Chapter Fifteen: “A Blessing in Disguise”?

Perhaps we want nothing better than to forget the
raw wounds of yesterday, to cover the scars with
delusions of security, but what was once taken away
can be taken again. Who knows but that the next
time will be made easier for the plunderers because
we shrugged and said: shikata-ga-nai
(it can’t be helped).
– Muriel Kitagawa, “Gray Dawn on Another Day.”

The rapidity with which the post-evacuation Nisei adopted at least the outward signs of middle-class status has been depicted as an achievement perhaps rarely equalled in the history of human migration.² The evacuation and relocation effectively broke up the ghettos of the west coast, destroyed the often inhibiting power of the Issei immigrant associations and institutions and acted, ironically enough, as a liberating force extending their horizons into new areas and communities in which the pre-war levels of discrimination were relatively absent. The remarkable resiliency – or compliance – which enabled the Nisei to accept the outrage of the evacuation and relocation and allowed them to rise above it can, of course, be explained by the traditional values that the Issei imparted to them. Enryo (reserve, restraint), gaman (patience, perseverance) and, perhaps most significantly, the shikata-ga-nai syndrome (it can’t be helped), along with an innate respect for authority, helped to shape their acquiescence to evacuation and enabled them to overcome, at least outwardly, the traumatic events and to carry on with the task of resettlement. These were aligned with a strong sense of family and a pervasive belief in the importance of education – all really “virtues” which were compatible, if not identical, to the values of middle-class Canadians – to which could be added diligence, cleanliness, neatness and the importance of keeping up appearances. These traits were favourably viewed by others and have become the stereotypes that are now associated with the Nisei. Indeed, their middle-class peers tend to see in the neat, well-dressed, efficient Nisei and their children a mirror of their own ideals. They are considered a “model minority,” giving credence to the notion that racism can be overcome – thus salving the white conscience.

Metropolitan Toronto, whose Japanese population – the largest concentration in Canada – was listed as 11,690 in the 1971 census, was the centre of influence and activity during the early post-war period and such leadership as exists in the minority group remains in that community. But except for the very early years of evacuation when the Japanese settled in the downtown core, particularly the Spadina Avenue area close to the garment factories, and mingled with the predominantly Jewish population, there has been no centre of geographic concentration. In ensuing years, the movement has been to the suburbs of Scarborough, Don Mills and Etobicoke,³ and it is rare to find two Japanese families living within the same block. Indeed, the Japanese consciously avoided congregating and thus the economic interdependence of pre-war communities.

After a period of dislocation and disorientation, a “community” – in the sense of the ethos of interacting social and political groups – quickly revived in Toronto, as was the case in most cities and towns wherever the Japanese resettled. The Nisei were at first unable to find the social outlets they needed in the larger society and there was the need to combat enforced deportation, pursue the property claims issue and struggle for the lifting of discriminatory legislation.

The spring of 1949, when the last wartime restrictions were removed, marked the advent of a period of stability which had not been attained since the turn of the century and which has not been disturbed up to the present time. The subsiding of the high levels of crude discrimination removed most of the external pressures which forced the Japanese to enclose themselves into an integrated community and gradually has erased their self-consciousness as an embattled minority and the sense of alienation which accompanied it. Now social cohesion and group survival no longer seem important. The Japanese now seldom think in terms of “we-they” but thrive for individual betterment, rather than attempting to improve the condition of the entire group.

The rapid rise⁴ and the gradual decline of their social, economic, religious and political institutions reflect the process of acculturation among the Nisei, the passing of the Issei from the scene and the lack of interest among Sansei in perpetuating them. The plethora of sports groups, which included almost the entire spectrum of athletic activities, the weekly dances, teenage clubs, the short burst of activity among the Issei who formed groups like the Kisaragi Club which gave instruction in ballroom dancing and the Kotobuki-kai, a social club for people over 60 years of age, are memories of the uncertain, groping post-war decade. The churches established their own Japanese congregations but their collective influence waned as their Issei membership decreased.

The virtual collapse of the JCCA as a national entity mirrors the fate of most Japanese institutions of the post-war period. From the very beginning – despite the critical nature of the issues that needed to be fought –the JCCA was lumbered by financial deficits, lack of support and suspicion of its leadership – marked especially by dissatisfaction over its handling of property claims. In its last full-fledged national conference in Vancouver in 1953 – which was dubbed, in a fine piece of unconscious irony, as a “homecoming” for most of the delegates – the annual budget was trimmed from a high of $8,500 in 1948 to $1,900. The post of a full-time executive secretary was abolished and it was decided to rotate national headquarters from province to province. But the plan failed, as even this modest budget could not be raised, the provincial chapters disbanded one after the other, and national headquarters reverted to Toronto. Thus, support waned as the major problems were overcome and the Japanese became economically secure. The final conference held in Toronto in 1961 was a vain attempt to revive the JCCA as a viable national entity. The national executive is still active in Toronto but its role is limited.⁵

The Toronto chapter, however, has survived mainly because of its broader social appeal, its annual community picnics drawing, in the peak years of the mid-1950s, crowds of more than 3,000. It was the one function that drew people of all ages and varieties of opinion to renew friendships and reinforce the rather strained bonds of group solidarity. Other local chapters exist but they face a common problem of survival. The chapter in Lethbridge, for example, faced a “crisis” in 1970: it lacked serious problems to occupy its business meetings. “We asked ourselves if there was any need for this association,” said President Kyoto Shigehiro. “But we didn’t disband because we still got requests once in awhile to do something for the community.” What were these requests? One of them was to supply a troupe of odori dancers for the ceremonial spring opening of the Nikka Yuko (Japan and Canada Friendship) project, the $300,000 Japanese gardens built by Lethbridge as its centennial contribution.

From the beginning, too, the JCCA was a focal point for debate among Nisei on the issue of “assimilation.” The politically conscious Nisei saw the JCCA as a force to counter any crisis that might arise in the future as well as a means by which they could strive for achievement and maintenance of the civil liberties of all ethnic groups. Others regarded the JCCA and other Nisei organizations as a “social crutch” retarding assimilation⁶ and expressed fears that the continuance of such groups would be “dangerous” in the sense that it would revive the image of a “non-assimilable, separate and distinct” minority in the eyes of the watchful, critical white society. To the outsider, the Japanese may seem to be a solidly homogeneous group but they have been, on the whole, poor co-operators among themselves and deep fissures along every dimension have prevented the formulation of any clear notion of their role in Canadian society and any organized attempt to achieve it. The Japanese Cultural Centre in Toronto has been the major attempt to conceptualize and act out one role, but it is by no means universally accepted. Two forces have been at work in the post-war era. one pulling towards the survival of the group, the other, which is more pervasive, having no connection with the group and evincing no sense of “belonging.” It is impossible to determine how strong an individual’s identification remains with his ancestral language and culture; the situation is further complicated by such factors as inter-marriage and geographic dispersal.

The fate of the two Japanese-English, twice-weekly newspapers, both published in Toronto and each with a circulation of some 3,000, also reflects the changing emphasis. The New Canadian, which had an unbroken publishing run through the war years, once functioned as a vigorous social conscience in the Nisei struggle for equality and maintained a high level of journalistic competence and informed analysis. Since the mid-1950s, however, it has operated mainly as a news outlet for the Issei and its English-language section is devoted mainly to irrelevant articles about Japan, bulletins on social activities in Toronto and cuttings from American Nisei publications. It no longer carries editorials on current issues, such as immigration, racism or the role of the “community” in a multiracial society and exerts little influence. The name of the newspaper itself, with its connotation of the newly-arrived immigrant, is outmoded. The Continental Times (Tairiku), one of three Vancouver Japanese-language newspapers forced to suspend publication on December 7, 1941, gains the bulk of its readership from the Issei, though it maintains a small English-language section. The Tairiku has often engaged in bitter opposition to policies espoused by the rival newspaper, tending to polarize divisions within the Issei. Neither of these two newspapers, which are mailed to subscribers across Canada, appears likely to survive beyond the next decade unless their focus is altered to serve the needs of the new immigrants.

The Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre in Toronto was born, finally, out of much travail, doubt and discussion over its cost, site, purpose and scope. First suggested in 1948 as a modest recreational and social centre, the concept broadened by 1953 into a “living memorial” for the “pioneer” Issei and a means of making a specific contribution to the Canadian ethos by cultivating and sharing facets of Japanese culture, as interpreted by Japanese Canadians.⁷ Plans in 1961 to incorporate a 16-lane bowling alley, at a cost of $250,000, as an income-producing venture, were wisely abandoned. Initial funding for the Centre was set at $300,000, raised by pledges from the Toronto Japanese, raffles, dances and concerts, and the $700,000 building was finally opened on October 27, 1963, after ten years of planning, and now has some 1,400 family memberships of which some 20% are non-Japanese.

As a monument to the Issei, the building, designed by Raymond Moriyama, with its textured concrete and wood, is impressive but its utility is limited, ironically, by the geographic diffusion of the population in Toronto. Its demonstrations of ikebana (flower arrangement), odori (folk dancing), origami (paper folding) and sumie (brush painting) have a limited non-intellectual appeal. Its film society eschews the important developments in the Japanese cinema for showing of chanbara (sword fighting) and probably its most popular activity is the practice of martial arts such as judo, karate, or kendo, or lessons in Japanese cooking. Still, the Centre was never intended, in the first place, to reflect more than modest intellectual or “cultural” aspirations, and its very existence is an index to the rapidity of the economic re-establishment of the Nisei.

Nisei have rapidly entered such secure and status fields as medicine, engineering, dentistry, architecture, law and teaching – a spectacular breakthrough for a minority which had been barred in British Columbia by provincial statutes from several of those occupations, and for a people whose highest expectations might have been to achieve the level of auto mechanics.⁸ Moreover, there are several near-millionaires among the Alberta Japanese. By 1970, former Fraser Valley farmer Fusajiro Takeda owned 4,200 acres in the Oldman River Valley near Lethbridge and was grossing over $120,000 a year from wheat and cattle. Tom Ohara, twice “world potato king” at the Royal Winter Fair in Toronto, who began growing potatoes on 35 rented acres in 1943, owned 1,500 acres 27 years later, producing potatoes, grain, and beef cattle on his Brooks farm. In the area around Vauxhall, where the potato is the chief crop, it is the Japanese who have “taken over” the industry. Indeed, the economic integration of the Japanese into the wider community has proceeded to such an extent that there are very few with an interest in the continuation of the Japanese “community” – with the exception of, say, ministers, newspaper publishers, and the owners of restaurants and food stores.

But in their drive for middle-class status, Nisei have not bloomed as public or corporate figures and have not penetrated the levels of power, prestige and privilege in terms of the hierarchical ranking or social stratification of Canada’s “vertical mosaic.”⁹ Neither have they made any impact on national political life. No Nisei has run for a major elective office, although Sigh Kobayashi of Winfield, a former President of the B.C. JCCA, was defeated in 1965 at the nominating convention for the Liberal candidacy in the Okanagan-Revelstoke constituency. The ultimate winner in the federal election was the Social Credit’s Harold Johnson, whose Nisei wife was the former Shuko Miwa of Vernon.

Tom Shoyama, appointed in February, 1975, as Deputy Minister of Finance, reputedly the second most powerful civil service post in Canada¹⁰, is the one startling exception. Shoyama, former National President of the JCCA and a member of the Nisei intelligence unit in World War II, graduated from the University of British Columbia in 1938 and – like many other Nisei graduates of that period – worked in a logging camp in Woodfibre and as a bricklayer before he became editor of The New Canadian and crusaded for equal rights for the Nisei. After the war, Shoyama joined Tommy Douglas’s CCF government in Saskatchewan as an economic adviser, moved to Ottawa as a senior economist and then rose to be Deputy-Minister of Energy, Mines and Resources in 1974. Now he is a member of Ottawa’s tightest little circle of the civil service elite.

Architect Raymond Moriyama, designer of the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre, has gone on to attain an extensive reputation as a site-planner for the Ontario Science Centre, the Scarborough Civic Centre and Metro Toronto’s new zoo. Kazuo Nakamura and Roy Kiyooka are two Nisei who have established national stature in painting. Others like architect Kiyoshi Izumi of Regina, who prepared himself for the work of designing the Yorkton Psychiatric Centre in Saskatchewan by taking LSD to simulate the schizophrenic condition of the inmates, and Dr. Robert Miyagishima, one of three surgeons who took part in Toronto’s first heart transplant, have been the subjects of magazine and newspaper articles. Dancer-choreographer David Toguri is one of the few Nisei to have pursued a successful career in entertainment. No novelists have emerged; the only published poet is Joy Kogawa, whose collection, A Choice of Dreams, includes several poems of her childhood memories of Slocan. Shizuye Takashima’s A Child in Prison Camp also evokes adolescent memories, by watercolour illustrations and text, of a time spent in wartime New Denver.

Although Nisei have been elected to councils in villages and small cities across Canada, mainly in southern Alberta and the interior of British Columbia, their achievement has been limited to local interest. The highest municipal and provincial office was attained by Toronto Nisei lawyer Lucien Kurata when he was elected in 1962 as Reeve of the municipality of Swansea, became a member of the powerful Metropolitan Toronto Council and was later appointed as an Ontario provincial court judge. But his downfall was as sudden as his rise had been startling, for he was dismissed from the bench for alleged misconduct during a trial over which he had presided, an incident that received sensationalized publicity in Toronto newspapers in 1969. Kurata had seen – as he had said – in his election to office and to the bench “genuine overtones of public recognition of Orientals and what they’ve contributed to Canada …. I can’t afford to let the Japanese community down.”¹¹ His dismissal caused some disquiet among observers who felt that it was influenced by details of his private life which were entirely irrelevant to his judicial conduct.¹²

Semanticist S.I. Hayakawa, who gained the national spotlight in the United States as the fiery President of San Francisco State College for his tough measures in quelling the student disorders of 1969, is undoubtedly Canada’s most famous Nisei expatriate. Born in Vancouver, educated at the University of Manitoba and McGill, Hayakawa once joined a Nisei delegation in 1936 to Ottawa to seek the franchise for Japanese Canadians. After getting his doctorate at Wisconsin in 1936, he said “I’d have given anything right then, to come back to Canada, but there were no jobs.”¹³ Now American Sansei call him “Top Banana” – yellow on the outside, white on the inside – for his anti-radical views and writings. In fact, he is one of the harshest critics of militancy among Sansei:

Pity … the little Oriental girl of the Asian-American Political Alliance at UCLA or San Francisco State looking in the mirror at her long and black but hopelessly straight hair, realizing sadly that it just can’t be arranged Afro-style. Right on. Racially I stand in the middle. I’m not white, I’m not black. Perhaps being an Oriental … may provide me ameliatory channels that whites and blacks don’t have.¹⁴

Meanwhile, University of British Columbia zoology professor David Suzuki provides an opposing image to Hayakawa’s, warning of the rise of racism in Canada and attacking the complacency of Japanese Canadians. “How stupid to think that bigotry aimed at blacks or Jews is any different from prejudice directed at us …. The merest puff of a whisper can turn anti-Semitism into fear of the yellow peril,”¹⁵ he told a group at the Cultural Centre. To the non-Japanese, however, he is more noted as the host of a popular series on science on CBC television.

It is impossible to assess the psychological effects of the evacuation on the Nisei. Many, like members of other ethnic minorities, have come to be hypersensitive on the subject of prejudice and are quick to assume discrimination where none is intended. Others increasingly have come to share the prejudices of the majority or at least a relatively unconscious aversion to members of particular ethnic groups – against Jews, Chinese, blacks, Indian – but that is not unusual in a society which has historically proclaimed the superiority of specific ethnic groups over others and has articulated comprehensive and coherent ideologies of racism. “Scratch a Nisei and you’ll find a WASP,” it’s often claimed. But the memories of their incarceration in the British Columbia camps remain an indelible scar which is generally carefully concealed from the public eye, puzzling researchers and Sansei who find Nisei reluctant to talk of the past.

Some Nisei, in fact, appear to have accommodated themselves so thoroughly to past events that, for example, they invite pre-war anti-Japanese politicians to be guest speakers at their annual meetings.¹⁶ A Toronto Nisei group organized a two-day Slocan reunion to celebrate, in song and dance, those aspects of a sojourn in wartime detention that still appeal to them – the days of their youth when they danced the jitterbug and foxtrot under the eyes of watchful parents – as if they had been spent in an idyllic summer camp. While former American evacuees make annual pilgrimages to camps at Tule Lake and Manzanar,¹⁷ like rather grim visitations to Dachau or Buchenwald, no such organized visits have been organized in Canada, even by Vancouver residents, as a solemn affirmation that such an event must never occur again. Generally, most Nisei agree with the official rationalization that the evacuation was a “blessing in disguise” which produced benefits that far exceeded the harm. Nisei invariably have been quoted on radio and television programmes and in newspaper articles on the evacuation as saying: “We didn’t know it then, but it was one of the best things that could have happened.”¹⁸ Of 100 Japanese in Hamilton asked to evaluate their evacuation and relocation experience, 79 said they saw the results as “almost completely good.”¹⁹ None claimed they would take “positive action” if it happened again.

A few Sansei, groping for a sense of identity in a milieu so vastly different from that which shaped their parents, appear to be interested in arriving at an understanding of the past and have tilted at the success and work ethic of the Nisei. Reminiscent of the ferment of the pre-war past which produced The New Canadian and the Japanese Canadian Citizens League, a group of Toronto university students formed the Tora (Tiger) Society. Two publications, Tora and The Powell Street Review, appeared in 1972 but, after a few issues, lapsed for lack of support. Sansei, gnawed by the crab of anxiety, could write:

Only now do we realize that our parents neglected to instill in us a sense of our cultural heritage and ethnic history. This is the very crux of the young Japanese Canadians’ identity crisis …. Why didn’t they tell us what it was like to be a dirty Jap in Canada during the Second World War?²⁰

Similarly, an editorial writer in the Powell Street Review:

As Asians, and as Japanese Canadians, many of us are beginning to realize that we are somewhat unique and distinct from other Canadians. Our problem to this point is that the implications of these differences have never truly been explored …. We are only now on the verge of comprehending who we really are.²¹

The thrust of the Sansei argument suggests that conflict is engendered by their generation’s disgust with the Nisei for having forsaken their cultural and racial heritage in order to be accepted as Canadians; that is, for disappearing into the fabric of the wider society and not flourishing the banners of their ethnic separateness. Many Nisei, in turn, have ridiculed the Sansei’s gropings and, like Dr. Hayakawa, have dismissed it as so much empty rhetoric and the visions of “insecure idealists.” But the search for a base for “yellow power,” aping the black nationalism of the 1960s and the volatile ferment of Sansei self-consciousness in the United States, has been, thus far, a state of mind on the part of a Sansei minority rather than a programme for action. They are learning, like those handful of Nisei who bucked the pervasively conservative elements among themselves, that they are only a pocket in a generation that is generally apathetic to the plea for militancy. Sansei are merging into the wider society through an increasing high rate of inter-marriage, the rate of which, based on a random survey, is about 59%, whereas in 1941 the Japanese had the highest rate of endogamy, 99%, of all groups in Canada.²² On most measurements of acculturation, Sansei are completely identical to the majority group in achievement, interests and social values. Their education is job-oriented, they speak little or no Japanese, they enter secure professions, and their upward mobility leads them into an almost exclusive level of social interaction with non-Japanese groups. The search of some Sansei for “identity” and their consciousness of marginality and of their minority status, of the need to reconcile the dualism between two cultures, may echo the uncertainties of the previous generation, but the Sansei effort lacks the often poignant tragedy of their earlier counterparts.

Few Sansei are old enough to have experienced incarceration during World War II; many come from homes in which there is no noticeable cultural division, except for the culinary, between Japan and Canada. The Sansei may indicate an ambivalence and mild anxiety over their own situation in society and may exhibit a desire to recover selected elements of the culture of Japan, but they are finding that their own acculturation has limited the possibility of recovery. They find their parents old-fashioned, unprepared to understand their ambivalence and unwilling to talk of the past. At times, they seem about to claim the right to dissolve their own identity in order to achieve deeper intimate association beyond the racial group and the inter-racial intimacies that transcend it. Yet they wonder how and in what manner they can or should retain their Japanese identity.

In their experience – and, indeed, in the experiences of most Japanese in the post-war era – proscribing some of the overt forms of discrimination, through the proliferation of anti-discrimination legislation, such as the Ontario Human Rights Code, has not resulted in its disappearance but has made it assume more covert forms. But few Japanese register complaints to the Human Rights Commission,²³ mainly because the forms of discrimination are too subtle to be controlled by law, even when their existence appears to be beyond dispute.

In one well-publicized case, charges of discrimination against the City of Toronto by Shakil Ahmad, a Pakistani who claimed that he was dismissed from his managerial job in the public accounts department because of his race, by Roy Sato, a Nisei senior accountant, and by Archibald Lyn, a Chinese from Jamaica, who testified that reprisals were taken against them because they had supported Ahmad’s case, were dismissed by a Board of Inquiry of the Ontario Human Rights Commission in 1973 because their complaints “had not been established.”²⁴ Sato testified that low-ranking employees suffered no discrimination, but that non-whites capable of taking over higher-paid, managerial positions in City Hall were denied promotion despite better qualifications. Indeed, Nisei in the upper income bracket probably suffer more discrimination than do those in the lower, for it is on that level that the subtle warfare for prestige and status is fought.²⁵

When members of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism asked the Vancouver community in 1966 whether it had any complaints or recommendations about racism, they were startled to find that it had none. Nisei in Vancouver agreed that discrimination existed – if one looked for it. But they felt that combatting isolated cases would inflate the problem out of proportion and “do the community more harm than good.” In Hamilton, only 20% of Nisei respondents felt that “something should be done” about discrimination, and 68% maintained that they did not experience discrimination.²⁶

The Issei, who are now mostly in the over-80 bracket, have changed only slightly except in those areas inevitable to the infirmities of age. They are generally retired and their problems are those of any aging group – finding useful roles and filling leisure time. Most of them stay quietly in the background either near or in the homes of their children, indulging their Sansei grandchildren – in complete contrast to the often tyrannical and unyielding discipline with which they attempted to control their own children. Still, the Nisei grant their parents a respected place of honour, acknowledging their accomplishments and their virtues. Most Issei appear to manifest little evidence of psychic wounds – despite having lost almost everything in the evacuation. They continue to cultivate their Japanese ways, clinging to old values and customs, and are really relics of the vanished Japanese era of the turn of the century – a fact they abruptly discover on trips to Japan. In the main, few regret their choice of emigrating to Canada or opting to remain here, and they obtain their chief pleasure in the degree of success that the Nisei have obtained for whom they undeniably made many sacrifices. A few Ontario Issei, either through choice or necessity, live in the Nipponia Home in Beamsville, the only old-age home for Issei in Canada, spinning out their lives in sequestered tranquility.

Researchers are often astonished to find that the Issei apparently do not harbour ill feelings over the evacuation. One writer for a national weekend magazine went to New Denver, to which some Issei, oddly enough, have returned after retirement. He wrote:

I feel slightly uneasy about my assignment – probing beneath healed scars; questioning people about events they have spent 25 years trying to forget …. I can find no animosity anywhere …. I am greeted by smiles and courtesy in every home …. I ask them all if they think some good came from the government’s wartime repression. Everyone says yes.²⁷

The Issei were simply being polite, answering his questions in a manner that reflected only what they expected the investigator wanted to hear. After all, social conformity required that they be “polite” in public, that they accept and respond to the veneer of the impersonal civility of the whites at the expense of the more idiosyncratic. In such confrontations, Issei are not likely to volunteer any more information about themselves than they have to, answering direct questions with vague or mildly meretricious replies, concealing feelings and opinions – in direct contrast to the often noisy, acrimonious discussions of their intra-group encounters.

A Nisei, writing of this “twilight generation,” summed up its virtues:

They show no resentment. The lines on the faces of Issei people are softened by a kind of acceptance, their slowing movements touched with quiet dignity. With them will go much of the colour and epic quality which makes an era memorable …. The Issei carved a foothold in a new world. Their women followed uncomplainingly, pitting their frail but steel-like endurance against loneliness – and a thousand unknown fears. And now their years are spinning to an end …. But if greatness can be measured in terms of adjusting to soul-shaking events without loss of personal dignity, then the Issei have come very close to greatness.²⁸

What, then, are the current prospects for survival of the Japanese identity in Canada? The concept of “the phenomenon of the third generation” – that is, what the second generation tries to forget, the third generation tries to recapture – has few visible signs in the Sansei or younger Nisei. The influence of the immigrants from Japan in “community” affairs has been almost negligible and their presence in Canada, in relation to Nisei and Sansei, has remained incongruous. Although there are institutions like the Cultural Centre pulling in the opposite direction and individuals who want to emphasize group uniqueness and a sense of connection with the past, the Japanese, who have played a role in Canadian history disproportionate to their numerical size, will likely fade as a distinct linguistic and social minority. The pervasive irony, of course, is that as interest in “ethnicity” has grown in Canada, the interest within the Japanese themselves in maintaining their uniqueness is decreasing.

The Utopian vision of a “multi-cultural” society, of a “mosaic” of ethnic groups in all their cultural diversities living peaceably together and flourishing within an integrated political system, conflicts with the divisive realities of colour or race. The idea of a Canadian “mosaic” is an appealing metaphor but it is one which has always borne within it the seeds of racial strife, and the majority has not always looked at it with the greatest generosity.

As the Japanese began the process of resettlement and reorientation, their goal was that of merging into the majority group, of “hiding” or renouncing their ethnic identity in order to succeed economically and be accepted. Some Nisei, however, re-examined their role and modulated that goal with the view that they had worthwhile “contributions” to make to Canadian culture because of their ancestral heritage and traditions. That kind of cultural pluralism, which postulates the preservation of immigrant culture within the context of Canadian citizenship, dovetailed neatly with Pierre Trudeau’s euphoric pronouncement in October, 1971, of the desirability of cultural diversity within Canada’s bilingual framework. But it was contrary to the Japanese experience, to their being viewed as an “inassimilable” menace to white society, and the Japanese community has generally not availed itself of government funds to proselytize its existence. For example, they have not responded to the surge in French-Canadian nationalism to see that linguistic and cultural maintenance is synonymous and to implement the notion that for culture to survive, language must also survive. No effort – except for perfunctory lessons on weekends, as opposed to the compulsory daily courses in pre-war Vancouver which were looked upon as breeding potential saboteurs – is put into preserving the Japanese language. Sansei or Nisei enrolling in East Asiatic courses in universities in Toronto or Vancouver have little linguistic advantage over non-Japanese students. Their small and scattered population, even in Vancouver and Toronto, precludes the possibility of Japanese participating in any proposed introduction of non-official languages in the public-school curriculum.

Still, the Japanese place in Canada’s history remains secure. Nothing, in fact, seems to have stirred the disquiet of those Canadians interested in civil liberties more than the wartime treatment of the Japanese. It is the skeleton in the closet that stalks out to haunt discussions on civil liberties and it has prompted Canada’s last three prime ministers to make public statements, firmly condemning what had happened. During the RCMP raids in 1960 in search of the thousands of Chinese who had entered the country illegally, John Diefenbaker was careful to avoid turning the issue into a racial affair. “One finds it difficult,” he stated, “to forget the wrongs … committed in freedom’s name but a few years ago.”²⁹ Later, in April, 1970, opposing the Liberal Party’s controversial Bill S-21, which amended the Criminal Code to outlaw the incitement of racial hatred through spoken, written, broadcasted or telephoned statements, Diefenbaker, then Opposition Leader, suggested that the legislation was “repressive” in its tendency to limit legitimate freedom of speech and the press and limit the right to dissent. “We will,” he said, “look back on this day in the years to come as one we would like to forget as we try to forget today the treatment of the Japanese.”³⁰ In 1964, Lester Pearson, speaking about the evacuation at the official opening of the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre, told the audience:

That action by the Canadian government of the day – though taken under the strains and fears and pressures and irrationalities of war – was a black mark against Canada’s traditional fairness and devotion to the principles of human rights. We have no reason to be proud of this episode.³¹

More recently, Trudeau has stated that the passing of the deportation orders-in-council “was one of the great scandals of Canadian history” and that while the forced deportation “didn’t quite happen … the fact it could have been contemplated [and legally carried out] is a frightening thing.”³²

However, those who helped carry out the wartime policies or who were among major figures in fomenting anti-Japanese agitation, have not expressed regret or admitted error. Indeed, they have turned a blind eye to the past and have reacted impatiently and with rancour when they have been reminded of their roles. In a CBC television interview, Louis St. Laurent, who as Minister of Justice helped to formulate evacuation policy, said the government ordered the evacuation because the loyalty of the Japanese was doubtful in case of the invasion of the west coast by Japan: “Blood is thicker than water.”³³ St. Laurent admitted that the government had made mistakes in handling evacuee property but insisted that “they couldn’t take their lands and possessions with them when they were moved.” Even in 1967, Howard Green maintained that the evacuation, far from being “an evil act” as it was described by Escott Reid, then President of Glendon College in Toronto, “was a matter of life and death.”³⁴ Senator Thomas Reid, interviewed for a CBC radio programme on the evacuation, retold stories, long discredited, of spies planted on fishing boats.³⁵ Others, like Jack Cornett and Halford Wilson, anti-Japanese former members of the Vancouver City Council, have preferred to adhere to a curious patois that is void of ethical content: “The evacuation was for the safety of the Canadian Japanese” (Cornett)³⁶ and “Providence has designed things for the Japanese” (Wilson).³⁷

In contrast, almost all officials who were involved in the American evacuation, like former Attorney-General Tom Clark, have acknowledged publicly that the evacuation was completely unjustified. In 1959, moreover, the Justice Department made a formal apology to all Japanese Americans for its part in the proceedings. But for those days, which in their own way will live in infamy even if relegated to only a footnote in Canadian history,³⁸ Mackenzie King, as Prime Minister, bears the ultimate responsibility. From King, there was no apology nor any expression of regret – even in those voluminous diaries which he kept. But his statement, in those same diaries, that it was “fortunate” that the atom bomb was used on the Japanese rather than on “the white races of Europe,” provides a clue to his attitudes on race.

The debate on the 1960 Bill of Rights and the imposition of the War Measures Act during Quebec’s 1970 crisis both excavated the issue of prewar anti-Japanese discrimination and the evacuation. When Diefenbaker introduced the Bill of Rights for debate in the Commons in July, 1960, critics such as Frank Scott of McGill University quickly condemned as “a legislative lie, a complete untruth” the declaration in the proposed bill that “there have always existed and shall continue to exist” certain rights and fundamental freedoms such as “the protection of the law without discrimination by reason of race, national origin, colour, religion or sex.” Although Scott did not specifically cite the Japanese experience in his representation before the Commons Special Committee, most press commentaries did so.³⁹ The word “always” was excised before Bill C-79 was given unanimous third reading on August 4, 1960. The Bill was intended to secure for Canadians certain basic rights such as freedom of worship, speech, press assembly and association, together with equality before the law and the right to a fair trial before an impartial court. But the bill was hedged with limitations and affected only the federal government, not the provinces. Even more important, Parliament was given the power to suspend it under the War Measures Act.⁴⁰

Citing the Japanese evacuation, Pearson urged that the bill be amended to prohibit any such action in the future, specifically the power by order-in-council to deprive Canadians of their citizenship and to expel them from the country. He wanted to limit the absolute power to detain persons, even in wartime, by bringing such cases for review before a Superior Court judge. These amendments were rejected by the Conservative majority. Later, on August 4, Diefenbaker admitted that during World War II many persons later proven to be innocent were interned simply on racial grounds. But he added that when “national security” was at stake, rights of the individual must sometimes suffer and suggested that a non-partisan committee could be set up to examine the War Measures Act for possible changes. But no such committee was in fact set up. Certainly Diefenbaker, always a staunch defender of civil liberties, was influenced, at least in part, by what happened to the Japanese during and after the war when he introduced the Bill of Rights. But, ironically, the existence of the Bill after 1960 would, in no way, of itself prevent another evacuation.

A major issue arising out of the Trudeau government’s invocation of the War Measures Act on October 16, 1970, on the grounds that a state of “apprehended insurrection” caused by Le Front de Liberation du Quebec (FLQ) existed in Quebec, was whether or not such a proclamation and the subsequent Public Order (Temporary Measures) Act were justified by the events. By now it is accepted that the “apprehended insurrection” that was used to justify emergency powers was merely the action of two small cells of the FLQ and that that they were unnecessary as a means of protecting Quebec against further terrorist attacks. Whereas the evacuation and detention of the Japanese, empowered by the War Measures Act for the purpose of maintaining “national security,” were never questioned at the time, the FLQ crisis was debated in Parliament and all the implications – such as the possibility of applying the regulations to all violent or non-violent groups of persons in Canada who advocated governmental change – were thoroughly discussed. The whole country was agitated, civil liberties were suspended, and the lives, jobs and families of over 450 people, most of whom were never charged with a specific crime, were disrupted.

One fact remains to haunt Japanese Canadians, other minorities and those interested in civil liberties. It is a fact that the Bill of Rights is a shield made of straw, that the War Measures Act, which overrides the Bill, can be invoked at any time that the Cabinet deems an emergency to affect “national security” – in war or peace. In the anguish and revulsion felt by critics who saw that the resort to emergency powers in 1970 added another niche to Canada’s “monuments of folly,”⁴¹ many cited the Japanese experience as a precedent that ought not to have been followed. But the attitude of most Canadians was much like that which insulated the rest of the country from the evacuation. In 1942, the evacuation calmed the people of British Columbia and assured them that the federal government possessed secret information and was responding with vigour to a threat. The mood of Canadians in 1970 was much the same, that the government was again responding massively by using necessary means to stamp out a threat and that the price being paid was worth the effort. A Gallup Poll, published on December 12, indicated that 87% of Canadians approved the invocation of the War Measures Act, representing a pinnacle of support for any government action. And so the emergency powers allowed authorities to arrest, detain, censor, expropriate with impunity; to stifle criticism and to round up innocent people. The terrifying allegations made in 1970, for example, by Jean Marchand, echoed those made in 1941 and 1942: “These people have infiltrated every strategic place in the province of Quebec …. They are in a position to cause the Quebec and the federal governments, as well as the city of Montreal, irreparable harm.” Not a shred of evidence was divulged to support the equally terrifying allegations made of the Japanese in 1942; similarly, Trudeau, who championed civil liberties all his adult life but who imposed on Canada the most repressive measures available to a prime minister, has never divulged in any sort of detail the components of the state of “apprehended insurrection” which was then said to exist in 1970.

The strong public tendency to accept at face value a government’s undocumented assertions of an alleged crisis, a readiness to see extraordinary powers of arrest and detention placed in the hands of authorities, no questions asked, and a willingness to see controls imposed on every aspect of life – even compulsory identity cards with pictures and thumbprints – reflected not only the fragility of a presumed democracy but the way in which Canadians can endorse uncritically the stand of governments in times of crises. Outside of Quebec, the imprisonment of French Canadians seemed like the detention of enemy aliens, and Canadians accepted their internment just as they accepted the incarceration of Japanese in 1942.

The real lesson of 1942 and 1970 was in the complacency of Canadians over the fact that there is no guarantee that future governments will not once again shuffle off the imperatives of freedom in the name of law and order or “national security.” Many Canadians, who may have had deep reservations, were reduced to silence in 1942 and 1970 by what seemed to be a reasonable discretion in uncertain circumstances. And politicians who had expressed disgust at the “scandals” of the past were seen to be willing to become chancellors of blood and iron. But for the Nisei in 1970, it did not require too much of an imaginative leap to project themselves back into a situation and time when a midnight knock on the door presaged – not just days or weeks – but years of detention without trial, recompense or apology.

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Notes

1. Newsweek, June 21, 1971. ↩
2. Broom, L., and J.S. Kituse, “The Validation of Acculturation: a Condition to Ethnic Assimilation”, American Anthropologist, 17 (February, 1955), pp. 44-8. ↩
3. City of Toronto Planning Board, Ethnic Origins of the Population of Toronto, 1960 (Toronto, 1961), pp. 8, D-13. ↩
4. See Wangenheim, E.D., The Social Organization of the Japanese Community in Toronto (M.A. thesis, Political Economy, University of Toronto, 1956) for analysis of the immediate post-war period. ↩
5. Report of the Proceedings of the Sixth National Japanese Canadian Citizens Association Conference, Toronto, September 1-3, 1961. ↩
6. E.g., The New Canadian, June 29, 1946; March 28, April 3, October 28, 1948. ↩
7. E.g., “The Centre is for People”, The New Canadian, December 22, 1962; Moriyama, R., “Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre”, The Canadian Architect (March, 1964), p. 40; Toronto Star, May 2, 1964. ↩
8. Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, Book IV, The Cultural Contribution of the Other Ethnic Groups (Ottawa: Information Canada, 1970), pp. 37-41; Maykovich, M., “Ethnic Variation in Success Value”, in Pike, R.M., and E. Zureik, eds., Socialization and Values in Canadian Society, 2 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1975), pp. 158-79. ↩
9. See Porter, J., The Vertical Mosaic (University of Toronto Press, 1970); Hughes, D.R., and E. Kallen, The Anatomy of Racism: Canadian Dimensions (Montreal: Harvest, 1974). ↩
10. Maclean’s, July, 1975. ↩
11. The New Canadian, March 16, 1969. ↩
12. E.g., “Is Judge Kurata Getting a Fair Judgment?”, Toronto Star, March 31, 1969; Haggart, R., “The Downfall of Lucien Kurata”, Toronto Telegram, May 6, 1969. ↩
13. Toronto Star, August 11, 1971. ↩
14. Newsweek, June 21, 1971. ↩
15. Suzuki, D., “On Being Japanese in Canada”, June 15, 1971. ↩
16. “How Now, Mr. Wilson?”, The New Canadian, March 11, 1953. See also Angus, H.F., Canada and the Far East, 1940-1953 (University of Toronto Press, 1953), p. 28, n.22. ↩
17. Time, June 10, 1974; The New Canadian, May 8, 1973. ↩
18. E.g., Belliveau, J.E., “The Exiles Who Made Good”, Star Weekly, December 24, 1955; Rasky, F., “Oriental Canadians”, Liberty, December, 1958; Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, op. cit., p. 50; Evenden, L.J., and I.D. Anderson, “The Presence of a Past Community: Tashme, B.C.”, in Minghi, J.V., ed., Peoples of the Living Land (Vancouver: Tantalus, 1972), pp. 56-7; Broadfoot, B., “Out With the Japs”, in his Six War Years 1939-1945: Memories of Canadians at Home and Abroad (Toronto: Doubleday, 1974), pp. 118-9. ↩
19. Henry. F.J., Perception of Discrimination Among Negroes and Japanese Canadians in Hamilton, Department of Sociology, McMaster University, 1965, pp. 65-7. ↩
20. Tora, May, 1972. ↩
21. The Powell Street Review, 1972. ↩
22. Survey based on 145 Sansei marriages of which 83 were to persons of Caucasian race. See also The New Canadian, February 18, 1975. A 1974 survey of 101 marriages in San Francisco also showed nearly three out of every five marriages were inter-racial. ↩
23. Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, op. cit., pp. 61-2. ↩
24. Toronto Telegram, August 6, 1971; Toronto Star, August 4, 1971. ↩
25. Henry, op. cit., pp. 84-9. ↩
26. Henry, op. cit., p. 69. ↩
27. Canadian Magazine, November 27, 1971. ↩
28. Henmi, E., “Issei – the Twilight Generation”, The New Canadian, January 26, 1952. ↩
29. Canada, House of Commons Debates, 1960, p. 7544. See also Marx, H., “Emergency Power and Civil Liberties”, McGill Law Journal, 76 (1970), p. 83; Tarnopolsky, W.S., The Canadian Bill of Rights (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1975), p. 4. ↩
30. “Diefenbaker Assails Legislation”, Toronto Globe and Mail, April 16, 1970. See also Toronto Star, April 9, 1970, for statement by Steve Otto, Liberal member for Toronto York-East, who said that the legislation was necessary because of Canada’s “history of racism” and that the Japanese were evacuated and dispersed “because their skin was yellow.” Still later, in his autobiography, One Canada: The Crusading Years (Toronto: Macmillan, 1975), pp. 222-3, Diefenbaker said: “the English language does not have words to condemn adequately the treatment of the Canadian Japanese [which] was one of the cruellest episodes in our history.” ↩
31. “PM Deplores Treatment of B.C. Japanese”, Toronto Globe and Mail, June 8, 1964. ↩
32. Toronto Globe and Mail, October 28, 1968. ↩
33. CBC TV programme “Inquiry”, October 17, 1961. ↩
34. “Wartime Internment Defended by Green”, Vancouver Sun, September 25, 1967. ↩
35. CBC radio programme, “Explorations”, February 24, 1960. ↩
36. Interview, November 27, 1959. ↩
37. The New Canadian, March 11, 1953. ↩
38. E.g., Granatstein, J.L., Canada’s War: the Politics of the Mackenzie King Government, 1939-1945 (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 211-2. ↩
39. 39 Toronto Star, July 15, 1960. ↩
40. E.g., Tarnopolsky, op. cit.; Hall, E.M., “A Plea to Halt Bill of Rights’ Slide to Oblivion”, Toronto Globe and Mail, March 22, 1975; Krauter; J.F., Civil Liberties and the Canadian Minorities (Ph.D. thesis, Political Science, University of Illinois, 1968), pp. 159-72. ↩
41. E.g., Eayrs, J., “The Nation: Dief’s Opposition to Mass Injustice Holds Up”, Toronto Star, November 10, 1970; Haggart, R., “How to Keep the People Calm”, Toronto Telegram, October 21, 1970; Haggart, R., and A. Golden, Rumors of War (Toronto: New Press, 1971), pp. 97-8, 213-7, 271-2. ↩

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