barren, the evacuees who traversed the Rockies often thought of themselves as “pioneers,” cutting trails in a new frontier. This time, they were not in search of gold but freedom from the ravages of racism and the persecutions of headline-hunting politicians. They were assuming the special risks and uncertainties inherent in their obviously close resemblance to the Japanese enemy and the tendency of the white population to regard them as one and the same. The evacuation, after all, had raised the inevitable question: “If these people are too dangerous to be permitted to remain on the west coast, aren’t they too dangerous here?”

Most people outside of British Columbia, in fact, had never seen a Japanese before – except as sinister characters in the movies. Many people found it difficult to conceive of the possibility that there had been no proof of guilt as a basis for evacuation. Indeed, during the entire relocation programme, the federal government did little to correct the impression that mass evacuation indicated widespread disloyalty. Even Mackenzie King’s pivotal statement in August, 1944, was typically couched in contradictions: no Japanese had been found guilty of any crime against the state; yet a “quasi-judicial” commission to determine “disloyalty” was in the works. Evacuation stigmatized the entire Japanese population and gave the spurious colour of official approval to racism, yet the federal government, in pursuing the relocation and dispersal of the evacuees across the country and, in the end, in attempting to complete this process by compulsion, failed to mount an organized public information programme that might have made relocation easier for the evacuees and acceptable to the host communities.

Still, since the evacuation was, in effect, a certification by the federal government that all Japanese were dangerous, the protests against receiving the evacuees by other areas in Canada were virtually unassailable. If the potential danger to “national security” was so great – and the evacuation orders could really be interpreted in no other way – that the entire group had to be removed from the coast, then the government could not really argue that the evacuees were not a factor for potential danger in inland areas. If the Japanese could sabotage ships in Vancouver, Prince Rupert and Esquimalt, they could also destroy the irrigation facilities of Alberta, burn the forests of Ontario or cut the transcontinental railroads running through all the provinces. This argument was cogent enough in the light of the stigma attached by the government to the Japanese. It was under this heavy burden, then, that the families went to the sugar beet farms on the prairies and the Nisei moved to the farms and towns of Eastern Canada. And it was only through the personal efforts of the Japanese that a growing number of other Canadians began to realize that the evacuees were not quite such monsters as they had been depicted. But that was a quiet, slow and subtle process.

At the outset, working on the sugar beet farms in southern Alberta and Manitoba seemed to be an attractive proposition to some Japanese, primarily since they could avoid having their families broken up which, under the Security Commission’s early plans, seemed inevitable. They were promised, moreover, fair wages, free housing, public-school education for the children, welfare and medical services. In fact, when the sugar beet programme was first announced on March 28, 1942, it was stated that 1,000 families would be moved to Alberta and Manitoba, each to be given “individual cottages and small plots of land for its own use and cultivation” and assured of at least $1,000 for the season.² The beet fields were ready and primed to turn out a larger volume of raw sugar than ever before in Alberta’s history but were acutely in need of manpower for planting, cultivating and harvesting. The west coast Japanese, some of whom were highly skilled in agricultural work, appeared to present an ideal solution to the problem.

But although the labour shortage was critical, the Albertans did not desire an uncontrolled influx of Japanese, sensitized as they had been to the problem of colonies of “inassimilable” people, such as the Hutterites, already in their midst, and against whom they “seethed with resentment.”³ Hence, the Security Commission drew up a formal agreement with the Social Credit government of Alberta on May 6, promising absolute control over the Japanese moving into the area. Alberta was also assured that the evacuees, who by June 25 numbered 2,495, would be shipped out “as soon as the emergency ceases” or more specifically, six months after the end of the war if the province so requested. This “deal” meant that the evacuees would be frozen to the farms to which they were assigned and blocked from settling in the major cities such as Lethbridge, Edmonton or Calgary and those small towns like Taber and Picture Butte where they could possibly become competitors with urban merchants.⁴ Indeed, most of the farmers looked upon the evacuees as a ready source of slave or prisoner-of-war labour, ripe for exploitation, which, under the terms of the agreement with the province, quickly became an accurate description.

Perhaps no other group of evacuees had to suffer as much harrowing deprivation and hardship. Since the beet workers who preceded the Japanese were single, migratory labourers who lived on the farms only during the beet season and moved to the cities during the winter, the shacks in which they lived were adequate for their limited needs. But they were scarcely so for the Japanese families who had to survive the winter. Indeed, housing became an immediate and pressing issue. One Issei, who arrived in Vauxhall in April with his wife and four young children, found his new employer

still cleaning the chicken coop when we arrived. When we said we wouldn’t live among the chicken lice, he let us stay in a shack abandoned by bachelor miners. I had never been bitten by bedbugs before. There was no water and the farmer led us to a pond. He told us that would do.⁵

Another evacuee complained that while the Japanese were fulfilling their part of the contract bargain, the farmers were reneging on theirs:

Too many of the farmers think of us as cheap labour with the lowest standards and that anything can be put over us. Is it any wonder then, that families of five, six and often more are crowded into 12 feet by 20 feet, 10 feet by 18 feet, and smaller shacks?⁶

Despite widespread complaints, farmers were loathe to spend their own funds to improve housing, and it was only when the Security Commission provided them with building materials that housing improved. But water for drinking and washing had to be collected from rainfall or hauled from distant wells.

Many of the evacuees did not earn enough in the summer and fall of 1942 to enable them to survive the first winter and, as a consequence, had to be given relief funds. Nearly half of the 578 families in the Lethbridge area, for example, had to have their income supplemented by monthly relief rates of $10 per adult and $5 for each child. It was not until arrangements were made for male members to work in lumber camps during the winter that families were able to become self-supporting. Other evacuees were allowed to work in canning factories, such as the Broder company in Lethbridge, but only on the condition that they return to the farms after the end of the canning season. However, even these arrangements failed to provide an adequate income. Added to their domestic burdens was the fee of $70 per child levied by local high schools because only the cost of public-school education, through an outright grant to the Alberta Board of Education, was borne by the federal government.

A major problem was the size and age of members of the family unit. A family of five, for example, could earn about $1,320 a year, based on the contract scale of $33 per acre and the assumption that one worker could work eight acres of beets. Often, however, the size of the family was too small or too large in terms of the allotted acreage; and, before the start of the second season, the evacuees militated to be allowed the freedom to move from farm to farm – a request bitterly opposed by the Alberta Sugar Beet Growers Association, which preferred that Japanese labour be frozen to the specific farms for the duration of the war. A total of 176 families, in fact, applied to change employers, some of them because of friction among themselves, others because they had become frustrated with the attitudes of white employers who threatened: “If you don’t do what you’re told, you can go back to Japan.” In the spring of 1943, then, the Japanese workers refused to sign contracts until the issue of their relative freedom of movement was resolved.

Despite the feeling initially that sugar beet labour was “hell on earth” and “the worst thing that ever happened to the Japanese,” the evacuees became adjusted to the work and felt a sense of accomplishment emerging:

We laboured hard this summer …. Mothers who never expected to toil on the soil again, old men who had looked forward to comfort in declining years, young women who knew manicures and permanents …. They worked from dawn to dark and even by moonlight to produce a record Canadian beet crop.

They said the girls couldn’t harvest the beets. But they did. They worked with the stiff southwest wind blowing stinging dust in their eyes, they toiled while their backs cried out in protest, while their fingers froze in the cold morning frost.

Then it was back to hauling water, chop a hole in the ice a quarter or half-mile away, cuss the cows and horses that wander around the water hole, and stagger back with spilling buckets to frame shacks and coal-oil lamps and the bare, chilly outhouse …. But we are proud we are getting along independently.⁷

The fact that only 15.4% of them wanted to go to Japan after the end of the war was an indication of how well they had become attuned to life in Alberta. Moreover, the 3,650 Japanese in Alberta – including 534 pre-war residents – remained fairly constant, with the exodus of those moving farther east balanced by the intake from British Columbia, comprised mainly of friends and relatives. By 1945, the evacuees constituted 65% of the beet labour and were therefore an almost indispensable work force in the province.⁸ Their sense of security, however, was never very solid because of the agreement between Alberta and Ottawa to remove them, upon request, after the end of the war. And while the province was quite willing to make use of Japanese labourers as long as they were needed, Alberta politicians, headed by Premier Manning, the provincial press and “patriotic” societies, kept reminding Ottawa of its promise. And under wartime regulations, evacuees had no right of free movement, were prevented from voting in the August, 1944, provincial elections on the grounds that they were “temporary residents only,” and, of course, could neither buy nor lease land.

The cities remained out of bounds to the Japanese for most of the war period. Lethbridge, for example, soon became known as an “anti-Japanese” city after its city council not only banned Nisei girls who had obtained work as domestics but also led a move to ban all Japanese from beer parlours and liquor outlets in the province. Calgary Mayor Andrew Davison urged the immediate removal of all Japanese from the province, and Edmonton’s city council, in August, 1944, rejected the application by two Nisei for temporary residence. One of them wanted to take a six-week course in automotive engineering but the council felt that allowing even one Japanese into the city would establish a “dangerous precedent.”

In contrast, the 1,053 evacuees who moved to the Manitoba beet fields encountered few problems of that ilk. At the outset, Premier John Bracken, apparently feeling that the evacuees would be an economic asset, was willing to co-operate with the federal government and accept evacuees.⁹ No formal agreement was drawn up, but it was understood that Manitoba could request the removal of the Japanese if it so wished after the war. The Manitoba government felt that the ultimate disposal of the new settlers was “wholly a federal responsibility.” Unlike Alberta newspapers such as the Calgary Herald which still persisted in circulating false stories of sabotage at Pearl Harbor and demanded deportation of all Japanese, the Winnipeg Free Press took a vigorous stand against racism, sought to establish the principles of Canadian citizenship in law and to protest against the federal government’s “repatriation” scheme.¹⁰

Ontario, however, was the magnet that ultimately was to draw the largest proportion of evacuees seeking resettlement. But until the crisis of forced deportation was over, movement into Ontario was slow, the numbers of Japanese who resettled increased the pre-war population of 132 Japanese in Ontario to only 1,650 by the end of 1943 and then to 3,742 three years later. Then, too, the early figure included the rather involuntary incarceration of some 700 men in the internment camps and 360 Nisei who had been shipped to road camps in northern Ontario in the spring of 1942. These Nisei were subsequently housed in eight camps operated by the Farm Service Force of the Ontario Department of Agriculture and hired out to sugar beet farmers. But in the spring of 1943, only two camps were reopened and less than 50 Nisei were involved in beet labour, the remainder either taking up other types of farm work or migrating to the cities. The sugar beet programme – at first thought capable of drawing a large number of families in similar manner to the prairie farms – was a failure in Ontario. Despite the request by Premier Mitchell Hepburn for help in saving the crops, Ontario farmers opposed the concept of using family labour. Nisei also complained about the back-breaking labour, their exploitation as “cheap labour” and “jailbirds.”¹¹ These Nisei, however, proved capable of fending for themselves and, along with the 681 men, women and children who moved voluntarily to Ontario in 1942, were the vanguard of the eastward movement.

It was assumed, of course, that dispersal of the Japanese throughout several provinces and perhaps across all nine provinces would help to solve the “Japanese problem” once and for all. The programme not only had the advantage of lightening the load for taxpayers, but administrators felt that dispersal, in the long run, would hasten the return of the evacuees to “normal” community life just as it would accommodate political and economic pressures from British Columbia. But despite attempts at persuasion and inducement, the movement east of the Rockies never gained popularity. The fact that those who moved east early in the war showed sufficient resilience and courage – unlike their fellow evacuees in the interior camps – to opt for the “unknown territory” of Eastern Canada did not give either them or Department of Labour officials the right to claim that they were now permanent residents of Canada. On the contrary, the federal government’s efforts to promote resettlement foundered partly because no such official assurance was given. By the summer of 1944, then, the eastward movement had almost ceased and by mid-1945 was almost negligible.¹²

The decision to resettle, of course, was one that involved innumerable and often incalculable risks, especially as it meant dealing with government agencies that, as the evacuees had experienced, had not kept their promises. The strong belief in the integrity of the family unit – around which was organized what resistance there was to the evacuation orders – also applied to resettlement, the Issei parents tending to oppose the wishes of children who wanted to break out of the lethargy of the interior camps. The problem of finding suitable work restrained many Issei and older Nisei who had spent most of their lives as fishermen or businessmen. But it was the “pseudo-security” of the interior camps that perhaps militated most against moving once again.¹³ Life in these camps at least constituted a haven against racial prejudice, and the peaceful tenure of everyday life allowed them to evade major decisions about an uncertain future which, to their way of thinking, depended on the vagaries of both the federal government, which offered no final or permanent solution to their problems, and the pressures of anti-Japanese politicians who continued to agitate for their mass expulsion from Canada.

The feelings of distrust, suspicion and frustration that were manifested in the interior camps came to be directed to some extent against the federal government, which seemed to be unconcerned over their rights as citizens, but more directly against administrators whom they felt were working against the interests of the Japanese. Relocation to the east, as it was espoused by the Department of Labour, came to mean co-operation with an inimical force. And clearly, the liquidation of property without consent was the wedge which drove the earlier attitudes of persecution deep into the personality of the evacuees. Unsatisfactory as living conditions were in the interior camps, they at least provided a minimal state of security which evacuees felt was owing to them. Like prisoners in the security of their cell blocks, they could evade or postpone painful decisions. A group of Nisei in Bay Farm, talking of “going East,” typified the problem:

We talked about our friends who had gone east. We talked about Albert and Dave who were apprenticing to become chartered accountants in Toronto and were trying to get their applications accepted by the Chartered Accountants Society.

We talked about Henry in Hamilton who, with a Bachelor of Commerce and a teacher’s certificate, was looking for a teacher’s job.

Finally, Aki said, ‘There is no logical reason why we should stick around here any longer.’

‘But we have to think about our parents.’

‘Maybe that’s an excuse for sticking around. Maybe we haven’t got guts.’

‘Maybe,’ said Aki.¹⁴

At the same time that Department of Labour officials were attempting to persuade evacuees to move east, the federal government made little effort to relax control over their lives. The Japanese had been prohibited from buying or leasing land or growing crops anywhere in Canada, except by permission of the Minister of Justice who had the right to grant licences. This prohibition was eased slightly by Order-in-Council P.C. 9702, December 20, 1943, which allowed Japanese to lease business or residential premises for a period of one year, but the licences were rigidly controlled until April, 1946. Obviously, the regulation was designed to alleviate anxiety amongst white businessmen who may have feared competition, but it could scarcely be considered conducive towards encouraging enthusiasm for resettlement, for it eliminated long-term opportunities for independence both in occupation and housing. Indeed, if the Japanese hoped to find a new mode of existence, it had to be sought under rather stringent limits. Under powers vested, first in the Security Commission and then in the Minister of Labour, the Japanese could be prohibited

from engaging in any specified activities, employment or business in Canada, from moving or travelling anywhere in Canada or from associating or communicating with any persons.¹⁵

These sweeping restrictions were not relaxed, either as a “reward” or a means of enticement, for the Japanese moving eastward. Moreover, the extension of disenfranchisement in 1944 to include Japanese who moved beyond British Columbia’s borders, as noted by the Winnipeg Free Press, was “seriously [to] impair the work of resettlement.”¹⁶

At one time, the Japanese might have cherished the notion that the farther they were from British Columbia, the less hostile would be the attitudes of the white population. But as they came to experience it, they found that racial prejudice was spread uniformly over the whole of Canada. For example, a Gallup Poll published in December, 1943, indicated that 54% of Canadians favoured “sending back” all residents of the Japanese race to Japan. Of Ontarians polled, 52% favoured “giving the Japanese his coat and hat after the war.”¹⁷ All the well-known stereotypes, reinforced by Japan’s entry into the war, the loss and imprisonment of the Canadian garrison at Hong Kong and the stories of Japanese atrocities, were accepted by Eastern Canadians who, no less than British Columbians, identified the Japanese in Canada with the enemy and, with few exceptions, made no allowances for citizenship. It was the wartime labour shortage – not a sense of justice or fair play – that actually motivated easterners to hire the evacuees and accounted for the limited success of the resettlement programme.

A great deal of the anti-evacuee hostility radiated from municipal councils in Eastern Canada. In southwestern Ontario where there was a shortage of farm labour, Chatham’s city council flatly refused to accept Japanese: “We don’t want our boys to come back and find their jobs filled by Japanese who were not here when they went to fight.”¹⁸ St. Thomas, not far from Chatham, was more tolerant, though the city worried even as late as November, 1946, about the “invasion” of some 150 evacuees to Fingal Hostel, seven miles away. Three men, out of a group of 300, were given suspended sentences on October, 1944, arising out of an anti-Japanese “demonstration” at a fertilizer plant in Ingersoll which had employed seven Nisei. Police, freely swinging batons, had to break up a “near riot.”¹⁹ In Grimsby, the Lincoln County Council protested against three Japanese families settling there in May, 1945, and the local reeve said that the new arrivals “so incensed the people … that he feared they might eject the Japs bodily.”²⁰ The town council of Georgetown, prompted by the local Canadian Legion, wrote to Labour Minister Mitchell, protesting the hiring of several Nisei machinists by a local factory:

If one or two Japanese are … employed, it will not be long until a colony of them will be established here.²¹

The reasons for this animosity – which at times echoed the rabid racism in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley when it was faced with an influx of evacuees from the west coast – had a rather familiar ring: inassimilability, unfair competition, lower standard of living, threat to national security. Added to this litany of horrors was the often expressed but undefined fear that the Japanese in Ontario also posed a threat to white girls who worked in nearby fields or in the same factories.

Toronto, ultimately the focal point of resettlement and the largest centre of the Japanese population in Canada, at first declined to accept evacuees. In April, 1942, the Board of Control – after a meeting with business, labour and “patriotic” organizations – passed a resolution prohibiting their entry, citing the vulnerability of its war industries.²² This ban was relaxed to allow some 700 to enter the city by the end of 1943, at which point Toronto again declared itself a closed city to Japanese except for “compassionate cases” such as those involving the reunion of family members. And although some pressure was exerted on Mayor Saunders to change the policy, the Board of Control remained adamant. According to Controller Balfour, Japanese already in the city were employed in large office buildings or as domestics “in places where they might glean valuable information” and thus could easily sabotage the war effort. Forest Hill Village, then a wealthy suburb of Toronto, also refused to rescind a resolution passed in 1943 prohibiting Nisei girls from taking domestic employment, despite the pleas from 60 of its residents that they were desperate for help. Reeve Gardiner’s defense of his policy was full of unconscious irony:

After the war, the municipality would have no right to direct these girls to leave, as they are Canadian citizens, and council would not be thanked … if in the future a Japanese colony were to be formed in the Village.²³

Municipal councils actually did not have the authority to impose any exclusion of Canadian citizens, but the Department of Labour generally operated on the principle that it would not permit Japanese to reside anywhere in Canada where there was an official protest. In fact, the early settlers who went east were required to furnish evidence that they would be accepted by the community of residence and to prove that housing and employment were available.

Also discouraging was the fact that the Toronto Police Commission rejected, on November 17, 1944, the issuing of licences for trade and business purposes to Nisei evacuees who wished to establish independent businesses. Or, as the commission phrased it, “no business licences will be granted to Canadian-born citizens … whose country is at war with the Dominion.”²⁴ One Nisei, Jimmy Hirai, who bought a small restaurant after gaining permission from the Department of Justice, was forced to sell out at a loss after a hearing over his application for a licence was postponed eight times and then finally rejected. Another Nisei, Frank Tabuchi, who sought to operate a radio repair shop in North Toronto, had his application turned down following a protest by the local businessmen’s association. During his hearing, Tabuchi told the board:

I did not come here of my own choice. I had a business in Vancouver but I had to give it up. Personally, I think that in a country like Canada which is fighting for democracy that I would be given more consideration.

Replied presiding Judge Herbert Barton:

You write and tell the holy father in Japan to call off the war and then I will consider it …. It’s the principle of the thing.²⁵

The fact that the Japanese expected to be the last to be hired and first fired²⁶ added to the restlessness and instability and a deep sense of racial persecution. Occupational maladjustments were inevitable as former fishermen or merchants not only found it difficult to change a whole lifestyle but had to become inured to jobs in which they were suddenly employees, often in low-paying, menial work on farms, in factories and domestic positions. A set of listings in the March 20, 1943, issue of The New Canadian for employment opportunities in Ontario typified the kind of work available:

• Two women for Beamsville, one for general housework, other as practical nurse to wait on invalids with arthritis.
• Houseboy, $40 per month, for Hamilton woman.
• Fourteen men to cut logs and operate portable sawmill, $54 per month.
• Cook, gardener and eight maids for Homewood Sanitarium, Guelph.
• Four housemaids, $25 per month, and two laundresses, $30 a month, for Trenton resident.
• Chauffeur and cook, $90 a month, for president of University of Western Ontario.
• Family for orchard labour for Beamsville farmer.
• Gardener and cook for Barrie farmer.

Of 240 Nisei working in Montreal by the end of 1943, 74 of them were either domestics or cooks, the rest involved in miscellaneous jobs in factories, garages and dry cleaners. As Nisei slowly graduated from this level of work to find jobs commensurate to their own skills and training, it was invariably the result of their own efforts, not that of the Department of Labour and its placement offices.

Then, too, the evacuees had to bear the burden of being “on trial,” and felt themselves to be highly conspicuous in their relations with white society in daily work or schools. Rev. Kosaburo Shimizu who was sent by the United Church to serve as a counsellor in Toronto and Montreal, wrote:

Because of repeated frustrations and rebuffs … these people … are unconsciously forming … a despair-complex. ‘It’s no use trying’ is an attitude taken by surprisingly many of them. ‘We tried to be good Canadians, industrious, law-abiding, and loyal, and yet we are treated as enemy aliens.’²⁷

It was easy for old wounds to break open from rebuffs large or small. The apparent attitude of the Canadian public as it reached the evacuees through the press was disquieting. For example, the Montreal Star published a long and bristling editorial on May 17, 1944, entitled, “Clear the Japanese out of Canada,” which depicted all Japanese as “secret agents of Tokyo” and concluded that the interests of Canada would best be served “by rooting out entirely from the Canadian scene this dangerous menace.” “I was quite happy,” one Nisei woman said of her sojourn in Montreal, “until that came out. This kind of let us down.” It was not easy to balance the virulence of such editorials with the more reasonable approach which some other major newspapers were increasingly taking. The daily existence of the evacuees often included humiliating experiences such as being refused rooms for rent or even seats in restaurants and barber shops, and the incretion of such incidents, combined with bitter memories of the past, made it easy to accept anti-Japanese sentiments as reflections of the opinion of most Canadians.

Most of the early resettlers were young, unmarried and separated from their families, a condition which added to their acute sense of alienation. A few of them were highly conscious of ghettoizing, and worried that too many Japanese, in the downtown McCaul-Dundas St. area of Toronto, for example, were clustered together. Others naturally missed the highly integrated pre-war community life of the ghettos or the cosy social round of the interior camps. Family disruptions also led to anxiety and guilt, centering around difficulties of providing financial assistance to families and the uncertain prospects of future reunion. Given the choice, most Nisei preferred to be close to their families and wanted to “relocate” their parents and siblings. But for many Nisei, resettlement in Eastern Canada also meant independence, not only from family obligations but also from the often stultifying control previously exercised by the Issei.

The evacuees, of course, were not without help from many individuals who had become interested in their plight. Church and YMCA groups, in particular, helped evacuees to find jobs and lodgings and assisted Nisei social and political organizations by offering free use of facilities. On the whole, they did a good job and provided assistance at a time when it was desperately needed. The work of the National Inter-Church Advisory Committee in fighting the disenfranchisement of Japanese in the summer of 1944 anticipated the swing of public opinion after V-J Day when organizations in Toronto and other major cities took an active interest in the ethical issues concerning the Japanese. The Advisory Committee, formed in 1944 for the purpose of dealing generally with the “Japanese problem,” swung into action during the Senate debate on Bill 135 by asking people to protest against the imposition of further restrictions and the denial of citizenship rights. Its efforts were in vain, but it gave notice to King and his Cabinet that efforts to impose further restrictions would produce some vigorous reaction.

Although the churches were well-disposed to the question of civil rights, their actions were not particularly fruitful. In fact, at the parish level, the negative response was shocking to higher officialdom. Although the formation of the Inter-Church Advisory Committee did not, of course, signify that all church groups were sympathetic to the Japanese, the committee was totally unprepared for the abysmal failure of its “Church Sponsored Placement Plan for Japanese Canadian Families.” Under the plan, local pastors and priests in small towns were to ask their congregations to sponsor one Japanese family for resettlement in their communities. Not one church complied with what was designed as an official directive from the various head offices of the churches in Toronto. The only reply the committee received came from a church whose congregation, made up of farmers, threatened to evict any Japanese placed within its midst. Again, after V-J Day, when local church congregations in Ontario took part in the protest against the federal government’s “deportation” scheme, the Department of Labour asked them specifically to assist in the work of resettlement. All of the department’s letters went unanswered. In this and other instances, then, were revealed the conflict between creed and deed, between statements or piety and action.²⁸ Even the work of the more committed members of the churches did little to resolve this rejection of the evacuees or instil any significant measure of confidence in those who wanted to settle in the East.

Although the process of evacuation had often been a corrosively bitter experience, most who were resettled – of whom three-quarters were Nisei – were not demoralized despite early problems of alienation and persecution. Buttressed by industriousness, ambition and zeal – those very attributes which had aroused enmity – they made efforts “to prove it can be done,” to build a new life, to make new friends, to reconstruct community organizations. In another report, Rev. Shimizu could qualify his first impressions:

Our relocees are proving themselves good pioneers. In their process of resettlement, they have not lost any of the good racial traits, as has been feared by some Issei. They are proving themselves just as industrious and law-abiding, enterprising in the face of difficulties … as their progenitors have been.²⁹

The net effect of forced evacuation and voluntary resettlement was the dispersal of the Japanese Canadians beyond the bounds of the interior camps into areas of wider opportunity of perhaps the most highly “assimilated” segments of the group. Some of these Nisei were obsessively concerned with the problems of citizenship, and from their ranks emerged the counter-pressure groups which were to militate for equal rights, campaign against the “deportation” scheme and organize the struggle to secure indemnification for property losses. These Nisei had long sought “to prove they were good Canadians” and had openly co-operated – vis-a-vis the Nisei Mass Evacuation Group – with the federal government’s evacuation orders with this purpose in mind.

An early, idealistic manifestation of this effort to demonstrate that they were loyal citizens of Canada, fully separate from the Japanese enemy, came when members of the Japanese Canadian Committee for Democracy, a newly organized group in Toronto, rejected a “gift” of food, including shoyu, miso and green tea, from the Japanese Red Cross. To them, the federal government’s approval of the shipment was “a clear indication” of its repeated failure to distinguish between Japanese aliens and native-born and naturalized Canadian citizens. Moreover, they felt it was an “insulting” attempt by Japan “to convert our sympathies to its fascist philosophy.”³⁰ Few other groups, however, declined the shipment. Evacuees in road camps and interior settlements delighted in the way the Japanese foodstuffs “helped to brighten our tables.” As insignificant as it seemed on the surface, the “shoyu incident” indicated once again the wide cleavage existing between different groups in terms of their attitudes towards citizenship or methods of counter-pressure activity. It became one of several incidents which hardened the attitudes of many Japanese, both Nisei and Issei, against Nisei citizenship groups and their leadership.

The Nisei civil rights activity centred in the JCCD which was organized in Toronto in 1943. It was an off-shoot of two Nisei sub-committees which provided an early link with the Co-Operative Committee on Japanese Canadians, itself a small group of Toronto citizens who had become involved in easing the difficulties of Japanese resettlement and which later expanded to become a federation of organizations, including the Canadian Jewish Congress, the National Council of Women and most church groups, for the purpose of resisting the “deportation” programme. The JCCD sought to relax the ban on Japanese entering Toronto, to prevent the concentration of Japanese living in one section of the city, to help Nisei mix with other Canadians, to promote the wider diversification and permanence of employment and to repeal those orders-in-council which prohibited the right to buy or lease property. And in the first of many deputations to Ottawa, JCCD Chairman Kinzie Tanaka accompanied a group of four men, including Eugene Forsey, Research Director of the Canadian Congress of Labour, in August, 1945, to meet Labour Minister Mitchell and other Cabinet members on the issue of deportation.

The JCCD was the object of much adverse criticism for some of its “extreme” actions, especially from the less politically-oriented among the Nisei, who felt the Toronto group had “taken too much on its hands without consultation of Nisei in other centres.”³¹ Indeed, many Nisei in Eastern Canada preferred to maintain a low profile, an attitude exemplified by a group in Montreal who turned down a proposal for forming a Nisei organization because

it would attract undue and unfavourable attention, give rise to misunderstanding and actually hinder the process of assimilation.³²

The issue divided the embryo communities, the “New Niseivilles,” as some quaintly liked to call them. While some Nisei complained over the lack of dances and “get-togethers” in lively letters-to-the-editor in The New Canadian on the subject, others sternly opposed a renaissance of pre-war Nisei social activity:

In Toronto, on Christmas Eve, there was a dance in a Masonic Temple Hall to which many (too many) Nisei went …. The very least we can do is to refrain from those very same mistakes we made in Vancouver – that of going around in exclusive packs. We are cutting our own throats.³³

Set against the dire mutterings of local residents in small towns such as Chatham, Essex and Ingersoll over “packs” of Japanese congregating on street corners and the accretion of press reports of widespread animosity, the expressed fear over “conspicuous” gatherings – as well as forming groups or re-establishing “ghettos” in the cities – was no trivial matter. It was not until the protest movement against disenfranchisement, which sparked the growth of Nisei organizations and brought them for the first time into meaningful contact with sympathetic and influential segments of the white populace, that the need for a programme of wider political action was accepted by more Nisei. It was then that groups like the Sophy-Eds in Hamilton, the Maniseis in Winnipeg and the Christian Fellowship Group in Montreal – as well as the JCCD – gained a wider base of support.

When the JCCD published its first issue on July 20, 1945, of a monthly “journal of opinion,” Nisei Affairs, it contained an “open letter” to Prime Minister King protesting that

a censorship directive has been issued to the press of Canada ordering that no information be released concerning the enlistment and activities of Canadians of Japanese ancestry in the Canadian Army.

King had admitted in the House of Commons on April 19 that Britain was recruiting Nisei “for war purposes,” but Defence Minister Ralston explained that no subsequent publicity was given to the service and training of Nisei “for reasons of military security and protection of personnel.” But censorship was no doubt partly imposed so that publicity would not harm some Liberal candidates in British Columbia who had partially organized their campaign for the June 11 federal elections around the Japanese issue. News of Nisei in the Canadian forces might have blunted the cause of such Liberal members of Parliament as Cabinet member Ian Mackenzie, Tom Reid and George Cruickshank, who were wooing the electorate by advocating the permanent exclusion of the Japanese from British Columbia, if not from Canada, on the old issue that none of them could be trusted.³⁴

At least three well-known candidates in Vancouver alone, all of them subsequently elected, hammered away at this issue and appeared to be conducting a contest for the most succinctly-worded slogan. Howard Green’s sentiments had long been familiar to his Tory constituents in Vancouver South. Mackenzie, the Minister of Pensions and National Health, vowed that he would resign if his Liberal government allowed the Japanese to remain in the province: “If the Japs are in, I’m out.” Meanwhile, a new Tory candidate, Lt.-Col. C.C. Merritt, a Dieppe hero and Victoria Cross winner, was telling Vancouver voters: “A vote for Merritt is a vote against the Japs.” This was going on while David Tsubota had been languishing in a German prisoner-of-war camp for the past two years. He was a Nisei from Montreal, who had enlisted before the war and had been captured in the commando raid on Dieppe.³⁵ But when the elections and the war were over, the ban on publicity was removed, and a brief Canadian Press wire story on August 28 carried the news that 150 Nisei had been accepted as members of the Canadian Intelligence Corps, the first group of 21 having been inducted that March.

In any case, Nisei enlistment proved too late and too little. Before Pearl Harbor, when the question of service for Nisei became a major issue under the National Resources Mobilization Act of 1940, the Special Committee on Orientals had recommended that Nisei “should not be given military training … and should not be enlisted generally in the armed forces of Canada.”³⁶ The Committee reasoned that because of the nature of the racism against Japanese residents in British Columbia, a warlike action by Japan might expose Nisei soldiers to “the danger of attack by the less responsible elements among their comrades.” But essentially, it was a matter of the Cabinet acceding to political pressure from B.C., such as that exerted by Premier Pattullo for whom the issue was inextricably bound up with withholding the franchise. Writing to King, Pattullo urged that Nisei not be recruited:

If they are called up for service, there will be a demand they be given the franchise, which we in this province will never tolerate. If any instructions have been given to call up Japanese … I sincerely hope you have them immediately countermanded.³⁷

Until the spring of 1945, then, the War Committee of the Cabinet remained adamant over its ban on general Nisei enlistment, although about 35 Nisei, some of mixed parentage, who had enlisted before Pearl Harbor, were allowed to remain in the forces.

Pressure to reopen the question of volunteer service came from the British Army when Capt. Donald Mollison arrived in Canada in the summer of 1944 with the specific mission of recruiting interpreters badly needed for Lord Louis Mountbatten’s Southeast Asia Command. Among Commonwealth countries, only in Canada was there a large number of men who could be trained for the job. Faced with an implacable government veto, he even suggested that Nisei be allowed to go directly to England, there to be inducted into the British Army and then, after the war, return to Canada in civilian clothing – as a sop to Canadian sensibilities. He was told, however, that there was no guarantee that they would be allowed to return to Canada.³⁸ He could only express disgust and incredulity that a large pool of men, presumably fitted to perform valuable service, had been treated in a manner that could not help but alienate their willingness to serve. In the meantime, the JCCD persisted with its view that the Nisei, as Canadians, must wear the uniform of their own country.

At this time, the Department of National Defence, prompted by the Intelligence arm of the Pacific Command which recognized the need for linguists who could qualify for overseas service after a short course at the army’s Japanese-language school in Vancouver, took a first faltering step, providing official forms in Toronto through which Nisei could file applications to join the armed services. It was a special five-page form that Nisei felt was open to attack as a rather discriminatory document, for it asked for references and an extensive personal history as well as details of their knowledge of the Japanese language. And in British Columbia, RCMP officers toured the interior camps, seeking men who would be interested in volunteering for special service – not with the Canadian Army but with the British forces.

But even as the focus of the war moved closer to the Pacific with the collapse of Germany, west coast anti-Japanese politicians were anxious to block Nisei enlistment. Then early in 1945, the Vancouver Consultative Council, a civil liberties group, wrote to King, threatening that if the policy of excluding Nisei was continued and, as a result, the safety of Canadian troops dispatched to the Pacific was in any way endangered, it would publicize the entire story behind government opposition to Nisei enlistment to the country at large.

Finally, on February 26, 1945, as 12 Nisei who had waited six months for permission to leave were about to be inducted into the British Army, Ottawa changed its policy – according to Capt. Mollison through the intervention of Winston Churchill who persuaded Mackenzie King that Nisei were desperately needed. These men were then hastily inducted into the Canadian Army and, without benefit of training, were sent to India on March 4 on loan to the British. Immediately thereafter, Nisei volunteers were recruited with a quota set of 150. One group, including men from British Columbia and Ontario, prepared for overseas duty by taking language training at the S-20 Pacific Command Japanese Language School in Vancouver³⁹ after basic training at Brantford and Simcoe, Ont., just before V-J Day. The Nisei who were shipped to the Far East theatre served primarily with the War Crimes Investigation Force and were stationed in the Dutch East Indies, Malaya, Burma, Thailand, French Indo-China and Hong Kong. A few Nisei served with the occupation forces in Japan. Their work in the Far East included varieties of “psychological warfare,” short and long-range broadcasting, the production and translation of pamphlets and the interrogation of Japanese prisoners.⁴⁰

In a grimly ironical postscript, three men met in a Hong Kong courtroom during the war crimes trials of May, 1946. Two of them, Roy Ito and Fred Nogami, members of the Canadian Intelligence Corps, assisted in the prosecution; the other, Kanao Inouye, sat in the prisoner’s dock, alleged to have been involved in the “sadistic” torture of prisoners-of-war at Shamsuipo Camp in Hong Kong. Inouye, born in Kamloops. B.C., and hence dubbed the “Kamloops Kid” by prisoners, had gone to Japan in 1938 at the age of 21 to attend university and was conscripted to serve as an interpreter in the Japanese army. Prisoners claimed that Inouye, whose father served in the Canadian Army in World War I, had insisted that he had been made to feel inferior in Canada and was therefore “out to get all Canadians.” His fate was death by hanging for the crime of treason, a civilian court later declaring that he had remained a Canadian citizen during the war despite his defence to the contrary. A happier note was offered by two other members of the intelligence unit, George Obokata and George Suzuki, who returned to Canada, bringing with them their war brides, two Chinese girls whom they had met in a Singapore cinema.

The Nisei contribution to the Canadian war record rested – through no fault of their own – upon what was a short and far from glamorous period of accomplishment; moreover, its impact on race relations in Canada was almost negligible. A few, like David Tsubota of Montreal who was captured at Dieppe, Jim Oshiro of Kenora who saw combat action in Italy and Tom Matsuoka of Raymond, Alberta, who was wounded by shrapnel in the bitter fighting along the Rhine, were men who had managed to evade the federal government’s prohibition against enlistment. The Nisei who were finally allowed to enlist in the intelligence unit were not inducted for combat duty and the war was over before most of them went overseas. They gained little publicity and no tokens of gratitude⁴¹ such as Truman’s presidential review of a “medal-spangled” American Nisei outfit at the White House. In contrast to the Canadian scene, the remarkable performance of the 5,000 Nisei who served in the “all-Japanese” 100th Infantry Battalion and the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the unabated favourable publicity they received and the contacts they established in American communities prior to overseas service, were primary factors not only in discrediting racism but in promoting acceptance of Japanese in the United States who wished to resettle. Their enlistment in the army early in 1943 and the subsequent reports of their combat exploits, then, was the dramatic turning point in the long struggle to regain popular and official recognition of their rights as Americans. The 100th was subjected to some of the bloodiest fighting of the Italian campaign and it suffered over 300 killed and 650 wounded out of a total of 1,300 men; and the 442nd, probably the most decorated unit in U.S. military history, spearheaded four major Allied offensives, three in Italy and one in France.

Unlike Canada’s timid officialdom, the War Relocation Authority felt that its public relations programme for the resettlement of evacuees had been greatly hampered by banning of Nisei from the armed forces and firmly believed that the decline in evacuee morale was attributable to the relegation of Nisei to the status of “second-class citizens” ineligible for military service. Secretary of War Henry Stimson, on January 28, 1943, opened the way to enlistment with the statement, approved by Roosevelt, that “it is the inherent right of every faithful citizen, regardless of ancestry, to bear arms in the Nation’s battle.”⁴² And the achievement of the Nisei soldiers as well as the 3,000 other Nisei who joined the Military Intelligence Service and proved their value in almost every major Pacific campaign from Guadalcanal through Iwo Jima showed that, given the opportunity, they could prove their patriotism and loyalty.

Canadian Nisei were denied the opportunity for combat and hence had no impressive evidence of loyalty which they could use to convince a confused and sceptical public. Perhaps in view of the disgust engendered by the total negation of their citizenship status, Nisei probably would not have responded in large numbers if a larger quota than the 150 had been allowed. And, given the particular conditions and pressures that existed in the interior camps, not many would have volunteered from there. Indeed, for many embittered evacuees, the true “heroes” or “martyrs” among them were those who were interned for making clear their outrage over the evacuation policies. Even in Toronto, friends had become alienated, either over the futility of mounting pressure on Ottawa to revise its policy on enlistment, or over the propriety of volunteering when the opportunity finally arose. Numerous intense family conflicts arose and to avoid them, some Nisei volunteers did not disclose their intention but went about it secretly. Why, then, did the Nisei join up? One Nisei veteran, Tom Shoyama, after sifting through various specific reasons, concluded:

The Nisei had good many reasons. But I doubt that devotion to democracy, hatred of fascism, or a passion for the Nisei cause were the crucial factors. I think it must have seemed like a job that really needed to be done …. I’m inclined to believe that the one crucial characteristic was actually his own individuality and independence. I think he’d enjoyed freedom enough to value it. He had that basic quality of maturity and democracy, a mind of his own that he’d been accustomed to use and obey.⁴³

Other Nisei, however – like those JCCC leaders who had decided that co-operating with the harsh evacuation policy was the only way they could prove their worth as loyal Canadians – were singlemindedly inspired by the belief that enlistment, with its corollary of self-sacrifice, was the sole means by which they could erase the stigma of distrust which had unleashed the evacuation. Many of the volunteers, who were driven by this conviction, emerged from the leadership of the existing Nisei organizations in Eastern Canada, such as the JCCD. It was their acid test for translating lofty principle into overt action. Almost the entire executive of the JCCD opposed an emotional groundswell of opposition in the community and was among the first to volunteer.

It was in the same fateful year of 1945, one which King, as he serenely wrote in his diary, felt “was the best year of my life,”⁴⁴ that the evacuees had to face the crisis of segregation and the threat of repatriation. If there had been any failures throughout the entire war, they were the failures of King and his Cabinet in areas relating to the Japanese. It was not that they failed to heed the vox populi of Vancouver, Lethbridge and Toronto, but that they constantly retreated before the most strident demands of the moment, making concessions to racist elements in the nation’s population in the hope of buying off pressure. Both British Columbians and those people who were interested in a democratic solution had every right to demand a final settlement of the problem of the evacuated Japanese, but it did not have to be one that continued the policy of selective controls strictly on racial grounds. Nor was it only King and his government that failed. Although there was much that was admirable in the efforts of some CCF members of Parliament, few politicians rose above the level of party politics and spoke out in favour of civil liberty. And, finally, Canadians in general – by their indifference and apathy – failed to perceive the immense human misery and tragedy they were conspiring to produce as the federal government proceeded in the spring of 1945, subsequent to King’s “compromise” policy announced in August, 1944, to launch a programme to disperse Japanese throughout the country, to segregate the “loyal” from the “disloyal” and to “repatriate” the latter to Japan.

Although the Department of Labour had made rather desultory efforts to persuade evacuees that it was “for their own good” to resettle across the country, no comprehensive action had been undertaken until the segregation and repatriation programme was launched in April. As over 15,000 Japanese still remained in the province, British Columbians were unhappy about the way that the entire problem had been allowed to drift. Howard Green and Tom Reid were pressing for “some solution” to the Japanese problem, expressing the fear that the 7,000 who had resettled in other provinces would be permitted to return to their former homes. As was expressed in previous and subsequent statements, in innumerable speeches, editorials, articles and letters-to-the-editor, what Green and others sought was the deportation of all Japanese, regardless of citizenship, as the “ideal” solution.⁴⁵ Opposed to these people were the much less influential groups such as the National Inter-Church Advisory Committee which favoured a solution based on democratic principles. Hence King’s compromise, between outright deportation – considered to be “ideal” – and dispersal – thought to be more or less “democratic.”

As it was essential for the Liberals to let nothing impair their chances of returning to power, King presumably timed the announcement of the programme in the spring of 1945 in order to convince British Columbians that his party was actually implementing its policies on the Japanese. However, the “quasi-judicial” commission which was to “examine the background, loyalties, and attitudes of all persons of Japanese race in Canada to ascertain those who are not fit persons to remain here” was never appointed. It hung in the air until King announced early in 1947 that the plan would be withdrawn.

In the absence of such a tribunal, then, the criteria for “loyalty” or “disloyalty” was based on two crude options: either to apply for voluntary repatriation to Japan or go “east of the Rockies.” The notices, placed in the interior camps and in placement offices in other provinces, were of two types. The first, under the signature of Labour Minister Mitchell, was directed to those seeking repatriation and announced that:

Free passage will be guaranteed by the Canadian Government to all repatriates being sent to Japan, and all their dependants who accompany them, and including free transportation of such of their personal property as they may take with them.⁴⁶

The second notice, under the authority of T.B. Pickersgill, Commissioner of Japanese Placement for the Department of Labour, offered financial aids to resettlement and warned that:

Japanese Canadians who want to remain in Canada should now re-establish themselves East of the Rockies as the best evidence of their intentions to co-operate with the Government policy of dispersal. Failure to accept employment east of the Rockies may be regarded at a later date as lack of co-operation with the Canadian Government in carrying out the policy of dispersal.⁴⁷

Starting on April 13 in Tashme, an RCMP detachment canvassed all evacuees 16 years of age and over as to their intentions, and Department of Labour placement officers accompanied them to interview evacuees wishing to remain in Canada about employment opportunities outside the province. Repeated emphasis was given by these officials that non-repatriates would be expected to make immediate plans for moving out of the province. Forms for repatriation signed by Japanese nationals or citizens, either Canadian-born or naturalized, were similar to the effect that each person agreed that the federal government would

arrange for and effect my repatriation to Japan, together with my dependants under 16 years of age.

But the Canadian citizen was also expected to

declare my desire to relinquish my British nationality and to assume the status of a national of Japan.

The RCMP showed its customary efficiency in completing the survey of the six interior camps in one month. Tashme residents, the first to be surveyed, had less than three weeks to make their decisions, which precluded consulting with sons or daughters living elsewhere. No systematic survey was made of the evacuees east of the Rockies, and persons wishing to be repatriated were instructed to report to the nearest RCMP office. When the survey of the interior camps was completed, Pickersgill announced that evacuees would not be sent east “unless” jobs were available and, in the meantime, that families wishing to remain in Canada would be segregated in Kaslo, “repatriates” shifted to Slocan Valley and Greenwood and those “unsuitable” for relocation moved to New Denver.

The concept of dispersal and compulsory resettlement had the tacit approval of most Canadians. The fact that the right of citizens to a choice of residence, without undue threat, was being ignored did not seem abhorrent even to those aligned on the side of the Japanese. In the United States, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes had announced that resettlement would be carried out without compulsion because “most of these Japanese are citizens, with the same constitutional rights of free movement as other citizens have.”⁴⁸ Moreover, the War Department already had revoked the west coast exclusion orders which had exiled American evacuees from California, Oregon and Washington because a Japanese attack was no longer “a substantial possibility.”

British Columbians generally were jubilant over the announcement of the segregation and repatriation programme. Groups such as the Federated Growers and the Native Brotherhood, an Indian organization, felt that it would cement the prosperity they had enjoyed since the Japanese had been ousted from the farming and fishing industries. Others such as the Richmond Japanese Repatriation League and the Canadian Legion expressed regret that total expulsion from Canada was not being ordered. But it was immediate reaction of provinces across the Rockies that created serious doubts among evacuees over moving east and influenced many of them to sign for repatriation. Headlines to articles in the April 2 editions of Time and Newsweek succinctly summed up the situation: “Who Wants Japs?” and “No Takers.” Alberta’s Public Works Minister W.A. Fallow said that his province wanted no post-war Japanese; Quebec’s Premier Duplessis said that he would take “necessary steps” to guarantee that no Japanese were relocated in his province. Said Nova Scotia’s Premier A.S. MacMillan, “We’ve got troubles enough.” Premier T.C. Douglas of Saskatchewan offered to take evacuees only if other provinces did; Ontario and Manitoba indicated that they had not been consulted and might have ideas of their own. These statements, then, were simply a reaffirmation of the prejudice which the evacuees had become accustomed to accept as endemic in Canada. It proved to evacuees that the federal government was attempting to enforce a programme whose details and repercussions apparently had not been thoroughly considered. And even if the negative reactions of the provinces were to be overcome, the evacuees had no guarantee of permanent residence or that restrictions on travel, ownership or leasing of homes and businesses or the prohibition of trade licences would be lifted.

Obviously, then, neither of the options was, to say the least, attractive. Both really involved making a choice to move to an “unknown” country. Even Issei opting to go to Japan would be confronted with a different country from the one they knew in 1907 or 1923. Decisions had little relation to any concept of loyalty or disloyalty and were based largely on personal circumstances, experience and psychological factors prominent since the evacuation. Many evacuees, whose property on the coast had been confiscated and sold, felt that the federal government was utterly untrustworthy. Others, like one elderly Issei, could say:

Since I arrived in 1907, not a year has passed without its anti-Japanese cry being raised. At 60 years of age, I’m too old to go east, and even if I did, I think we’ll meet the same prejudice.

Since his own experience suggested that there was little hope of happiness for his children, he saw in repatriation a means of holding his family together. Many felt that their best option for the moment was to sign for repatriation, remain in British Columbia for the duration of the war and hope that government policy would once again change. The interior camps, after all, represented the only sure refuge during wartime.

The interior camps were thrown into an acute state of tension and turmoil, stirred up by a series of rumours about impending government action. One Nisei, groping to explain to an outsider why her parents chose to sign for repatriation:

You have never been in one of those relocation or security centres, or maybe you would understand. Thousands of rumours fly around. By the time news reaches you, all the truth and facts in it are distorted. One rumour was that those who didn’t sign repatriation papers would be shoved out of the centre and would be left homeless and without food. I know that sounds silly to you, but when you’re alone and afraid and worried, you’re liable to believe things like that.⁴⁹

A young girl, the only support for her aged parents, attempted to persuade them to go east with her. But as they were adamant about remaining in British Columbia, she also signed for repatriation in order to avoid quarrels at every meal. Later, she wrote:

I have nearly given up hope. Every time I think about the future in store for us I feel like crying. I am just living on memories of the past …. I keep hoping some miracle will happen to save us, but this seems unlikely …. I can’t express my feelings in words – it’s a feeling of being all mixed up.⁵⁰

The note of anguish and dread, of decisions made in fear and trembling, runs through these stories. On the eve of having to make her decision, a Nisei woman wrote:

We are in a state of nerves and anxiety about all this voluntary repatriation or go east. Roy [her husband] is interpreting secretary for the committee here and has to go to all the meetings, interviews, etc., though we know it is useless to protest. So many have signed to go to Japan; about 95 per cent at Lemon Creek because all that goes with signing is so much more advantageous than going east, but we have decided to go east …. Oh, Lord, when will this thing ever close! It means every time we move we have to leave all the improvements we have made and start all over again …. Roy has a chance to go as a sawyer at $1 an hour, north of Kamloops, but he can’t go unless he signs to go to Japan. If he signs to go east, X [the placement officer] is waiting in the next room to push a job into your face. If you refuse to take it, you lose your job here and maintenance when Roy’s not working. If you have a big grown-up family who can all work, then farming is the best job, but where a baby and mother can’t do much and only one to do the work, it isn’t very good.

We sign tomorrow and I hope many will sign to stay. To sign to go to Japan is to make everything so fine for now, but after the war what? To sign to go east may be hard now, but we hope for better later and I pray that I may be right in thinking so.

I never did so much useless thinking and worrying before. Our minds get buzzing fiercely after so much arguing without a very certain future to look forward to …. We’ll let you know what becomes of us as soon as we know ourselves.⁵¹

So inept and piecemeal was the administration of the programme that Labour Department officials, flooded by pleas for definitive statements about permanency of residence, housing or jobs, could not assuage the fears of people on the brink of a major decision. Thus Pickersgill, writing to a committee in Tashme:

It is true that certain questions about the future of people of Japanese origin remaining in Canada are still unanswered …. No guarantee can be given … of permanency of employment and provision of housing …. We cannot however see that Japanese Canadians wishing to remain in Canada are in any worse position while engaging in employment which we have to offer, while some of these questions are unanswered, than by remaining in the settlements of B.C. We do not consider this a valid excuse for declining to accept employment east of the Rockies.

And, in the end, people opting to go east could still be deported:

We cannot see that any person of Japanese origin whom the loyalty tribunal might consider ineligible to remain in Canada is any worse off because this decision is made in Eastern Canada or in B.C.⁵²

Eighty-one per cent of people over 16 years of age in the interior camps had requested repatriation, compared to only 15% of those living east of the Rockies. But the remarkable statistic was that 10,632 people, nearly half the Japanese population in Canada, faced repatriation.

The months immediately following the RCMP survey produced a flurry of confusion and excitement, many evacuees charging that they were “intimidated” into agreeing to repatriation. By early summer, many sought to revoke their requests and the entire issue came to a boil after Japan signed unconditional surrender terms on September 2. Symptomatic of this confusion was the effort of a Slocan Valley committee which hired Vancouver solicitor Dennis Murphy and submitted two writs on behalf of Shigemitsu Toyosaki and Norimichi Taniwa against the Security Commission in the British Columbia Supreme Court on July 18. Murphy intended to contest the validity of repatriation and to claim that the evacuees who signed repatriation forms had done so “under duress.” But he never got to argue the case, for the writs were set aside by Justice Manson when the federal government’s legal advisor pointed out that the suit was being filed against a non-existent defendant, the Security Commission having been dissolved in February, 1943, and the handling of the Japanese transferred to the Japanese Division of the Department of Labour through Order-in-Council P.C. 946.⁵³ That transference of authority was, indeed, common knowledge; the case for the Japanese collapsed out of their legal counsel’s own ineptness.

The charges of “intimidation” were, of course, denied by Labour Minister Mitchell who stated in the Commons:

I would not stand for it for one minute, neither would the government nor the people; this is a free country.⁵⁴

What the complainants meant by “intimidation,” however, did not involve threatening physical behaviour by RCMP or placement officers. Intimidation was more subtle and reflected the complexity of motivations for desiring repatriation: the spectre of a “loyalty” tribunal which presumably would impose compulsory repatriation if the evacuees refused to take either of the options; the presence, during the survey, of placement officers who exerted pressure for immediate relocation if evacuees wished to remain in Canada; the threat of loss of jobs or maintenance; the lack of a court of appeal or other procedures by which evacuees could stand on their rights as citizens; the very language of the two notices with its either-or proposition which, to people embittered by three years of evacuation experience, was simply another instance of the federal government’s bullying tactics.

Intimidation also could have been said to have emerged from the well-publicized statements of hostility in the prairies and Eastern Canada and the anti-Japanese statements in British Columbian newspapers and by members of Parliament and pressure groups. That the fear of the hostile “outside” world for these displaced people was sometimes enough to tip the balance in favour of repatriation was evident. That the decisions were made not only for self-protection but also to assure family unity and security for the duration of the war was also evident. Opting to remain in British Columbia was, in the language of the notices, considered culpable in terms of “loyalty”; repatriation could be thought of as punitive. But obviously, decisions were made for reasons highly irrelevant to the matter of political allegiance. Since non-repatriates had been subjected to intensive pressure to resettle, many evacuees therefore believed that the federal government was planning to force them out of the camps to face the hostile Canadian public which was responsible for their evacuation and detention. To those people, the choice offered was not between Japan and Canada, in a political sense, but between the interior camps and the rest of Canada, in a security sense.

Intimidation was also exerted by intra-group pressure, by the more fanatical among the Issei and older Nisei who still believed that Japan would win the war and that rewards would accrue to them through victory, and by a large group which genuinely wished to go to Japan in complete disillusionment and anger at the persecution which had been meted out. Among Nisei educated in Canada, the abrogation of the “rights” which their indoctrination had led them to believe were implicit in Canadian citizenship often resulted in signing for repatriation. Others had built up prospects of a future in the Orient, free from racism, in which their ability to speak both Japanese and English would be advantageous. Within the confines of an interior camp, it was easy to feel that there was no longer a viable chance for success in Canada. And among many evacuees, seasoned judgement and maturity of thought were not conspicuous after three years of abnormal life which had robbed them of initiative and self-reliance. This was a group of people who probably were forced to make more major decisions in a short period than most people face in a lifetime.

By the end of the war in the Pacific, applications seeking cancellation of requests for repatriation involved a total of 4,720 persons, including dependents. Of these requests, Labour Minister Mitchell announced that Canadian-born and naturalized citizens who had submitted them prior to September 2 would be permitted to remain in Canada; cancellation of requests by Japanese nationals would not be considered. The cases of Canadian-born citizens who applied after that date would be reviewed. Thus September 2, the date of the unconditional surrender of Japan, was defined as the critical date, suggesting that if an evacuee applied for cancellation after that date, he was “disloyal” to Canada. Or, as Mitchell explained:

Up until the defeat of Japan, the Japanese wanted to go back to their own country. As I said … this is a free country, and we took them at their word. But when the atomic bomb cropped up, and Japan was defeated, they were prepared to change their minds. That is the position in a nutshell.⁵⁵

Mitchell’s “nutshell” was rather confined; his statement was a wilful misreading of perhaps the most tangled, misunderstood, badly misrepresented and crucially important issue in the entire programme of evacuation, detention and resettlement which he had helped to institute on the premise that Canadians of Japanese origin constituted a danger to “national security.” Mitchell’s “nutshell” could hardly contain hundreds of cases such as that of a Nisei whose devotion to ailing parents forced him to sign for repatriation:

My father was injured on Dec. 2, 1944, and although he has been a resident of Canada for 40 years and till then had never considered returning to Japan, since he was unable to move around he had no alternative but to sign. My mother was also unwell before the birth of my baby sister three months later. I, being the oldest and sole supporter of the family, had to remain to look after them. The constable told us that if we wished to cancel our application we could write in to the commanding officer of the RCMP in Vancouver. Because of this, I believed that as soon as my parents were well again I could cancel my application and go east.⁵⁶

Mitchell’s statement was in vivid contrast to that of Secretary of the Interior Ickes who wrote to Attorney-General Clark about the problem of 5,589 evacuees who had voluntarily requested renunciation of their American citizenship, most of whom wished to cancel their requests and avoid repatriation:

I believe it would be unjust in the extreme to treat all renunciants in a class, without individual differentiation, and to assume that they would all be dangerous to national security …. I understand that it is a regular procedure of the Department of Justice and Naturalization Service to establish the facts concerning the legality of and the need for deportation in particular cases before undertaking deportation. Such investigations or hearings are clearly needed in the case of the renunciants, and I recommend most urgently that they be held. Unless they are held, I think that the deportation of the renunciants could in many cases be called seriously into question on the grounds of legality, justice and plain human decency.⁵⁷

On December 10, the United States Justice Department announced that deportation or so-called “mitigation” hearings would be held for all renunciants who did not wish to go to Japan. A total of 3,186 would-be repatriates who claimed that renunciation was made “under duress” appeared before the hearings early in 1946. Unfavourable decisions were handed down in only 406 cases. Meanwhile, King, Mitchell, Justice Minister St. Laurent and other members of the Cabinet assumed that requests for repatriation were irrefutable evidence of “disloyalty.”

The ethical problem of “human decency,” if not legality and justice, therefore had to be forced upon the federal government’s attention by Nisei, CCF members of Parliament and by other Canadians whose attitude was best expressed by a Winnipeg Free Press editorial, “Shall Decency Prevail?” That newspaper, the Toronto Saturday Night, the Toronto Star and others, which were interested either in the principle of civil liberties or merely seized an opportunity to attack King and his Liberals, turned the spotlight on the threat of deportation. Nisei groups, such as the JCCD in Toronto, began to carry out an intensive publicity campaign, helped by the Co-Operative Committee on Japanese Canadians, the Vancouver Consultative Council and the churches. Hundreds of petitions and letters flooded Ottawa, some of them interpreting the issue as a wedge which would undermine Canadian values and pose a threat to all citizens of any racial origin.

What provided the target was Clause G of the National Emergency Transitional Powers Act, Bill 15, introduced by St. Laurent on October 5. This bill was to provide the federal government with transitional powers in peace-time, since the War Measures Act was to lapse at the end of 1945. Through Clause G, the federal government proposed to control, as an emergency power, “the entry into Canada, exclusion and deportation, and revocation of nationality.” And although the term “Japanese” was not used, it was designed to provide the legal foundation for completion of the repatriation programme. In the same autumn session of Parliament, Secretary of State Paul Martin introduced a new citizenship bill which proposed to establish certain fundamental rights and liberties involved in Canadian citizenship, the passage of which, he later assured Tory members Green and Davie Fulton, would not stand in the way of the deportation of Japanese Canadians.⁵⁸

The vigorous protest against Clause G, the sheer volume of support and the belated awakening to the issue of citizenship was, of course, sheer irony to many Nisei, just as it was a shock to King’s Cabinet. Hence when Bill 15 was passed on December 7, Clause G was not included. But any notion of victory was short-lived, when on December 17 King tabled three orders-in-council which empowered the Cabinet to do precisely what Clause G had been intended to do, except that the reference was not specifically to the Japanese.

The debates in the Commons on December 17, during which King defended his stand, once again brought into focus the two views on the Japanese “problem.” CCF members MacInnis of Vancouver, H.W. Herridge, a new parliamentarian from Kootenay West, and Alistair Stewart of Winnipeg North branded the orders-in-council as official sponsorship of racial discrimination while all the old-line anti-Japanese members from British Columbia wanted to ensure that the legal machinery for removing the Japanese would not be disrupted. While Green pressed for the expulsion of the Japanese to some area in the Pacific, if they did not want to go to Japan, Stewart engaged in an acrimonious debate with Ian Mackenzie and King:

Stewart: I say this, that the policy that is to be carried out as regards these Japanese Canadians certainly is not liberal.

Mackenzie: May I tell my honorable friend that I fought an election on that issue ….

Stewart: That reflects no credit on his constituents. I regard this policy as a direct negation … of decent, elemental, fundamental democracy. I will go farther and say this, that in carrying through this policy, in deporting these Canadian citizens of Japanese origin, the Liberal government has merely proven itself to be what many of us have long suspected, an organized hypocrisy.

King: I ask that that term be withdrawn. No honorable member has any right to say that any honorable member or any government is an organized hypocrisy.

Stewart: I will withdraw the words if I am out of order. I should have said, the Liberal Party.⁵⁹

The debate proved to be merely an exercise for high-powered rhetoric, for the orders-in-council did not require parliamentary assent, and were neither revised nor withdrawn. Meanwhile, those listed to sail for Japan early in 1946 had been ordered to report to public-health officers for inoculations and told to be ready to proceed to Vancouver under RCMP guard, for shipment out of Canada.

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Notes

1. Toronto Star, August 11, 1943. ↩
2. The New Canadian, March 28, 1942. ↩
3. Sanders, D.E., “The Hutterites: A Case Study in Minority Rights”, Canadian Bar Review, 42 (May, 1964), p. 225. ↩
4. E.g., “Keep the Japs Out”, Edmonton Bulletin, September 5, 1943, an editorial which attacked the city council for allowing the entry of three Nisei students to the University of Alberta and the Provincial Normal School on the basis that it was “impossible to intelligently distinguish” between loyal and disloyal Japanese. The Bulletin qualified this statement further in an editorial, “They’re All Disloyal”, September 11, 1944, claiming that Japanese immigrants are “agents of Imperial Japanese Government” and that “fully 90 per cent of Canadian-born Japanese [take] an oath of loyalty to the emperor.” The Alberta press was uniformly anti-Japanese and militated vigorously for the prohibition of evacuees from the cities and for the removal of the evacuees after the end of the war. For a short summary of the Japanese settlement in Alberta, see Palmer, H., Land of the Second Chance: A History of Ethnic Groups in Southern Alberta (Lethbridge Herald, 1971). ↩
5. Lethbridge Chronicle-Herald, February 4, 1965. ↩
6. The New Canadian, March 27, 1943. ↩
7. The New Canadian, December 26, 1942. ↩
8. Phil Baker, president of the Alberta Sugar Beets Growers Association, stated in January, 1946, that of Alberta’s 30,000 acres of beets, 19,500 acres were worked by the Japanese, 5,500 by white farmers, and 5,000 by German prisoners-of-war. In 1945, an all-time record crop of 363,000 tons was produced. ↩
9. After Bracken was chosen national Tory leader at the party’s national convention in December, 1942, however, he espoused the expulsion of the Japanese from B.C. and suggested that they be deported from Canada if the other provinces were not willing to accept them as resettlers. He made this attitude quite clear in a speech on behalf of Davie Fulton, Tory candidate for Kamloops. See Vancouver Province, August 15, 1944. Fulton, who gained a reputation as “a politician with principle” (e.g., Newman, P., Renegade in Power: The Diefenbaker Years (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1963), pp. 105, 107, 112), characterized the public pressure against the federal government’s deportation policy as deriving from “uninformed and unenlightened groups in the country” (Hansard, April 5, 1946, p. 643). Alistair Stewart, CCF Winnipeg North, retorted that these groups included the Church of England, the United Church and civil liberties associations (Hansard, p. 722). ↩
10. Winnipeg Free Press, October 18, 1945. ↩
11. The New Canadian, September 26, 1942, records “bitter split” and “unsympathetic attitude” towards Nisei sugar beet workers in the Kent County area. ↩
12. Department of Labour, Report on the Re-Establishment of Japanese in Canada, 1944-1946 (Ottawa: King’s Printer, 1947), p. 25. ↩
13. Department of Labour, Report on the Administration of Japanese Affairs in Canada, 1942-1944 (Ottawa: King’s Printer, 1944), pp. 42-3. Also see The New Canadian, April 17, 1943; Black, N.F., “Problem of Japanese Canadians and Solution”, Saturday Night, February 5, 1944. ↩
14. The New Canadian, July 1, 1944. ↩
15. Order-in-Council P.C. 946, August 1, 1943. See supra, chap. 11. ↩
16. Winnipeg Free Press, June 19, 1944. ↩
17. A second set of findings, published on February 6, 1944, was based on attitudes towards citizens and aliens:

    	Japanese nationals	Japanese Canadians
    Send back to Japan	80%	33%
    Allow to stay	14	59
    Undecided	6	8

    A third poll, December 24, 1945, showed the following:

    	Japanese nationals	Japanese Canadians
    Send them back	64%	25%
    Allow to stay	7	49
    If loyal and good citizens, allow to stay	-	4
    Allow to stay under close watch	3	9
    Give choice of taking out citizenship or leaving	13	-
    Miscellaneous answers	5	6
    No opinion	8	7

    ↩
18. The New Canadian, September 2, 1944. ↩
19. Vancouver Province, September 25, 1944. ↩
20. The New Canadian, June 2, 1945. ↩
21. The New Canadian, September 16, 1944. ↩
22. The Vancouver Province published an editorial, “Toronto and the Japanese”, April 23, 1942, attacking Toronto for refusing “to accept their share of responsibility for solving an acute national problem.” ↩
23. Toronto Globe and Mail, April 10, 1974. ↩
24. Toronto Star, November 17, 1944. ↩
25. The New Canadian, November 25, 1944. ↩
26. Nisei Affairs, September 29, 1945. ↩
27. LaViolette, F.E., The Canadian Japanese and World War II (University of Toronto Press, 1948), p. 183. ↩
28. See also, Berton, P., The Comfortable Pew: A Critical Look at Christianity and the Religious Establishment in the New Age (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1965), pp. 43-9; Feinberg, A., Storm the Gates of Jericho (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1964), pp. 62-77. ↩
29. The New Canadian, January 22, 1944. ↩
30. The New Canadian, January 29, 1944. Many Issei still express resentment over what they felt to be a peremptory move on the part of the “Nisei establishment.” ↩
31. The New Canadian, December 9, 1944. ↩
32. The New Canadian, March 13, 1944. ↩
33. The New Canadian, January 15, 1944. ↩
34. E.g., column by Elmore Philpott, Vancouver Sun, December 8, 1944: “It is not hard to guess the motives of … Ottawa [which] succeeded in having the British War Office request pigeon-holed …. They are afraid that if 200 Japanese of unquestioned loyalty to Canada were selected to serve in Burma they would serve too well …. They are afraid that if, given the chance, these young men would discredit the race hate campaign which these people are cooking up for the next election.” ↩
35. The New Canadian, March 10, 1945; Khaki, April 16, 1945, a bi-monthly Canadian Army bulletin published in Ottawa. Tsubota’s father, a World War I veteran, served in World War II as a company sergeant-major attached to Canadian Army headquarters in London. ↩
36. Special Committee on Orientals in British Columbia, Report and Recommendations, December 1940 (Ottawa: King’s Printer, 1941), p. 12. ↩
37. Toronto Star, January 19, 1972. Patullo’s letter is among the “top secret” minutes, letters and memoranda of the War Committee released to the National Archives in Ottawa early in 1972. ↩
38. Mollison to Judy LaMarsh, “This Country in the Morning”, CBC radio, March 17, 1975. ↩
39. The Japanese Language School was instituted in September, 1943, and operated until July, 1946. Including white army personnel, a total of 232 attended the courses with 113 seeing subsequent duty related to their training. ↩
40. See, inter alia, Shoyama, T., “Niseis in Canadian Khaki”, The New Canadian, a five-part series beginning December 21, 1946; “A Note on the Issue of Military Service for Canadians of Japanese Ancestry”, in LaViolette, op. cit., pp. 310-314; Nisei Affairs, October 7, 1946; Moritsugu, F., “The Evacuation”, in The Canadians at War 1939-45, 1 (Montreal: Reader’s Digest Association, 1969), pp. 158-9. ↩
41. E.g., “Soldiers Insulted”, a column by Elmore Philpott in Vancouver Sun, November 23, 1945, which relates story of Nisei soldiers refused tickets to a Vancouver cinema. ↩
42. Thomas, D.S., and R.S. Nishimoto, The Spoilage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1946), p. 56. See also War Relocation Authority, Nisei in Uniform (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, n.d.); Shirey, O.C., Americans: the Story of the 442nd Combat Team (Washington: Infantry Journal Press, 1946). ↩
43. Nisei Affairs, October 7, 1946. ↩
44. Pickersgill, J.W., and D.F. Forster, The Mackenzie King Record, 3 (University of Toronto Press, 1970), p. 103. ↩
45. E.g., Green, H., “Should We Send the Japs Back? Yes”, Maclean’s, December 1, 1943, pp. 12, 34-5. Cf. MacInnis, A., “Should We Send the Japs Back? No”, pp. 12, 37-8. Also see Neill, A.W., and W.H.H. Norman, “Should Japanese Canadians Be Sent Back to Japan?”, British Columbia Digest, 1 (December, 1945), pp. 2-10. ↩
46. Department of Labour, Canada, Notice to All Persons of Japanese Racial Origin Having Reference to Making Application for Voluntary Repatriation to Japan. The second notice was entitled Notice to All Persons of Japanese Racial Origin Now Residing in British Columbia. ↩
47. Financial assistance, after May 1, 1945, was based on the following rates: $12 per person for subsistence during travel to Eastern Canada and an outright grant of $35 for each single adult, $60 for each married couple and $12 for each child under 16 years of age. A year later, these rates were increased to $45 for a single adult, $120 for each married couple and $15 for each child under 16 years of age. ↩
48. The New Canadian, March 31, 1945. ↩
49. Toronto Star, January 26, 1945. ↩
50. Toronto Star, February 22, 1946. ↩
51. Letter, April 23, 1945, Norman, H., What About the Japanese Canadians? (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1945), p. 4. ↩
52. Pickersgill to R. Shirakawa, April 10, 1945. ↩
53. The curious part of the government’s stand was that, even as late as May 15, 1945, T.B. Pickersgill, Commissioner for Japanese Placement of the Department of Labour, was using the letterhead of the BCSC. The Commission was also listed in the 1945 Vancouver telephone directory. ↩
54. Canada, House of Commons Debates, 1945, p. 2376. Ernest Maag, representing the International Red Cross, made a tour of the interior camps to investigate complaints of intimidation. He then reported to his Geneva headquarters that “there can be no question whatsoever of intimidation and that the word is entirely unjustified.” See Department of Labour, Report on the Re-Establishment of Japanese in Canada, p. 13. What criteria Maag used to come to his conclusion is not known, although he did say that evacuees were allowed to bring interpreters “of their own choice” so that they would be fully cognizant of the “purport and significance” of the repatriation declaration. Grace Tucker, Anglican Church missionary-teacher in the Slocan camp, related that all the camp supervisors – under instructions contained in a “confidential letter” from the Department of Labour – were given “stars” according to their success in gaining signatures for repatriation. ↩
55. Canada, House of Commons Debates, 1945, p. 2405. ↩
56. Fowke, E., They Made Democracy Work: the Story of the Co-operative Committee on Japanese Canadians (Toronto: Garden City, 1951), p. 16. ↩
57. United States Department of the Interior, WRA: A Story of Human Conservation (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1946), p. 74. ↩
58. During the House of Commons debate on the second reading of the Citizenship Bill on April 5, 1946, Green wanted to know whether or not the government would use the bill as an excuse for not carrying through with deportation. Fulton added that since the Japanese put loyalty to Japan first by signing repatriation requests, they should be denied rights of citizenship. Martin assured them that the deportation of the Japanese Canadians was “a distinct and separate matter.” ↩
59. Canada, House of Commons Debates, 1945, p. 3704. ↩

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