Chapter Two: Confrontations

No Chinaman, Japanese or Indian shall have his
name placed on the Register of Voters for any Electoral
District, or be entitled to vote at any election.
– Provincial Elections Act of B.C.

The desire for white settlers collided with the need for labour. When the transient population melted away after the gold rush had subsided, only 8,500 people remained in the colony. Without increasing its population, the colony, and later the province, could never become prosperous; yet the white settlers were constantly concerned over the racial origins of immigrants who came to the area. Efforts were made to exclude the “wrong” kind of settlers; yet without them there was not an adequate supply of labour. As part of the bargain with British Columbia, which finally joined the Dominion after toying for some years with the possibility of annexing herself to the United States, Ottawa had agreed to complete the Canadian Pacific Railway to the coast; for this task, the only large and ready supply of labour was the Chinese, whose use greatly added to the problem of the province’s composition and marked the real beginning of the “Oriental problem.”

The arrival of the first passenger train from Montreal to Port Moody in July, 1886, signified the vision of the great overland route made reality. In its wake came a tremendous boom in the economy and waves of new settlers. Within weeks of its incorporation as a city on April 6, 1886, Vancouver’s population had grown to 2,000. Within two years, the population rose to 8,000, composed of settlers who had come from all directions, and who were easily absorbed into the community, the exception being the Chinese and a very small cluster of Japanese. This rapid increase in population continued to be made up of people of predominantly British origin who were preternaturally obsessed with the desire not only to maintain their British heritage in the most aptly named of provinces but also to exclude the “undesirables” who were unable, because of cultural and racial differences, to merge quickly into the developing amalgam.¹

In the fifteen years following the arrival of the first passenger train, the industrial changes in the province were startling. By 1901, the population had bounded to 178,657 people, more predominantly British than ever, but this group had been “infiltrated” by an increasing number of Orientals, and there appeared to be some foundation for the fear that the province might soon be overrun by these people whose arrival ran counter to the cherished idea of a “white” British Columbia. The 1901 census had put the number of Japanese in the province at 4,597 – small enough, but when added to 14,885 Chinese, the total amounted to about 10% of the province’s entire population.

At first, the “Oriental problem” was strictly concerned with the Chinese. The gold strikes in 1858 on the Fraser brought nearly 25,000 men from California, among whom were large numbers of Chinese. Continuing to immigrate from California and directly from China, they came to be regarded as an undesirable, “inassimilable” element in the white population. As early as 1860, the imposition of a special tax on Chinese immigrants was advocated in order to discourage further influx. After British Columbia joined Confederation, the first session of the new provincial government extended the franchise to all but Indians and Chinese; in almost every succeeding year some attempt was made to restrict the entry of Chinese for fear they would “injure” the population of the province. One adroitly-phrased motion was introduced in 1876 to impose an annual tax of ten dollars “on every male of eighteen years who wears long hair in the shape of a tail or queue.” Two years later, it was hopefully recommended that no man with hair longer than five-and-one-half inches could be employed by the Canadian Pacific Railway. The phrasing was less frivolous than it seemed, for it was designed to avoid the appearance of legislation imposing a special tax on aliens – a right belonging to the Dominion government under the terms of Confederation.

When construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway began in 1881, matters were exacerbated as Chinese labour was imported by the thousands. In four years, 15,701 Chinese entered British Columbia, welcomed by the contractors and hated by the white workers. The Chinese, they said, were not only introducing “loathsome diseases” and “demoralizing habits” but were incapable of assimilation and provided unfair competition, because they were able to undercut wages owing to their low standards of living. To stop immigration and restrict employment, the provincial government passed a series of anti-Chinese acts, all rejected by Ottawa. Prime Minister John A. Macdonald agreed that the Chinese were not desirable immigrants but expressed a belief that once the railway was completed, the Chinese would depart. He claimed, too, that Canada could not afford to offend China or the Chinese in the interests of the proposed steamship line to the Orient and the trade it foreshadowed. Above all, he saw that Chinese labour was essential for the completion of the railroad; no Chinese meant no railroad. But finally, the efforts of the anti-Chinese elements were rewarded when a head tax of $50 on each Chinese immigrant was allowed by the Dominion government on April, 1885.

The Chinese had entered the province because of the lack of an adequate supply of labour at a time when it was needed to build the railway and to develop the natural resources. Employers saw the Chinese as providing cheap and plentiful labour; the white labourer resented the Chinese who were willing to work cheaper. The political parties had to adopt an anti-Oriental stand or lose the labour vote, even though it meant that the wives of some politicians would have to forfeit the services of an Oriental scullery hand. Many members of the legislature were large employers and naturally wanted to block anti-Oriental legislation; others whose positions were less ambiguous were eager to take full advantage of the issue. Protests and petitions against the Chinese continued even after immigration fell to less than 700 persons a year after 1886 and after many left the province upon completion of the Canadian Pacific. And when the legislature in 1891 requested the federal government to raise the head tax to $200, it was also the occasion for the first protest against the entry of the Japanese, as an amendment to the motion asked that the Japanese also be taxed. From that year onwards, the Japanese were lumped together with the Chinese in the minds of most of the legislators who attempted to restrict in one way or another the entry of immigrants from Asia or their employment in the province.

However, opinion was curiously divided about the relative merit of the Japanese and Chinese. Some went so far as to favour the Japanese, an attitude they were soon to reverse. An article in the Victoria Colonist on December 6, 1884, stated:

If the Chinese are free to come why not give the Japanese a chance? As a race, they are industrious, quiet and sober. If they come to the country they will settle in it, and as they are by no means the degraded race that some people suppose, the settlement of a limited number of them in B.C. need never be regretted …. [The] proclivities of the Japanese make them peculiarly suited for helping in the development of this province. After the completion of the railroads these people would settle down to farming and mining …. They would obtain and cultivate land which would be despised by white farmers. The Japanese are intelligent, have peculiarly active minds, and acquire knowledge readily …. Of the two races give us the Japanese always.

But at that time, the Japanese were an unknown quantity: too few of them were in the province for these ideas to be tested. Yet until 1900 the Colonist continued to insist, singlemindedly, that the Japanese and Chinese “ought not to be placed upon the same footing,” that the Japanese “will not do as the Chinese do – simply exist here on what he can import from his home country, and save all his money to send away” – and that “Japanese competition on the labour market is largely a myth.” Strangely out of step with the rest of provincial opinion, the Colonist in 1899 could still insist that even the labourers from Hungary, Poland and other countries of Continental Europe were “from almost every point of view … inferior to the Japanese.” Unlike the “parsimonious” Chinese, the “Europeanized” Japanese, “adapting himself to the ways of Occidental civilization with even greater rapidity than is good for him,” wanted wages just as high as anyone else, and proposed to live just as well.²

The Japanese had always considered themselves as separate from the Chinese as they were from other groups. Certainly at no time in the early years of settlement did they attempt to pool their resources in an effort to combat the grievances they had in common; and through the years, the Japanese had scarcely any relations with the Chinese, although they often dwelt in the same or adjoining districts. The Chinese, on the whole, seemed comparatively indifferent to the political and economic discrimination which the Japanese bitterly resented and fought against. Whether or not the immigrant Chinese were much further down in the scale – in literacy, resourcefulness, standards of living, morale – than the Japanese, as was often claimed,³ the customary linkage of Japanese and Chinese as “Orientals” – as if they were united in one amorphous, inscrutable mass was contrary to the feeling which prevailed between the two groups. The Japanese felt themselves to be superior to the Chinese, just as they felt themselves better than other racial groups. And just as the white working classes felt bitter resentment over Japanese competition, so the Chinese were resentful, having cause to suffer more, at the rate in which they were being displaced by the Japanese in the industries which they were first to enter.

Heightening the strained relationship between the two groups was Japan’s continued aggression in the Far East against China, which began with the Sino-Japanese war of 1894-5. In this conflict, it was scarcely conceivable that Japan could defeat and then dictate terms to China. But in nine months, Japan expelled the Chinese army from Korea, defeated a fleet off the mouth of the Yalu River, captured Port Arthur and the Liaotung peninsula in southern Manchuria, and seized the port of Wei-hai-wei on the coast of Shantung. The Treaty of Shimonoseki in April, 1895, gave Japan some valuable prizes in Formosa and the Pescadores and the payment of a large indemnity to meet the cost of the war. The dramatic triumph raised Japan’s status as an international power, and coupled with the victory over Russia ten years later, the Japanese gained a further rise to international power such as had not been seen in centuries. This was the beginning of Japan’s opportunist attempts to bring the then prostrate and divided giant, China, under her supervision if not control, and served to whet her ambitions for territorial expansion in Asia. These ambitions, of course, cast a darkening shadow on the lives of the immigrants in Canada.

Opinions on the desirability of the Japanese presence in British Columbia, pronounced mainly by those employers eager to seize upon a new source of cheap labour, ran counter to the prevailing feeling and political action in the province in the last decade of the nineteenth century. A petition, signed by 3,000 people, was sent to the provincial legislature in 1892 from the Vancouver Island mining centres of Nanaimo, Wellington and Comox, requesting that Japanese as well as Chinese be prohibited from working underground. For the miners in these areas, the Orientals were “a source of grave danger” to their lives, a sentiment heartily endorsed by the Vancouver Trades and Labour Council which also sent a petition signed by 700 members of local trade unions.⁴ In 1895, an attempt to exclude Japanese from certain works authorized by the provincial government failed, but the legislature achieved success that same year in a different but far more significant area, when it extended the clause in the provincial elections act which had deprived the Chinese of the right to vote to include the Japanese.

The provincial government was at least assiduous and tenacious in its attempts to stop immigration and restrict employment. A series of acts were passed beginning in 1897 which prohibited the employment of Orientals on works authorized by the provincial government. All of these acts – including the Alien Labour Act of 1897 – were disallowed by Ottawa as a violation of international treaty rights. When British Columbia asked the federal government to amend the naturalization laws so that ten years’ residence, instead of three, would be required of Orientals before naturalization would be granted, the request was turned down for the same reason. Japan had succeeded in concluding the Treaty of Commerce and Navigation with Britain in 1894, by which subjects of either power were granted “full liberty to enter, travel or reside in any part of the dominions and possessions of the other contracting party.” Canada was bound by imperial policy to disallow British Columbia’s efforts to enact anti-Oriental legislation concerned with the prohibition of employment and immigration, although she herself had refused to adhere to the treaty. Sir Mackenzie Bowell’s Conservative government had expressed Canada’s willingness to do so in 1895, provided that reservations were made with reference to the Dominion’s right to control immigration. But when Wilfrid Laurier’s Liberal government came to power, the new government declined to adhere to the treaty, fearing that Japanese immigration might be encouraged. It was not until 1906 that Canada accepted the Anglo-Japanese treaty, and even then, under its terms, Canada virtually had to relinquish direct control over Japanese immigration.

An attempt by British Columbian members of the House of Commons to introduce a bill at Ottawa in 1898 to make the Chinese Immigration Act applicable to the Japanese and to increase the head tax to $500 also proved fruitless. Japanese consul Shimizu immediately told Laurier that

[it was] unfair and unjust to legislate, or even attempt to legislate, discriminately against the subjects of the country which I have the honour to represent here … in the same way as against the Chinese …. If the bill shall have any great number of supporters … the Japanese nation cannot be helped considering it as the attitude of Canada towards their country [and] it may hinder the development of the trade and commerce between both countries which bids fair to grow year after year.⁵

Laurier was placatory: his government had no intention of introducing tax legislation affecting the Japanese. In June, 1899, Ottawa disallowed all acts which had been passed by the provincial legislature in the previous year’s session containing anti-Oriental clauses.

Like mother hens clucking over their brood, Japan’s consular representatives in Canada expended a great deal of energy in looking after the welfare of the immigrants. They protested to Ottawa or to the British Foreign Office as each piece of anti-Japanese legislation, whether in Victoria or Ottawa, came to their attention. Like those “bosses” who were the middlemen between employer and immigrant labourer, the consuls assumed almost an identical role on the political level, acting as spokesmen and intermediaries. For the immigrants, the consuls became the recognized guardians of their welfare, and the chief symbols of authority, substituting for the Japanese nation and the Emperor. Especially in the early years did they demonstrate the paternalistic attitude of the Japanese government towards its nationals residing in Canada, and even if their role as spokesmen waned later, they maintained a tight emotional hold on the communities. The consul was paid homage and deference as the official representative of the Japanese government; his position remained prestigious, his influence pervasive, and in the developing social structure of the immigrant society, he enjoyed the highest status, at least among those who continued to identify themselves with Japan.

Much of their efforts in the late 1890s was directed against the tendency of non-Orientals of lumping Chinese with Japanese. According to remarks attributed to Tatsugoro Nosse, Consul-General for Japan at the time, the Chinese immigrants were the “lowest in the scale,” of the kind who smoked opium and were “unclean.” In contrast, his charges were “highly civilized,” “clean and frugal” and “practicing Christians.”⁶ He attacked the idea that both groups shared the same low standards of living, and he suggested to Laurier that the total number of Japanese in the province was far less than the figure tabulated in the 1901 Dominion census: “The Chinese, since the war of 1894, and consequent defeat by the Japanese, have assumed, a great many of them, English customs, and pretended to be Japanese.”⁷

Recognizing that the federal government was adamant over rejecting the request that the Japanese immigrant be taxed along with the Chinese, the provincial legislature turned to another ploy. On August 31, 1900, three weeks after Japan announced her own restrictions, the province passed an immigration act, similar to the Natal Act earlier recommended by Colonial Secretary Chamberlain, authorizing a language test for persons entering the province. Little attempt was made to obscure the fact that it was a measure aimed at the Chinese and Japanese, contrary to Chamberlain’s somewhat pious wish that the disqualification be “not based specifically on distinction of race or colour.”⁸ The act was attacked by the Japanese government. Pressed by the British Foreign Office and Chamberlain, who now stated that under the British North America Act such a measure was beyond the competence of the provincial legislature, the federal government disallowed the act, as it was to disallow similar subsequent attempts to invoke discriminatory measures.

Only when the Japanese government itself took voluntary action against emigration to Canada did effective restriction come about, and even then it was to provide only a temporary lull in the controversy. Japan could not but heed the growing anti-Japanese agitation which had reached one of its peaks by 1900.

The Japanese consul at Vancouver reported to Tokyo that many of the 3,020 Japanese who had arrived in the city in April were in an indigent condition because of a work shortage. The press in Japan was reporting that the “excessive” numbers of Japanese emigrating to the Pacific coast were causing unrest in California and British Columbia. The San Francisco Labour Council had sponsored the first of a series of anti-Japanese meetings in May at which the chief speaker, a Stanford University Professor of Sociology, said “it would be better for us to turn our guns on every vessel bringing Japanese to our shores rather than to permit them to land.”⁹ In the same month, 2,167 people from the Vancouver area signed a petition to the Earl of Minto, Governor-General of Canada, warning that the province was being flooded with an “undesirable class” of Orientals who constituted “a menace to health.” Acknowledging the uneasy conditions on the Pacific coast, the Japanese government suspended all emigration to Canada with the exception of three classes: returning immigrants, family members of residents in Canada and merchants and students. Viscount Aoki, Minister of Foreign Affairs, instructed the governors of all the prefectures “to prohibit entirely, for the time being, the emigration of Japanese labourers for the Dominion of Canada or for the United States.”¹⁰ The Japanese consul, in turn, told Laurier that this voluntary action proved that the charge that Japan was attempting to colonize the province was “absolutely baseless.” And for the next four years Japanese immigration came almost to a standstill.

Japan’s “voluntary” move, however, was motivated by the need to mobilize all of her resources, including manpower, for an impending war with Russia. In 1900 Japanese troops had played a part, along with Britain, France, Germany and Russia, in the international army that crushed the Chinese uprising in the Boxer Rebellion. But during the rising, Russia had moved large numbers of troops south through Manchuria, and it looked as if Russia might eventually take over all of Korea, a prospect galling to the Japanese who looked upon the country as ripe for control and exploitation by themselves. With this in mind, in 1902 Japan signed the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, a pact which practically guaranteed that she would have no interference by any country in Korea. In a war with Russia, Japan could rely on British neutrality or, in the event another country came to the aid of Russia, on active help.

Feeling she had to drive Russia out of Korea, Japan declared war against the colossus of the north in February, 1904. Full of dramatic, full-scale battles on land and sea, courageously and gallantly fought by both sides, the war captured the imagination of the world, although sentiment was decidedly on the side of Japan. To Canadians, Japan was an ally of Great Britain, and she was fighting a power that had been regarded as one of Britain’s most dangerous enemies. In the eyes of the public, “Gallant Little Japan” was standing up to the bully, the Russian Bear.

Although Japan eventually drove the Russians into Manchuria, it was at the cost of severe losses in manpower. In a five-month siege of Port Arthur in 1904, Japan’s losses amounted to 60,000 men; casualties were over 40,000 in the victory at Mukden early in the following year. On sea, the decisive battle which took place in the Sea of Japan, when Admiral Togo’s fleet engaged Russia’s Baltic fleet in May, 1905, saw virtually all of Russia’s forty ships sunk or captured; Japan lost only three torpedo boats. Peace negotiations began a week after the battle, and the war concluded on September 5, 1905, when the Treaty of Portsmouth was signed.

But mingled with admiration and astonishment over Japan’s meteoric rise to a position of international power was a dampening thought. In the flush of celebration, bartenders in Victoria served free drinks to Japanese. In the eyes of many British Columbians, however, the quaint country was to become transformed before long into the sinister “Yellow Peril.” Having defeated Russia and beginning a rather tardy but aggressive game of empire-building on the Asiatic mainland, she was felt to be stretching her talons across the Pacific as well by sending immigrants to the Pacific coast. In the few months following the end of the war, 345 Japanese entered the province, and in 1906, the number increased to 1,922, sharply breaking the four-year lull. To British Columbians, the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902 meant that the interests of British Columbia were being “sacrificed” in the interests of Empire politics as seen by the Foreign Office in London and endorsed by Ottawa. And when Canada adhered to the Anglo-Japanese Treaty of Commerce and Navigation in 1906, without any alterations to the article giving subjects of each country full privileges in each other’s territories, one member of the House of Commons, J.B. Kennedy of New Westminster, warned that the door would be flung open to Japanese immigrants. Other British Columbian members, however, did not oppose the pact; Laurier had cleverly argued that the province would benefit enormously from increased trade with Japan, and thereby balanced the cupidity of the representatives against the demands of their electorate.

British Columbia, in any event, had never placed much value on Japan’s voluntary undertaking to limit emigration nor did she feel that it constituted a permanent solution to the problem. The first Natal Act was passed by the legislature three weeks after Japan announced her own restrictions; and although few Japanese were entering the province, the legislature again passed, in the face of certain disallowance, bills providing an educational test for Oriental immigrants in 1903, and yet again in 1905. Within the province, as the immigrants who had entered before 1901 began to consolidate themselves in the major industries and therefore began to compete, at times fiercely, with white workers, antagonism was the general rule.

The nub of the characteristic criticism against the Japanese immigrants was contained in Minister of Finance and Agriculture Francis Carter-Cotton’s letter to Thomas McInnes, Lieutenant-Governor of the province. In it, he reiterated the usual claim that the Japanese were a “source of danger,” protesting that the laws passed by the legislature restricting Oriental employment were not sanctioned by Ottawa:

All that is sought … is that Chinese or Japanese persons shall not be allowed to find employment on works, the construction of which has been authorized or made possible of accomplishment by granting of certain privileges or franchises by the legislature …. The economic conditions in British Columbia and Japan and the standards of living of the masses of people in the two countries differ so widely that to grant freedom of employment to Japanese on such public works … would almost certainly result in all such employment being monopolized by the Japanese to the exclusion of the people of this province.

It is unquestionably in the interests of the Empire that the Pacific province of the Dominion should be occupied by a large and thoroughly British population, rather than by one in which the number of aliens largely predominated and many of the distinctive features of a settled British community were lacking …. The former condition could not be secured were the masses of the people subjected to competition which would render it impossible for them to maintain a reasonable and fair standard of living.¹¹

The conclusions reached by the Royal Commission on Oriental Immigration reflected the rather pervasive extent to which the Japanese, still numerically small, had managed to permeate the province’s major industries within the space of a few years. Appointed in September, 1900, the Commission submitted its report in February, 1902. It noted that the Japanese, especially the fishermen, were not interested in becoming an integral part of a larger community but instead were a largely seasonal and itinerant group. Of those occupied in the fishing industry, the report stated:

Many of them return to Japan after the fishing season is over, and the rest find employment where they can, in getting out wood and bolts, in mills, boat building, and other employment, working at a wage upon which a white man cannot decently support himself and his family, and creating a feeling so pronounced and bitter among a large class of whites, as to endanger the peace and be a fruitful source of international irritation.¹²

Because of the Japanese, then, the fishing industry was “a source of contention and weakness.” One hostile witness, while admitting that Japanese labour was absolutely necessary to keep the canneries operating, complained that they took over unskilled labour in the off-season, such as supplying cordwood to the canneries, clearing land and cutting shingle bolts: “It is aggravating to a man to be pushed out by Japanese …. I’d rather starve together with my own race.”¹³

The report pointed out, for example, that the Japanese had come to control the boat-building industry, pushing out the whites from Port Moody to the mouth of the Fraser. Living in shacks along the water, the Japanese cut their own planks from the timber-lined shores and undersold the finished products, in one instance selling boats for about $65, as compared to the $85 asked by the white boat-builders. Other “evidence” pointed out the generally poor living conditions of the Japanese, whether in boarding-houses or in shacks near the fishing or lumbering areas, and concluded that it was owing to this “wretched existence” that the Japanese were able to compete, unfairly, with whites.

Employers were obviously delighted to obtain cheaper labour; it was only the working class who complained bitterly. At this stage, the Japanese immigrants had no bargaining powers and accepted what they could get: thus they were exploited and hated, caught in a squeeze. One employer from Mount Sicker, 45 miles from Victoria, who used 35 Japanese to sort ore, was delighted to pay the Japanese 90¢ a day rather than the $1.50 he had to pay white labourers. The company would not employ whites because that would cut into the $19,000 yearly profit that was made by employing Japanese labour. Similarly, the Royal City Mills in Vancouver reported that it paid its Japanese sawyers $1.25 a day, compared to the $2.25 that white labour of the same class would receive.

Almost all of the witnesses agreed that the Japanese were more independent, energetic, aggressive – and consequently more dangerous – than the Chinese. Indeed, it was only in the process of comparing the Japanese immigrant to his Chinese counterpart that the witnesses were able to see the Japanese in an image other than that of the grubbing, pusillanimous drone. The Japanese were “more manly,” “more like our own people,” “more adapted to white man’s labour,” “will live as the white man does,” “cleaner in his surroundings,” “can do more work than the average Chinese,” “are more muscular,” “more ready to adopt [white] mode of dress and living.”¹⁴ But the Japanese, on the other hand, were considered “less sober and lawabiding” than the Chinese, easily falling into the white man’s vices.

Most of these accusations concerning low standards of living, the tendency towards insobriety and living in crowded and squalid quarters were valid. Shacks and rundown tenements were a very real condition of life, sufficient only for people who did not intend to stay. It was only when the Japanese settlement began to assume a more permanent nature, especially when wives were imported after 1907, that the situation began to change. Yet the charges persisted, firmly rooted after an early notion became a concrete conviction, whether groundless or not.

An increasing antagonism was a usual corollary of the degree to which the Japanese were becoming established in the primary industries. The ultimate result was to force them out of these industries and into new fields, particularly agriculture and small commercial ventures. But the antagonism which had begun in the 1890s and the drive towards the restriction of employment were largely quiescent during 1901-05, and the Japanese were able to consolidate their progress. With the resurgence in immigration, however, the drive for their elimination, symbolized by the September riot of 1907, moved into high gear again.

It was seven years after the first salmon cannery was established in New Westminster in 1870 that the first Japanese began to trickle into the fishing industry. But by 1901, the Japanese held 1,958 fishing licences out of a total of 4,722 issued. Since there were two men to a boat or licence, over 4,000 Japanese were engaged in the fishing industry. The grounds for acute racial rivalry, if not actual strife, were thus amply present.

At the turn of the century, most of the fishermen resided in Steveston and worked the surrounding waters, until they began to migrate up the coast as far north as the Naas and Skeena Rivers. In 1899 the village of Steveston contained about 2,000 Japanese; and with such a comparatively large population, even if many of them were seasonal workers, an embryonic community was forming. For example, the Japanese erected a hospital just in time to minister to scores of fishermen who fell victims to a typhoid epidemic.

During this period, Japanese claimed credit for developing at least two branches of the fishing industry. Several fishermen conceived the idea of salting excess salmon for export to Japan. From 300 tons exported in 1896, the tonnage was increased to 8,000 in 1905, and the market became established in Japan as the product was improved. Another fisherman began salting the herring caught in the Gulf of Georgia, and exported the product to the Orient. Others followed him into the field, and export figures quickly reached an average of 8,000 tons. Unlike the salt salmon industry, which fell off considerably in ensuing years, the tonnage of salt herring continued to increase, reaching 25,650 tons by 1933.

The Japanese had rapidly proliferated in the lumbering industry and its various branches, from the time when close to 70 immigrants were employed in 1890 in the Hastings Saw Mill in Vancouver to 1900, when the Royal Commission estimated that one in four in the coastal mills were Japanese. From Vancouver’s mills, they spread out to the logging and shingle camps in Vancouver Island and along the coast so that at one time, not many years later, upwards of 3,000 Japanese were employed in all branches of lumbering. Lumbering was an industry on which the Japanese could rely to offset the seasonal unemployment endemic to the fishing industry. While many immigrants returned to Japan during the off-season, the remainder would find jobs in lumbering close to the chief fishing grounds in the mainland and on Vancouver Island.

The income of the lumber workers remained lower than that of white labourers, compared to income derived by Japanese fishermen who obviously could increase, within limits, the size of their income through hard work. Race was not a determinant in the size of the catch. Japanese millworkers were paid 15¢ to 17¢ an hour as compared to the usual rate of 20¢ for white labourers for the same work. The Moodyville Sawmill paid its 40 Japanese employees from 90¢ to $1.25 and board (35¢) a day as opposed to the standard rate of $30 to $140 a month. The superintendent confessed that he saved $600 a month by using Japanese labour and would have to shut down if he were not able to do so. The Brunette Sawmill in New Westminster, employer of 78 Japanese, paid them $26 a month, instead of $35 to $45 formerly paid to the white men whom they had replaced.

Despite the inequities, the Japanese were “fairly well satisfied” in these early days, for they felt they were “Japanese in a white man’s country” and of necessity must accept lower wages. Some years later, one Japanese in Woodfibre expressed his feelings over the inconsistencies rather succinctly:

I get only 25 cents an hour while the White men on the same job get 35 cents an hour. I work faster than many of them, and just as efficiently, but they earn about $72 [a month] while I earn only $52, and after the company has deducted $1.25 for the hospital, one cent a day for the compensation fund, and one per cent for the government, and after I pay the company $10 for the four-room shack that they supply, and $6 a month for fuel, and with what I have left, less than $35, I have to feed and clothe my wife and children and myself, and send the children to school, and then they say the Japanese are a menace because of their low standard of living, but when I asked why we got less than the Whites, I was told that we had a low standard and didn’t need anymore.”¹⁵

Distinct from the wage-earners in the company towns was a small group of independent, Japanese-owned logging operations, one of which began operations as early as 1895 when Y. Aoki opened a logging camp at Indian River, employing some 45 Japanese. He was soon followed by two other immigrants who opened camps in Port Moody and North Vancouver, the vanguard of a small group of successful immigrants who by 1934 had invested over a million dollars in their logging companies, and were annually producing $1,184,500 worth of timber, most of it for export to Japan.

Mining was another familiar part of immigrant life, but various means were used to oust them from the industry so that their numbers, fairly constant until 1907, declined in ensuing years. The Vancouver Island coal mines in Cumberland, and the copper mines of Britannia Beach on the south shore of Howe Sound were the two largest areas of Japanese concentration. Contract labourers were imported in 1891 to work the Cumberland mines, under an agreement with James Dunsmuir, at a rate of $1.25 per day or 80¢ per ton of coal mined. The pay was satisfactory enough, but working conditions underground became intolerable enough for the miners to select a committee to negotiate with the company for better conditions. The Japanese consulate dispatched an official to investigate, the contract was cancelled, and most of the Japanese left the mines for other work.

When increased markets for coal created a heavy demand for labourers, in 1892 seventy experienced miners were brought in from Japan. But a general strike of all miners in Cumberland resulted in the cancellation of the contract. Most of the miners remained in the town, laying the foundations for a permanent Japanese community in the face of agitation by the miners on Vancouver Island for the complete prohibition of Orientals from the industry. Miners and residents of the area petitioned the provincial legislature in 1892

to cause effective legal provision to be made to exclude Chinese and Japanese from working underground in any of the collieries of this Province. Your petitioners keenly feel that the presence of Chinese or Japanese in the mines is a source of grave danger to the lives of those who are employed underground in mining coal, and that it will be in the public interests to prevent such risk to life.¹⁶

Relations with management and fellow workers proved to be much happier in Britannia Beach, an unusual state of affairs in the light of the general hostility in the province. In contrast to the millworkers of Woodfibre, across Howe Sound, who slept on plank bunks, two or three to a room in gaunt bunkhouses, the Britannia Beach men were provided with a room of their own, almost lavishly furnished in the context of those times with dressers, mattresses and linoleum. The place became an isolated pocket of racial harmony, engineered by the foresight of the company management who later provided a clubhouse and a language school for the Japanese.

The number of immigrants working on the railroads, from dining-car hands to heavy construction labourers, rose to a peak of 1,284 by 1907, but declined sharply thereafter. Following the first appearance of a railroad hand in 1899, hundreds followed within a short period, imported by a variety of contractors. In general, the Japanese appeared to satisfy their employers; one Great Northern Railway official stated, “When we send out Japs for section work, we know they will stay all summer. They go out and stay there until they are fired …. White men can do more work, but are more bother, and really accomplish less in the end than the Japs.” Unlike the white labourer, the Japanese apparently gave “a good day’s work for a good day’s pay,”¹⁷ even if the day’s pay was considerably less.

The movement to the land was not to begin in earnest until World War I, but a few immigrants had begun to follow Mankichi Iyemoto after he settled in the Fraser Valley in 1903. Jiro Inouye, a Waseda University graduate, left his Oriental Trading Company in Vancouver to buy twenty acres of land in Haney in 1906, there to “pioneer” the strawberry industry among the Japanese. Within thirty years, strawberry-growing was to expand into a million-dollar industry. Inouye wrote articles in Japanese newspapers, urging commoners to settle on the land rather than coming to Canada as floating or transient labour. They could save, he wrote, $10,000 in ten years.¹⁸ The advice lured farmers across the ocean in search of land and riches; but lack of capital meant that they had to serve a lengthy apprenticeship as cheap labourers before they could lease or buy land. Some engaged in half-share farming on small plots of land, but even these independent farmers had to supplement their meagre income by working for others. The drift to agriculture was slow at this time, but during World War I, more Japanese began to settle not only in the Fraser but in the Okanagan Valley until farming became the last recourse for the Japanese who were being pushed out of other industries.

Few of the early immigrants were engaged in any work other than rough labour. Entry into commercial occupations, as in agriculture, where they could gain a measure of independence, was a much later trend. Still, by 1907 a sizeable Japanese community had grown in Vancouver, Gastown, Hastings, Granville – whatever names Vancouver was known by before its incorporation – which had included only a few Japanese by 1880. Shinkichi Tamura opened a toy shop in 1887 at the corner of Cordova and Carrall, the forerunner of scores of little shops operated by Japanese. Three years later, G. Oya opened a Japanese provisions store to cater to the increasing number of immigrants. By 1900, small business operations mushroomed along Powell Street, close to the Hastings sawmill which employed 500 Japanese, and near the city’s business centre. The Japanese moved into deteriorating tenements in this area, small wooden frame houses and shops and operated a cluster of barber shops, blacksmithies, candy stores, dry-goods shops, cleaners, fish markets, green groceries, restaurants and lodging houses.

Few of these early shopkeepers were as successful as Tamura, who became the owner of three import-export firms and a trust company. When Tamura returned to Japan, he was to recall his early days as a penniless boy in Vancouver, where the streets and houses were built on pilings:

When you got back from the waterfront a short distance you got into a great deal of mud. I recall the danger of going on the streets at night. You might fall off the sidewalk at any time. But we carried lanterns along with us at night to light us on our way.¹⁹

Saving money from his labours in sawmills and canneries, the budding tycoon opened the toy shop and then a small silk-goods store on Granville Street, paying $10,000 for the lot in 1904. When he sold the property to the Bank of Montreal some years later for $160,000, he clearly had enough capital to expand his interests from Vancouver to Osaka and Kobe. He became President of the Kobe Chamber of Commerce and was appointed to Japan’s House of Peers. It was at his suggestion that Canada participated in the Japan Exhibition of 1903 from which Sydney Fisher, Canada’s official representative, brought home glowing reports of the future of Canadian trade in Japan. After managing the Canadian exhibit of wheat, flour, pulp and paper, tinned goods and fish in the exposition at Osaka, Tamura returned to Canada to ship the first consignment of Canadian wheat to Japan.

Another enterprising immigrant, Arichika Ikeda, journeying north in April, 1906, in search of new fishing grounds, came upon Moresby Island, one of the Queen Charlotte Islands, where he located a small bay at the southern end. He found, not new fishing grounds, but a richly endowed copper field. He returned to Victoria, registered his claim, and started a mine in the same year, having interested the Japanese government in its potentialities.²⁰ With Japanese capital, he built a small railroad and wharf, installed mining equipment, and imported 118 labourers to work his claim. The news of the copper discovery drew prospectors to the once deserted area; a hotel and bar were built at Jedway, near to what became known as Ikeda Bay. American capitalists offered $400,000 for the rights and the plant, but the Japanese refused, placing a price of $850,000 on them.

Before Ikeda Bay closed down in 1920, Ikeda had also interested Japanese financiers into backing a scheme to purchase mining and lumbering rights in the province, but the plan was nipped by the Depression. Like Tamura, Ikeda was one of the few immigrants who departed from the usual pattern of unending and often fruitless struggle; his agile, concocting mind even led him to attempt new means of cultivating oysters on Gambier Island in the Gulf of Georgia. He was cited by the Japanese government for his work in improving the Japanese fisheries.

Whatever their means or ambitions, in less than two decades the immigrant Japanese had become firmly rooted in the economic life of the province. Measures to stop immigration and restrict employment had without exception been disallowed by the federal government either because they were outside the jurisdiction of the province to enact or contrary to imperial policy. But the one measure that had been passed by the provincial legislature and upheld in 1902 by the Privy Council in London was that which disqualified the Japanese in 1895 from the right to vote.

Not only did the 1895 act deny the provincial vote to those who became British subjects by naturalization but, still more important, it was to disqualify – on the basis of race – those children of immigrant parents who were born in Canada. The Japanese were also excluded from voting in municipal elections or for school trustees. Using the voters’ list as the basis of qualification, the province effectively barred any Japanese from eligibility for office or from liability to, or privileges of, certain public services. Thus Japanese were excluded from being elected to the provincial legislature, from being nominated for municipal office of any sort and for the office of school trustee, and from jury service. And the practice of using the provincial voters’ list in compiling the Dominion list prevented Japanese from voting in federal elections; that is, the prior restriction imposed by the provincial authority extended, as a matter of practice, to the federal franchise.

Barring the Japanese from the franchise, while not actually writing discriminatory regulations in the field of employment into the law, did result in a de facto exclusion of British subjects of Japanese race from certain fields of employment. Licences for hand logging required the applicant to be on the voters’ list. In contracts awarded by the Department of Public Works, the contractor was bound to give preference to British subjects and not to employ any Asiatic “directly or indirectly, upon, about or in connection with the works.” If the clause was violated, the Minister could forfeit all money due to the contractor. In the law and pharmacy professions, it was required that the name of the student or apprentice, when he reached the age of twenty-one, be on the voters’ list. This regulation was written into the rules of the Law Society of British Columbia and the pharmacy by-laws. The original by-laws of the Pharmaceutical Council of 1895 contained no such clause restricting applicants, but were amended in 1921 to take advantage of the franchise bar.²¹ Other de facto barriers were effectively to bar Japanese from such civil service branches as police, forestry, post office and public-health nursing.

Denial of the privileges of citizenship rights, however, did not mean exemption from its obligations. The Japanese were not free from the Taxation Act or the Income Tax Act; and the Dominion Militia Act, which provided for conscription, if necessary, of all male British subjects between the ages of 18 and 45, did not restrict this obligation to those entitled to vote. Ironically enough, however, even enlistment into the armed services was later barred to Canadian Japanese.

The legislation of 1895 was therefore the basis for a series of discriminatory measures which were enacted by the province, restricting British subjects of Japanese race from certain fields of employment. As opposed to the unsuccessful legislation against the Japanese based on the ground of nationality, the province succeeded in its purpose by drafting legislation in such a way as that it applied to racial groups rather than to aliens. The denial of the franchise was to come to symbolize for the Japanese, especially the Canadian-born, the status of second-class citizenship. The fundamental right of Canadian citizenship – the simple act of casting a ballot and participating in elections – was denied to them as it was denied to aliens. Citizenship became an empty status, for the lack of the right to vote signified, as so many anti-Japanese spokesmen contended, that the Japanese were undesirable citizens, and were even placed on the level of “savages and degenerates.”²²

For those immigrants at the turn of the century, most of whom did not intend to stay in Canada, the franchise was not particularly meaningful. Certainly the idea of one of their number standing up for election was exceedingly remote. They had no heritage of political democracy behind them; to be a good citizen in Japan, one merely conformed to the principles of filial piety and loyalty. Naturalization was a means by which they could attain a fishing licence, nothing more. And even as naturalized British subjects, their emotional, as well as half of their technical allegiance, by reason of Japanese law, still lay with the country they had so recently left.

Although the earliest movement to remove the franchise bar was scarcely representative of the immigrant group as a whole, evolving as such only when the immigrants decided to make Canada a permanent abode and raised children to whom the issue became critical, the Tomey (Tomekichi) Homma case in 1900 was the beginning of the protracted struggle.

A Vancouver boarding-house keeper, employment agent and naturalized citizen, Homma applied on October 19, 1900, to Thomas Cunningham, Collector of Voters for the electoral district of Vancouver, to have his name entered on the voters’ list. Cunningham refused, evoking Section 8 of the Provincial Elections Act: “No Chinaman, Japanese, or Indian shall have his name placed on the Register of Voters for any Electoral District, or be entitled to vote at any election.” A “Japanese,” by definition, was “any native of the Japanese Empire or its dependencies not born of British parents, and any person of the Japanese race, naturalized or not.”²³ When Homma notified the Collector that he would have the decision reviewed in the County Court of Vancouver, Cunningham replied that no matter what happened, he would put no Asiatic name on the list. He “would go to jail first.”²⁴

The judgement of Chief Justice McColl of the Supreme Court of British Columbia, handed down on November 30, was that the clause barring the naturalized Japanese from voting was ultra vires of the provincial legislature; he ordered Homma’s name to be put on the list. McColl noted that the disqualification of Japanese from having a part in the political life of the province might, in a broad sense, not be to the advantage of the country:

The residence within the province of large numbers of persons, British subjects in name, but doomed to perpetual exclusion from any part in the passage of legislation effecting their property or civil rights would surely not be to the advantage of Canada and might even become a source of national danger.²⁵

McColl’s decision did not mean that Homma and other naturalized Japanese could vote six days later in the federal elections. The Vancouver Daily Province swiftly reassured their readers that the Japanese were only entitled to have their names entered on the new provincial roll, a roll which was not to be used in the current election. Devoting the entire front page of its December 1 edition to the matter, headlined “Japs Cannot Vote,” the Province accused the Conservative Party of attempting to poll Japanese votes in support of James F. Garden, three-time Mayor of Vancouver, in “as daring and disreputable a Tory plot as ever disgraced the political history of Canada.”²⁶ It claimed that “hundreds” of Japanese had been fraudulently naturalized by Tory agents to work closely with cannery operators so that Garden could get the support of a “Japanese bloc” of votes over the Liberal-Labour candidate George Maxwell. Maxwell himself suggested that “it was clearly a Tory scheme from beginning to end” and offered to donate $100 to local charities if the Tories succeeded in polling one Japanese vote. Maxwell was re-elected as one of six members of the Commons for the province, polling 2,716 votes to Garden’s 2,089. Would the Japanese votes have made any difference? And why would they have voted en masse, if they had been allowed to vote, for the Tory candidate as the Province so darkly suggested?

Homma’s “victory” was not long-lived, and the province was to win the issue. After McColl’s decision, delivered in County Court, was sustained by the Supreme Court of Canada on March 9, 1901, it was appealed to the Privy Council which reversed the decision on December 17, 1902. The Colonist trumpeted:

We are relieved from the possibility of having polling booths swamped by a horde of Orientals who are totally unfitted either by custom or education to exercise the ballot, and whose voting would completely demoralise politics …. They have not the remotest idea of what a democratic and representative government is, and are quite incapable of taking part in it.²⁷

The Privy Council’s decision meant that it was intra vires for the province to deny the right to vote in a provincial election to a British subject on the basis of his racial origin, or to deny him the right to be engaged in certain employment or on public works. The Council clearly established that under the British North America Act the powers of the federal and provincial governments were divided, and that consequently British Columbia had the authority to determine the right to vote in its elections since the provinces were given exclusive jurisdiction over civil rights.²⁸

It was somewhat ironical that the position of Japanese aliens resident in Canada, as compared to that of naturalized and Canadian-born Japanese, was more favourable. Provincial legislation, such as the Natal Act, aimed directly at aliens who were subjects of Japan, had been declared ultra vires by the federal government; other discriminatory measures were disallowed because the Dominion had the power, under Section 132 of the British North America Act, to compel a province to comply with treaty obligations between the British Empire and foreign countries. Restrictions on the basis of nationality were held to be within the powers of the province in the case of sales of Crown timber in which Asiatics could not be employed; but if the land was Crown-granted, a similar condition was held to be invalid in relation to Japanese nationals who were protected by treaty.

Provincial legislation could affect aliens, and if carefully framed, it could in practice impose disabilities on them, but it could not deal with them directly. Disabilities could only be made applicable to aliens by making them applicable to British subjects as well. Provincial legislation therefore made distinctions on the ground of race rather than nationality; the position of the British subject of an alien race was less secure than the foreigner of the same race. Thus the British subject of the Japanese race was in a particularly helpless position, as he could not apply to a foreign government for help and could derive no benefit from “most favoured nation” treaties such as the 1894 Treaty of Commerce and Navigation.

Such subtleties of distinction, then, made Canadian nationality meaningless. The Privy Council decision meant that a Canadian province was not cramped in its legislative powers by any obligation to respect individual rights. It was therefore possible for a province to enact legislation which was discriminatory on grounds of race, and even to withhold the franchise from Canadian citizens on this ground, although there were no federal barriers to naturalization on such grounds. Immigrant Japanese in the United States, on the other hand, could not vote because, on the basis of race, they were ineligible for naturalization. The second-generation American Japanese were able to vote because they were Americans by birth and entitled to the constitutional rights guaranteed by the Fifteenth Amendment.²⁹ In British Columbia, disqualification from the franchise – imposed in terms of race – applied equally to the second generation, born in Canada.

The province had tried hard enough to deny naturalization privileges. In February, 1900, the legislature had passed a resolution asking the federal government to make the naturalization of Asiatics impossible; in Ottawa, it was thought not wise to offend a useful ally of Great Britain by “declaring them not fit for citizenship.” Much of this agitation for excluding the Japanese from the privileges of naturalization was owing to the controversy, at the turn of the century, over the alleged breach of the naturalization regulations. They were suspected of obtaining papers by “fraud” since all fishing licences were issued, by law, only to Canadian citizens, either naturalized or native-born. William Hayward, provincial member for Esquimalt, complained in the legislature that many Japanese

had been naturalized at wholesale rates, amid grave irregularities, that they had left the disinfectant tank at the quarantine station one night, and twenty-four hours afterwards had gone through those grave formalities which should include a residence of three years in the country.³⁰

Others, including Robert Tatlow, member for Vancouver, claimed the existence of an “organized conspiracy.” But Joseph Martin, premier of the province for 3½ months in 1900, pointed out that the claims were all based on rumour, for “no facts of a single case” had come before the legislature.

Six Japanese fishermen were arrested on September 16, 1900, when their naturalization papers showed an “apparent irregularity.” It was alleged that they had arrived in the province in March of that same year but had falsely sworn that they had resided in Canada for four years. Charges of perjury were preferred against them, and the case “Regina v. Hanichi Shibata et al” came up on September 24 in Vancouver police court. In his defence, Shibata admitted that he had never been in Vancouver to swear his allegiance to the Queen, nor did he even know that it was necessary to do so in order to fish. He had arrived in Victoria in March, he stated, and was shipped by a labour contractor to a cannery in Rivers Inlet. Sometime in June, he was handed a naturalization certificate which showed him to have resided in Canada for four years, but not being able to read English, he was ignorant of its significance. The case “collapsed utterly” when Magistrate Russell found no evidence to connect the accused with perjury.³¹ Prosecuting attorney W.J. Bowser could find no evidence that the accused had not been residing in the country for the required time, as the defence lawyer stated that Shibata had returned to Canada after making a short trip to Japan.

While there was no evidence of a “conspiracy,” evasion of regulations was child’s play in those times of extreme laxity over naturalization procedures. Americans who came up from Oregon and California in large numbers to the Fraser River found it easy to evade the 1892 regulations which limited fishing licences to resident British subjects. As the Royal Commission of 1900 had carefully phrased it, naturalization procedure gave rise to “grave irregularity, if not actual fraud.” Between 1891 and 1901, some 2,692 Japanese had been naturalized, but it was difficult to ascertain how many of these men, in a given year, were actually residing in the province or had returned to Japan. It was easy enough, in any case, to transfer the coveted papers to other Japanese fishermen.

As in the Shibata case, conviction over alleged “fraud” appeared to be difficult to obtain. When notary public E.W. McLean of Vancouver, who had issued certificates for 208 Japanese between May and June of 1900, had his commission revoked, he denied that there had been any irregularities in his actions. With incredible ingenuousness, McLean stated that groups of three or four Japanese would come at one time accompanied by an interpreter, half signing in English, the others in Japanese characters. Edward Bremner, labour commissioner for the province, contended that out of thirty Japanese appearing in one afternoon, armed with naturalization certificates and applying for fishing licences, not more than four could understand English. It was evident that nearly all of those Japanese obtaining papers at this time were doing so for the express purpose of qualifying themselves for fishing licences and taking advantage of the curious slackness over strict enforcement of regulations. In the end the controversy fizzled out.

The early years of the century also saw the Japanese embroiled in industrial disputes which were quintessentially racial in nature. The most violent and spectacular of these were the two strikes in 1900 and 1901 on the Fraser River fishing grounds, in which white and Indian fishermen combined in near-mortal combat against the Japanese.³² At the advent of the strikes – the most violent of the numerous disputes in the entire history of the fishing industry – the Japanese were strongly entrenched, holding 1,958 of the total number of 4,722 licences. Moreover, the 1,900 licences issued to the canneries were used mainly to employ Japanese fishermen, so that over 4,000 Japanese, including cannery workers, were engaged in the industry, mostly in the Fraser, the most important ground for sockeye and coho on the Pacific coast.

The antagonism towards Japanese fishermen, increasing since 1893 and rampant in the early 1900s, was part of the general tension and unrest which marked the economic life of the province in the first years of the new century. The labour movement in the province was entering a dynamic stage in its struggle for the improvement of deplorable conditions, which included the use of brute force against labourers by employers who were deeply hostile towards trade unions and refused to recognize them. Strikes were endemic in mining and on the railroads, and strikes were beginning to be called for union recognition. Together with the growth of radicalism, anti-Oriental demands were reaching a peak of intensity on the part of organized labour.

If fear of competition was at the root of the antagonism of the working class towards the Japanese, then this fear and antagonism was even more pronounced in the fishing industry. By its very nature, fishing was a highly competitive industry, requiring a maximum effort in a short season, physical risk, uncertainty of income, and the vagaries of supply and demand. The use of sailboats in the early years of the industry made fishing particularly hazardous. Moreover, the heterogeneous composition of the fishermen in the province, sharply separated by race and language and isolated in ethnic communities, bred antagonism and conflict. During the early period, the Indians worked in cohesive, unified groups, organized under the leadership of chiefs and indigenous tribal bands. Regarding fishing as an inherent and aboriginal right, they reacted against encroachment, especially by the Japanese. White fishermen, comprised of various national origins – Yugoslavs, Norwegians, Finns, Swedes, Italians and Greeks as well as British – usually transcended their own differences and united into a common front against the Japanese.

Most of the Japanese fishermen, like the other groups, lived in what amounted to virtual isolation, closely knit by the common bonds of language and culture and by a rudimentary community in Steveston which included a Japanese Fishermen’s Association of some 1,800 members. This loose association was the forerunner of the Amalgamated Association of Fishermen, which was given official recognition as a bona fide trade union by the Trades and Labour Congress in 1935, some years after it was formed to militate against the policy of progressive reduction and ultimate elimination of licences held by the Japanese. But in 1900, the Japanese were in a far weaker bargaining position than the other racial groups, as they were working under language barriers, lack of capital and obligations to contractors and canneries. Even so, they had built themselves into a formidable labour force and could not be easily intimidated. Indeed, by 1919, they were staging strikes and using intimidation and arms, while the white fishermen were willing to compromise with the canners – a complete reversal of roles to those played in 1900-1.

The first recorded strike in the industry took place in 1893 against a background of severe depression and mass unemployment, a situation which sharpened antagonism against the Japanese who were thought to be “starving out the white man.” Support was enlisted from the local Trade and Labour Council in a campaign to persuade the federal Department of Fisheries to reduce the number of licences granted to Orientals. But during 1898-1901, the Klondike gold rush drew fishermen into other industries; and the canners, complaining of the labour shortage, were quickly replacing the whites with Japanese. Fearing that the Fraser River Salmon Canners Association was going to flood the Fraser with Japanese, the white fishermen formed the B.C. Fishermen’s Union in 1899 to protect themselves against their steady displacement.

In 1900, the rising tension broke into violence. Both groups were reported to be in harmony at the beginning of the season, demanding 25¢ a sockeye in the face of the canners’ offer of 20¢. The whites feared that the Japanese would accept the canners’ terms and staged a “show of strength” at Steveston on July 7 with a parade of strikers consisting of British, Portuguese, Spaniards, Swedes, Danes, Indians and even a few Japanese. Signs were posted: “To White Fishermen and Indians: Any Japanese or other fishermen selling fish at less than union rates, 25¢, will be shot or have his boat stove in – the former preferred.”³³ The canners offered a reward of $100 leading to the arrest and conviction of anyone damaging nets or boats, or for any acts of intimidation. Forty special police constables were brought in from Steveston to patrol the Fraser and protect the estimated 45% of the fishermen willing to accept 20¢. A week later, about 1,000 strikers marched to the Court House in Vancouver to stage a noisy demonstration.

For a time, the only strike-breakers were white fishermen, as the Japanese stood firm with the white union. But the Japanese were in a vulnerable position, as they were closely dependent on the canneries, since many did not yet own boats and equipment. Salmon fishing was their chief means of support and there was the fear of hardship over the coming winter if the season was lost. When a few Japanese started fishing on the canners’ terms, persistent rumours began to circulate that the Japanese were arming themselves with guns to prevent interference.

A huge parade of Japanese, estimated at 4,000 strong, staged “to show strength and unity,” further exacerbated the situation on July 22. Threats of violence expressed in “intemperate” language were made by excited white and Indian strikers. When it appeared that a riot was imminent, martial law was enforced, and a militia detail of 160 soldiers from the Duke of Connaught’s Own was sent to Steveston. Colonel Woarsh, Officer Commanding, announced that his men “had not come there for amusement, but for business; at the first sign of interference they would fire and the work would be short but quick.”³⁴ Then 2,000 Japanese, followed by many white fishermen, were escorted by police to the open river.

Milling about the soldiers, jeering and shouting, the strikers almost precipitated the reading of the Riot Act. But the intervention of the militia prevented an open race riot, for the whites were choleric, the Indians had armed themselves, and the Japanese would not have submitted meekly. The backbone of the strike was broken: no one had won except the canners, and everyone was fishing by July 30. The Vancouver Daily Province sourly proclaimed that “Canadian authority had to provide sufficient force to protect an alien force of fishermen defending, by recourse to arms, their inalienable right to work,” and the result was to “give the river to the Japs.”³⁵

In the next season, the year of the greatest sockeye run in the province’s history, a series of wild clashes were reported beginning early in July, as the white union sent out patrol boats to prevent Japanese from fishing. Much fighting, shouting and crippling ensued as men used oars and sticks to batter each other, at times into insensibility and worse, for the Japanese had organized their own patrol boats to protect their fleets. The village of Steveston was quiet, for the struggle this time was on the open water. Two Japanese were reported missing after their boat was found adrift in English Bay and one cannery offered a reward of $500 for information about the killers. Hand-to-hand fighting, net cutting, boat smashing, gunfire and slashing by axes were reported daily for a period of a week. In one incident, twelve patrol boats surrounded a group of five Japanese boats, levelled rifles at the unarmed men and compelled them to row to Bowen Island where they were marooned.

Six men who had stopped a Japanese boat at gunpoint were arrested by policemen who had hidden themselves aboard. Charged with “endangering the public peace,” the “desperate and lawless” men were refused bail for fear their release might exacerbate the agitated situation. Despite the judge’s advice of a guilty verdict, the men were acquitted. Similarly, two other strikers, charged with kidnapping, were freed despite the urging of Justice Drake for the jury to bring in its verdict on the weight of the evidence alone:

There was not the slightest doubt that the guilty parties acted as thieves and robbers in the course they adopted. It has not been disputed that the Japanese were seized by white patrol boats and put on an island. Not content with this, the guilty parties took from the Japanese everything that would enable them to get away from the island, besides chopping up their boats and cutting nets.³⁶

In 1902, however, it was the turn of the Japanese to hold out briefly for better prices after the white union had arranged a settlement with the canners. By this time, the canners had grown proficient in playing race against race in their efforts to keep prices down. Swiftly the Japanese were to become the most aggressive group on the Fraser. In the strike of 1913, they used guns to intimidate the white strike-breakers, and cut nets and destroyed the catches of those who had put out to sea. Clearly, strike-breaking was not limited to any one racial group, each indulging in it at one time or another, perpetuating the divisions between them.

In no other industry was the conflict so sharply demarcated, yet this bitter feeling was a general condition in the province. From the lower mainland, it was a long way to the Kootenays in the interior, but the city council of Slocan, not long after the rush to the silver-lead deposits had made the area famous, sought advice on whether or not it had the power to frame by-laws prohibiting trading licences being granted to Japanese on the grounds that they were “undesirable citizens.”³⁷ Years later, ironically enough, thousands of the “undesirables” were to be dumped into the environs of the forlorn “ghost town” that it had become.

In the remote north of the province, thirty miles south of the Yukon boundary, the gold miners of Atlin did not rely on the comparative niceties of the law to drive out the Japanese. Protected by guards carrying Winchesters, a group of Japanese drew up to McKee Creek on March 22, 1902. The “evil news” of their arrival soon spread from creek to creek, and a gang of 150 miners marched to the Japanese camp, escorting interlopers on a journey back to Skagway. An exchange of notes between the Atlin Mining Company, which had hired the Japanese, and Attorney-General D.M. Eberts failed to bring provincial intervention. The miners, overjoyed at their victory, “gave themselves up to celebration of the auspicious event, the sounds of revelry and rejoicing ringing over the town,”³⁸ as well they might in the still predatory frontier.

Five years later, when thirty-five Japanese were contracted in April, 1907, by the North Columbia Mining Company to work as pipemen and shovel wielders to fill the acute shortage of labour in Atlin, they were expelled again. The “thoroughly aroused” miners held a mass meeting and then delegated a committee to urge the Japanese to depart peacefully or else face forcible ejection. The miners were vigorously supported by William Sloan, the local Member of Parliament, who saw the Japanese driving out white labour from north to south: “the thin edge of the wedge of Oriental labour in the placer mines of the North has been driven in the Atlin camp …. The only result of this must be the driving out of the whites who pioneered that country.”³⁹ When a third group of 77 Japanese was escorted out of Atlin by a group of 300 miners later that same year, the situation surely had become manifestly absurd and pathetic. Japanese Consul Morikawa understated the matter when he said in Vancouver: “That is a bad place for us …. After the former disturbances there, it was assumed that Japanese would not again enter the district; in fact, that seemed to be the understanding among the Japanese themselves. Under what conditions Japanese were induced to go there again I don’t know.”⁴⁰

The conclusion of the negotiations between Canada and Japan on January 31, 1906, following the decision to accede to the Anglo-Japanese trade treaty of 1894 – which contained the famous article giving subjects of the contracting parties full privileges in each other’s territories – reflected the cordial relations between the two countries. British Columbia made little protest in Ottawa, and the bill sanctioning the treaty came into effect a year later. During that summer of 1907, a warm public welcome was given to Prince Fushimi, cousin of the Emperor, when he made a month-long tour of the major cities in Canada. Before leaving Esquimalt, Fushimi told Laurier that the public enthusiasm shown him was evidence of goodwill towards Japan.

But this evidence of “goodwill” was merely the demonstration of a superficial ceremonial politeness. Behind the facade was the reality of the animosity of the working classes towards the immigrant Japanese. High-level diplomacy in Ottawa had little relationship with the realities of the situation in British Columbia. The heroes of the Russo-Japanese War were not the immigrant Japanese – the former could be distanced in an aura of glamour, the latter had to be met face to face in the daily grubbing for existence. Members of the House, who could visualize their province being blessed by increased trade with Japan because of Canada’s adherence to the trade treaty, could therefore keep silent in Ottawa despite the fact that it also guaranteed free movement of Japanese into Canada.

The end of the Russo-Japanese War marked the beginning of a fresh wave of immigration from Japan and Hawaii to the Pacific coast. Close to bankruptcy, gripped by a “terrible malaise” and debilitated by a series of strikes, the province was revivifying at the time it returned Richard McBride and his Conservatives to power in 1903. A new stability and a tremendous leap in development were transforming the major industries; by 1906, the portents of an enormous boom were becoming a reality: the automobile had arrived in Vancouver, which had soon outstripped Victoria in population, people were thronging the new “moving picture” theatres, and real estate values were soaring. A new spirit of confidence and optimism could be felt throughout the province. But once more, by the next year, the economy of the province was plunged into a temporary recession. And as prosperity dipped, the residents of Victoria and Vancouver gazed at more and more Japanese immigrants descending the gangplanks in the harbours. With this influx, the events of the recent years were moving ineluctably towards a climactic show of violence.

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Notes

1. Cf. Hurd, W.B., “The Relation of Origins of Immigrants to Settlement of the Country”, Canadian Political Science Association Papers and Proceedings of Annual Meeting, 2 (May 30, 1931), pp. 48-58. Hurd discusses the three sectional racial problems existing in Canada: i.e., the Anglo-French problem of Eastern Canada, the Anglo-European problem of the prairies, and the Anglo-Oriental problem of the Pacific Coast. Accidents of history created distinct population structures in each of these three regions, and each was faced with problems peculiarly its own. ↩
2. Victoria Colonist, March 30, 1897. ↩
3. 3. E.g., Young, C.H., H.R.Y. Reid, and W.A. Carrothers, The Japanese Canadians (University of Toronto Press, 1939), pp. 98-100; Lower, A.R.M., Canada and The Far East – 1940 (New York: Institute of Pacific Relations, 1941), pp. 82-5. Lower notes that nearly one Chinese in five was illiterate (17.4% in 1931) and about one Japanese in nine (11.2%). Nearly all of the commentators feel that the Chinese immigrants were inclined to accept a low status. See Woodsworth, C.J., Canada and the Orient (Toronto: Macmillan, 1941), p. 151; Report and Recommendations of the Special Committee on Orientals in British Columbia (Ottawa: King’s Printer, 1941), p. 15; Park, R.E., Race and Culture (Glencoe, Illinois: Free Press, 1950), pp. 227-8: “The Japanese is still less disposed than the Negro or the Chinese to submit to the regulations of a caste system and to stay in his place.” ↩
4. British Columbia Legislative Assembly, Sessional Papers, 1892, pp. 465-75; Canada, Sessional Papers, 1907-8, p. 4. Writing of the TLC, Corbett, D.C., Canada’s Immigration Policy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1957), p. 6: “It led to the protest against Oriental immigration, alleging a danger not only to standards of living but to standards of morality as well! On this point the Congress was making capital of the supposed connection between Oriental immigration and the use of narcotic drugs.” ↩
5. Shimizu to Laurier, March 14, 1898, in British Columbia Laws, Statutes, etc., Documents relating to the recent disallowance of certain statutes passed by the legislature of British Columbia (Ottawa, 1899). For other sources relating to anti-Oriental legislation in this period, see British Columbia Legislative Assembly, Sessional Papers, 1898, p. 963; SP, 1897, p. 1277; SP, 1898, p. 769; SP, 1894-5, p. 587; SP, 1899, pp. 711-12. For correspondence between Canada, Britain and Japan relating to Japanese immigration to Canada, see Canada, Sessional Papers, 1907-8, pp. 1-168. ↩
6. Victoria Colonist, March 28, 1897. ↩
7. Nosse to Laurier, February 3, 1903, in Canada, Sessional Papers, 1907-8, p. 97. ↩
8. Canada, Sessional Papers, 1907-8, pp. 27-8. ↩
9. San Francisco Call, May 8, 1900. ↩
10. Report of the Royal Commission on Chinese and Japanese Immigration (Ottawa, 1902), p. 396. ↩
11. Carter-Cotton to McInnes, February 13, 1899, in Canada, Sessional Papers, 1907-8, pp. 23-4. ↩
12. Report of the Royal Commission on Chinese and Japanese Immigration, op. cit., p. 390. ↩
13. Ibid., p. 343. ↩
14. Ibid., pp. 374-397, for testimony of witnesses appearing before the Commission. ↩
15. Sumida, R., The Japanese in British Columbia (Master’s thesis, Department of Economics, University of British Columbia, 1935), pp. 321-2. ↩
16. Canada, Sessional Papers, 1907-8, p. 4. ↩
17. Victoria Colonist, May 10, 1899. ↩
18. Yamaga, Y., “My Footsteps in British Columbia” (entry in National Japanese Canadian Citizens Association History Contest, 1958). See also his “The History of Japanese Farming in British Columbia, 1906-1941.” ↩
19. Vancouver Daily Province, February 18, 1929. Tamura was among the top five men chosen in a survey held to select the “outstanding Japanese Canadian of the half-century”. See The New Canadian, March 1, 1950. ↩
20. Victoria Times, May 16, 1907; Dalzell, K.E., The Queen Charlotte Islands: 1774-1966 (Terrace, B.C.: Evergreen, 1968), pp. 118-9. ↩
21. Pharmacy Act, R.S.B.C. 1924, chapter 193, section 5; also see Legal Professions Act, R.S.B.C. 1924, chapter 136, section 37; for restrictions on hand logging, see R.S.B.C. 1924, chapter 93, section 22, s.s. i (b). ↩
22. Norris, T.G., In the Matter of the Dominion Franchise Act 1934 and the Dominion Elections Act 1934 and in the Matter of the Disqualification of Certain Persons in the Province of British Columbia from being Registered and Voting under the Said Acts (Vancouver, May 12, 1936), p. 23. ↩
23. British Columbia Legislative Assembly, Sessional Papers, 1901, pp. G11-15. ↩
24. Vancouver Daily Province, October 27, 1900. ↩
25. Vancouver Daily Province, December 1, 1900. ↩
26. Ibid. ↩
27. “The Tomey Homma Case,” Victoria Colonist, December 18, 1902. ↩
28. B.C. Legislative Assembly, Sessional Papers, 1903, pp. J7-8. See also “Cunningham v. Tomey Homma [1903] A.C. 151”, in Mackenzie, N., and L.H. Laing, eds., Canada and the Law of Nations (Toronto: Ryerson, 1938), p. 237. ↩
29. In the United States, aliens were defined as those persons who were neither “free white persons” nor “of African nativity or descent” and immigrant Japanese therefore were ineligible for naturalization. The rights of American Nisei, however, were protected by Section One of the Fifteenth Amendment: “The right of the citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Section One of the Fourteenth Amendment: “All persons born … in the United States … are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the law.” ↩
30. Vancouver Daily Province, August 14, 1900. ↩
31. Vancouver Daily Province, September 25, 1900; British Columbia Legislative Assembly, Sessional Papers, 1901, pp. 529-44. ↩
32. For a detailed study, see Gladstone, P.H., Industrial Disputes in the Commercial Fisheries of British Columbia (M.A. thesis, Department of Economics and Political Science, University of British Columbia, 1959); Howay, F.W., W.N. Sage, and H.F. Angus, “Lumber and Fish”, British Columbia and the United States (Toronto: Ryerson, 1942), pp. 310-16; Jamieson, S., and P. Gladstone, “Unionism in the Fishing Industry of British Columbia,” Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, 16 (February, 1950), pp. 1-11. ↩
33. Victoria Colonist, July 11, 1900. ↩
34. Ottawa Free Press, July 25, 1900. ↩
35. Vancouver Daily Province, July 24, 1900. An interesting sequel to the Province’s comments was its August 2, 1900, report of the death of four Japanese during a severe storm a few days after the end of the strike: “The blow as severe as any in months – fatality fortunately confined to the alien element.” The italics are mine. ↩
36. Victoria Colonist, October 10, 1901. ↩
37. Minutes of the Council of the Corporation of the City of Slocan, April 22, 1908. ↩
38. Victoria Colonist, April 2, 1902. See also British Columbia Legislative Assembly, Sessional Papers, 1902, pp. 843-4. ↩
39. Victoria Times, August 16, 1907. ↩
40. Victoria Times, September 21, 1907. ↩

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