Chapter Four: Picture Brides

Was this the land of promise I had anticipated in Japan?
Life seems only to consist of backbreaking work that reaps no return.
– Koto Kawamoto

But the favourite and most practical scheme was the “picture bride” plan, which began with an exchange of photographs after relatives of the immigrant had sought out a woman whom they regarded as suitable. If the would-be groom liked what he saw in the photograph, he would write to his relatives and the “marriage” would be registered in Japan. Bride and groom would then exchange letters, and the woman would then come to Canada as his wife after the groom had arranged for a passport. In most cases, the principals were complete strangers, and the union was based essentially on the couple’s suitability to be helpmates in the struggles of the new world. Invariably, the woman would come from the same prefecture, if not the same village in Japan, as her husband.

If the prelude of romantic courtship was completely absent in these proxy marriages, it was a commonplace condition in Japanese custom, in which any exception to the miai-kekkon (arranged marriage) was a startling deviation. Marriage-making in Japan involved a complex ritual in which the principals had little, if any, say in the matter; the choice of mate was largely left to families of the couple. When the immigrant son in Canada told his family in Japan of his desire for a wife or, more usually, the family exerted pressure on him to marry, the process of selecting a bride was the same as if the son had been living at home with his parents instead of in Canada. It was the parents who would choose, in either case, the girl whom they regarded as a most suitable mate for their son.

Calculated and prosaic as they were, these proxy marriages usually worked well and fulfilled an important function at the time. But like other immigrant institutions – for example, the “boss” and “contract” systems – it was obviously not without serious defects. Some saw that the marriage system created “a lot of trouble”:

Many of the women who wanted to get married were those who didn’t seem to be able to get married in any other way, and many were not of the most desirable type for marriage. It is said that girls with great big ugly moles on their chins would hide the lower part of their faces with fans, and in that way give the impression of looking very well. Old men would have their pictures touched up so that they looked years younger. Those were the days when photographers were doing a fine business. Men would put on their best collar-shirts and Sunday suits to have their pictures taken when in reality they put on such clothes only once in several months.¹

Even if the couple overcame their initial disappointment over the difference between substance and shadow, tension and discord between spouses were not infrequent as a result of this system. Obviously many of the brides also had to live under conditions vastly different from what they had been led to expect in the new land, often a life that was extremely harsh and penurious, even below what they had been accustomed to in Japan. If the mate was unsatisfactory, there were often problems as well in the personality development of the Canadian-born.

In Japan, the prospective bride and groom could at least meet each other before the contract was completed. The initial criteria of selection were strictly objective ones: the suitability of the bride to preserve family traditions and breed sons, her domestic abilities, her intelligence and her accomplishments, and the man’s ability to earn and the suitability of their respective temperaments. After the parents selected their son’s wife, usually through the good offices of a go-between (nakodo or baishakunin), the latter would arrange an artfully “accidental” meeting (the miai) between the two young principals. Even this meeting took place in the presence of the parents, who did not allow the couples to converse. For the man, for whom other female company and sexual experience were always available outside marriage, it was not unreasonable to accept without demur the partner whom his parents judged to have the right domestic and eugenic qualities. As far as the girl was concerned, nothing in her upbringing usually had occurred to suggest that personal preferences had anything to do with matters of duty such as marriage. Withdrawal from the marriage arrangements, once a miai had been held, required some strength of mind to resist the pressure of parents and the go-between, who were convinced of the appropriateness of the match and would find it embarrassing for negotiations to be broken off.

Usually the good son’s repayment of parental on (obligations) did not allow him to question his parent’s decision. Everything, in fact, was done to make the meeting so casual and seemingly unarranged that, even if negotiations were broken off, the honour of neither family would be threatened. By these methods, the Japanese avoided occasions in which failure might be shameful; perhaps no other process was controlled to such a degree. After the meeting, the opinions of the boy and girl were sounded and, in theory, if either voiced violent disapproval, the arrangement was likely to be dropped – with no shame to anyone, since nothing had been openly or admittedly started.

Each family would surreptitiously but exhaustively investigate the history of the other’s family. Insanity, leprosy, venereal disease or tuberculosis – on the assumption that these afflictions were hereditary – were insoluable barriers. Each family would determine the social and economic worth of the arrangement as well as a myriad of other details ranging from connections with outcastes to the zodiacal animal associated with the birth year of the prospective mate. Girls born in the year of the sheep were unlucky, especially when marrying boys born in the year of the tiger. After the two families decided on the marriage, the go-betweens would keep at a distance, for if anything went wrong or a divorce took place after marriage, it would not be so embarrassing as if they had been on close personal terms.

These checks and balances were designed to avoid besmirching of reputation, of obviating “shame-causing” situations which might call in question one’s giri (duty of keeping one’s name and reputation unspotted by any imputation).² Thus etiquette required that as little cognizance as possible be taken of any project until success was assured. But notwithstanding the personal feelings of the principals, the complex rituals at least ensured that the marriage would be predicated on carefully researched, “sensible” attributes, absolutely shorn of the Western ideal of marriage as the culmination of romantic love. The immigrant in Canada would be ensured that investigation of his bride and her family had been assiduously carried out, though he would lack the reassurance of the “accidental” meeting and would need to rely on the often illusory photographic image.

At least the young wife in Canada was freed from living with the groom’s parents and with a mother-in-law who proverbially found fault with her. For a Japanese woman, especially one who married the eldest son, marriage was conceived less as an entry into conjugal relations with a particular man than as an entry into another family group. Submission to the commands of the mother-in-law and obedient absorption of her instructions were the essential duties of the young bride. Conflict and ill-feeling between the two were therefore considered almost normal. The burden of fulfilling contractual obligations was therefore heaviest on the young wife; even when husband and wife were happy in their marriage, the mother-in-law could send her away, and the husband – who again could not question the decision – would have to agree to a divorce according to the obligations imposed on him by filial piety and the proper repayment of indebtedness to parents. A man of strong “moral character” obeyed filial piety and accepted his mother’s decision to divorce his wife; a man could not elevate his feelings towards his wife to the level of his feelings towards his parents or his country. In terms of required behaviour, in disputes between his wife and other members of the family, the husband had to take the side of the family, since ties of blood were thought to have stronger emotional force than those generated by sexual relations, the ties accruing from the latter not being highly valued.

Having been uprooted from this rather onerous situation, the young wife in Canada therefore did not have to fear the acute antagonism that often existed between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, in which the former made her belief explicit that the young wife was not nearly good enough for her son. On the surface, these somewhat unfortunate wives became submissive and mild but, in turn, as they became mothers-in-law, they would turn an accretion of repressed resentment against their own daughters-in-law. Thus, in order to avoid a domineering mother-in-law, girls would often prefer not to marry an heir – and, of course, marrying an immigrant in Canada was one way out of the circle of obligations and restraints that would constrict her life. But absence of primary control – such as that exerted by parents – tended, at times, to add to the problem of domestic stability, since the young couple were now left to their own resources after years of a regimented life.

Since the lot of the wife in Japan was fixed – her duties were, simply, to stay home, bear children and work hard – life in Canada promised, as it had to her emigrant husband, much more than it possibly could in Japan. But like her husband before her, she was soon to be disillusioned with the image of Canada that had been built up in her mind. There was to be no emancipation from a concept of marriage that precluded any purpose beyond the procreation of children and the continuity of family life. There was to be little change in a traditional concept of marital relationship that might approximate that of a Western ideal based on the interplay of the subjective feelings of two presumably equal and independent individuals. It was basically assumed that women were biologically inferior; hence, a “love” which placed the woman on a footing of equality, much less on the pedestal of European romantic tradition, offended the canons of masculine superiority. In any case, a wife ticketed for Canada was chosen on the qualifications set by the household: she should be healthy, skilled at housework and (if possible) farming, good natured and docile. And these qualities were utterly essential, for the husbands were to drive their wives and children with the same intensity with which they drove themselves.

The wife was simply an adjunct to the husband’s needs in house and field, a person who would look after his wants and relieve his discomforts much as his mother had always done. The expected pattern of daily behaviour tended to curb any show of affection, caresses or sense of humour in the husband and virtually banned all sexual allurement on the part of the wife. Even in the give and take of family life, the children would rarely see an erotically affectionate gesture pass between them. Loneliness, therefore, was the common lot of most of these young wives, especially in their early years in Canada.

It was probably only when they began to give birth that they could sublimate, in love for their children, a considerable part of the drives that might otherwise have been expressed in marital relationships. They could give to their child, especially if he was a boy, every maternal solicitude through his infancy, childhood and adolescence, catering to his new wants and softening his sorrows to the limit of her ability. Even so, many women who arrived from Japan were taken out to farms where they laboured in the fields and continued to do so after the birth of their children, preventing them from giving their children the care and attention they needed.

It was the arrival of the Japanese wives, however, that broke up a tendency among the immigrants towards increasing immorality, and the wives were responsible for mitigating the incidence of degeneracy, one of the characteristics of the initial stages of settlement in Canada, and the almost inevitable consequence of an immigrant population which was preponderantly male. And despite the often shattering disappointments, gruelling hardships and maladjustments, divorces or separations were few, unlike the situation in Japan where divorces were almost commonplace, depending more often than not on the whims of a domineering mother-in-law. The social and cultural techniques organized for the adjustment of poor marriages – and their dissolution – were not at hand in Canada, and the conditions of immigrant life, moreover, imposed on the couples the onus for maintaining their marriages even if they had proved unsatisfactory.

Whatever the problems, the “picture bride” system proved highly efficient. And by the 1920s, the contrast with the population structure of 1900, which consisted almost exclusively of young males, was startling. The birth rate, by that time, was beginning to reach its maximum. In 1921, out of a total of 15,868 Japanese in Canada, 5,348 were female, and the Canadian-born totalled 4,334. And not long after the “picture brides” began to arrive, the anti-Oriental pressures had begun relatively to abate, and a short-lived period of tranquility, abruptly ending with the resumption of hostility during the post-World War I years, made the “family-building” phase viable.

Although the province never ceased to be unhappy with its lack of direct control over immigration from Japan, the arrival of the women was not singled out for special comment. Unlike the American exclusionists, British Columbians did not raise an outcry over the “immorality” of the picture bride system, although the Americans were less concerned with this aspect of the proxy marriages than with their anxieties that a “fantastic” Japanese birth rate would soon overrun the country. Until 1917, the United States did not recognize these marriages as valid and required the Japanese couple to undergo a marriage ceremony on American soil. Thus brides and grooms were lined up en masse on the seaport docks for a ceremony as soon as the women disembarked. This bizarre spectacle prompted the Japanese ambassador to complain to Secretary of State Robert Lansing that, under Japanese law,

places of actual residence of the parties form no essential requirement for a marriage to be legalized. A man can marry a woman in Japan by personally affixing his seal to the document to be presented to the registrar – and validity of such marriage is simply attested by issuance of a certified copy of the family register bearing the official seal of the registrar, which document the picture bride is always provided with before leaving Japan.³

For Secretary of Labour William Wilson, however, the “moral” issue was still unresolved. He pointed out that in Japan, in addition to legal registration, there must be an exchange of vows in the presence of Shinto and Buddhist deities, “a very strict and solemn service.” He told Sato that “to omit the marriage ceremony because they are coming to a distant colony, going off immediately after landing, to live together without further ado, is not proper.”⁴ But after an exchange of diplomatic notes, Wilson capitulated to the Japanese viewpoint; women who furnished a certified copy of the family register (koseki-tohon) of each party to the marriage were freely admitted.

American exclusionists, however, continued to claim that the “picture bride” system was “immoral” and that the women also increased the supply of Japanese labour, as indeed they did. Bowing to pressure, the Japanese government issued a proclamation stating that February 21, 1921, was to be the last day on which passports would be granted to picture brides. No such “ladies agreement” – as it was aptly termed by some – was applied in Canada until 1928, at which time Japan gave assurance that steps would be taken to terminate the practice of “picture bride” marriages.

When this female migration began in 1908, the portents for settling down in British Columbia were favourable. Everywhere in the province a rise in the economic picture was accompanied by a rise in population. English settlers were being attracted to the province by the special fare of $40.00 offered by the Canadian Pacific Railway for transportation from England. Vancouver was growing at the rate of 1,000 persons a month, and by 1911 the total population of the city would reach over 110,000. Many of the tourists who crowded the Empress Hotel in Victoria would themselves become settlers, some of them as gentlemen farmers in the verdant inland valleys. Once every three weeks, the Empresses were leaving for the Orient from Vancouver. Premier McBride’s announcement of January, 1909, that he was arranging to bring a third transcontinental railway line into the province, was “electrifying news.” The province, “intoxicated by prosperity,” swept McBride’s Conservatives back into power by a majority of 34 seats. American and European capital and settlers were attracted by the boom. A colony of Doukhobors, moving from Yorkton to the Kootenay in 1910, was welcomed with “open arms” by the government.

On March 4 of that same year, thirty Japanese were killed when tons of ice and snow fell, burying an entire Canadian Pacific Railway snow service crew of 58 men, providing a grimly ironic commentary on McBride’s promise that no Asiatics were to be employed in construction work on the proposed railway. Years of trouble had dogged Rogers Pass, a 77-mile shortcut through the Selkirk Mountains for the first train that had dashed to that last spike at Craigellachie in 1886. Late in February, a mighty blizzard had paralyzed the whole northwest, and plough crews fought to clear the lines. Trains were hopelessly out of schedule. Heavy rains had loosened the lower layers of snow, and the superimposed masses of fresh snow on top had set the entire mass into “deadly, swift motion.” Some days later, with every able-bodied man drafted from Revelstoke to dig out the men, the shovel gang was located, all perfectly preserved, their faces flushed, some with axes raised, others doubled over a saw or shovel, one even rolling a cigarette. As the bodies were brought out one by one and laid side by side, “no more gruesome sight could ever be witnessed.”⁵ This landslide was the climax of numerous tragic accidents which finally forced the Canadian Pacific to close the Pass.

Until the outbreak of World War I, the issue of immigration continued to be debated in Victoria and Ottawa. The complaint which harassed both Laurier and Borden was that Canada had sold out her control of immigration under the terms of the “gentlemen’s agreement,” and by associating herself with the Treaty of Commerce and Navigation. Although Laurier declined to adhere to a new treaty, signed by Britain and Japan on April 3, 1911, because certain commercial aspects were not advantageous to Canada, his government extended the existing treaty for two more years, until July 17, 1913. Ottawa assured Japan that no further discussion of immigration was necessary in relation to mutual entry rights, for the “gentlemen’s agreement” was “entirely satisfactory” to Canada. Advocating caution on this delicate topic, Mackenzie King, who now sat in Laurier’s Cabinet as Minister of Labour, told the House that the way in which Canada handled Oriental immigration was one of her “most important and far-reaching concerns.” It could be dealt with either by diplomacy or by “hurling defiance in the face of Orientals.”⁶

When Borden headed the new Conservative government after defeating the Liberals in the 1911 elections, it was his turn to justify what he had so vigorously attacked during his years as Opposition Leader. He declared that Canada stood “purely upon existing conditions of international relations between Great Britain and Japan,”⁷ a statement which echoed those made by Laurier. Borden, moreover, declared that Japan had “very loyally” carried out the terms of the “gentlemen’s agreement.”

Earlier, Borden had reassured British Columbia that not only would Canadian interests in controlling immigration be safeguarded, but that the province would be consulted if she was particularly concerned. He told T. Nakamura, the Consul-General for Japan, that Canada would adhere to the new trade treaty between Britain and Japan if it did not affect or repeal any of the provisions of the Immigration Act of 1910 which sanctioned the prohibition “for a stated period, or permanently, the landing in Canada … of immigrants belonging to any race deemed unsuited to the climate or requirements of Canada, or of immigrants of any specified class, occupation or character.” Nakamura replied that his government would not object to the proposal since it felt that the act did not single out the Japanese as one of the “unsuited” races but was applicable to the immigration of all aliens from all countries including the British Empire.⁸ By accepting this reply, Borden thus opened himself to the suggestion that Canada was now prevented from administering the Immigration Act in a discriminatory way against the Japanese. What real advantage Borden hoped to gain from introducing the subject of the Immigration Act of 1910 in the first place was indeed nullified by his acceptance of the Japanese note. Control still ultimately rested with Japan, and Borden found himself tied – as was his Liberal predecessor – to the bounds of imperial policy.

He told the House that, if Parliament sanctioned the new trade treaty on the terms he had proposed, he hoped Japan would offer a written assurance that the limitation on immigration would be continued. Despite the controversy, the bill was passed and the treaty came into effect on April 10, 1913. Japan’s “assurance” came a day later: she was “fully prepared to maintain … the limitation and control which they have since 1908 exercised in the regulation of emigration from Japan to Canada.”⁹ All that Borden actually gained was the assurance that Japan would not take advantage of that clause that guaranteed her subjects complete freedom to enter Canada but would stand by the “gentlemen’s agreement” of 1908. Unlike the manner in which Canada peremptorily blocked the immigration of Chinese and Hindus, it was politically impossible to deal with Japanese immigration in the same way.

Distrustful of Japan’s good faith, McBride, bolstered by a sensational electoral victory in 1912 in which he wiped out the Liberals from British Columbia, was reported to have stated to Foreign Secretary Edward Grey during a visit to London that Britain must choose between Japan’s friendship and British Columbia’s loyalty. Grey promised that he would do everything possible, through diplomatic channels, to improve the situation.

And in 1912, an era was coming to an end in Japan. Emperor Meiji, whose proclamations had encouraged travel to the West and actually prepared the way for the mass emigration of the Japanese to North America after Japan’s protracted period of seclusion, fell ill and died in July. In the impressive funeral rites, his catafalque was borne on a wagon drawn by five oxen, and his body was interred near Kyoto with four earthen effigies of warriors in full armour. At the precise moment the funeral procession left the palace gates, General Nogi, the victor of Port Arthur, committed suicide in the traditional samurai manner, following his lord in death in the fulfilment of a ritual which had once been regarded as the supreme manifestation of loyalty.

The year also saw the first anti-Oriental legislation enacted outside of British Columbia when the Province of Saskatchewan ruled that white women could not be employed in any place of business owned by an Oriental. As there were less than 60 Japanese residing in the province,¹⁰ the legislation was obviously aimed at the Chinese. The Saskatchewan legislature, which later amended the regulation to apply only to Chinese, made it an offence for any person to

employ in any capacity any white woman or girl or permit any white woman or girl to reside or lodge in or to work in or, save as a bona fide customer …, to frequent any restaurant, laundry or other place of business or amusement owned, kept or managed by any Japanese, Chinaman or other Oriental person.¹¹

British Columbia, on the other hand, framed its own 1914 statute in order to forbid the employment of white women in establishments conducted by “men of certain races, irrespective of their nationality.”

Almost immediately after the Saskatchewan act came into force a Chinese, Quong Wing, contested its legality, but the Magistrate’s Court, the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court of Canada, following the decision of the Privy Council in the Tomey Homma case, all ruled against him. In one of two dissenting judgements, Chief Justice Haultin of the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal stated that the enactment deprived the Chinese of the ordinary rights of the inhabitants of the province. He felt that “the right to employ … and to own, manage or conduct any business without being subjected to unequal and discriminatory restrictions, are just as truly ordinary rights … as the right to vote.”¹² Leave to appeal to the Privy Council was refused.

Both Japanese and Chinese labourers were involved in the violent Vancouver Island strike and riots of August, 1913. They played a guiltless, if not ignominious role, as pawns to the mine owners who had bought out Dunsmuir’s coal interests. Over 2,000 miners had been forced to join a few hundred members of the United Mine Workers of America who had gone out on strike in May of that year. In the end, practically all collieries on Vancouver Island were shut down and 8,000 men were out of work. On August 11, after weeks of “seething discontent,” caused by friction between themselves and with the townspeople of the mining towns, and infuriated by the use of Orientals as strike-breakers, a mob of 1,000 practically took possession of Nanaimo. They drove away wives and families of men who were still working, attempted to blow up buildings with bombs or dynamite, and killed or wounded over a dozen persons. They swarmed over the mining region in a wild melee, looting, burning, destroying property.

After a Vancouver police force of 25 men had been driven back to their steamer, 1,000 soldiers were dispatched from Victoria by Attorney-General Bowser and the region was placed under military rule. The strike leaders were arrested and the militia remained until after the outbreak of war in August, 1914, escorting non-striking miners, including the Japanese and Chinese, to and from the mines. The strike was serious enough to have reduced the coal output by $2 million and helped to grease the province-wide slump in the economy in that year.

While Japanese immigration was assuming a different character, the Chinese were apparently no longer hindered by what had been intended as a prohibitive head tax of $500, and much excitement was aroused by the strenuous efforts of the Hindus to pierce the ban against their entry into British Columbia. About 1,500 Chinese were entering the province every year and in 1911, over 4,500 arrived. But the Chinese were at least adding not inconsiderable sums to federal and provincial treasuries. The total revenue collected from Chinese immigrants for 1911 was $2,262,056 at the rate of $500 per head; in 1912 the take was over $3 million. Still, Chinese immigrants continued to pour into the country, rising to a peak of 7,078 in 1913, until the Dominion government declared that after March 31, 1914, the landing of any skilled or unskilled labourers at any British Columbian port was prohibited.

In the case of each of the three groups of Asiatics, the federal government found different ways of handling the problem. Migration from Japan had been curtailed by the “gentlemen’s agreement,” but imperial policy blunted Canada’s desire for more severe restrictions. No such consideration applied to the Chinese. It was the Hindus, however, who were most harshly treated during this time, for their lot was to be that of virtual exclusion, even if they were British subjects and full members of the Empire.

As the province was suffering a widespread economic slump in 1913, highlighted by a severe financial collapse in Vancouver, and was fretting over the ominous dispatches from Europe during the spring and summer months of 1914, concern over Chinese and Japanese immigration was suddenly eclipsed by excitement over a Hindu “invasion” and fears of an insurrection. The notorious Komagata Maru affair in Vancouver was the last of a series of violent events that convulsed the west coast over varying aspects of the Asiatic “problem.” And it reflected the general anti-Oriental hostility which by this time was as much a part of the province’s ethos as the mountains and forests were part of its landscape.

Some 5,000 Hindus had entered Canada since 1905, but nothing had been done to restrict their entry. The violence and passions manifested in the 1907 riot, however, prompted British Columbians to realize that barriers must also be put up against them. An old statute of 1883 which had made emigration of indentured labour to Canada illegal was unearthed. The Laurier administration then passed two orders-in-council to apply to other classes: one required all Asiatic immigrants to possess $200, instead of $25, at the time of landing; the other stipulated that all immigrants must come by “continuous journey … from the country of their birth or citizenship.” The fortuitous absence of direct steamship lines between India and Canada obviously made a “continuous journey” impossible.

Since Mackenzie King had become something of an expert on Oriental affairs following his investigation into the 1907 riot, Laurier dispatched him to England to confer with the Colonial Office. King later reported to Governor-General Earl Grey that the exclusion of the Hindus was officially based on “grounds of humanity” as well as the usual “social and economic” reasons:

The native of India is not a person suited to this country, that, accustomed as many of them are to the conditions of a tropical climate, and possessing manners and customs so unlike those of our own people, their inability to readily adapt themselves to surroundings entirely different could not do other than entail an amount of privation and suffering which render a discontinuance of such immigration most desirable in the interest of the Indians themselves.¹³

By 1914, after six years of fruitless petitions to Ottawa, the Hindus in British Columbia were apparently “seething with sedition.” Their sense of grievance and frustration was exacerbated by Indian associations which were sprouting along the Pacific coast, urging revolution in India to upset the British raj.¹⁴ A Hindustani newspaper Ghadr (Mutiny) “breathed murder and revolt” and urged Indians everywhere to prepare themselves for a return to the Punjab and take part in a second Indian mutiny to expel the British.

Into this inflammatory situation came a party of some 400 East Indians aboard the Komagata Maru, a Japanese ship chartered in Hong Kong and manned by a Japanese crew. It arrived in Vancouver on May 23, 1914, having picked up passengers in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Kobe and Yokohama. Since the passengers were not making a “continuous journey” from India, the attempt to enter Canada was contrary to regulations. The vessel was in Vancouver harbour for eight weeks, during which time three riots occurred, lives were nearly lost, several broken bones were suffered, and HMCS Rainbow was called out, together with several detachments of militia.

Gurdit Singh, the leader of the expedition – a wealthy Punjab agitator – was later to be accused by a Royal Commission that his motive for bringing the passengers was to add to the political unrest in India. Certainly he was aware of the illegal nature of the enterprise and, shrewd as he was, probably guessed at the outcome. Since Ottawa knew seven weeks previously that the ship was enroute, immigration officials had been instructed not to allow it to dock. While the boat was moored in the harbour, officials examined the passengers, found 90 unfit to land for medical reasons, allowed 20 to disembark after they substantiated their claim that they were prior residents, and ordered the remainder to be deported.

But eight demented weeks were to follow. Gurdit Singh resisted the deportation order and demanded a writ of habeus corpus for each of his passengers. The immigration authorities then established a board of inquiry but failed to make a decision at the end of each case, preventing the Indians from making an appeal. The passengers, in the meantime, were on short rations, as the charterers refused to supply food and water, and what was supplied by the immigration authorities was inadequate. The Indian colony in Vancouver protested to the government that the treatment of their countrymen was “a lot to which even cattle would not be subjected.”¹⁵ Cables were sent to the Secretary of State for India and the Viceroy. The India office wired Ottawa to allow the landing. Cables arrived from Indians all over the world. On the other hand, most of the public organizations in British Columbia – labour groups, boards of trade, city councils, Orange lodges and the legislature itself – petitioned Ottawa not to give in. Six weeks later, after the validity of the order-in-council excluding the Hindus was upheld, the deportation orders were re-issued.

But on July 17, when the deportation order was enforced, the passengers seized control from the Japanese crew. A party of 150 immigration officials and police attempting to board the ship from the tug Sea Lion was repelled. As the Sea Lion’s deck was 15 feet lower than the Komagata Maru’s, the police were easy prey for the coal, bricks, scrap iron and bamboo spears that fell about them. The Hindus on shore threatened to join in the skirmish, and some armed themselves with guns. So chaotic was the situation that Inspector Malcolm Reid, the local immigration officer, wired Ottawa: “We urge immediate action owing to danger of anti-Oriental outbreaks in Vancouver.”¹⁶

Meanwhile, HMCS Rainbow, the flagship of Canada’s two-boat navy, with its armament of two six-inch guns and six four-inch guns, slipped into Burrard Inlet and anchored near the Komagata Maru, its crew prepared to board the tramp steamer. The show of force was sufficient for the passengers to be conciliated with $4,000 worth of provisions supplied by the federal government for the return trip. Thus on July 23, the shore and house tops of Vancouver were crowded not only by troops but also by thousands of people who had come to view the Komagata Maru as it drew off to sea, trailed by the Rainbow.

Concern over the impending war in Europe had faded into the background in Vancouver because of the excitement over the Komagata Maru and its desperate human cargo, but once the news of war with Germany came, and citizens were demanding that guns be placed in Stanley Park and at Point Grey for their protection from the German navy, the question of Oriental immigration quietly dropped away. From one point of view, the war had come at a fortunate time. Close to seven years separated the arrival of the Kumeric and the Komagata Maru, but both ships had plunged the citizenry into a state of acute anxiety, bordering on hysteria, over fears of mass “invasion” from unwanted intruders from the East. The landing of the Kumeric and its 1,189 Japanese immigrants had prepared the way, to a large degree, for the 1907 riot. The mooring of the Komagata Maru had led to the possibility of riots outrivalling the earlier one. The “subversive” Hindus working the Fraser Valley sawmills were supposedly hatching a massive plot to subvert part of the British Empire, just as those Japanese working in the fisheries, mines and lumber camps in the province were deemed to be the tentacles of the “Yellow Peril.”

Exactly a month after the ancient Rainbow steamed into action, the Japanese cruiser Izumo slipped into Burrard Inlet, followed a few days later by the Asama. The two Japanese men-of-war were met, by most sections of the public, with gratitude and relief. At the beginning of the war, the only part of Canada which was actually open to danger was the west coast. Admiral von Spee’s formidable China squadron had put out to sea, and the German light cruisers Nurnberg and Leipzig were believed to be hovering near the Straits of Juan de Fuca, ready to bombard and capture Vancouver and Victoria and take over the coast. Except for the Rainbow, a few obsolete shore batteries and two unmanned submarines hastily purchased by the Borden government, the coast was completely defenceless.¹⁷ Thus, when Japan, in accordance with the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, had entered the war on the side of the Allies, the move eased the problem of the unprotected coastline during the first few months of the war and alleviated the public’s state of panic. The Japanese also agreed to reinforce their squadron with the battleship Hizen.

Six years previously, while discussing the “gentlemen’s agreement,” Laurier had predicted that in the event of war “we may see the fleet of Japan weighing anchor in the harbour of Vancouver for the protection of those British interests to which Canada attaches such vital importance.”¹⁸ Japanese ships were to continue to patrol British Columbia’s coast until America entered the war in 1917. The timely appearance of the Japanese cruisers probably kept the German ships in southern waters, away from the routes of the Canadian Pacific Empresses which were running for port. The Empresses were fast ships which could be used as armed naval auxiliaries, and the Germans were possibly interested in capturing them. In any event, von Spee’s squadron turned south rather than north and was later destroyed off the Falkland Islands.

The Anglo-Japanese Alliance, which had been so long inveighed against by British Columbia, was therefore of some utility to Canada during the early anxious months of the war. Towards the end of the war, too, Canadians joined Japanese and American troops in a short-lived scheme to recreate an eastern front in Siberia in an attempt to draw Russia back into the war. At the same time, the protection of British Columbian ports and shipping offered a display of Japanese strength to both ally and enemy. When the British government first asked for Japan’s aid against German armed vessels and informed Ottawa that a Japanese declaration of war was imminent, the news sent Premier McBride into a “distraught” state. Distrustful of Japan’s motives, he felt that the Japanese must be kept out of the war. He told Borden, in a message relayed to First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill, that Japan would not hesitate to betray Britain and co-operate with Germany despite the Alliance. Churchill replied that Japan was welcome as “a comrade and an ally.”¹⁹ During the next year, McBride was to reverse his anti-Japanese stand. Praising the contribution of Japan to the protection of the North Pacific, he spoke of the loyalty of the Japanese residents in his province – the first occasion (and the last) that he was able to muster praise instead of condemnation.

Britain had been reluctant at first to ask for Japanese aid because of her distrust of Japan’s territorial ambitions, not only in the Pacific – in the Dutch East Indies and South Sea German islands – but also on the western coast of North America. Foreign Secretary Edward Grey had tried to suggest that Japan’s theatre of operations be confined to Kiaochow, the German base in China, and the neighbouring Chinese waters. When the war broke out, Japan’s intention was to observe “strict neutrality,” to remain aloof from the European controversy. But if Britain claimed her assistance, she would abide by the second article of the Alliance in which each country agreed to render the other armed support if either should become involved in war. Both Germany and Britain possessed powerful fleets in the Far East; Britain’s ships were a fair match for Germany’s, except for the factor of speed. But the problem of attacking German ships by tracking them down, of blockading Kiaochow and of capturing German territory, was a difficult task for the British navy, and Japan’s entry into the war swung the balance of power, wrecking the German plan of war against Allied shipping in the area.

Certainly the obsessive fear of Japan’s ambitions was not unfounded. Not long after the Japanese army captured Kiaochow in November, 1914, Japan forced her ill-conceived “Twenty-One Demands” upon China in a maladroit attempt to bring China under her aegis. It was charged, especially by the United States, that Japan had made use of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance to enhance, as indeed she did, her own power and to add to her possessions. In Canada, anxiety over Japan’s ambitions was always coupled with distrust over the presence of the Japanese settlers in British Columbia. They were there, the critics charged, because of Japan’s ultimate plan to conquer the Pacific coast and make it part of a growing empire. Those fishermen in Steveston and Prince Rupert were alleged to be Japanese navy reservists engaged in charting the coastline for Japan’s naval authorities; neither were millworkers or labourers in the province for peaceful purposes. In the pre-war days, some of those who advocated that the Pacific fleet be enlarged felt that unless this was done, Canada’s Pacific merchant marine and so-called “navy” would fall into the hands of Japan. These fears – and the public expression of them – were largely quiescent during the war but lay ready to be renewed when labour problems, the immigrant birth rate and the renewal of the Alliance became controversial issues.

McBride was sufficiently shrewd not to allow, in a time of crisis, agitators to continue to stir up discontent over the continued presence of the Japanese in the province. And the labour shortage, created by massive enlistment, created demand for Oriental labour in many parts of Canada. Even in British Columbia, some people felt, if fleetingly, that their presence was not only tolerable but desirable. With a population of less than 450,000, British Columbia had responded in “overwhelming numbers” to the call for volunteers, contributing 55,570 men to Canada’s war effort; hence, there were jobs for everyone. But though various employers and members of Parliament in other parts of Canada sought to import labourers from the Orient – even suggesting that 50,000 Chinese be employed on the proviso that they would be returned to China when no longer needed – British Columbians unanimously opposed every gesture of this sort.²⁰

While the war years were a relatively prosperous time for the Japanese immigrants, many British Columbians turned their hostility towards German and Austrian residents, in a hysteria that was adumbrative, in some respects, of events 27 years later. In the first few months of the war, as the German fleet was thought to be poised off the coast, rumours of espionage among German and Austrian residents were soon bristling, enhanced by reports that German-language newspapers were postulating the utter falsity of Allied successes and proselytizing the triumphant victories of Germany. All along the coast it was feared that German residents were conniving to co-operate with the German squadron when it went ahead with its plan to attack British Columbia. Agents were planning, McBride was told, to blow up the dry docks at Esquimalt; the destruction of the Granville Street Bridge in Vancouver on April 29, 1915, was alleged to have been the work of German “enemy incendiaries.”

Thus residents in Vancouver and Victoria were apprehensive over “enemy agents” and of the extent to which German residents would cooperate with them. The news of the sinking of the Lusitania on May 8, 1915, aroused fears that coastal shipping might be exposed to the same danger. Rumours that Germans were celebrating the sinking as a great victory provoked an angry mob, led by soldiers, to smash German property, including a beer garden and a brewery, in Victoria. When the Riot Act was read and the militia called out, citizens in the city angrily demanded the internment of all “enemy aliens.”

Canada, on the whole, was tolerant of the German population and limited arrest and internment only to “security risks” and army reservists. At the close of 1915, about 6,000 persons out of a German population of over 161,000 had been placed in camps across Canada for what was called “the most obvious offences.”²¹

Meanwhile, some of the Japanese settlers were anxious to join the war effort. “The time has come when our loyalty to the country of our adoption is to be displayed.” So read one of their slogans.²² Out of 196 Japanese immigrants who fought in the trenches of France and Belgium, 53 never returned to Canada – of these, an almost equal proportion were either interred in graves in such historic battlefields as Vimy Ridge and Ypres or were listed as missing in action. Among the survivors, only ten escaped being wounded, and one soldier died of his wounds in a hospital in Nelson. Thirteen received the Military Medal for bravery. One of them, Otomasu Yamamoto, who was cited for bravery at Valenciennes and at Drury, was a man who “could not string a sentence of decent English together.”²³ On October 31, 1918, he took part in an infantry charge on a ridge guarded by a nest of German machine guns near Valenciennes, leading a group which encircled and wiped out the gunners who had been holding the Canadians at bay.

At the outbreak of the war, the Japanese had asked Prime Minister Borden, through the Canadian Japanese Association, for permission to enlist in the Canadian army and navy. Although a definite reply was not to come until June, 1916, the Japanese set out in the interim to raise volunteers when it was suggested that there was a possibility that they might be accepted for duty on the home front.

After medical examinations weeded out the unfit, 202 men formed what they called the “Japanese Volunteer Corps” and began training in Vancouver early in 1916 under the tutelage of Captain Robert Colquhoun and four other officers of the Canadian Army Service Corps. Expenses for the training and maintenance of the volunteers were borne by the Japanese communities. Each day, the spectacle of the volunteers, marching in close file to the sound of bugles, drew curious stares and some hand claps in the streets of Vancouver. But having trained for three months, the men were eager to leave for France. Yasushi Yamasaki, President of the Canadian Japanese Association, was sent to Ottawa to obtain approval for an all-Japanese unit but could get no official clarification of their status. Finally, Ottawa declared that since there was insufficient numbers to form a separate battalion of 1,100 men, the volunteers were not needed.

The group, told it was unacceptable, was dissolved. Part of their frustration, exacerbated for some time by the intense rivalry between two Japanese-language newspapers which were engaging in a power struggle in the Vancouver community, vented itself in an attack on the offices of the Canada Shimpo when one of its editorials impugned their motives for volunteering. In a wild raid on the Shimpo building, they broke windows, overturned shelves of Japanese type and hacked at printing machines with hammers, putting the newspaper out of commission for the next two months.

The British Columbian government made no statement on this issue of service for these naturalized Canadians, but there was little doubt that it saw the enlistment of Japanese as a prelude to the demand for the franchise. Given the background of the Oriental “problem,” the legislature could scarcely permit the enlistment of these few men. Once before, in 1900, the Japanese had offered to raise and equip their own unit to fight in the Boer War, only to be rejected. Though barred from the franchise, the Japanese were not faced with any legal barriers to enlistment in the province; then an invitation came from the army in Alberta.

Two weeks after the Shimpo incident, a recruiting officer from Blairmore, Alberta, advised the Canadian Japanese Association that he wished to include Japanese in his battalion. One by one, or in twos and threes, the Japanese volunteers went to Alberta to enlist, some of them forming all-Japanese platoons. The Vancouver volunteers, wishing to leave the city dressed in khaki, sent a telegram to Calgary, asking for the requisition of uniforms. They were ill-fitting but arrived in time for the proud recruits. The first group of Japanese went overseas with the 209th Battalion in the summer of 1916. The 13th Cavalry (the Princess Pats) included 42; the 192nd had 51 and the 175th included 57 Japanese. The 191st Battalion, which left in 1917, took the last of the volunteers.

The Japanese motives for enlisting were mixed. The call of “King and Country,” of patriotism to an adopted country, was much less of a lure than burgeoning pride in the fact that Japan had become an active ally of Canada and Britain. One volunteer, indeed, declared that he primarily joined “as a Japanese, not as a Canadian.” Others said they wanted to do “something concrete” about anti-Japanese prejudice. Still, though enlistment was not predicated on an overt plan to attain franchise rights, each individual having joined for reasons of his own, the fact that the volunteers had acquitted themselves with some distinction in Europe and had suffered casualties to one-quarter of their number provided a strong tactical weapon during the resumption of the struggle for the franchise which, in one form or another, continued through the first half of the century.

At war’s end, the campaign for the franchise and for equal fishing rights for this small group of veterans began in earnest. In 1920, the war veterans convention in Vernon unanimously supported a resolution to assist in gaining the franchise for all returned soldiers. But the general feeling in the province, in the legislature and in the towns and cities where speaking tours were arranged, was fiercely and implacably opposed to the principle of extending the vote to the 143 survivors of the war who had made their way back to British Columbia.

In their argument – outlined in an open letter circulated among members of the legislature in the spring session of 1920 – the veterans pointed out that they had been allowed, “without any previous request on our part,” to vote as Canadians in the federal elections while serving in France. They argued that

many of us have spent nearly all our lives in B.C. and we have within us a love for the nation and reverence for her institutions – otherwise we should not have offered our lives that her liberty might be preserved …. When, after our return, it was suggested … that any sacrifice on our part … might receive recognition by the right to continue the exercise of the franchise which had been granted to us while overseas, we welcomed the idea enthusiastically and with no thought of a possible controversy. If the extension of the franchise to us will have an evil influence or prejudice the welfare of the country for whose liberties we have fought, we do not wish to have the vote. We do not think that this is the case, and believe that our patriotism has been fully tried and tested.²⁴

Attacking the various resolutions passed by groups who opposed their right to vote, the Japanese posed a question: “How could we be less patriotic in an election campaign, and … not be at least as trustworthy as possibly some voters of enemy alien origin, or others who did not wish to enlist?”

The opposition that the veterans faced was crystallized in a letter, published in the Victoria Colonist, which was supposed to represent the opinion of “the women of British Columbia,” who themselves had only gained the franchise in 1916 after years of militant campaigning. After citing the usual fears that the “lower standard of living” of Orientals was undermining the ideal of a “White Canada,” the writers linked the franchise issue with the problem of immigration:

We recognize the deadly menace that confronts our eternity if we open our doors to an alien people with whom we can never assimilate and whose unlimited presence among us can only mean our final disintegration. Therefore we have stated emphatically our unshakeable opposition to the granting of the franchise to any Japanese for any cause whatsoever.²⁵

Calling the Japanese veterans Premier John Oliver’s “late Japanese friends,”²⁶ Conservative leader Bowser opposed “in no uncertain manner” a proposed amendment to the Elections Bill which would have extended the franchise to the Japanese veterans, giving the lead to other members of the legislature who fell in behind him. Oliver “wrathfully rebuked” the Opposition Leader, pointing attention to the manner in which the Japanese had borne themselves while on active service. But the concerted opposition forced Oliver’s hand; on April 14, 1920, he announced that the legislature had decided not to grant the vote.

The times, indeed, were scarcely propitious for action of this sort. If the war provided a lull in anti-Japanese agitation, the post-war years caught up the frenzy once more, prompted by bitter resentment at the “economic penetration” of Japanese immigrants, immediately voiced by returned soldiers, many of whom were unable to find jobs in the depression-bound economy of the province. The problem of absorbing the returning soldiers into peace-time occupations was acute even without the presence of the Orientals, especially as the end of the war inevitably resulted in a contraction of markets in almost every industry, in the cutting or suspension of production. Inevitably, charges were revived that the Orientals, particularly those Japanese who were fishermen, were monopolizing certain industries and that their lower standards of living made it impossible for whites to compete. It was not surprising, for example, that the Great War Veterans’ Association of Vancouver, which at first warmly supported the Japanese veterans’ bid for the franchise, withdrew its backing. Few returned soldiers took advantage of Oliver’s invitation to open new farming lands in the province and instead converged on Vancouver, often languishing on park benches in Victory Square, adding to the massive unrest in the labour force which was marked, in 1919, by strikes and complaints against the Oliver administration, partly fomented by the groundswell of radical socialism.

The post-war economic slump also brought pressure to bear on the Dominion government to enact legislation which would, once and for all, place a legal racial disqualification upon the Orientals from voting federally. Hitherto, the voters’ lists used for elections under the Dominion Elections Act were those which were ordinarily used in provincial elections. Although provincial disqualifications did not by law exist in respect to dominion elections, the Japanese were excluded from voting federally because of this practice. In 1920, the Dominion Elections Act was re-enacted and, for the first time, in Section 30 Canada made provisions which had the effect of excluding, on the grounds of race, the Japanese in British Columbia from voting in federal elections. Those persons “disqualified and incompetent to vote” in federal elections were those who, “by the laws of any province in Canada, are disqualified from voting for a member of the Legislative Assembly of such province in respect of race.”

The Japanese had not only become the largest group in the fishing industry, but also the most dominant and aggressive. Consequently, the big drive for their removal – led by William Garland McQuarrie, member of Parliament for New Westminster – began shortly after war’s end, ostensibly to provide more jobs for the whites. The high prices and labour shortages of the wartime period had temporarily enabled all fishermen to enjoy unprecedented earnings, and the number of Japanese fishermen had increased to a peak in 1919, at which time they controlled 3,267 licences, or nearly half of the licences issued for that year. The “invaders from the Orient” were indeed a significant force in an industry which in that year produced fishery products of a total value of $25,301,607 in British Columbia, close to half of the total production for Canada. Major R.J. Burde, Independent member for Port Alberni, warned that “they have become so arrogant in their feeling of security that many white settlers are reaching the limit of tolerance.”²⁷

Relatively inactive during the war years, the Fraser River Fishermen’s Protective Association, formed in 1914 principally to consolidate anti-Japanese opinion, spearheaded the post-war drive for anti-Japanese legislation. Its membership, it declared, was open to all who “believe in driving the Orientals out of the industrial life of the province.” The Japanese might claim to have “developed” the fishing industry in the province, but to their opponents, they were “a deadly menace” who were “steadily driving the White and Indian fishermen off the river” and, in the process, “sapping the financial life of the Fraser Valley.”²⁸ In one of its petitions to the provincial and federal governments, the Association asked that the Japanese be excluded from the Fraser.

The fishing industry was then suffering a temporary relapse. The Hell’s Gate slide of 1913 and the failure to practice conservation measures resulted in decreasing catches. The Fraser was “fished out.” Those army veterans who turned to fishing found it difficult, if not impossible, to compete with the Japanese fishermen who were “marvellously skilful” gill-netters. The federal government bowed to provincial pressure. In 1919, the Department of Marine and Fisheries decided “to gradually eliminate Orientals from the fishery” by reducing the number of licences issued to them, and four years later, licences issued to “other than white resident British subjects and Canadian Indians” were reduced by 40%. Clearly the Japanese were expendable because they were really too proficient for their own good; their flaw, in Major Burde’s phrase, was that they were “excessively industrious.”

Internationally, the immediate post-war events were unlikely to offer a good prognosis for the future of race relations. Japan’s proposal for a declaration of the principle of race equality in the Covenant of the League of Nations was turned down at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919. This setback naturally rankled in the minds of the Japanese, who felt that, despite their admission to the Great Powers’ Club, they were still not regarded as full equals by the nations of the West. Opposition to the Japanese proposal was largely based on the fear that it might further weaken control over immigration. It had been a standing grievance in Japan that her people had either been excluded from other countries or, if admitted, were not accorded full rights, thus postulating an inferiority which Japan would not recognize nor willingly tolerate.

Britain was ready to accept a general statement of racial equality, but it was the intransigence of “vinegary” W.M. Hughes, Australia’s Prime Minister, that defeated the proposal. He was implacably opposed to any amendment, however innocuous, that could be interpreted as an attempt to question Australian “sovereignty” in controlling Asiatic immigration. The Canadian delegation, headed by Borden, was ready to work out some formula that would save both Canadian autonomy and the pride of Japan. Organizing several meetings between Commonwealth ministers and Japanese delegates, the Prime Minister tried to find a compromise that would be at once a gesture towards soothing Japan’s ruffled feelings and yet not be a commitment to accept her nationals as immigrants. In the end, no compromise could be found after Hughes insisted that a declaration be included in the Covenant stating that immigration and naturalization were purely domestic matters.²⁹ When Hughes further threatened to start public agitation in the Dominions and the United States, the moderates urged the Japanese to drop the matter.

Still another proposal at Versailles, brought up in connection with international labour legislation, was cause for concern in Canada. If accepted, it would have conflicted with British Columbia’s legislation barring Japanese from the franchise and certain professions; consequently, feeling would have run high in that province. The proposal, which would have ensured labourers and their families lawfully admitted to any country “the same treatment as the nationals of that country,” clearly raised an “awkward” point. A revision, produced by Borden, was accepted by the plenary session of the Conference, emasculating the original intent: “the standard set by law in each country with respect to the conditions of labour should take due regard to the equitable treatment of all workers lawfully resident therein.” Both proposals had posed serious problems for Canada, but Borden emerged from the Conference as a diplomat of no little skill. Meanwhile, as more “picture brides” crossed the Pacific, so the birthrate rose. There were only 64 Canadian-born children in 1901 but over 4,000 by the end of 1920, a statistic that provided grist for the windy alarmist mill in the 1920s and 1930s. The fear of “invasion” by immigration was displaced by that of their “phenomenal” fecundity.

Anti-Oriental interests had already, in 1914, demanded that Japanese and Chinese children be segregated from the white pupils in the public schools of the province. The agitation began when a Chinese domestic in Vancouver was reported to have hacked his employer with an axe and burned her body in a furnace after having suffered “cruel treatment” at her hands. Charges spread throughout the city that all Orientals were “dangerous” and that Japanese students, some of whom were older than their schoolmates, would “corrupt” other children and “impart immorality” and should therefore be segregated.³⁰

In another incident, the Parent-Teachers Association of Vancouver’s Henry Hudson School charged that Japanese pupils were infected with skin diseases and trachoma and therefore constituted a menace to health and should be excluded from the school. Municipal Inspector J.S. Gordon, however, investigated 33 schools in Vancouver which contained Japanese pupils, and found that nearly all of the principals thought their Oriental pupils were “harmless.”³¹ The principal of Central School, on the outskirts of the Chinese quarter, stated that he “never had to complain of any unseemly conduct on the part of an Oriental” nor “of unhealthiness.”³² The Vancouver school board therefore refused to carry out a policy of segregation. Some years later, further attempts at segregation were made, but the attention shifted to disturbances over the presence of Japanese-language schools which were charged with nurturing and disseminating Japanese nationalism among the school children.

The influx of the “picture brides” and the early “family-building” years provoked a change in emphasis in the tactics of anti-Japanese pressure groups and, at the same time, influenced the internal organization and pattern of immigrant life. Settlement became more and more concentrated and stabilized on the Pacific coast and was accompanied by a lateral movement into occupations that promised a more secure future than those which depended on the vagaries of white employers. The primitive “communities” of the past had by this time been consolidated into self-sufficient ghettos, each with its network of institutions, shops, schools, churches, restaurants, mutual aid and prefectural societies.

The verve and quality of a floating “frontier” life were things of the past. Constant charges of inassimilability and harassment by politicians of every party and by the trade unions intensified the group consciousness of the Japanese. As the number of associations and the scope of their activities increased, they became the fraternal instruments of defence against the overt hostility of the larger society, while at the same time serving the functions of sociability and mutual help. For some, the awareness of rejection stirred up their pride, and they made a virtue of their exclusiveness. Others tried to adjust, in their own fashion, with the disquieting knowledge that no adjustment would ever earn them full acceptance. In these communities, none more concentrated and symbolic than Vancouver’s “Little Tokyo,” the standards and traditions of the Old World were superimposed onto a New World context. At its best, however, it was an odd hybrid.

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Notes

1. LaViolette, F.E., Americans of Japanese Ancestry (Toronto: Institute of International Affairs, 1945), p. 14. Cf. sentimental treatment in Michener, J.A., Hawaii (New York: Random, 1959); Beattie, J.L., Strength for the Bridge (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1966).↩
2. Among the copious literature on the subject, see Embree, J.F., Suye Mura: A Japanese Village (University of Chicago Press, 1939), pp. 203-15; Benedict, R., The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1946), pp. 120-1, 134-5, 184-5.↩
3. Sato to Lansing, in Ichihashi, Y., Japanese in the United States (Stanford University Press, 1932), p. 294.↩
4. Wilson to Sato, in ibid., p. 294.↩
5. Revelstoke Mail-Herald, March 5, 1910.↩
6. King further declared that “restriction in the number of Oriental immigrants was desirable but it should be effected, not by such means as the obnoxious poll-tax, but by negotiation at high levels of government.” See McGregor, F.A., The Fall and Rise of Mackenzie King: 1911-1919 (Toronto: Macmillan, 1962), p. 239.↩
7. Canada, House of Commons Debates, 1912-13, pp. 7202-3. For a defence of his policy, see Borden, H., ed., Robert Laird Borden: His Memoirs, 1 (London: Macmillan, 1938), pp. 395-8.↩
8. Canada, House of Commons Debates, 1912-13, pp. 6958-9.↩
9. Nakamura to Borden, April 11, 1913, in ibid., p. 7550.↩
10. The 1911 census listed 57 Japanese and 957 Chinese residing in Saskatchewan. In 1921, there were 109 Japanese, 2,667 Chinese.↩
11. Statutes of Saskatchewan, 1912, c. 17. See also Schmeiser, D.A., Civil Liberties in Canada (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), pp. 259-60.↩
12. Ibid., p. 260. See also Quong-Wing v. The King, Supreme Court of Canada, 1914, in Mackenzie, N., and L.H. Laing, eds., Canada and the Law of Nations (Toronto: Ryerson, 1938), pp. 241-2.↩
13. King, W.L.M., Report on Mission to England to Confer With the British Authorities on the Subject of Immigration to Canada from the Orient and Immigration from India in Particular (Ottawa: King’s Printer, 1908), pp. 7-8.↩
14. For details, see Morse, E.W., “Some Aspects of the Komagata Maru Affair, 1914”, in Canadian Historical Association, Report of the Annual Meeting (University of Toronto Press, 1936), pp. 100-8; Reid, R.L., “The Inside Story of the ‘Komagata Maru’”, British Columbia Historical Quarterly, 5 (January, 1941), pp. 1-24; Ferguson, T., A White Man’s Country: An Exercise in Canadian Prejudice (Toronto: Doubleday, 1975). ↩
15. Morse, op. cit., p. 103.↩
16. Morse, op. cit., p. 106.↩
17. E.g., Stacey, C.P., The Military Problems of Canada: A Survey of Defence Policies and Strategic Conditions Past and Present (Toronto: Ryerson, 1940), pp. 70-4, 81-4.↩
18. Canada, House of Commons Debates, 1907-8, pp. 2092-3.↩
19. Churchill to Borden, August 14, 1914, Borden Papers, Public Archives of Canada. See also Smith, G., “Canadian External Affairs During World War I,” in his The Growth of Canadian Policies in External Affairs (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1960), p. 36; Spinks, C.N., “Japan’s Entrance into World War,” Pacific Historical Review, 5 (1936), pp. 197-311.↩
20. Canada, House of Commons Debates, 1917-18, pp. 986, 996-7.↩
21. “Treatment of Enemy Aliens in Canada During the War”, Canadian Annual Review (1914), pp. 275-86; “Condition and Treatment of Enemy Aliens in Canada”, Canadian Annual Review (1915), pp. 353-64. The census in 1911 listed 161,000 persons of “Teutonic” origin in Canada, of whom 18,895 resided in British Columbia.↩
22. The New Canadian, September 8, 1939.↩
23. The New Canadian, September 22, 1939.↩
24. Victoria Times, March 24, 1920.↩
25. Victoria Colonist, April 4, 1920.↩
26. Victoria Colonist, April 15, 1920.↩
27. Victoria Colonist, May 22, 1920.↩
28. British Columbia Federationist, April 24, May 23, 1914.↩
29. Borden, H., ed., Robert Laird Borden: His Memoirs, 2, pp. 926-8: Glazebrook, G.P. deT., A History of Canadian External Relations, 2 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1966), pp. 19-20; Mackenzie, N.A.M., “Canada and the Changing Balance of Power in the Pacific”, Canadian Papers – Yosemite Conference of the Institute of Pacific Relations, 1936 (Toronto: Canadian Institute of International Affairs, 1936), pp. 57-8. For a detailed analysis of the Canadian role at Versailles, see Glazebrook, G.P. deT., Canada at the Paris Peace Conference (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1942), pp. 69-73. Japan’s proposal, introduced on February 13, read: “The equality of nations being a basic principle of the League of Nations, the High Contracting Parties agree to accord … to all alien nationals of States members of the League, equal and just treatment in every respect, making no distinction, either in law or fact, on account of their race or nationality.”↩
30. Development of Japanese in Canada (Vancouver: Continental Daily News, 1924), pp. 69-70.↩
31. Statistics of Japanese students were not recorded prior to 1922. According to a survey conducted by Tsutae Sato, Vancouver Japanese Language School principal, there were 1,422 Japanese enrolled in elementary and high schools in British Columbia in the 1922-23 session, of which 206 attended Strathcona Public School in Vancouver out of a total enrolment of 997.↩
32. Vancouver World, February 21, 1922. See also Canadian Japanese Association, A Few Facts About Japanese Schools in Canada (Vancouver: n.pub., 1927).↩

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