Chapter Five: Becoming a Foreigner

How should I begin ….
And how should I presume?
– T.S. Eliot

If prejudice impelled the immigrant Japanese into self-enclosed congeries, other reasons were equally powerful, including sociability, mutual assistance, common language, food and customs. Also pervasive in the Japanese group and individual mentality was the overweening belief in the superiority of Japanese values and ethical codes which were certainly intensified by – perhaps accentuated in defence against – the overt hostility of the dominant group, but nonetheless ingrained in their character. The outer society attempted to impose an inferior status upon them, but the average Japanese felt himself to be a person of dignity, part of one of the old cultures of the world, and so could consciously resist such efforts and feel himself to be worthy, able and beyond disrespect. Like most insular peoples, the Japanese regarded themselves as a race apart, unique in origin and achievement. No racial prejudice could eliminate this pride of race. Transplanting this intrinsic feeling, which lined their cultural luggage, the immigrants established in their community organizations a bulwark against hostility. And thus their life in nihonjinmachi (Japanese town) reinforced their group solidarity and clannishness. Old clan and kinship groups, among other immigrants, might have tended to break down and be partially replaced by other social organizations, but amongst the immigrant Japanese, the process of assimilation was taking place very slowly, if at all.

Since the assimilation of the immigrant generation (the Issei) into the larger community was impeded by implicit social segregation and actual economic and political discrimination, they turned towards the “mother country” rather than towards their adopted homeland for aid and comfort; they were suckled, for a time, by the paternalistic and protective interest of the consular offices in their welfare. But, by and large, it was the strength, solidarity and self-sufficiency of their ethno-centered organizations that allowed them to accommodate themselves to alien conditions.

Group relationships had an enormous influence on the Japanese. They thought of the family and of the group as realities more concrete than the individual; their family system, supported by strong traditional ties, was quite unlike the system they encountered in Canada. Numerous social forms, such as the kenjinkai (prefectural association), and such customs as the tanomoshi (mutual financing) were part of the system, binding together family, people from the same prefecture, and the community into a remarkably integrated internal solidarity which set them apart from other groups as much, perhaps, as did the external pressures. The tightly knit structure of immigrant society was sharply at variance with the loosely constituted and unorganized character of social forms in a mobile, unstable society only recently emerged from frontier conditions. Indeed, the extraordinarily great differences between the languages of the Japanese and of the white population, the distinguishing racial characteristics, the divergences between the ceremonial customs and etiquette of the two groups, the diversity in family relationships, contrasts in food habits and differences in cultural values all contributed to the crystallization of a feeling of separation.

Failure to master the English language was alone sufficient to cause the Japanese to dwell together. In contrast to many other immigrants, the Japanese were literate in their own language but achieved, at best, only a very imperfect speaking knowledge of English. The majority came from the lower classes – especially from the agricultural class, perhaps the most conservative and backward portion of any nation. Living in rural areas relatively untouched by modern ideas, the farmers, labourers and fishermen had little preparation for their new life in Canada. It was inevitable that they should show a compulsion to segregate themselves in communities of their own people where they could keep up their own language and customs.

While it was sometimes claimed that the immigrant Japanese were more zealous in learning English than some other immigrant groups,¹ few Japanese showed any facility in the language. Even students who had much better opportunities than the average immigrant to learn English expressed themselves with difficulty even after years of study. It was no surprise that labourers who had come to Canada as adults should have found mastery of English an almost insurmountable difficulty. Indeed, the longer these older residents lived in Canada, the more unlikely was it that they would learn the language. Unlike the European immigrant, whose contact with English-speaking “natives” would increase with their period of residence, the immigrant Japanese experienced little change in the course of time in the clannish conditions in which they lived and worked. By 1925, for example, only 26.2% of 3,480 immigrants declared they were able to read and speak in English.²

Efforts to overcome the linguistic handicap were made early, largely through night classes established by several of the Christian churches. The most important of these was the school begun in Vancouver in 1912 by the Methodists and continued by the United Church. It attracted, during its 22 years of operation, an average monthly attendance of 40 students, purporting to help them “to think along clear, inspiring lines.” The studies were punctuated each night by “an earnest exhortation along moral and religious lines,”³ delivered by the current principal, usually a former pupil. Whatever the inspirational value of this training, the educational value allowed seven of its graduates to go on to the University of British Columbia.

Although the immigrant Japanese were the objects of considerable proselytizing by Christian missionaries, about 68% of them continued to prefer Buddhism. Still, Christianity made considerable inroads and the United Church, the most popular of the non-Buddhist churches, claimed 4,789 Japanese members by 1931.

The process of “conversion” had begun as early as 1892 when the Japanese Christian Endeavour Society of Seattle sent Masutaro Okamoto to British Columbia to work among the fishermen in the Skeena. Four years later, under his guidance, a mission was established in Victoria and a Sunday school in Vancouver. A Methodist church was built in Vancouver in 1906 at the corner of Jackson and Powell. After Reverend Yoshimitsu Akagawa became pastor in 1918, he raised $12,000 – a sum matched by the Methodist General Board of Missions – for a gymnasium and social centre. A year after the union of the Methodists with the Congregationalists and Presbyterians to form the United Church in 1924, Reverend Kosaburo Shimizu was called to head the Powell Street United Church which quickly became one of the focal points of activity for the Vancouver community.

Christian Japanese liked to claim that Christianity was a liberating factor facilitating their adjustment to Canadian life. As it was looked upon as an integral part of Western civilization, many Japanese underwent conversion so that they might identify themselves more closely with white society and then claimed that they were more “Canadianized” and “progressive” than the Buddhists. In most cases, however, immigrants joined the Christian churches because of the ceaseless services of the ministers to the community who acted as interpreters, employment agents, mediators and counsellors, gaining respect and admiration more as leaders of the community than as interpreters of the gospel.

The missionaries were also the first, if not the only, members of an important institution that attempted to assist the newly arrived immigrants. By so doing, they played directly upon one of the most pervasively collectivistic sentiments of the Japanese: hardly anything was more sacred than the spirit of helpfulness between one member of society and another. The social welfare undertaken by the missionaries and the early Japanese ministers would have been provided for in the family system in Japan; but in Canada, the Christian churches began to fit more into the traditional mores of the Japanese than did their native religions.⁴ As one observer put it:

The missionary comes to the door and in very polite Japanese invites the Issei mother to a tea at the church. There she sits around and talks to some of her neighbours. As she is leaving, the missionary politely expresses the wish to see her again. And the Issei mother, having accepted his hospitality, feels obligated to attend the church.

Despite claims to the contrary,⁵ the acceptance of Christianity did little to hasten integration into white society, for all of these churches were self-segregated. Wherever missions existed, they were for Japanese alone, the pastors conducting services in the Japanese language. And all of the peripheral activities – committee meetings, parties and conferences – were essentially Japanese in sponsorship, support and attendance. Limited contact with the larger community was only offered through white evangelists, pastors or laymen who were associated with the Japanese pastors. Still, even this extremely limited contact provided a basis for interracial association which had no counterpart in Buddhist congregations.

Although the first Buddhist temple in Canada was opened in 1905 in Vancouver and a priest brought over from Japan, the development of an organized church was slow. Obviously, the Buddhists had no white co-religionists to assist them, nor were any large groups in Japan interested in disseminating Buddhism in Canada. Unlike the Christians who were aided by the material resources of the larger Protestant denominations, the Buddhists lacked the money to meet the religious needs of the immigrants. Thus the Buddhists had to struggle to maintain their identity as a religious group and to reconstruct their old faith in Canada. What in Japan had always been at hand, the product of centuries of growth, now had to be recreated. By and large, the money that built the temples was assembled from the earnings of labourers who devotedly gave what they could.

A second and larger mission, the Hompa Canada Buddhist Temple, was erected in 1910 on Vancouver’s Cordova Street, ministering to the needs of some 200 contributing members and their families. As one priest had to serve all of the Buddhists in the scattered Japanese settlements in the province during this early period, the more highly organized Christian denominations found it easier to gain converts. But the organization of the Buddhist Church improved materially and three additional temples were founded in Steveston, Port Haney and Mission, each luxuriating in its own priest. The trend towards adoption of Christianity was also checked as families tended to revert to their customary ancestoral worship and to utilize the Buddhist rituals in connection with the life crises such as weddings and funerals, and to consider Buddhism to be the preserver of Japanese culture and a reinforcer of the Japanese ethical code.

By the mid-1930s, Buddhist organization had expanded to four temples in Vancouver and seven other temples or branches elsewhere, ministered to by a collection of six priests. The Hompa temple was the largest, numbering about 3,000 contributing members. Up to the beginning of the war, then, Buddhism more than held its own, even increasing slightly its number of adherents for a variety of reasons. Not the least of these were the identification with Japan which the temples could assert in a time of rising nationalism and the unrelenting hostility of British Columbians, a factor which made it difficult for Japanese to believe in the viability of Christian principles.

The attraction of Buddhism lay, indeed, in the fact that those of the immigrant generation especially valued their link with the culture of Japan and felt that the Japanese were superior to other races in moral qualities. One Buddhist complained that:

These days our camp in the country receives many visits from Christian ministers, but they move the people’s hearts comparatively little. I have heard the Christian minister speak. He criticizes Japan in this way and that, and speaks of his own country as if it were miserably inferior to the Western countries. That at once makes his hearers feel very unpleasant. Next, his illustrations are all taken from the Western peoples, as though there were nothing worth talking about in Japan. This also displeases the audience.⁶

Buddhists felt that their faith was pervasively influential in teaching obedience to the Emperor, the teacher, the parents, the elder brother or sister, and in requiring parents to devote their energy to the welfare of their children from whom in return they expected to receive the utmost devotion. In short, they believed that it inculcated yamato-damashii, or Japanese spirit. Buddhist parents felt that if their children lost this moral superiority, they would be treated with contempt by others, and would thereby lose pride in themselves as Japanese or as Canadians. In this respect, they liked to cite the plight of the Indians in Canada.

Obviously, this attitude became problematical for the Nisei (the second generation) whose secular training was essentially Canadian. Conflict between Christians and Buddhists, however, was much less intense than those usually existing, in general, between Catholics and Protestants. Some antagonism, indeed, did exist between members of the two faiths: Christian Japanese claimed that Buddhists were “too conservative, too nationalistic and superstitious,” and the latter charged that Christians were “too superficial and shallow in their ideas.”⁷ These remarks were not important in themselves, but the development of differences indicated that the Japanese recognized many points of separation among themselves and were not a homogeneous grouping, as most people believed, but one with many cleavages.

Since it became transplanted to Canada, however, Buddhism gradually adopted many of the formal practices of the Christian congregations until it assumed a bizarre and diffuse mixture of the paraphernalia of both faiths. The new environment, in its strangeness and looseness and new freedom, made it difficult to preserve the ceremonial of forms, with the result that the ethics of behaviour were given new clothes. The altar of the Buddhist temple with its lotus flowers, candles and icons of the Amida Buddha came to be housed in an auditorium containing pews, hymn books and organs in the Christian manner. The kindergarten was adopted. And the whole process was what Christian Japanese liked, with some cynicism, to call “the Christianization of Buddhism.” Moreover, Buddhists adopted Sunday services, Sunday schools and societies paralleling those found in Christian churches. The Buddhist children even sang hymns such as “Buddha loves me, this I know;/For the Sutra tells me so,” instead of “Jesus loves me, this I know;/For the Bible tells me so.”

Even the conversion from Buddhism to Christianity – unlike the severe conflicts and intense doubts often engendered in the change from one religion to another – was relatively easy, possibly because of the superficial “similarities” which were held to exist between Buddhism, especially the prevailing Shin sect, and evangelical Christianity. Having been introduced to Christianity by attending the United Church’s night school in English, one convert was able to alternate his devotion to Buddha and Christ in a most curious manner before opting for the latter:

I thought then it was a very unsafe policy to forsake Buddha all at once, at least until I became very certain of my salvation in Christ. Hence I worshipped Buddha in the morning and Christ in the evening, which order, however, I afterwards reversed to Christ in the morning and Buddha in the evening, relegating to Christ the higher honour of the morning worship.⁸

Despite its “Christianizing,” the Buddhist temple was regarded as definite proof of the “inassimilability” and “nationalism” of the Japanese. Hence, a temple that was to have been built in the fishing village of Steveston was postponed for some years because of sensitivity to this attitude. As one Christian spokesman put it:

Almost all the Japanese immigrants who came to Steveston in the early days were Buddhists. When a large number of them … first proposed to erect a Buddhist temple in order to provide a gathering place for lonely Japanese fishermen, I objected to such a proposal for I thought that erecting a temple and spreading out this religion in this community might create unnecessary suspicion and fear on the part of the lower classes of white Canadians. For this reason, the erection of a temple was postponed until 1928 when the Japanese decided that the adoption of Buddhism should not necessarily be inharmonious to the Canadian people.⁹

The grounds for controversy were often ostensibly predicated in this manner by divergent attitudes in the community towards this very aspect of whether or not the more visible of the Japanese institutions should be perpetuated in Canada. But the basis of conflict on many issues lay essentially in the struggle by the various churches to win prestige and influence in the community which so often, after the pious moralizings had been spoken and forgotten, was the root of many factional disputes. In the jockeying for power, no holds were barred, and rumour-mongering was a favourite tactic. One United Church minister’s account – even if highly coloured – was illustrative of the divisive elements at work in rural communities where the Buddhist-Christian issue was much more the subject of tension than in the urban areas:

When I was appointed here we had a membership of only five full members. During the past five years the membership has reached over 1,000 … and my future mission is to realize ‘A Pacific Christian Hamlet.’ There are so many hindrances and objections. One particular instance I might mention, as follows: The scheme of a Buddhist institution among the Japanese in the O[kanagan] V[alley] was originated by some of the unyielding Buddhists and had its opening ceremony conducted by the Buddhist priest from Vancouver …. Prior to this, representatives of the Japanese Mission of the United Church of Canada invited these projectors and in the presence of crowded audiences had lengthy, familiar talks from various points of view. It was the particular effort of the Christian Japanese to secure the peace and welfare of the community, under the deep consciousness of its critical influence and vital consequences, especially to the Japanese children who will be the future members of the constitution of Canada.

Notwithstanding our expostulation, the projectors urgently called repeatedly on everyone, even to the Christian homes, in an effort to get the signatures of as many as possible to become members of the Buddhist Association, whether they had a living faith in Buddha or not. Again, a man opposed to the work of the Christian Church, inciting the mass to violence against the church, had his headquarters at O[kanagan] C[entre] …. During the past three years we have had to remove the names of two of our members from the church roll through his influence. Since then they published something against me and the church, in an effort to break my reputation and hinder the work.¹⁰

For some time, differences in religious affiliation continued to promote a growing gulf between people. But much of the hostility was resolved and modulated into a keen sense of rivalry in which the ceremonials, not the doctrines, were the subject matter for the often trivial issues. What kind of marriages should be conducted? The Buddhists, it was claimed, had large, costly and elaborate weddings and suppers with the serving of sake (rice wine), whereas the Christians favoured smaller weddings and served ice cream, sandwiches, cake – and tea, rather than sake.

Concomitant with their isolation from white society, immigrant organizations expanded and proliferated until the traditions inculcating the family and community life of late nineteenth century Japan were efficiently transplanted. The keystone of the immigrant society was the Japanese family system, the chief unit in an ideal community essentially composed of a collective system of families, involving concepts such as “honour” and “obligation.” It was an axiom in Japan that stable families meant a stable society; if a family was well-regulated, the state was rightly governed, and the whole kingdom was made tranquil and happy. What the immigrants were attempting to transplant in Canada was a tradition that was part of a feudal system which had existed for centuries. It was a tradition which regulated daily behaviour and entwined each individual in a rigid pattern of obligations and rights, defining his position in the family and community. The initial act of immigration itself might have been an individual movement, a break with the cohesive family group; in their early years in Canada, the young immigrants maintained this individualism. But with marriage, the system again came to the fore.

The immigrant family closely adhered to the traditional Japanese structure which might have had similarities, to some extent, with the structure of any family. But among the Japanese, the roles which individual members of the family played were explicitly defined; rights and obligations were not merely implied but were defined in express and minute detail. The family was patriarchal in form with the father exercising supreme authority. The woman’s position was lowly; the wife’s function was to provide a male heir, to be generally a servant to her husband and children in every respect, to manage the household, and to augment the family income. She was, in essence, a domestic servant: the last to dine, last to bathe, last to go to bed, and the first to rise. She had to be a woman, under these conditions, of infinite patience and endurance.¹¹ Children were expected to be obedient and to strictly observe the canons of filial piety. And although masculinity had its privileges and prerogatives, the head of the household held recognized duties and responsibilities: to manage any family property and provide a future head of the house, support all household members, arrange for marriages and provide education and guidance.

The continuity of the family line was vital; hence, male children were often prized far more than females – an attitude which persisted in immigrant families for some time. One informant noted:

My mother went over to congratulate Mrs. W. on having a new baby. When she spoke to Mrs. W., the reply was, ‘Why, that’s nothing to be congratulated about. It wasn’t a boy.’

And since the marriage of husband and wife had been arranged, partly to ensure the procreation and rearing of offspring who would be “good Japanese” in the sense that they would be family-bound, hard-working and loyal, it was expected that the selection of a mate would be controlled by the parents when the time came for the second-generation children to be married.

Indeed, as the child grew into adolescence, strict parental dominance and control was the rule. As a child, however, it was traditional to allow almost every whim to be gratified, even beyond the first years of school life. As long as his actions were not injurious to himself or to others, the typical child was allowed an exceptional degree of liberty, almost a licence for mischief. Constraint came much later – and with a vengeance! To mould a personality which respected and unquestionably submitted to the parents and was sensitive to the demands of family loyalty and the minutiae of social proprieties was the ideal towards which parents strived. Most parents firmly believed that this system was a potent force for the creation of good citizens and the development of valuable personalities. But in the context of the Canadian scene, it was a retarding influence on children.

“Family honour” was vital. Constant stress was placed on the rule that children must never do anything that might stain the family name. Characteristically, the fear that the child might not achieve proper manners and emotional control was not based on a concern for the well-being of the child but stemmed from an anxiety that he might not fit into prescribed ways of thinking or acting. The ideas of filial piety and seniority, which permeated all Japanese thought, were intended to enclose the child into uncritical acceptance of persons who were his elders and therefore possessed more “experience” and “wisdom” in the ways of the world and of traditions which were “true” because they were based on custom. Little praise, for example, was directly offered to the child who had to understand that the withholding of commendation and unfavourable comparison with others was the Japanese way of showing affection and of encouraging him to greater effort.

“Honour” pertained, not simply to the individual, but to the family. A man’s acts brought praise or blame not only on himself but on his family, his parents and brothers, his ancestors and his descendants. Concern for the family honour, therefore, became an important moral force operating on the individual in all of his dealings with the community. If he offended against the rules of propriety governing his relations with other members of the community, his shame was his family’s shame, for his honour was his family’s honour. If his actions brought the family’s “good name” into ill-repute, the family might reject him. Thus the possibility of incurring the displeasure of, and becoming emotionally isolated from, his family and the community was a sufficient sanction to prevent him departing from the established modes of conduct, such as marrying a Chinese or a white.

In the community, then, as well as within the home, the individual was expected to act “properly” at all times so that all behaviour was closely linked in a reciprocal relationship. “We must live up to the expectations of the community!” To besmirch the family reputation was an unspeakable act:

Mother often lectures us that whatever we do threatens or upholds our family name, and that if we should do anything shameful, the public could blame the parents’ method of bringing us up. A blot on the family honour!¹²

“You must respect yourself,” was constantly on parents’ lips in admonishing their adolescent children, and it referred to observing proprieties and living up to other people’s expectations. A girl was thus admonished to sit without moving, her legs properly placed, and a boy to train himself to watch for cues from others.

Obviously, these rigid mechanisms of behaviour were to work imperfectly; in many cases, parents were either unable or unwilling to impose these modes of conduct. The influence of daily attendance at Canadian schools, contact with Western customs and ideas and their own coming of age were forces that were to compel the Nisei into bitter conflict with this system. Yet this authoritarian system was enormously influential – often in sourly negative ways – in moulding their personality. And for most, this inheritance was impossibly difficult to eradicate completely, affecting their behaviour outside the smothering womb of their society.

The kenjinkai further linked families firmly to the life of the community. This was actually a new association organized in Canada to take the place of missing parts of the family council and the old village structure. Emigration abruptly broke the extended kinship ties which bound a Japanese from birth and which regulated the essential functions, especially at birth, marriage and death. The kenjinkai filled this gap. The prefecture in Japan was an administrative and geographic unit of the nation, and the people from each prefecture were generally distinguishable from others by regional differences in dialect, customs and traits. Such a common background offered members of a prefecture an intimacy which they could not feel with people from other ken. “Which is your province?” was the inevitable question when strangers met. Hiroshima-ken people, for example, were regarded in Canada as shrewd and sharp-dealing, with a special acumen for business or trade. As new immigrants arrived from Japan, the kunimono (people from the same prefecture) felt bound to help each other.

The big event of the year for the kenjinkai was the giant summer picnic, a gay affair of gossip, dancing, speeches, games, soda pop and sushi (rice cakes). But kenjinkai were not merely organized for casual social purposes. These associations performed a vital role as “mutual aid” societies through which the immigrants adjusted themselves to the new social and economic context. Many immigrants learned new trades or prospered in business through contact with their own kenjinkai, often living close together and working in the same jobs. Sometimes the kenjinkai served as a means of self-aggrandizement for those whose qualities of leadership could find no scope in white society. Leaders of labour gangs, for example, were not beyond exploiting their own people. But the spirit of mutual helpfulness, with its corollary of mutual obligation, permeated these associations and proved to be of enormous aid in not only getting immigrants settled in homes and jobs but in integrating them into a new community life.

Kunimono usually felt obliged to transact all of their business with their own members, as these were generally their closest friends or acquaintances. Thus an insurance agent might depend for his success on belonging to a kenjinkai with a large membership; a merchant might extend credit to a kunimono in cases where his business sense would ordinarily reject it. And, generally, the kenjinkai gave help to those members who were financially embarrassed by illness, death or unemployment.

The practice of tanomoshi, the mutual financial association, was generally organized among kunimono, though not necessarily restricted to them. In contrast with the impersonalization of commercial transactions, with their interest payments and securities, a man in need of money would not require any security beyond his “good name.” A group of friends would form a tanomoshi, gather at an informal dinner, and each contribute an agreed sum of money which was then “rented” to the borrower, who was the subject of the dinner, free of charge. He usually reciprocated by paying the cost of the dinner, returning the money through monthly instalments and giving a small monetary gift to each member. The tanomoshi, attended by ritual politeness and group sentiment, was a striking example of the spirit of “mutual help” which informed community relations, passing from the immediate family circle to a larger matrix.

The problem of arranged marriages was also part of the kenjinkai’s concerns, for parents would ordinarily wish to mate their offspring with persons whose ancestral roots lay in the same prefecture. Thus the kenjinkai often provided intermediaries for arranged marriages and undertook the investigation of family lines. Such a practice, however, came to be exceedingly unpopular among Nisei as were the efforts of parents to continue the tradition of the kenjinkai among their children.

In such a closely knit life, deviations from accepted mores became quickly known; therefore, obligations were scrupulously fulfilled to guard position and reputation. Usually the celebration of birth and marriage and the obsequies of death involved a cluster of traditional obligations, chiefly that of gift-giving. To fail to give a gift at the birth of a child was a social offence scarcely to be condoned, giving rise to comment and speculation. The more closely the giver was associated with the family, the larger the gift was expected to be. In the matter of funerals, a gift to the bereaved was deemed as a token of the giver’s share in the sorrow, and the family representative always gave money enclosed in an envelope bearing the name of the family. A record of the koden (literally, “incense gift”) was kept, for the list was a concrete testimonial to the number of sorrowing friends and relatives. It also became a memorandum for future use in deciding the proper amount to contribute to a funeral in the families of any of the visitors. But the process did not stop there, for if a person was required to pay koden, then he had a right to expect something in return. Thus as a token of appreciation, the recipient was obligated to return some of the money directly or indirectly, by donating, for example, to some public organization or institution such as a church. Indeed, many clubs depended on “donations” of this sort on the occasion of births, marriages, deaths or other such auspicious events as graduation or recovery from an illness, rather than exacting membership fees. Churches and ministers also expected to receive “donations.”

Often the burden of reciprocal obligations became intolerable and pernicious. One participant complained:

The Japanese custom of paying back obligations is based on the idea that a person should always share things. It is bad to keep things to oneself, and, to be completely right, one should always give just a little more than one receives. This means that obligations may keep pyramiding until it is difficult to get on in the world.¹³

A new competitiveness or rivalry arose. And often, in order to maintain or promote their status in the community, a family might try to outdo other families in the fulfilment of obligations, even if it meant “eating just rice and pickles” to make up for the cost of gifts. Said one victim of this enforced diet:

It is customary to send very elaborate and expensive gifts and if, unwittingly, you don’t send something that is just as expensive, the receivers will comment on it and word will spread. I never could understand when I was a little girl, why mother opened the packages when they came, and then wrapped them up again. Now I know she did this to determine their value and see if her gift was equal to the one received.¹⁴

Such behaviour was enjoined by the idea that each was interdependent on all who lived in that society. To acknowledge this concept explicitly by a constant readiness to perform favours for others and punctiliously to requite favours received with material gifts (shirushidake or “mere token”) was proper and moral behaviour.

The New Year was a traditional occasion for the settlement of accumulated obligations. It was customary to call on New Year’s Day at the home of relatives, friends or any person to whom one was indebted, according to a descending order of indebtedness or importance as established by etiquette. It was the duty of the male members of the family to make the calls while the females remained at home to serve guests. But of course the visits were also symbolic of friendship, and this latter meaning came to supersede the niggling obligations of acknowledging and paying past favours, for New Year’s Day was essentially a joyous occasion. It continued to be celebrated in a richly convivial manner, almost Bacchanalian in its surfeit of food and drink, usually preceded by pounding mochi (rice cakes), eating soba (noodles) at the stroke of the new year, having a ritual bath and eating ozoni (a broth with mochi and vegetables) in the morning.

This organizational life, with its emphasis on avoiding shame, meant that the Japanese always “looked after their own.” Because they had been driven out of certain industries and barred from others, serious unemployment and a heavy relief load might have been inevitable through the years. But unemployment was relatively low and the Japanese exerted less of a strain on provincial welfare than most other groups. In the height of the Depression, 93,924 persons were listed as being on relief in British Columbia, representing 13.05% of the total population. But only 924 Japanese, or, 4.2% of the Japanese population, were on relief.¹⁵ Those familial and kinship ties which bound the Japanese together ensured that assistance would be given to the needy. Sometimes the kenjinkai would intervene:

We do not wish to see our own ken people starving or committing a crime, for in either case it reflects disgrace on us. If he is starving, we should take the responsibility of helping him, and if he displays any criminal tendencies, we should restrain him and lead him back to proper conduct, for he is one of the doken-jin (fellow member of the prefecture).¹⁶

The same eagerness to protect their “good name” kept down the rate of delinquency and crime among the Japanese to the point where they were among the most law-abiding citizens in Canada – in contrast to the usual pattern which marked the disorientation accompanying the early settlement of most immigrant groups.¹⁷

The low rate of crime was especially remarkable as most Japanese lived in depressed neighbourhoods. In a 10-year period, according to records kept by the Vancouver Juvenile Court, a total of 13 Japanese children (compared to 5,262 other juveniles) were detained. Judge Helen McGill, commenting on this “remarkably” small number, declared that though Japanese were exposed to the potential “contagion” of near slum neighbourhoods, low standard housing and the high ratio of delinquents among their white school mates, they managed to stay out of the courts.

The sense of family responsibility is keen. When an Oriental child is before the Juvenile Court, the courtroom is filled with relatives – fathers, mothers, older brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins, grandparents, etc., all anxious for the child, and for the family credit, all eager to help and to rectify any wrong. Too often, the white child stands alone, a tragic, pathetic little figure, uncomforted by the presence of other members of the family. The relief office may feed him, the Children’s Aid mother him, the public school educate him, but the family remains aloof, uninterested, or hostile and resentful. Many times have I adjourned court to insist that the father and mother stand beside their child. Never is this so with the Oriental.¹⁸

For the Japanese, crime was regarded as an exceptional disgrace because it was recorded in the koseki-tohon (family register). Passed on from generation to generation, the koseki-tohon contained important information about all members of the family. When marriages were to be arranged, for example, the usual investigation would ferret out any crime committed, and family members would not be able to marry as advantageously as they might wish. More generally, the “crime” – whatever the extenuating circumstances and its nature – would engender for family members immediate loss of face and feelings of shame, impossible to avoid in a gossip-ridden community. Hence, the treading of the “moral” tight-rope.

In the matter of a few decades, then, the Japanese built up a vast complex of associations and clubs, involving at least 230 units of secular and religious associations in British Columbia, of which 84 functioned in the Vancouver colony which contained, by the 1930s, nearly one-third of the province’s Japanese population.¹⁹ Indeed, the Vancouver community functioned as a “brain centre” for the scattered immigrant population, with the most important associations having their headquarters in the city.

Outside of Vancouver, the associations tended to diversify their functions. Most groups in Vancouver – such as the barbers, cleaners, pressers, merchants or rooming-house keepers – consisted of members of highly specialized occupations and served a limited and specific purpose. But in the smaller communities, the trade associations of the farmers or fishermen functioned for the community as a whole. The adult males in the dominant local industry performed the dual functions of an occupational organization and a community council. They would protect the economic interests of their members – which involved almost the entire community in, for example, the fishing areas of Steveston or Prince Rupert – especially against the attempts of anti-Japanese groups to restrict their employment. And they would also promote the welfare of the entire local community, giving moral and financial support to subsidiary associations such as language schools or athletic groups.

Subordinate to the adult male organizations lay a substrata of women’s and youth organizations. The women’s associations, usually comprised of wives of the men in the trade groups, provided the same services that the fujinkai rendered in Japan. Usually their activities consisted of learning or adapting new domestic techniques, or in supervising kindergartens for their children. The youth groups, like their prototypes in Japan, usually indulged in a programme of lectures, debates, social activities and sports, proliferating as more of the second generation reached adolescence. Their activities were stereotyped and, for some time, largely controlled by the parents who wished them to follow rigidly defined ways of acting in public.

As a result, there was general opposition to dancing or to mixed recreational activities. Japanese custom decreed that young men and women should not be seen together until after marriage. When parents insisted upon this sex segregation, conflict with their Canadian-born children, who were aware of the way in which sexes mingled among other Canadians, was inevitable. For the first generation, whose experience led them to believe that males sought women only to satisfy sexual needs, the association of the sexes could not but jeopardize the daughter’s reputation and make it difficult to arrange a suitable marriage. Should a young man put his arms around a girl when dancing, it was interpreted as a prelude to “immoral” relations. The subject of dancing came to be a source of strife at home and evolved into a community issue and although more and more parents learned to compromise, it did not mean that their attitudes had in any way changed.

Out of the plethora of organizations, the Canadian Japanese Association, established in 1897, was the one group which claimed to represent the entire immigrant population. The CJA performed useful service in aiding many immigrants to find jobs and developed programmes for adult education, especially in the study of Canadian customs and the English language. In the early years, it tried to act as a watchguard of “moral standards,” not an easy task owing to the preponderance of single males and the flourishing of the usual vices.²⁰

In ensuing decades, it encouraged immigrants to become naturalized Canadians and promoted Issei to enlist during World War I. After the war, when the veterans agitated to obtain the franchise, the CJA backed their ten-year struggle. Although its aims were somewhat vague, the CJA continued its long existence primarily because of the anti-Japanese pressure in the province. In the late 1920s, it geared the efforts of the fishermen to win a temporary victory over the federal government’s reduction of licences to naturalized and native-born citizens.

Reorganized in 1934, the CJA launched a scheme to make itself the coordinating agency for all Japanese associations. It succeeded to a large extent, claiming a dues-paying membership of over 3,600 people and a total of 23 associations affiliated with it throughout the province, including the more important groups such as the 600-member Fishermens Association of Skeena, the 413-member Fishermens Benevolent Association of Steveston and the wealthy Merchants Association of Vancouver with its 78 members. Its newspaper, the Tairiku Nippo, reached 3,000 readers.

Much of its prestige and influence stemmed from its close relations with the Japanese consulate, which recognized the Association’s position as a central “control agency.” The CJA was granted privileges by the various consuls and was utilized as an administrative organ to issue certificates of various kinds, to collect statistics and to process documents. That leadership and control of the CJA was generally in the lap of the more wealthy businessmen contributed further to its influence.

The virtual homogeneity of the social and economic background of the immigrants at first resulted in a curious lack of class consciousness. Status and prestige were generally based on the amount of worthy social service rendered by an individual. But this attitude slowly shifted, and economic success came to be regarded as a basic criterion of status. And by the 1930s, a very small group became relatively wealthy in comparison to the bulk of struggling Japanese. Even the gambling overlords of the Vancouver community had their fingers in the CJA pie and began to assume an increasingly greater control. On top of the scale, however, was the Japanese consul – as the official representative of the Japanese government and the chief symbol of authority and identification with Japan – the person to whom most deference was paid. For the Japanese immigrant, the strength of the consular office in no small measure compensated for their lack of citizenship rights, so that to normal deference was added a feeling of dependency. Thus the combination of influential leaders, backed by the prestigious office of the consulate, loomed over immigrant affairs.

When complaints against discrimination were channeled to the Japanese consulate, they usually received prompt and sympathetic attention. From the very early years, it was the consul, acting on behalf of the Japanese government, who tried to protect the rights of the immigrants and explain their position to a hostile public. This intervention, based on the paternalistic attitude of Japan towards her people who settled in foreign lands,²¹ irritated the anti-Japanese public, but it was perfectly legal for the consul to intervene in the interests of Japanese nationals on the basis of the conditions of the trade treaty between Japan and Canada. Even other classes of Japanese could be indirectly drawn into the consulate’s hegemony through the latter’s contact with the CJA. Thus this relationship helped to create the suspicion that Tokyo was in control of immigrant affairs and was directing them for “colonizing” Canada, among other nefarious purposes.

Undoubtedly, the CJA, performing functions which in Japan might have been carried out by the government bureaucracy or by a more informal village council, did good work. Realizing that economic opportunities in many fields were blocked by discriminatory regulations, the CJA promoted a “fact-finding” survey in 1935, meticulously researched by six Nisei university students and graduates, and published the results in a 56-page report. Earlier, in an effort to combat a move to segregate Japanese pupils in public schools, it published a pamphlet, A Few Facts About Japanese School Children in Canada, hoping to dispel rumours that the children were carriers of contagious diseases and to proselytize their “superior” intelligence. It booked a full-page advertisement in the Vancouver Province, to review for a sceptical public the contributions of the Japanese to Canada.²²

Still, the CJA was essentially oriented towards Japan, stressing the superiority of Japanese ethics and culture; it therefore lacked the incisive insight, within the terms of Canadian society, which might have allowed it to plan its strategy more efficiently. For example, in a severely jingoistic pamphlet, published in 1937 as Japan continued her march in China, the CJA put its nominal authorship to 14 pages of close print which endeavoured “to disabuse the minds of the people [of Canada] of any misunderstandings which may have arisen in connection with the situation in the Far East.”²³ In its apologia for the Sino-Japanese War, the CJA, in effect, blamed the “arrogant” Nanking government for fomenting the war and whitewashed Japan’s patently aggressive role. Even though this attitude might have reflected the general feeling of the community as a means of “clearing” the tense anti-Japan hostility in British Columbia, the circulation of this piece of war propaganda was totally misguided.

Although the immigrant Japanese obviously had many things in common, there were individualists among them, people who were interested in shedding the circumscribing Old World attitudes. Variations in education and age and attitudes towards permanent residence and assimilation, served to whittle away gradually some of the constrictions, despite the inhibiting quality of life in the nihonjinmachi. Throwing its gauntlet into the sphere of authority and prestige enjoyed by the CJA was the Camp and Mill Workers Union, composed of a bloc of younger Issei, some with a broader education and a white-collar background. Organized in 1920, it soon presented a direct challenge to the CJA and represented almost a totally different direction in which the Japanese could move. The CJA, protectionist and conservative, pursued a policy of separatism; the Union felt that the interests of the immigrants, in the long run, were identical with those of similar groups in white society. Rather than merely attempt to defend the status of the Japanese, the Union advocated meaningful contact, if not co-operation, with white labour.

Inspired by E. Suzuki, the Union began publishing a weekly newspaper, later called The Daily People, to proselytize its policies. It also opened a retail co-operative and an employment bureau and by the mid-1930s, had organized eight locals with a membership of about 600. Its most astonishing coup occurred in 1927 when it became affiliated with the Trades and Labour Congress of Canada which hitherto had been among the most indefatigable and vociferous of enemies of the immigrant Japanese, alleging that the Japanese were a danger not only to standards of living but to standards of morality as well.²⁴ The TLC and other national congresses historically opposed wide-scale, unselective immigration, though they had been moderate and restrained compared with the locals in British Columbia with their narrow sectional prejudice against the Japanese. But four years after the TLC accepted the Japanese, the Union became affiliated with the Vancouver, New Westminster and District Trades and Labour Council.

Another coup was the Union’s success in getting the TLC at its Vancouver convention in 1931 to endorse its request that British Columbia amend the Provincial Elections Act so that Canadian-born Japanese could obtain “equality of treatment and full rights of citizenship.” It also persuaded the Congress to amend a discriminatory resolution which had advocated “the exclusion of all Asiatics from Canada.” The new clause at least made the proposition much more vague, aiming for “the exclusion of all races that cannot be properly assimilated into the national life of Canada.” Finally, the Congress committed itself to press the federal government to treat applications for naturalization by Japanese “on an equal basis with applications of other aliens.”²⁵ Although the TLC did little to implement its promises, the very fact that it made these gestures represented a signal triumph.

Naturally, the TLC was not acting out of altruism. It had merely come to the conclusion that the solution to the problem of Japanese competition was to invite them to become partners in the fight for higher wages. By raising the standards of living of the Japanese, the TLC hoped to reduce their advantage in competition.

Rivalry between the CJA and the CMWU flared into open animosity. Although some of their expressed aims might have been similar, certainly the emphasis was different. Both, for example, were urging immigrants to become naturalized citizens, but the CMWU made a consistent stand for the renunciation of Japanese citizenship. The problem of “dual citizenship” was especially vexing to the Nisei whose parents, for a variety of reasons, registered them with the consulate as Japanese citizens. Under a 1924 amendment to her nationality laws, Japan had declared that Japanese who had acquired another nationality by birth in certain specified countries, including Canada, automatically lost Japanese citizenship unless they were registered within 14 days of birth with the Japanese consul.

The two groups also differed in their attitudes towards the emerging Nisei who by the early 1930s were attempting to assert themselves independently on many issues. But lack of money frustrated their attempts to act separately, and the cultural gap between the two generations blocked meaningful communication. The CJA, however, began to include some of the older Nisei on its board of directors; on a few occasions they made joint representations to various authorities on problems affecting the community. But the gap between the generations was often widened by public criticism of the Nisei. After one CJA-sponsored conference held to discuss vocational problems, the Nisei complained that the Issei offered few remedies but spent almost the entire meeting heaping “recriminations” on the character of the Nisei.²⁶ Leaders of the CMWU, on the other hand, tended to express public admiration for the second generation and wholeheartedly supported their attempts to gain closer rapprochement with white society.

In a large sense, the split between the CJA and the CMWU symbolized the trends along which the community, as a whole, was slowly drifting. The Japanese were not a group who gave unquestioned obedience to one group of leaders in their own ranks, and cleavages between various colours of opinion and allegiance always marked the group. Until the Nisei could effectively emancipate themselves from the yoke of parental control, however, community influence remained in the hands of the Issei.

The CJA gave the closest approach to overall leadership by force of numbers and prestige, and contained three times the number of members as did its rivals. But its weaknesses as a body able to provide a unified and coherent voice to community affairs were apparent in the evacuation crisis when it almost collapsed with the first shock of the war. The CMWU, on the other hand, failed to attract a sufficient popularity because it was aligned with those Issei who sometimes spoke out or wrote unfavourably about the militarism of Japan. Moreover, its mild socialism was against the conservative grain of the Little Tokyo mentality. The Issei generally found the concept of unionism repugnant because it did not fit into traditional attitudes of loyalty and indebtedness to employers or contractors. And through its close ties with credit-controlling merchants, the CJA could exert pressure on families and groups not only in Vancouver but also in the lumber camps and canneries up the coast and among farmers in inland British Columbia, thereby weakening the influence of the CMWU and other “deviant” groups.

The three Japanese-language newspapers – the Tairiku, the Canada Shimpo and to a lesser extent, the Daily People – served to tighten the ring of isolation. The dailies, particularly the Tairiku, tended to preserve nationalistic feeling for Japan in that they maintained contact between the home country and the settlers, especially in the 1930s when the fortunes of Japan in her military venture in China was the most important item on the front page. The papers also featured articles on the anti-Japanese movement on the west coast and recorded any manifestation against the Japanese which took place. But their staple was gossip, sensation and fiction. The organizational activities of the community were recorded in great detail, as were all the births, marriages and deaths and other events which made up the body of the community’s daily conversation.

At its best, the vernacular press was the instrument through which the immigrants learned to interpret the issues and events of the white society within which they were situated. In the columns of their journals, they read reports of the important incidents of the day, rendered in a meaningful manner. But none of the dailies carried an editorial section which followed a consistently defined policy, criticizing or objecting, commending or approving in community affairs. The Japanese press probably suffered from an intellectual enryo (restraint) in failing to provide strong leadership, a fault often attributed to the Japanese characteristic of “cursed sensitivity to adverse criticism.”²⁷ Thus they would rarely criticize any community attitude or movement openly or take a clear-cut public stand for fear of ruffling feelings among readers.

The Japanese-language school was also an institutional device for reaffirming traditional Japanese values that attempted to perpetuate these values in the growing children. A language school, consisting of one teacher and 30 pupils, was already in existence on Vancouver’s Alexander Street by 1906. By 1935, some 40 schools were functioning in the province with a combined staff of 80 teachers and an enrolment of 3,283.

Classes ranged from 12 pupils meeting twice a week at Mount Lehman in the Fraser Valley to 967 pupils meeting daily for two hours at the Alexander Street school in Vancouver.

The immigrant Japanese hoped that the schools would be a powerful means of instilling in their children a sense of pride in their background. They thought that the schools might assist in bridging the gap that had begun to separate the two generations. Without always being aware of the fact, the Issei were seeking to bring up their children as compromise Canadians, capable of living in two worlds. In most schools, the courses of instruction were limited to reading and writing in the Japanese language, but a few schools deviated from this programme. They included extensive reading of shushin (ethics) and Japanese history and thus attempted to inculcate reverence for the Emperor and pride in serving Japan. Moreover, textbooks used in all schools were imported from Japan and drew their illustrations from Japanese events, personalities, concepts and mythology. Kimigayo, the national anthem, was sung on special occasions; the Emperor’s birthday was marked with formal bows and banzais.

Critics contended that the daily classes conflicted with and hindered the programme of the public schools and that the additional workload imposed an impossibly rigorous strain on the children, injurious to their health. And as interpreted by anti-Japanese agitators – irrefutable evidence of loyalty to Tokyo. As international relationships became more strained, so the school issue became more controversial.

Even within the community these schools had become an issue, between parents who harangued their children into attending and Nisei who resented this pressure. Probably one of the heaviest blows for the immigrant generation was the realization that their children were gradually turning away from them. They were fond of claiming that they had pinned all their hopes on their children, that it was for them that they had “sweated and slaved” without thought of personal gain, of good clothes, homes or cars, that they lived in the hopes of their children. The rebuffs they experienced in British Columbia were perhaps minor when compared with the growing realization that they lived in one world and their children in another – and that they could not even share a common language.²⁸

A year before Pearl Harbor, Tsutae Sato, principal of the largest school in the province, was publicly emphasizing that the public schools must be recognized as the prime educational factor in the community and that Japanese-language instruction was secondary and, at best, merely an adjunct to the moulding of good citizens. A respected educator among the Japanese, Sato still had not managed – like most Issei – to acquire a speaking knowledge of English. At the same time, Minister of Education George Weir announced that he had introduced amendments to the British Columbia School Act which would give the Department of Education the power to supervise and inspect language instruction in private schools. The measure, designed to guard against “possible subversive teaching” in language schools, was enacted by the provincial legislature in December of 1940. Shortly before it came into effect, some 60 Japanese-language school trustees and teachers met to discuss ways of acquiring textbooks “in line with the life and interests of the pupils themselves and the Canadian scene,”²⁹ and were said to be “unsparing” in urging greater emphasis upon the “cultivation of Canadianism.” An effort had been made fifteen years previously to secure new textbooks to replace those printed in Japan, but the cost apparently had been prohibitive. A newly organized Japanese Educational Society then took rather belated steps to raise $5,000 for the revision of the texts.

Years earlier in California, where attacks on the language schools had been just as intense, the State School Department had specified standards for the contents of permissible texts and also required teachers to be conversant in English.³⁰ The Japanese associations generally complied with the law requiring registration of schools, qualifying of teachers and adoption of new texts. But only one school in the Fraser Valley town of Haney adopted the California texts.

Through the years, the Japanese had struggled to retain the language schools despite the unsettling knowledge that they were an admitted failure. The efforts to maintain them illustrated how high the symbolic value of language was, for on any pragmatic test of their success, the schools would have been abandoned. Standards were astonishingly low and were geared to the traditional methods of promotion and the exigencies of finance. Since the schools depended on maintaining their levels of attendance if they were to exist, students whose marks were below passing were not failed and made to repeat a grade. Although they underwent periodic examinations, students invariably were promoted each year and so stayed with the same group of schoolmates. Teachers rarely inflicted the “shame” of failure on a child, a shame which would be reflected on the child’s family; therefore the duller children passed through school at the same rate as the bright ones. Together with this curb on any incentive to excel, the opportunities for independent and constructive thinking were limited by the sheer burden of rote learning imposed by the three systems of script: katakana and hiragana syllabaries and Sino-Japanese characters.

The schools were not “subversive,” nor were they actually the nurturers of Japanese nationalism. Aged from seven to 15 years, most of the children took to the task of learning Japanese without enthusiasm, looked upon it as a punitive task imposed on them by parents, and resented the restriction upon their time which otherwise could have been indulged in sports and other activities taking place after regular school hours. Only a very minimal fluency in the Japanese language was achieved in any case. The majority of the Nisei, a few of whom were full graduates of the schools, seldom read Japanese literature and were unable to read even the simple prose of the vernacular press.

Most of the teachers, Japan-born and trained, were unable to speak English and consequently lacked any kind of incisive insight into their pupils’ minds. Discipline problems, especially in classes taught by young women, were frequent, adding to the general ineptitude of the teachers’ classroom techniques. Male instructors often resorted to heavy-handed methods to chasten students who, in contrast to their behaviour in public schools, tended to be unruly and disrespectful. In the public schools, they were invariably extolled for their application and not infrequent brilliance and remarked upon for their docility and politeness. One Nisei, in reviewing his years at a language school, declared that

nothing very much remains but a ‘conditioned’ allergy to the study of the Japanese language, which persists even to this day, and memories of youthful pranks at the expense of the long-suffering teacher.³¹

The student preferred, moreover, “the gusty, boisterous exploits” of Radisson or Champlain to the “remote and confusing” accounts of Jimmu Tenno, the first Japanese Emperor. For the teachers – men and women who had the impossible task of functioning as cultural outposts and for their pains were accused as being spies in the payroll of the Japanese army – the low pay, the indifference of the children and the handicap of limited facilities were only mitigated by the high respect in which teachers were held by the community.

The obligatory attendance at language schools also frequently resulted in certain speech difficulties for the Nisei, particularly if the Japanese language was learned well or used consistently. An adolescent learning Japanese was likely to speak English somewhat poorly: “this” became “dis”; “the” became “da” or “dee”; there was difficulty in “l” sounds, and definite articles dropped or plurals omitted. Such defective English was not noticeable when the Nisei associated entirely with his own group; but in conversation with other native-born Canadians, these peculiarities of speech were often painfully embarrassing. Straddling two cultures and being brought up in a semi-English, semi-Japanese environment, many Nisei were genuinely and instinctively at home with neither language.³²

If the immigrants, then, were to adjust to their new environment, it had to be within the confines of the ghettos which the environment created. The common situation that cut them off from the rest of the city, town or camp united them, and the immigrant Japanese unit existed as a separate system unincorporated in the organization of the dominant white population. Even in the more remote areas, such as the Skeena or the Okanagan, the tendency was always towards a solid geographical concentration. It was rare for a Japanese to move out of the narrow coastal strip; it was even more unusual for them to move east of the Rockies. On the contrary, they were more densely concentrated on December 7, 1941, than they had been 20 or 30 years previously.

Concentration and visibility increased the prejudice against them, and this prejudice, in part, increased the degree of concentration. It tended to accentuate those aspects of Japanese culture and tradition which accounted for group solidarity. It tended to preserve the Japanese family system; it made possible the continuance of a highly organized group. And the fact that the immigrants had a homogeneous and self-satisfying culture tended to make them more socially content with the restricted world in which they lived. For the immigrant generation, the desire for acceptance by the members of the larger, dominant community was not based on social grounds but on the basis of economic or political parity. Within the social pattern brought from Japan, the immigrants lived by themselves, and everyday routines became systematized in institutionalized relationships within family and community. By the force of group opinion, they controlled crime and delinquency and promoted harmony, industry and frugality. They perpetuated the language and customs of the land they came from. Denied acceptance, they clung to a belief in the “Japanese way”; it was better than any other they saw.

“Little Tokyo” – or “Japtown” as the more hostile termed it – was a physical as well as a social fact; the Vancouver Powell Street area, the focal point of Japanese activities, was the symbol for all Japanese communities in the province. It was a physically segregated area – as it was mentally. And from the physical, the immigrants gained a deep consciousness of their separateness. The area was apart as if a ghetto wall defined it. It was possible to shop at Japanese-owned stores, to live in Japanese-operated boarding-houses or hotels, to congregate at street corners, to sit in soft drink and ice cream parlours, to eat traditional Japanese foods in cafes, to go to the Japanese-language school and hall close by, to watch the local athletic teams play on the sandlot, to worship in Buddhist temple or Christian church.

On a warm summer evening the older men and women might sit in front of the stores that were also their homes, gossiping in their Kumamoto or Hiroshima accents. Pleasure came out of talk; the ability to communicate with each other was sometimes bond enough. Almost every individual was known to his fellows: he had a reputation and played a role. And whether he was the butt of laughter or the subject of respect, he was a person of some defined character. Groceries, fish markets, dry cleaners, barbers, pool halls, garages, takuan (pickled radish) and tofu (bean curd): the immigrants had created nihonjinmachi, a miniature of the life they had known in Japan, a wall against prejudice and rejection, a compensation for that return to Japan of which they dreamed. The temple, the school and the neighbourhood group stitched and bound the community; the environment was controlled.

But of course the immigrants were not completely secluded within their own folkways. They showed a willingness to adopt the superficies of Canadian ways: to adopt Canadian clothes, furnishings, profanity and even religious practices. Many of them cultivated an almost fanatical taste for baseball; they supported one of the perennially successful teams, the Asahis, in Vancouver’s sandlot leagues. And characteristically, the Asahis played with industry and perseverance, if not style. Some of the immigrants delighted in mixing their worship of motion picture folk heroes: Hollywood’s Hopalong Cassidy, Tom Mix, Charlie Chaplin and even Fred Astaire with the feudal samurais of the sword-clashing chanbaras and the drooping, long-suffering heroines of the sentimental romances.

Urban Japanese even cultivated, by necessity, the porcelain Western bathtub, a tepid substitute for the daily bone-soaking in the traditional Japanese bath, one of their best-loved pleasures of the body. For the poorest rice farmer, the meanest servant, just as much as for the rich aristocrat in Japan, the daily soak in superlatively heated water, even if it was merely in a wooden barrel, was not only for cleanliness’ sake but was refined to a fine art of passive indulgence – hard to duplicate in the bathing habits of the rest of the world.

They were model citizens if only for the fact that their crime rate was astonishingly low. They paid their debts and supported their own indigents. Observers claimed that few other immigrant groups ever made a more determined effort to succeed in the face of more obstacles than had been encountered by other racial minorities.³³ But their adoption of Canadian ways was, for the most part, superficial; their cultural heritage was too meaningful and binding. They were pious Christians mixed with perfervid nationalists. Many had no English; some lived restricted and narrow lives, in touch with no vital currents of thought either in Canada or in Japan. And if they were sentimentally attached to Japan, it was to a Japan they had not seen for many years.

Within their own group, the Japanese immigrants could celebrate their own heroes and holidays, live quite comfortably together, could laugh and deride their persecutors. As long as they cohered, they did not need to feel too much haunted by their problems. As the white community derided them by calling them “Japs,” so the Japanese often used the derogatory word keto, rather than the polite hakujin (white man), in reference to their persecutors. Some writers saw a war to the death between “two incompatible races” or at least visualized a white race and a yellow race fated forever to live beside each other on the Pacific coast implacably at odds with each other – unless the Japanese changed their ways.³⁴ It was up to the Japanese, the theory went, to acquire “white standards.” It was not, conversely, up to white society to do anything: that is, to lower bars and restrictions, modify some of its prejudices, or offer equality.

Few people in British Columbia blamed discriminatory laws and practices for the clannishness of the Japanese. They did not see that the Japanese were bound to cohere in the face of restrictive laws, exclusion from citizenship rights, from many occupations, from many neighbourhoods. Rather, the clannishness was ascribed to the “nature” of the Japanese as well as to control by Tokyo. But where members of the minority group were systematically excluded from occupations and political rights, it was sometimes fair to ask: Who was being clannish?

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Notes

1. Cf. U.S. Congress, Senate, Reports of the Immigration Commission, Immigrants in Industry, Japanese and Other Immigrant Races in the Pacific Coast and Rocky Mountain States, 61st Congress, 2nd Session, S. Doc. 85, Part I, Washington, 1911, pp. 147-8, 152-3. The number of Japanese night schools in the United States and the many who attended them were considered “the best evidence of the ambition and eagerness of the members of this race to learn western civilization.” Comparison with other groups suggested that “no adult immigrants in the west, unless it is the Hebrews, [showed] as great a desire to learn the English language.” ↩
2. Sumida, R., The Japanese in British Columbia (Master’s thesis, Department of Economics, University of British Columbia, 1935), p. 58. ↩
3. Osterhout, S.S., Orientals in Canada (Toronto: Ryerson, 1929), p. 144. ↩
4. Miyamoto, S.F., “Social Solidarity Among the Japanese in Seattle”, University of Washington Publications in the Social Sciences, 2 (1939), pp. 100-1. ↩
5. Most Christian Japanese tend to exaggerate the role of the church. Sumida, op. cit., p. 129: “Throughout the whole history of immigration [from Japan] the Christian Church has been recognized as the greatest institution aiding the assimilation of immigrants.” ↩
6. Park, R.E., The Immigrant Press and Its Control (New York: Harper, 1922), p. 158. ↩
7. Sumida, op. cit., pp. 144-5. ↩
8. Osterhout, op. cit., pp. 152-3. ↩
9. Interview, S. Yoshida, Steveston. Also see LaViolette, F.E., Americans of Japanese Ancestry (Toronto: Institute of International Affairs, 1945), p. 45 n. 14, who cites a case in Pasadena, California, in 1934 where Japanese Christians strenuously opposed the building of a Buddhist Church because Pasadena was “a Christian community” and “to bring Buddhism into Pasadena would not only break the peace of the community, but also cause and strengthen the anti-Japanese feeling.” ↩
10. Young, C.H., H.R.Y. Reid, and W.A. Carrothers, The Japanese Canadians (University of Toronto Press, 1939), p. 97. ↩
11. Kaibara Ekken’s Onna Daigaku (The Greater Learning for Women) was a book of moral instruction probably known to every Japanese. A translation of the book is contained in Chamberlain, B.H., Things Japanese (London: Kegan Paul, 1890), pp. 367-76. A basic assumption was that women were biologically inferior, an ethic that was implicitly acknowledged by the immigrant. “The five diseases of the female mind are disobedience, anger, slanderousness, jealousy and lack of intelligence. Seven or eight out of every ten women suffer from these faults. That is why women are inferior to men. In particular lack of intelligence is at the root of these other faults.” The wife must therefore “look to her husband as her lord, and must serve him with all worship and reverence, not despising or thinking lightly of him. The great lifelong duty of a woman is obedience. In her dealings with her husband, both the expression of her countenance and the style of her address should be courteous, humble and conciliatory, never peevish and intractable, never rude and arrogant …. Should her husband be roused at any time to anger, she must obey him with fear and trembling, and not set herself up against him in anger and disputatiousness. A woman should look up on her husband as if he were Heaven itself.” ↩
12. LaViolette, op. cit., p. 26. ↩
13. LaViolette, op. cit., p. 60. ↩
14. LaViolette, op. cit., p. 61. ↩
15. British Columbia Department of Labour, Unemployment Relief Branch, Statement Showing Numbers Receiving Direct Relief in Organized and Unorganized Territory (Victoria, December 31, 1934). ↩
16. Sumida, op. cit., p. 159. ↩
17. Sumida, op. cit., p. 160. In 1934, there were three Japanese (0.6%) of a total of 527 inmates in British Columbia penitentiaries. According to the 1931 census, the Japanese in the province represented 3.2% of the total population. A survey of Japanese inmates in Oakalla prison farm during a 14-year period, 1920-1934, showed a total of 147 imprisoned for offences ranging from murder to “frequenting a bawdy house” (2). During the period, the total prison population at Oakalla was 23,961. Twenty-nine, the largest group, of the Japanese had served sentences for violation of the Liquor Act; 13 Japanese had been incarcerated for murder. ↩
18. MacGill, H.G., The Oriental Delinquent in the Vancouver Juvenile Court (Vancouver, 1936), p. 31. In the ten-year period, 1926-1935, there were 13 Japanese boys, out of a total of 5,662 delinquents, who appeared before the Vancouver Juvenile Court. Charges were for auto theft (1), false pretence (1), conspiracy to defraud (1), breaking and entering (1), retaining stolen property (1), theft (1), indecent exposure (2). Remaining offences were minor by-law infractions such as riding bicycles on sidewalks or without a light or bell. ↩
19. Cf. Park, R.E., and H.A. Miller, Old World Traits Transplanted (New York: Harper, 1921), pp. 168, 180. The Japanese in the United States were described as “the most efficiently and completely organized among the immigrant groups” and “not at all equalled” by other foreign language minorities in “the work of accommodating themselves to alien conditions.” ↩
20. Cf. the Japanese Association of Fresno, California, which was instrumental in closing the Oriental gambling dens and brothels located in that city. For a brief statement of the activities of Japanese Associations in the United States – which parallel those of the CJA – see Thomas, D.S., The Salvage: Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952), pp. 47-9; Park and Miller, op. cit., pp. 167-80. Park and Miller, p. 167, state that “the Japanese in America have been treated by their home country as colonists here … and the Japanese Association in America is practically a department of the Japanese government.” See also Davis, J.M., “The Orientals”, in Fairchild, H.P., Immigrant Backgrounds (New York: John Wiley, 1927), pp. 180-95. ↩
21. E.g., Steiner, J.F., The Japanese Invasion: A Study in the Psychology of Inter-Racial Contacts (Chicago: McClurg, 1917), pp. 85-6, who states that Japanese consuls deliberately discouraged Japanese in United States from dispersing from the west coast because they wished to localize areas of competition and friction. McWilliams, C., Prejudice, Japanese Americans: Symbol of Racial Intolerance (Boston: Little, Brown, 1944), p. 84, states that consuls in British Columbia held the same policy. But evidence is lacking for this assumption. ↩
22. Vancouver Province, June 27, 1940. ↩
23. Canadian Japanese Association, Sino-Japanese Conflict Elucidated (Vancouver: n.p., October 1, 1937). Cf. LaViolette, F.E., “Social Psychological Characteristics of Evacuated Japanese”, Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, 2 (August, 1945), p. 421 n. 4: “It is reported that Buddhist priests arriving after 1937 brought with them strong attitudes of nationalism and racialism. Japanese war propaganda was from that year distributed widely in all communities.” ↩
24. Logan, H.A., Trade Unions in Canada (Toronto: Macmillan, 1948), p. 67. ↩
25. Trades and Labour Congress of Canada, Report of the Proceedings of the Forty-Seventh Annual Convention Held at the City of Vancouver, B.C., September 21st to 25th, 1931, pp. 152-3, 191-2. ↩
26. The New Canadian, October 20, 1939. ↩
27. The New Canadian, July 18, 1941. ↩
28. For a rather extreme statement on the problem, see Niisato, K., Nisei Tragedy (Tokyo, n.p., 1936), p. 23: “There is little harmony in many families because of the gap between the two generations. There is no understanding, no sympathy, each of them walking his own way. The community elders voice no optimism in the future of the Nisei …. They hold to the belief that a dark, forboding end awaits them.” ↩
29. The New Canadian, November 22, 1940. ↩
30. Bell, R., Public School Education of the Second Generation Japanese in California (Stanford University Press, 1935), p. 24. See also Yamaga, Y., My Footsteps in British Columbia, p. 6: “The object was to teach the Japanese language … not to teach loyalty to the throne of Japan. The Japanese textbook compiled in Japan was not suitable to the Japanese born in Canada …. I argued the point at the convention of B.C. Japanese Language School Federation repeatedly, but no one took much interest. The rest of the 50 language schools were using Japanese national textbooks.” ↩
31. The New Canadian, January 17, 1941. ↩
32. The New Canadian, May 29, 1940. ↩
33. E.g., Smith, B., Americans from Japan (New York: Lippincott, 1948); McWilliams, op. cit. ↩
34. E.g., Hutchison, B., The Unknown Country: Canada and Her People (New York: Coward-McCann, 1942), pp. 286-7. He cites the “fecundity” of the Japanese and their “low standards” of living which enabled them to offer competition that no white men could meet and concludes: “there is no hope either of their absorption or their decline. Forever a white race and a yellow race are fated to live beside each other on the Pacific Coast.” ↩

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