Chapter Six: Paring a Surfeit

The Jap sets his teeth when difficulties arise and the
only way to keep him down is to kill him.
– B.C. Magazine, April, 1911

Canada, on the whole, had shown little previous interest in the Alliance; in Ottawa it had been mentioned only occasionally, chiefly when British Columbian members brought up the subject of Japanese immigration. Although British Columbia, for the most part, was concerned over what was termed the economic “takeover” by the resident Japanese in certain industries, the latent fear that the Japanese government was fostering emigration to the Pacific coast in order to ultimately conquer it was part of the anxiety-ridden ethos, so picturesquely vivified by the propagandists. Japan’s role in protecting the Pacific coast during World War I – under the terms of the Alliance – had merely quieted for a few years charges that immigrant fishermen were really Japanese navy reservists, industriously charting the coastline for future use.

After the war, the bogey of the “Yellow Peril,” slightly moth-eaten but eminently serviceable, was dusted off and made ready for use again. Were the immigrant Japanese all reservists, disguised soldiers ready to fight for Japan in a war with Canada? Would Japan go to war over the immigration question? Alan Webster Neill, the Independent member for Comox-Alberni and one of the most vociferous of the anti-Japanese group in the House of Commons for the next two-and-a-half decades, seemed to think so:

Is it better to fight now when Japan controls only one-half of British Columbia or to leave the fighting until ten years hence when she will, by peaceful conquest, have absorbed the whole of British Columbia and have thousands of her trained troops scattered throughout British Columbia and the other provinces beyond the Rocky Mountains?¹

Neill’s florid rhetoric had little relation to fact or logic but, expressed in terms of invective, the issues which he raised became issues of polemics. And the crudest charge, whatever its basis, became a legitimate charge if it produced an effect.

Feeling in British Columbia ran high against the Alliance, and Canada, in general, felt that it had outlived its usefulness and knew that the United States was definitely hostile towards it. One of the prime aims of American policy after Versailles was to ensure that the Alliance should not continue. Last renewed on July 13, 1911, for a ten-year period, an extension of the Alliance was considered to be a threat to good Anglo-American, and hence American-Canadian, relations. After the war, the conditions which had called the Alliance into existence had disappeared. Czarist Russia, against which it originally had been mainly directed, had been destroyed; Imperial Germany, against which the renewal of 1911 had been largely intended, had been defeated. There remained only three powers of first rank: the United States, Britain and Japan.

The Alliance, therefore, tied two of these powers together, and it looked to American minds as if Britain had to make a choice between the United States and Japan, between white and yellow, between a closely related people and a distant and “utterly alien race.” As Loring Christie, legal adviser in Canada’s Department of External Affairs, succinctly put it, the special friendship with Japan might resolve itself into a matter or race:

Always we should be on the defensive in the arts of explanation even with our well-wishers in the United States. In time they might indeed be found saying to us: ‘Given the choice of friendships in this new state of the world you chose the yellow man rather than us.’²

Should the Alliance be renewed, other dire prospects would emerge. In the event of a war between Japan and any of the Dominions or between Japan and the United States, a member from Montreal warned that Canada would be turned “into a new Belgium” and that Canadian ships would bear “the brunt of the Japanese torpedo attacks.”³ Most leading Canadian newspapers opposed renewal, warning that the United States would become estranged from the British Empire. American bitterness towards Japan had grown in intensity over Japan’s increasing aggression and widening sphere of influence in the Far East; over Japan’s annexation of Korea, Formosa and the Pescadores; over her control of southern Manchuria and the Shantung province of China. At the same time, there was domestic trouble over Japanese immigrants in California.

California’s anti-Japanese feeling, like British Columbia’s, had become part of the social and political fabric of the state. The Alien Land Law of 1913 prohibited resident Japanese from legally purchasing land or holding leases for terms exceeding three years. An Initiative Act in 1920 and a statute in 1923, passed on the crest of a wave of anti-Japanese agitation, restricted even short-term leases and declared that aliens ineligible for naturalization – as the immigrant Japanese were deemed – had no rights whatsoever to real property.⁴ Seven other states enacted legislation similar to California’s; in 1924, ineligibility for citizenship provided the legal basis for excluding Orientals from immigration into the United States. It was no wonder that British Columbians looked with envy at these developments.

The serious nature of these acts was emphasized by boycotts of American goods in Japan and by truculent comments – “Americans are as spiteful as snakes and vipers” – in the Japanese press. Anti-American demonstrations, which included a rash of suicides, spread in Japan. Students in Tokyo debated the question, “Shall We Declare War Against the United States?” All the old issues were once more front-page news in both Japan and the United States. American films and novels began to “document” the menace of the immigrant Japanese, usually as spurious in their sensationalism as was the Hearst newspaper campaign a few years previously.⁵ When a group of immigrant labourers was forcibly ejected from a fruit-growing area in California, leading newspapers in Japan seized upon the incident to demand an indemnity for “the damage done to their feelings.”

Immigration problems in California and in British Columbia were inextricably linked to the problem of whether or not the Alliance should be renewed,⁶ though they were clouded over by the international issue created when Japan began to dismember China. Meighen came to the Conference opposed to renewal because he felt it would imply some measure of tolerance towards Japanese aggression in the Far East. Adding urgent force to a basic principle of Canada’s foreign policy, that of maintaining the best possible relations between Britain and the United States, was the fear that Canada might be used as a battleground in war between the United States and Japan.

The Alliance quickly became the main issue at the conference table at 10 Downing Street. Meighen launched a bold and singlehanded bid against its renewal, a line advocated by his Dominion and British colleagues who included Secretary of State for the Colonies Winston Churchill. W.H. Hughes of “white” Australia, who had implacably resisted Japan’s request for a statement of racial equality in the Versailles Peace Conference, noisily opposed Meighen, preferring Japan as an ally rather than isolationist America. Pointing to Japan’s “generosity” during World War I, Hughes was as forceful in his defence of the Alliance as was Meighen in his opposition to it. Lloyd George and Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon, however, came around to Meighen’s side and it was decided that the Anglo-Japanese treaty would continue without definite renewal. Meighen’s leading role in preventing the renewal and in paving the way for the series of agreements which replaced the Alliance was recognized, at least by Canadians, as a spectacular feat. In lessening the danger of an American-Japanese war, he was judged to have greatly served Canada and the Empire.⁷

A subsequent Washington Conference replaced the Alliance by a broader Four-Power or Quadruple Pacific Treaty in which the British Empire, France, the United States and Japan agreed to respect each other’s respective rights to insular possessions in the Pacific. A Naval Treaty also fixed a ratio of 5:5:3 between the capital ship tonnage of Britain, the United States and Japan respectively, and thus hopefully restricted the ship-building race. The delegates at Washington also agreed to respect Chinese sovereignty and independence and re-affirmed the “open door” policy – the principle of “equal opportunity” for the commerce and industry of all nations throughout the territory of China.

But the Four-Power Treaty of 1921 was in reality an empty agreement and in no sense a security pact. It was a device for winding up an Alliance that, in the eyes of the British Cabinet, was becoming more of an embarrassment than an asset. Meighen had his way, Britain had discarded an ally and was now free from American apprehensions. The Japanese had regarded the treaty with Britain as one of the permanent bases of their foreign policy; thus Britain’s decision not to renew it inflicted a wound received in sorrow and remembered in wrath.

Although British Columbian representatives thought that the new Four-Power treaty was preferable to the old Alliance, they were still highly suspicious of agreements of any kind with Japan. Actually, the disposal of the Alliance did not affect immigration policy, for the Anglo-Japanese Treaty of Commerce and Navigation, with its paper guarantees, was still in force, as was the 1908 “gentlemen’s agreement.” Hence the anti-Japanese exclusionists now sought the abrogation of the trade treaty and the cancellation of the “gentlemen’s agreement.” In addition to numerous petitions sent to Ottawa by veterans’ associations, trades unions and other organizations demanding that Asiatic immigration be prohibited, the provincial legislature passed a resolution asking Ottawa to terminate the trade treaty as far as Canada was concerned.

The end of the war had made possible the renewal of immigration. Canada was immense in area and natural resources yet the population was small. With more people and the interaction of production and demand, it was felt that wealth would increase along with the power and prestige of the country. But there was constant apprehension over the political and social results of barriers against immigration being lowered indiscriminately, and it was also thought undesirable to have an undue proportion of people in Canada from southern Europe. The racial balance had to be maintained: in other words, the Anglo-Saxon and French strains were to be preserved. Debates on immigration took up long hours in the House of Commons, and both government and opposition adhered to a policy of “selective” immigration. Members from British Columbia would have defined that policy more carefully to exclude Orientals, along with professional labour agitators and a new menace, the “Bolsheviks.” It was agreed that more people were needed as settlers, to swell the ranks of industry and to justify the expense of the transcontinental railways, but the “ethnic balance” was not to be endangered.

In 1923, Canada once and for all rid herself of her Chinese “problem.” On March 2, Minister of the Interior Charles Stewart introduced the Chinese Exclusion Act by which only four categories of persons “of Chinese origin or descent irrespective of allegiance or citizenship” could henceforth enter Canada: members of the diplomatic corps or other government representatives and their retinues; Canadian-born children absent from Canada for educational or other purposes; merchants and students who would actually attend a Canadian university or college; and Chinese in transit through Canada.

Little attention was paid in the Commons to the fact that a serious “social situation” would be created by the exclusion of wives and children of Chinese already resident in Canada. Neither would Chinese clergymen or teachers be allowed entry. The main objection to the act, however, was that the clause relating to the entry of “merchants” was not sufficiently stringent. This class was later to be defined as those involved for at least three years in the import-export trade and who had invested at least $2,500 in the business. The $500 head tax was also abruptly ended, bringing to a close a lucrative source of revenue. During the preceding 40 years, over $22 million had been handed over by Chinese immigrants. Protests by Chinese over the Act were to no avail and the July 1 holiday of 1924 was mourned as “Humiliation Day” by the Chinese in Canada.⁸

Only the state of total war between Japan and Canada was to end Japanese immigration. But Mackenzie King, pursuing the line of “effective restriction” which he advocated soon after becoming prime minister, had begun negotiations in 1922 to cut down Japanese entry. After an apparently “amicable” exchange between Ottawa and Tokyo, the Japanese government declared it was willing to meet Canada’s wishes on further restriction, providing “it is not incompatible with the dignity and legitimate standing of Japan” and that Canada “will omit no effective effort to check any legislation which is undesirable in the light of international cordiality.” When King assented to these conditions, Tamekichi Ohta, Consul-General at Ottawa, wrote to Immigration Minister James A. Robb on August 22, 1923,

that the Japanese Government do not … contemplate that the number of Japanese emigrants going to Canada as household servants and agricultural labourers will exceed one hundred and fifty annually.⁹

Wives and children were still free to enter without restriction.

British Columbia’s reaction was predictable. Eyeing Canada’s own Chinese Exclusion Act of 1923 and the United States Immigration Act of 1924, British Columbia demanded similar legislation. King and his Liberals, meanwhile, walked the slippery diplomatic tightrope of attempting to appease British Columbia and of not offending Japan, from whom Canada was profiting handsomely in terms of increasing trade and exports.¹⁰

The next inevitable step in the pattern was an appeal for “repatriation.” In the spring of 1928, the province’s Liberal administration – looking ahead to the coming elections in the summer – asked Ottawa to negotiate for the “repatriation” of the Japanese and Chinese in Canada

so that the proportion of Orientals in Canada to the Canadian population shall not exceed the proportions of Canadians in China and Japan respectively to the population of China and Japan.¹¹

Although expulsion of Orientals was a relatively new concept to British Columbians, it was one which came into greater currency during the following two decades, some well-known politicians even favouring some remote Pacific island as a dumping place.

In 1938 King was himself to suggest a variation of British Columbia’s proposal: a “reciprocal” agreement in which the number of Japanese and Chinese nationals allowed to enter Canada would be regulated proportionately to the number of Canadians wishing to migrate to Japan.¹²

Following successful negotiations for the exchange of ministers between Canada and Japan, King announced in June, 1928, a further modification of the “gentlemen’s agreement.” To be included in the annual quota of 150 immigrants were the wives and children hitherto exempted. The “picture bride” system was to end, passports would now be processed by the Canadian legation established in Tokyo, and finally, the provisions of the Canadian Immigration Act which empowered exclusion of “inassimilable” immigrants would be applied to Japanese, notwithstanding the reciprocal “free entry” clause of the Anglo-Japanese trade treaty.

But again, this further modification – and the fact that Japan lived up to the bargain – did not appease the malcontents who declared that even the few who were entering were adding to the undesirable Japanese population in Canada. The exploitation of the immigration issue for individual and party political advantage swung into even more perfervid action. Left to themselves, the resident Japanese in the province might have won some acceptance. But British Columbian politicians and municipal council members – however fitfully opposed by a few who were beginning to champion Japanese rights – maintained a stream of racist propaganda well-calculated to gain votes at election time, propaganda which capitalized on the deep-seated animosity towards resident Japanese. The gloomy myths perpetrated by the politicians with the connivance of the electors maintained the uneasy situation in the province. At every point in its lengthy history, the agitation against the Japanese had always been skillfully manipulated for political ends. With an eye cocked on elections, MLAs and MPs – some of whom held cabinet office – were able to speak effectively in either Victoria or Ottawa against the Japanese, to both the province and the country, their speeches quoted at great length in the daily press.

More objective observers were conceding that restriction of immigration was indeed imperative in order to solve the “Japanese problem” on the west coast. They argued that such a step would eliminate one of the petty grievances exploited by “generally ignorant” politicians but that Canada and British Columbia ought to confer full and equal rights to those who were naturalized citizens and the Canadian-born. University of British Columbia economist Theodore Boggs somewhat prophetically declared that:

We Anglo-Saxons of the British race cannot afford again so soon to give occasion for another rendering of Longfellow’s ‘Evangeline’. In its Orientalized version the story would reflect no more favourably upon us than when applied to the French Acadians.¹³

Other writers were beginning to undertake a coolly objective appraisal of the situation, but their pleas for an enlightened solution, published in the university quarterlies, the Canadian Forum and other organs of limited and specialized circulation, were not likely to be overheard by the general public.¹⁴

At the same time that British Columbia was seeking the exclusion of the Japanese, the province was also making a concerted drive either to oust resident Japanese from the major industries or to restrict their employment. This was a familiar pattern – temporarily abandoned during the war – writ large. But previous agitation had been directed against masses of cheap labour flooding the industries; by this time, the Japanese were regarded as much too skilful, diligent and industrious for their own good – and for the good of their competitors. The energy with which the labourers had saved their earnings and worked long hours in their aspirations to become independent farmers, fishermen or small businessmen constituted a “menace,” a “danger,” a “ threat,” to “ white supremacy.”¹⁵ Their very virtues had become cause for antagonism.

In the early 1920s, attempts to impose formal legislation restricting the economic activities of resident Japanese nationals were frustrated by treaty obligations. When British Columbia sought to prohibit Japanese employment under Crown-granted logging and timbering licences throughout the province, the province’s Court of Appeal declared the measure ultra vires of the legislature. The contentious question had been referred to the Court because of differing opinion between the federal Minister of Justice and provincial Attorney-General J.W. de Beque Farris concerning the power of the province to enforce the prohibition. The Court ruled that it violated the principle laid down in the Anglo-Japanese trade treaty protecting Japanese nationals resident in Canada.

British Columbia countered on April, 1921, by passing an Oriental Orders-in-Council Validation Act which provided that “in all contracts, leases and concessions made by the Government provision should be made that no Chinese or Japanese should be employed in connection therewith” and threatened to cancel licences of those employing Japanese. But the Supreme Court of British Columbia ruled against this Act, upholding the earlier decision of the Appeal Court. Arguing that it was within the power of a province “to prescribe by what persons its timber shall be felled” and that the legislation “enacted disabilities upon persons of certain racial origin, not upon any persons as having certain nationality or allegiance,”¹⁶ British Columbia appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada. The legislation was again declared ultra vires of the province, and the Privy Council dismissed a further appeal. Japanese nationals, then, enjoyed a marginally more favourable position than did naturalized citizens or the Canadian-born, who were unprotected by treaty. It was a curious situation in which Canadian citizens were being discriminated against in favour of aliens.

The next obvious step for British Columbia was to pass a resolution late in 1922 asking the federal government to amend the British North America Act itself to empower the province to make laws prohibiting “Asiatics” from acquiring proprietory interests in agricultural, timber and mining lands or in fishing and other industries as well as employment in them. What the province wanted was the power, like California’s, to enact an Alien Land Law which would prohibit Japanese from owning or leasing land. Minister of Lands and future Premier Thomas Dufferin Pattullo warned the Japanese “to stay off B.C. natural resources.” He disavowed prejudice against the Japanese but hedged:

The fact is, however, that as peoples we are ethnologically different and will not mix; consequently it will be better for business and for preservation of harmonious relations if Japs abstain from trying to secure control of any of our natural resources.¹⁷

Similar sentiments from taxi-cab owners in Vancouver clearly indicated the extent to which anti-Japanese opinion permeated all classes of society. Taxi drivers urged “the white population of the city to support us with their patronage in preference to the Oriental taxi concerns [because] we aim especially to give protection and courtesy to white women!”¹⁸

The cloud of the post-war economic slump was lifting by 1922; in the summer of that year, the production of the mines, the forests and the fisheries was approaching the 1918 boom figures. The province was welcoming new settlers from the prairies: one group of Mennonites had settled near Fort George, another in the Fraser Valley. And in England, the Agent-General was busily soliciting more British settlers. New stimulus was being given to the lumber industry by the expanding market in Japan and China. And there were ample signs in Vancouver – the centre of anti-Japanese agitation – that the city was in for another boom.

But racial feeling ran unrepentently. A resolution passed on December 17, 1924, by “all parts of the House,” neatly summed up most of the prevailing attitudes:

Whereas there was in British Columbia, according to the last Dominion census, 23,532 Chinese and 15,006 Japanese:

And whereas statistics show that there is a very large natural increase of Orientals in British Columbia, multiplying each succeeding year to an alarming extent:

And whereas the standard of living of the average Oriental is far below that of the white man, thus enabling him to live comfortably on a much lower wage than our white men:

And whereas the Orientals have invaded many fields of industrial and commercial activities to the serious detriment of our white citizens:

And whereas considerable unemployment always exists in British Columbia, partly due to the fact that large numbers of Orientals are filling situations in our industrial and commercial life which could be filled by our white citizens:

And whereas the Orientals are fast invading the commercial areas of many municipalities and districts …, carrying on commercial and industrial pursuits:

And whereas many of our white merchants are being forced out of business by such commercial and industrial invasion:

Therefore be it Resolved, That this House go on record as being utterly opposed to the further influx of Orientals … and, further, that this House places itself on record as being in favour of the enactment of such amendment to the ‘Immigration Act of Canada’ as is necessary to completely prohibit Asiatic immigration ….

Be it further Resolved, That this House is also of the opinion that the field of industrial and commercial activities of all Orientals now in Canada and particularly British Columbia be restricted by legislation.¹⁹

In 1926, the province experienced the most prosperous year in its history: the fisheries, for example, had grossed a record total of $27 million at the same time as the Department of Marine and Fisheries was reducing licences held by Japanese fishermen. The mills at Ocean Falls and Powell River – among two of the “company towns” which employed considerable numbers of Japanese workers – were turning out enormous quantities of pulp and paper as well as turning out many of those labourers.

In the Golden Jubilee year of Confederation, Vancouver had become the third largest city in Canada, and “Honest John” Oliver and his Liberals had ruled the province for close to ten years – a period in which the province’s economic fortunes had soared to a historic peak. And after Simon Fraser Tolmie’s Conservatives took office, the first few months of 1929 saw an even more impressive and unprecedented prosperity. Almost all previous records for economic endeavour were broken, and the average weekly industrial wage reached a record level of $29.20 – a euphoric prelude to the financial crash of October and the bread lines, relief camps and hunger marches of the Depression.

When the drive to oust the Japanese from the fishing industry accelerated right after the war, the federal government for the first time responded to the pressure from British Columbia. When the federal Department of Marine and Fisheries announced in 1919 that it would “gradually eliminate Orientals from the fishery” by reducing the number of licences issued to them, the move was designed to dislodge those who were Canadian citizens. Since only naturalized citizens and the native-born could be granted licences, the matter was strictly a domestic issue in which considerations of treaty obligations need not apply.

The fact that four of the six members of the Fisheries Commission appointed as an investigatory body were members of Parliament from British Columbia certainly loaded the scales. The Commission held twelve meetings in fishing centres along the coast in which only white and Indian fishermen were invited to express their views. Only the rate at which licences issued to Orientals would be reduced was the point at issue:

The question … is not whether Oriental licences should be reduced in number but what percentage of reduction should be decided upon in order to bring about the displacement of Orientals by white fishermen in the shortest possible time without disrupting the industry.²⁰

The Commission then recommended that the number of licences, except for trolling, issued to “other than white British subjects and Indians” be cut by 40% immediately and then by another 15% in 1925.

If government policy was geared to encourage more Indians and whites to join the industry, the results were not immediately encouraging. Canners, who feared that the industry would be disrupted by excluding Japanese, said that the average Japanese was “beyond any question, more efficient as a salmon gillnet fisherman than the average white man.” That was precisely the point that the anti-Japanese interests were making. One of the canners went on to say:

The cause of all the trouble is that four members of the last Commission represented Fishing Constituencies where Japs had no vote, and where they depended on the Whites for their seats. Was it not natural that to win the favour of the voters in their own Constituencies, they should recommend the elimination of the Jap? Would a Commission of men without interests in those Constituencies have framed the same report?²¹

By 1925, however, the Department of Marine and Fisheries had stripped close to a thousand licences from the Japanese, reducing their control of licences by nearly half.²²

At the same time, Japanese fishermen in the northern Skeena area of the coast were barred from the use of boats powered by gas engines, another niggling disability designed to cut down their competitiveness. Those fishermen were thus placed at an almost insuperable disadvantage because lack of power limited the range, mobility and speed of operations in an industry in which survival depended not only on special skills and aptitudes but also on the utilization of technological changes in equipment. It was not until 1930 that the Japanese were allowed to use gasoline engines and to fold up their sails.

Among themselves, the Japanese worked out a system that produced the least amount of hardship. At the time of the massive reductions in licences, married men were given priority in retaining licences. In years when other reductions were ordered, the most recent arrivals to each district were asked to step down; and in 1927, the 10% who thought they could best be able to find other employment voluntarily withdrew their names from the list of applicants for licences. Several relief measures were organized. The Fishermens Benevolent Society in Steveston raised funds and gave $150 to $350 to each family head who lost his licence, the government having refused to make any compensation for loss of investment and means of livelihood.

On the average, a fisherman in Steveston had invested $1,530 in boat and gear. Incomes were low, averaging an annual $1,082 per fisherman, of which $395 was required for operating expenses. The trollers on Vancouver Island – in contrast to the Japanese on the Fraser or in the northern district – enjoyed a relatively higher standard of living, each grossing $2,109 annually after an investment of $3,245 on boat and gear. For most of these fishermen, then, years of scratching out a living had been wasted.

Since no further cuts had been laid on for 1926 and thereafter, a Select Standing Committee on Marine and Fisheries met to plan further reductions. At the meeting, the Department of Marine and Fisheries disclaimed all responsibility for the merits or demerits of “the policy of distinguishing between British subjects on racial grounds.”²³ The Deputy Minister maintained that his department had adopted the policy on the recommendations of the Fisheries Commission of 1922 and that the work of his department was confined simply to implementing its recommendations. The 1922 Commission had operated on the assumption that its work was only to consider the rate of reduction, the policy having been set down by the federal body. No one wanted to officially bear the responsibility of having set forth a discriminatory policy; the problem of “injustice” was never a matter of debate between members of the 1926 Committee which again concluded that the matter was settled once and for all.

Through the leadership of the ubiquitous A.W. Neill, the Committee then recommended that

the licences issued to other than white men and Indians be reduced 10% on the numbers issued in 1926, and the same reduction in each future year, so that these licences will be entirely confined to whites and Indians.²⁴

Licences for Japanese engaged in offshore trolling had been cut by almost half, and in other less important branches of the industry – in fishing for cod and herring – similar reductions had taken place. The Japanese were practically wiped out of the herring industry: only two purse-seine operators were left in 1927. In addition, the Department of Marine and Fisheries drew up a regulation compelling all dry salt herring operators to employ at least 25% white or Indian fishermen in their fishing and curing operations. Inevitably, the department decreed that “no British subjects of Oriental origin” were to be employed in this particular branch of the industry, one which the immigrant Japanese had originated.

What the battles of 1900-1901 could not accomplish, the federal government had made possible through the bloodless machinery of regulations. By 1941 the Japanese were to hold only 12% of all licences. Japanese efforts to combat these reductions had proved fruitless. The Japanese unions – the Amalgamated Association of Fishermen and the Steveston Benevolent Fishermen’s Association – sent two delegates, Nobutaro Yasuno and Ritsu Ide, to Ottawa late in 1922 in an attempt to bring about a more lenient settlement than the harsh strictures promulgated by the federal branch. But the trip was futile. Fisheries experts felt that those opposing the policy had not made “a strong enough case” to justify abrogation. The department’s view, as quoted in the Victoria Times under a front-page headline spread across eight columns, was that the policy was “reclaiming the great Pacific fishing industry for Canadian citizens.”²⁵ Again, in 1926, one of the unions sent a representative to Ottawa in a final, futile attempt to get Ottawa to reconsider the policy.

Fearing their complete exclusion from the industry, the Japanese then took legal action in 1927.²⁶ While the test case was sub judice, the Fisheries Department halted further reductions. On May 1, 1928, the Supreme Court of Canada delivered judgement in favour of the Japanese:

Any British subject residing in British Columbia, who is not otherwise legally disqualified, has the right to receive a licence, if he submits the proper application and tenders the prescribed fee.

The Dominion government’s appeal was dismissed by the Privy Council on October, 1929; on the grounds that the federal minister did not have the discriminatory power to withhold a licence from a duly naturalized Canadian citizen.

But the federal government neatly circumvented this judgement. While the case was being appealed to the Privy Council, Ottawa enacted legislation which gave to the Minister of Fisheries

absolute discretion, wherever the exclusive right of fishing does not already exist by law, to issue or authorize to be issued, leases and licences for fisheries and or fishing.²⁷

In its ruling, the Supreme Court had stated that there was nothing in the language of the fisheries legislation which gave rise to the necessary implication that the minister had the discretion to grant or withhold licences. Hence, the government merely had to make explicit its discretionary right in order to bypass the judgements made against it.

In 1930, then, the Fisheries Department announced that the policy of elimination, by which a 10% cut in licences issued to Japanese would be made annually, would be resumed in the following year. But as a result of a strong protest from Japanese fishermen who sent a petition to Prime Minister King,²⁸ supported by canners and a few white fishermen – and what was probably more effective, by anti-Japanese interests in other industries – the department suspended action.

In the eight-year period following 1922, however, over 1,253 fishermen had been driven out, though some of them remained in the industry as members of boat crews or as employees in canneries. Some were disillusioned enough to return to Japan, but the majority found their way into other occupations. And that was the rub – as proprietors and workers in these occupations were discovering. The federal government’s policy was shortsighted and piecemeal in that it produced similar problems elsewhere. Critics of the reduction policy had claimed from its inception that it would compel the Japanese to enter other occupations, thus “inflicting hardship” and “causing further strife,” without eliminating them as competitors in the province’s economic activities.

Hence, when the Japanese petitioned that the number of licences not be further reduced, they were supported by people who asked Minister of Fisheries Arthur Cardin that the Japanese be kept in fishing and off the land. Members of the Richmond Board of Trade, for example, apprehensive over the fact that more Japanese were turning to farming, asked Cardin to intercede with the Dominion government to stop further reduction, declaring that

those Japanese who have had their licences taken away are forced to go on the land or into other industries as unskilled labour and bring direct competition with white market gardeners and other workmen.²⁹

The circle was complete. A Vancouver Province editorial admitted:

Our handling of the Oriental problem has not only had more than a trace of injustice in it; it has been ineffective as well. We have hunted the Orientals out of the fishing industry and they have gone to the woods and they have gone to the farms. We have made it uncomfortable for them on the farms, and they have gone into business in the cities. We haven’t diminished their numbers; we have simply pushed them about.³⁰

The same dreary restrictive pattern persisted in the various branches of the lumbering industry in which hostility had been endemic since the turn of the century. Once the demand for lumber and the shortage of labour engendered by the war were over, the Japanese in lumbering, like their compatriots in fishing, were deemed expendable. By war’s end, 1,565, or about 13% of the labour force, were Japanese. But lumped with the Chinese, Oriental labour comprised 42% of the total.³¹

In 1925, the Male Minimum Wage Act passed by the British Columbia Legislature solved the “problem” to some extent. Doubtlessly, for non-Orientals, it was an important piece of progressive social legislation, but the statutory minimum of 40¢ an hour was aimed in part at restricting Oriental employment. At this time, Japanese were receiving far less than white labourers for the same work, not more than 25¢ an hour. There was said to be “common testimony” that the white mill hand was entitled to a higher rate because of his “greater efficiency.”³² A more curiously-worded rationalization was the white labourer’s “greater ability to respond to an unexpected emergency.”³³ These and other convoluted reasons camouflaged the fact that employers easily exploited the Japanese whose bargaining power was practically non-existent and who took whatever wages were offered.

But the new Act put a halt to the practice. The Board of Adjustment appointed under the Act took the view that if employers were obliged to conform to a higher standard of wages in employing Oriental labour, such labour would be less desirable. That proved to be the case, for 986 Japanese were dropped from the payrolls in camps throughout the province.

The employers were unhappy when the cheap supply of labour dried up. As a result, in 1934 the British Columbia Board of Industrial Relations modified the original ruling of the Minimum Wage Act so that a quarter of the workers in the sawmill industry might be paid 25¢ an hour while the general rate was set at 35¢. No stipulation was made concerning what type of men were to be included in the special category but, in practice, employers assigned Japanese to it.

Unlike the fisherman who could depend, on the whole, on his own individual enterprise, whatever his race, to determine the amount of his income, lumbermen always suffered from the peculiar caste system perpetuated in the industry. And unlike the more militant fishermen, they avoided face to face conflict. The Camp and Mill Workers Union, though it gained some concessions from the Trades and Labour Congress in terms of abstract concepts such as “racial equality,” was never able to gain equal payment for equal work.

In startling contrast to the struggling wage-earners, a small group of independent logging and sawmill operators, an emerging capitalist class among the immigrant Japanese, had emerged. Three logging camps were established in the 1890s and by the early 1930s, there were 14 independent enterprises, 12 of which had invested a total of $1,948,000, each year producing some $1,185,000 worth of timber, mostly exported to Japan. The largest of the sawmills was the Royston Lumber Company on Vancouver Island, bought in 1916 for $30,000 and worth ten times that amount two decades later. Its monthly payroll exceeded $6,000, paid out to a multiracial group of 81 employees, including 12 whites and three Chinese.

The rise of such conspicuously successful ventures inevitably aroused suspicion. Any unusual rise in the standard of living was interpreted as an index to “peaceful penetration,” and the implication that financing of these ventures was Tokyo-based aroused suspicion of espionage.³⁴ Even the purchase or rental of middle-class homes was thought to be irrefutable evidence. And when Japanese took to small businesses in the cities to make a living, they were suspected of having been supported by capital supplied by the Japanese consulate. Thus it was claimed that these logging and sawmill operations, supposedly controlled by large business corporations in Japan, were being developed only in strategic areas. Unprofitable mines, the theory went, were being worked so that Japan could control strategic points in the province for storing war supplies. None of these rumours had any basis in fact.

From the immigrant point of view, it was “sheer hard work, enterprise and ability” that inspired the rise of people such as Eikichi Kagetsu, lumber “magnate” and owner of the Fanny Bay Logging Company on Vancouver Island, some 50 miles from Nanaimo. As a labourer in the logging camps, he saved $500 and used part of his stake as a first instalment on timber rights to 160 acres on the island. After sweating out years of pitifully meagre returns, his major camp at Fanny Bay represented a capital investment of $200,000, hewing out some $135,500 worth of logs each year and providing work for 70 men. When Kagetsu began to develop a new logging camp near Cowichan Lake, the secretary of the Britannia branch of the Canadian Legion demanded that Ian Mackenzie, federal Minister of Defence, cancel the sale of the land on the premise the property was “vital to Canada’s national defence.”³⁵ If a “low standard” of living – of which Japanese were always accused – was a threat to the economic well-being of white workers, the converse also posed insufferable dangers.

Kagetsu’s scale of success was uncommon but the drive for independence, freedom and security from economic harassment was shared by many Japanese who were making a smaller livelihood off the land. The exodus into farming, however, was not voluntary but enforced, for the net effect of economic discrimination was mainly to shove the Japanese from one occupation to another. In most cases, it shoved them a little further up the scale – from railroad labourers or millhands to farmers. The land was one of the last retreats, and in the proportion that they were restricted elsewhere, the Japanese went to the land.

Since many of the immigrants came from small village farms in Japan, it was natural that they should use their savings to repeat a not uncommon immigrant tendency to rise to a position in their adopted country once occupied in the homeland.³⁶ They came from a tradition which, on the whole, treated agriculture with some respect and which in Canada denoted a status not obtainable elsewhere. Field, garden and orchard gave them the best promise of establishing independence; it was probably easiest for the average Japanese immigrant to escape the wage and employment restrictions by becoming a farmer than in any other way. The availability of uncleared land and the valuable experience gained from intensely cultivating exceedingly small farms in Japan meant that the immigrant farmer could farm successfully on a few acres. They were accustomed to the labour required to cultivate plants which hugged the soil and which also required comparatively little capital to grow, and would yield a fairly ready return. And as independent farmers, they would require only a modicum of knowledge of English – not an insignificant factor in the world of the immigrant Japanese.

The “back-to-the-land” movement had been preceded by a few Japanese who had quickly become disenchanted with the seasonable and unpredictable nature of railroad labour during the first decade of the century. Another ripple in the pattern was caused by the phenomenally high prices offered for farm produce during the war. The last movement, however, was of a different kind.

In Steveston, for example, a large number of dispossessed fishermen remained in the area to farm the rich Delta lands. In 1923, the year that licences were massively reduced, the Steveston Japanese Farmers Company was organized and 80 acres of land were bought on capital raised from sale of shares. The land was then rented to former fishermen, implements were provided and, in some cases, farmers were lent money until their crops were marketed. This was the old tradition of “mutual assistance” working at its best, for of all the fishing centres in the province, it was the gray village of Steveston that was the hardest hit.

Disgruntled fishermen and industrial labourers ousted from employment swelled the number of Japanese farmers. A report prepared for the British Columbia Legislature in 1927, purporting to prove the “economic takeover” of the Orientals in the province, showed that Japanese either owned or leased land and property valued at $2,664,182. And of this total, Department of Agriculture statisticians estimated that the total acreage owned by Japanese amounted to 9,238 acres valued at $1,252,063.³⁷

Most Japanese took to farming in pockets of uncleared land in the lush and verdant valleys of the Fraser and the Okanagan. Other smaller clusters of farmers established themselves in the Kootenay Valley, in the Cariboo and on Vancouver Island, especially in the Comox Valley. In the Fraser, the most populous area, the Japanese settlements extended the whole length of the Valley from Lulu Island, at the mouth of the river, inland to Mission City.

The land was painfully cleared, acre by acre of timber, stumps and brush; it was felt that the success of a few in clearing the land would attract others to the area. In practically every instance, the Japanese purchased wild brush land which had formerly lain waste and brought it under cultivation after backbreaking labour. The Maple Ridge district, formerly an uninhabited waste section of land, became a thriving farming area – as Japanese farmers like to claim, “a monument to their labour, diligence and perseverance.”³⁸

The first crop invariably consisted of strawberries. Indeed, berries and other small fruits became their specialty, ideal for intensive and careful cultivation in a small space. The Japanese soon dominated soft fruit growing, taking over the role of white farmers, and operated about 63% of the total acreage in the Fraser Valley. A government inspector estimated that by 1934 the Japanese were producing at least 85% of the berries grown in the Fraser because they cultivated “much more intensively and efficiently than other groups.’’³⁹

One Port Hammond farmer’s amazement was shared by others who did not look as kindly on a Japanese farmer’s dedication. This farmer related that:

My mother sold 18 acres of wild land to a Japanese farmer some time ago. We thought that it would never be of value for it was covered with bush and huge stumps, having been logged over, and in addition, the soil did not seem very rich. Last winter, I went out to this farm to cut wood, and found, to my surprise, that it was nearly all cleared and had been transformed into a highly productive berry farm. I found out that this Japanese farmer in 18 months had cleared 4½ acres, an area which would take the average white farmer three years to clear.⁴⁰

This startling “efficiency” again was interpreted as another instance of “peaceful penetration” controlled by capital from Japan. If that were so, the immigrant farmer and his wife were unaware of it. Indeed, the role of the woman, who enjoyed little respite from the gruelling round, was the distinctive feature of the family enterprise:

The picture bride worked with pick and shovel with her husband when they cleared the bushland to plant strawberries. Then hoeing and cultivating the berry patches besides her household chores. She would get up very early in the morning and go to bed at eleven at night. Upon arising in the morning, she fed the chickens and the horse; then prepared breakfast; washed the dishes; followed the family to the field where she drove the horse behind a plow or cultivator. She would return to the house shortly before dinner, prepare it, clean up, and then return to the field. During the berry picking season, she picked the berries or packed them from dawn to dusk, taking very little time for household chores. After the busy season was over, some of the wives would work in the fruit cannery or hire out as a domestic worker. These pioneers never dreamed of such a thing as ‘holiday with pay’. They worked hard all year around, and the children were also trained to work as soon as they were able.⁴¹

The dedication of the Japanese to the ceaseless round of unremitting toil was definitely not a criterion to be valued by those who stood in danger of their competition. Still, the Japanese were allowed to build up a virtual monopoly in the Fraser Valley without the legal or de facto barriers which protected white competitors in other fields, and inter-racial relations were relatively less strained in farming than in other industries.

Proponents of an anti-Oriental land law had attempted to eliminate the Japanese whom they accused of glutting the market with their produce. Indeed, ignorance of proper marketing methods was at first woeful among the Japanese, admittedly causing uncontrolled shipments to pour into the prairie markets and upset prices. Until the Japanese became properly indoctrinated in the techniques of marketing, the movement to oust them gained more adherents. The organization of co-operatives and a multiracial federation of growers, however, ameliorated a rather tense situation.

The first of the producers’ co-operatives, the Maple Ridge Berry Growers Co-Operative Exchange, was organized in 1927 by Yasutaro Yamaga of Port Haney, the dominant figure in the struggle to establish amicable inter-racial relations. Later, the cluster of growers’ associations which had proliferated in the valley to provide mutual aid and a “protective” front was amalgamated into the Consolidated Farmers Association; its annual meeting even attracted white growers. Under the Natural Products Marketing Act, both white and Japanese groups submitted a scheme to regulate the marketing of small fruits and rhubarb produced in the valley and suggested the formation of a local board to consist of one Japanese and two white farmers. This was a ratio which some Japanese found objectionable, since they produced over 80% of the produce to be regulated. Still, this type of bilateral economic solidarity was rare in the province.

Hostility against Japanese farmers in all areas of the province, though latent in the early period, was late in blooming. As more Japanese became attracted to farming, however, white owners began a consistent and widespread programme of opposition to Japanese immigration and land ownership. “Anti-Japanese B.C. Land Law To Be Urged” ran a Victoria Times story in April, 1925. Looking at the infiltration of Japanese in his bailiwick, Harry Barber, Conservative member for Fraser Valley, argued in the Commons that Canada must employ a Natal Act to keep out Japanese. The Advisory Board of Farmers Institutes asked the Minister of Agriculture

as to whether legislation can be enacted to prevent Chinese and Japanese from owning, selling, or leasing land in British Columbia, or, in the alternative, imposing conditions upon their rights of ownership.⁴²

For the Select Standing Committee on Agriculture which was considering the problem, this proposal was “absolutely reasonable and most desirable.”

The more recent competitors of the Japanese began to act almost exactly as the groups in fishing and lumbering had done: they wrote letters to newspapers, articles for trade journals and magazines and sent petitions to Parliament. The extremist White Canada Association included members of farmers associations on its executive committee. Its secretary, Charles Hope, warned of the pervasiveness of Japanese expansion in a brief presented to the provincial legislature:

The Japanese produce most of the strawberries, and about half of the raspberries …. The Japanese are getting a strong foothold in the Okanagan and have made a fresh start both there and in the Lower Fraser Valley in dairying …. The situation is steadily growing worse, but it is when one looks into the future that its true seriousness is most apparent.⁴³

But despite these gloomy portents, which he reiterated in Maclean’s, it seemed difficult to oust the Japanese who appeared to be in farming to stay.

The exodus into farming was paralleled by an expansion of commercial activities in Vancouver which, by 1931, was home for 8,328 Japanese, nearly one-third of their population in Canada. And although Japanese were living in every ward in the city, over half, or 4,520, resided in the Japanese quarter of Powell Street. With the arrival of wives from Japan, many of the immigrants had sought living quarters in or on the periphery of the deteriorating trade-service centre, the “Little Tokyo” of Vancouver. Two other settlements located on the south shore of False Creek, pockmarked by cheap houses and cabins near the sawmills and shingle mills, accounted for most of the other Japanese living outside the Powell Street ghetto.

Many of those Japanese “gainfully employed” in Vancouver were dependent upon unskilled work in sawmills, gardening, odd labour, domestic and hotel service. But nearly half were involved in a wide range of commercial enterprises. Small Japanese business enterprises had always existed in Vancouver since the 1880s, catering to the floating population of labourers. A cluster of small shops, markets, rooming houses and restaurants sprouted up as more immigrants came into the province during the early 1900s. Around this nucleus were established laundries, bathhouses, pool halls, watchmakers and other service enterprises and recreational facilities. But the most concentrated period of expansion occurred in the 1920s when over half of 60 important Japanese businesses existing between 1892 and 1931 were opened.

By 1931, the Japanese held 858 trading licences, in contrast to 10,772 for non-Orientals. In other words, as anti-Japanese spokesmen liked to point out, there was one licence for every ten Japanese in the city to only one for every 21 non-Orientals. As dressmakers and fish dealers, Japanese shared the total number of licences about equally with non-Japanese, and as proprietors of cleaners and pressers, barber shops, lodging houses, grocery stores and tobacconists, they posed serious competition for whites involved in the same businesses. They were to be found not only along Powell Street and other areas of concentrated settlement but were proliferating to a “remarkable” extent throughout the city.

The majority of the Japanese-operated establishments continued for some years to cater exclusively to their own group, but a considerable number attempted to broaden their base of operation to serve a wider public, opening stores outside the ghetto. To the worriers, then, the Japanese, along with the Chinese, were well on their way to becoming “the Jews of the Orient,” on the verge of “swamping” the city:

Pender Street East is triumphant. Insidiously, but surely and with marked acceleration every year, it is establishing glorified extensions of itself along Robson Street, Davie, sections of Granville, and a dozen or more commercial streets of Vancouver upon which, even so short a while as ten years ago, not a single Chinese or Japanese shop was to be found. The wholesale as well as the retail white trader is beginning to feel the cut of Oriental competition, and if this state of affairs continues to increase during the next ten years unchecked, at the rate it has during the past ten years, many of our best streets will then resemble the best streets of Hongkong or Shanghai in the matter of shops, their proprietors, clerks and assistants …. And the intellectual young Japanese and Chinese who are born and bred here, and educated by us, will control the mercantile life of Vancouver as much as the Jews control the mercantile life of New York today.⁴⁴

A series of articles published in the Vancouver Province and Vancouver Morning Star vented these fears, and they were collected and circulated in a pamphlet, Oriental Occupation of British Columbia.

The imagery of the “Yellow Peril,” however, did not fit reality. The largest group, those 200 tobacconists and operators of confectionery stores, was scarcely making adequate returns. Grocery and provision stores hired few salaried employees; of seven Japanese “drug stores” in the city, only one was actually a pharmacy and was maintained with a white partner, as exclusion from the franchise meant that no Japanese by himself could hold a licence as a pharmacist. The hundred rooming or lodging houses owned by the Japanese catered to an impoverished and transient clientele, many of whom were white labourers on provincial welfare rolls. The operators of dry-goods stores, shoe repair shops, photography shops, fuel dealers, watch repairers, garages and stationers generally drew a modest net income of $1,170.

At the top of the heap was the Japan and Canada Trust Savings Company, the financial centre of the community, operating with a gross annual revenue of $800,000. Nine companies handled exports, chiefly to Japan, of wheat, lumber and salt fish, valued at $2,119,000 each year. A small group of wholesalers and manufacturers of provisions, paper boxes, beverages and Japanese confections and importers of Japanese foodstuffs, textiles and toys were part of the “merchant” class in Vancouver. Other successful businesses included a grocery and provision supplier who grossed an annual $630,000, a fish market which listed its annual income at $180,000, several women’s wear and silk-goods stores which grossed up to $450,000 annually. These merchants had an annual income of some $8,740 in contrast to the modest income of the professional class of doctors and dentists ($2,800), the struggling tradesmen ($2,410) and the labourers, who averaged $750.

Many Japanese had been attracted to gardening because it required little capital investment, although it offered only a fluctuating and seasonal source of income. Still, contract gardening became one of the distinctive operations for immigrant Japanese and utilized, at varying times, a substantial part of the labour force. It was inevitably an occupation in which Japanese could exploit their peculiar skills and background. And all that they required was a second-hand pickup truck, lawn mowers, hoses and gardening tools. Full employment was a problem because of intense competition and general anti-Japanese antipathy among prospective white employers.

Clearly, the immigrant generation appeared to have achieved a ceiling and was undergoing a process of retrenchment. Most businesses, in fact, survived only because of the unpaid labour of the whole family. Still, it was a sign of remarkable economic expansion that close to half of the working population in the course of a few decades had worked themselves up from the bottom of the economic ladder to where they were offering serious competition to those in the larger community involved in the same businesses.

The problem of “competition” – and the various rationalizations for the anti-Japanese propaganda – would probably not have existed had it not been for the peculiar pattern of immigrant settlement. Most of the Japanese had chosen to settle in the two most densely populated areas of the province: in Vancouver and in the villages of the Lower Fraser Valley, and along both coasts of Vancouver Island. Over 75% of the Japanese, moreover, were living within 50 to 75 miles of the city of Vancouver where they were within more or less immediate contact with a correspondingly large white population. Instead of being tucked away in isolated enclaves in relatively remote areas as were the Doukhobors in the Kootenay Valley, the Japanese were thrown in close contact, geographically and economically, with the larger group.

Obviously, the Japanese presented a physically highly visible and differentiated group. Dispersed throughout Canada with its 11 million inhabitants, the 22,205 Japanese in the province would have been relatively unnoticed. But over 95% were living in a few districts of the province, and the most highly populated ones at that. This concentration was so salient a feature of their settlement that it was inevitably utilized by anti-Japanese interests as providing evidence of a central control:

With the Japanese, penetration appeared to be ordered and controlled as though from some central control. It has all the earmarks of the efficiency which characterizes Japanese expansion everywhere. It is orderly, consistent and continuous, planned in a manner possible only with a homogeneous, aggressive, organized and imperially-minded people …. An orderly advance is now in progress, carrying a Japanese population along the Fraser Valley on both sides of the river and into the one-time socially exclusive Okanagan.⁴⁵

And although the Chinese were by now considered far less “dangerous,” 27,139 lived in British Columbia. The province’s population in 1931 was 694,263; its Asiatic population was 50,951. One person out of every thirteen was of Asiatic origin.

Adding supposedly “irrefutable” evidence which seemed, for anti-Japanese observers, to substantiate the horrors of the image of Japanese immigrants swamping the province and becoming the dominant race, was their “power of fecundity.” Their rate, the highest of all racial groups in the province in the twenties, was therefore presented in a lurid light:

There is a Japanese woman for every Japanese man who wants one and has the wherewithal. As a result there is a continuous peaceful penetration, by reason of which the Japanese are breeding themselves into possession of a rich share of the business of British Columbia.⁴⁶

“One in Every 8 Babies Born in B.C. in 1931 is Japanese” ran a Vancouver Province headline over a report of 1,342 Japanese babies registered in that year.⁴⁷ Discussing the dangers inherent in granting the franchise to the Canadian-born, one writer began his article in Maclean’s: “More than six hundred brown-skinned babies are opening their little black eyes for the first time in British Columbia every year.”⁴⁸ Speeches made in the provincial legislature echoed this kind of imagery: “Statistics show that there is a very large natural increase of Orientals in B.C., multiplying each succeeding year to an alarming extent.”⁴⁹

The birth rate of the Japanese was indeed spiralling from two to four times that of all other groups.⁵⁰ What the propagandists neglected to include in their perorations was the fact that the high rate of these menacing pregnancies could be only temporary. An unusual number of babies were being born simply because of the sudden influx of females of child-bearing age – not because baby factories were being organized or because the Japanese were any more fecund than any other racial group. Then, too, because of the peculiarities of immigration from Japan over the previous two decades, the excess of female over male immigration was ensuring an almost equal sex balance, overtaking the almost exclusively male immigration of the initial period.

By 1931, the high rate of child-bearing phase was patently over. The increasing age of the immigrant Japanese, most of whom were nearing or had passed the age of 40, was correspondingly accompanied by a decline in births. “Picture brides” were no longer being freely admitted. The second generation, moreover, would scarcely replace the first generation as a child-bearing group for some years. Indeed, 1931 marked a dividing line between two trends in the Japanese birth rate, for after that year the number of births declined sharply, decreasing each year until practically converging with the rate for other groups in the province. Still, the lurid prognostications continued unabated. Since immigration no longer constituted a vital problem except for its utility as a political issue, it was supplanted by the birth rate as a useful source of contention.

In a period in which the more extreme anti-Japanese charges were being consolidated into the demand for the repatriation of all Japanese from Canada as the ideal solution, the decade ended in a small victory for the Japanese – one that they considered a presage of better things to come. It was less than glorious, however, as it was tarnished by the niggling way in which a principle was given grudging and token acquiescence. Still, the right to vote was won by the small group of war veterans who went overseas in the 1914-1918 war and left 53 dead in the battlefields of Europe.

A concerted drive for the right to vote was instituted in the spring of 1931 when the veterans learned that the matter of franchise rights would be on the legislative agenda in Victoria. By this time, the Japanese had managed to get the enthusiastic backing of a few members of the legislature who were themselves war veterans, especially that of MacGregor MacIntosh, Conservative member for the Islands. After paying tribute to the “unusual bravery” of the Japanese, he declared in the legislature that granting the franchise would be “a gracious act of recognition for men who fought under the British flag.”⁵¹ Members opposed to granting the vote gave the by now standard reasons for their position.

In a vote during a committee meeting on a motion to declare Japanese veterans ineligible for the franchise, a deadlock of 18-18 was broken when the chairman decided in favour of the anti-Japanese bloc. But at the next day’s session of the legislature, after “earnest” speeches on the Assembly floor, another one-vote margin granted the franchise to the veterans despite the concerted opposition of Premier Tolmie’s Conservative Cabinet members who, with one exception, voted solidly against it. Oddly enough, however, votes were not cast along party lines but were apparently based on personal convictions: “for” votes – Conservatives 11, Liberals 7, Labour 1; “against” votes – Conservatives 17, Liberals 1. The bill passed third reading on April 1.

This narrow victory, going against the grain of anti-Japanese hostility which had hardened in almost every aspect, was greeted with jubilation by the Japanese community. Speeches given at the Japanese Hall in Vancouver turned to naive variations on the theme that winning the franchise “can be likened to a link in the chain towards the obtaining of the franchise for the Nisei.”

But even the veterans’ supporters had carefully reassured the legislature that the right to vote “would not apply to the descendants” of the veterans.⁵² The Victoria Times, for example, hailed the decision as “eminently fair,” but numerous letters in the daily press pointed out that the government had established a “dangerous precedent” which might in the future lead to “grave and disturbing industrial complications.” A wiser reward was suggested:

Let us pay them a pension for life, pay their fare home to Japan, where the pension would be worth five times as much to them as it would be living here in Canada. When we begin to give some Orientals the vote, the next generation would demand it for all.⁵³

It was largely owing to the quaint adoption of the veterans by the ex-soldier MLAs that the favourable decision was made possible. For a brief moment, it was as if they were looking after their own. But in nearly all other matters, such as the drive to eliminate fishermen who, like the returned veterans, were all naturalized or native-born citizens, the veterans’ supporters were all implacably anti-Japanese. In the blinking of a few years’ turning, Captain MacIntosh was to become even more fierce as an opponent of the Japanese than he had been a temporary advocate of a small portion of them. He was to advocate the repatriation of all Japanese over a ten-year period because he foresaw, within 40 years, an “Eurasian, vice-dominated people” who would drive the whites out of existence. He foresaw a “Japanese Cabinet” in Victoria unless white Canadians ensured that Canadian-born Japanese would always be denied the franchise. “Some weak-minded party will probably give it to them,” MacIntosh declared.⁵⁴

But on April 1, 1931, the Japanese saw a possibility that a vaster and grander dream might become reality. Writing to friends in Victoria after hearing the news, Saburo Shinobu, who led the fight for the franchise, declared:

I cannot help thinking … of the future of the Japanese Canadians as a whole. While I write this letter, thoughts of the morrow come, and why, I do not know, but the tears spring unbidden.⁵⁵

And when the veterans sang “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” and the sentimental “A Waga Senyu” (“My Fellow Soldier”) at their celebration banquet, they were not conscious of what the lyrics of the Japanese song presaged for the future. Koko wa mikuni no nanbyaku ri, they sang – “This place is many hundred miles from my country.”

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Notes

1. Canada, House of Commons Debates, 1922, p. 1545. ↩
2. Lower, A.R.M., “Loring Christie and the Genesis of the Washington Conference of 1921-1922”, Canadian Historical Review, 47 (March, 1966), p. 45. ↩
3. Herman Deslauriers, Montreal St. Mary’s, in Canada, House of Commons Debates, 1921, pp. 2676-7. ↩
4. Acquisition of American citizenship by naturalization was limited to “free white persons” under the Naturalization Act of 1790. An act of 1870 extended the privilege to “aliens of African nativity and persons of African descent”. Further amendments and revisions removed racial barriers for American Indians, Filipinos, Hindus and Chinese. Anti-alien land laws, however, were extensively evaded by the immigrant Japanese in various ways until the 1930s when American-born Japanese could appear openly as owners or leaseholders for parent-owned enterprises. ↩
5. The Hearst campaign was launched by an article in the N.Y. American, September 18, 1915, describing Japan’s plan “to invade and conquer the U.S.” The piece purported to be a translation of a book published in Japan by the “Japanese Military Association.” It was illustrated by pictures alleged to show troops practicing landing operations preparatory to an assault on California. Investigation revealed, among other details, that the pictures were retouched illustrations used during the Sino-Japanese war of 1895. Another issue of the American, July 23, 1916, printed a poem “Hymn of Hate” which read, in part: “Uncle Sam, won’t you listen when we warn you?/ They meet us with a smile/ But they’re working all the while,/ and they’re waiting just to steal our California!/ So just keep your eyes on Togo,/ With his pockets full of maps,/ For we’ve found out we can’t trust the Japs!” ↩
6. E.g., in his “Memorandum” which Loring Christie presented to Meighen in advance of the convening of the Prime Ministers in London, he made clear that the interests and feelings of the United States and Canada “are most nearly identical … especially with regard to the immigration question.” See Lower, op. cit., p. 46. ↩
7. Canadian Annual Review (1921), p. 121. ↩
8. Cheng, T-F., Oriental Immigration in Canada (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1931), pp. 96-8; Angus, H.F., “A Contribution to International Ill-Will”, Dalhousie Review, 13 (April, 1933), pp. 22-33. ↩
9. Ohta to Robb, in Canada, Sessional Papers, August 22, 1923. ↩
10. E.g., Angus MacInnis: “Greed for cheap labour brought the Oriental to British Columbia, and greed for trade has kept him coming in.” Canada, House of Commons Debates, 1938, p. 563. Prior to World War I, imports from Japan had greatly exceeded exports, but the end of the war marked a turning point in trade with Japan. In 1924, for example, exports to Japan leaped from the previous year’s total of $14,510,000 to $26,992,000, while imports totalled $6,298,000. For further analysis, see Lower, A.R.M., Canada and the Far East – 1940 (New York: Institute of Pacific Relations, 1941), pp. 51-60; Woodsworth, C.J., Canada and the Orient (Toronto: Macmillan, 1941), pp. 207-51. ↩
11. British Columbia Legislative Assembly, Journals, 1928, p. 177. ↩
12. Canada, House of Common Debates, 1938, p. 570. ↩
13. Boggs, T.H., “The Oriental on the Pacific Coast”, Queen’s Quarterly, 33 (February, 1926), p. 323. ↩
14. Ibid., pp. 311-24; also his “Oriental Immigration”, Annals of American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, 107 (May, 1923), pp. 50-5; Woolacott, A.P., “Canadian Born Orientals” Canadian Forum, 11 (November, 1930), pp. 52-4; Whiteley, A.S., “The Oriental in British Columbia”, Canadian Forum, 9 (June, 1929), pp. 342-4. Whiteley, for example, advocates “social legislation” and “directed efforts at assimilation” rather than coercive measures aiming at removal of Orientals. For the most acute analysis, see Angus, H.F., “Underprivileged Canadians”, Queen’s Quarterly, 38 (Summer, 1931), pp. 445-60. ↩
15. E.g., Ryder, D.W., “The Japanese Bugaboo”, The Annals, 93 (January, 1921), p. 51. ↩
16. Olmstead, R.A., Decisions of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council Relating to the BNA Act 1867 and the Canadian Constitution 1867-1954, 2 (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1954), p. 385. For background, see ibid., pp. 384-93; also Mackenzie, N., and L.H. Laing, eds., In re Employment of Aliens (1922), 63 S.C.R. 293, By Reference to the Supreme Court of Canada, in Canada and the Law of Nations: A Selection of Cases in International Law, Affecting Canada or Canadians, Decided by the Canadian Courts, by Certain of the Higher Courts in the U.S. and Great Britain and by International Tribunals (Toronto: Ryerson, 1938), pp. 366-71. For a concise statement of the applicability of Section 132, see Deener, D.R., The Growth of Canadian Policies in External Affairs (Durham: Duke University Press, 1960), pp. 81-98. ↩
17. Victoria Times, August 25, 1923. ↩
18. From advertisement in Danger: The Anti-Asiatic Weekly, December 1, 1921, published in Vancouver. The Japanese began operating taxis in 1914 with two cars, expanding by 1921 to 25 cars, run by nine owners. ↩
19. British Columbia Legislative Assembly, “Report on Oriental Activities Within the Province”, in Sessional Papers, 1926-7, pp. BB 3-4. ↩
20. British Columbia Fisheries Commission, Report and Recommendations, 1922 (Ottawa: King’s Printer, 1923), pp. 11, 13. ↩
21. Letter to Leon Ladner, MP for Vancouver South, April 24, 1925. Files of the Amalgamated Association of Fishermen of B.C. Four of the six-member commission were A.W. Neill (Comox-Alberni), Fred Stork (Skeena), W.G. McQuarrie (New Westminster) and Charles Dickie (Nanaimo). ↩

22. Salmon Gill Net Licences Issued 1922-1925

    	Whites	Indians	Japanese	Total
    1922	1470	1032	1989	4491
    1923	1642	1122	1193	3957
    1925	1963	1247	1015	4225

    Increase or Decrease from 1922

    1923	+172 (9.5%)	+90 (7.4%)	-796 (40%)
    1925	+493 (33.5%)	+215 (20.8%)	-974 (48.9%)

    See British Columbia Legislative Assembly, “Report on Oriental Activities”, op. cit., p. BB 19. Trolling licences held by Japanese were reduced by 25% from 1922 total of 332 to 249; and in 1925 to 191 licences, a 62.1% decrease from 1922. ↩
23. Select Standing Committee on Marine and Fisheries, Minutes of the Meeting, Ottawa, April 29, 1926, p. 3. ↩
24. Ibid., pp. 33-4. ↩
25. Victoria Times, August 25, 1925. ↩
26. Yonemura, H., “Japanese Fishermen in British Columbia and British Fair Play”, Canadian Forum, 10 (July, 1930), p. 357: “It may be said that in taking the matter to court, the Japanese did not take the wisest course that it might have been possible to take. In the method they adopted there was an ever present danger of antagonizing the Government and the people of Canada.” But. in view of the stakes involved, the writer concludes that the action was justified. ↩
27. See 1929, 19-20, Geo. V. Chap. 42, Sec. 2, amending R.S.C. 1927, Chap. 73, Sec. 7. A similar policy was followed in respect to licences for fish canneries, salteries and reduction plants, but in 1930, it was decided that the provincial government had sole power to grant such licences. Up to 1941, no discriminatory legislation was enacted by the province in this matter. ↩
28. Citizens of Canada of Japanese Origin, Petition to the Right Hon. W.L. Mackenzie King, Premier, and to the Hon. J.P.A. Cardin, Minister of Marine and Fisheries, February, 1930. One of the groups which supported the petition was the traditionally hostile B.C. Fishermen’s Protective Association which passed a resolution endorsing the request. A Vancouver Province editorial, “The Oriental Problem”, April 29, 1930, hailed the “new state of affairs – Orientals asking for a concession and their Caucasian rivals backing them up.” But the support was temporary. ↩
29. Vancouver Province, April 9, 1930. ↩
30. Vancouver Province, April 29, 1930. ↩
31. Report of the British Columbia Department of Labour, 1919 (Victoria, 1919). ↩
32. Report of the British Columbia Department of Labour, 1927 (Victoria, 1927), p. F43. ↩
33. Carrothers, W.A., “The Immigration Problem in Canada”, Queen’s Quarterly (Summer, 1929), pp. 521-2. ↩
34. Woodsworth, C.J., Canada and the Orient (Toronto: Macmillan, 1941), p. 251. Cf. Shaw, C.L., “Japan’s Finger in Canada”, Maclean’s, October 15, 1937; Hope, C.E., and W.K. Earle, “The Oriental Threat”, Maclean’s, May 1, 1933. Shaw credited Japan with vast schemes of “economic penetration,” of acquiring huge timber lands in the Queen Charlotte Islands and elsewhere, of operating iron mines and spending large sums on nickel and other mineral developments in various parts of the province. See “Are Japanese Invading B.C. Log Industry?”, Vancouver Province, February 8, 1936, which speculated that big shipping, paper and lumber interests in Osaka were interested in shipping B.C. logs to Japan and even possibly planning “to invade B.C. forests and thus control the industry from its source.” In Vancouver Province, March 3, 1938, new Japan-backed “large-scale development of copper interests on the West Coast of Vancouver Island” was announced as fact, but March 2, 1939, issue reported that mines operated by Japanese had nearly all been abandoned, and that “inference that holdings have been operated profitably for benefit of foreign interests is without much support.” ↩
35. Vancouver Province, July 8, 1937. ↩
36. Cf. Hurd, W.B., Racial Origins and Nativity of the Canadian People, census monograph no. 4 (Ottawa, 1937). In his study of racial origins based on the 1931 census, Hurd refers to “racial aptitudes” or “occupational preferences” of various ethnic groups: “in the case of the Hebrew preference for commerce, the Japanese for fishing, the Indian for trapping and that of Scandinavian females for household service.” But unless choices were open, it was not quite to the point to speak of occupational “preferences.” See Porter, J., The Vertical Mosaic: An Analysis of Social Class and Power in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 1965), pp. 63-4, 68-9. ↩
37. “Report on Oriental Activities”, op. cit., p. BB 9. ↩
38. Sumida, R., The Japanese in British Columbia (Master’s thesis, Department of Economics, University of British Columbia, 1935), pp. 278-9. ↩
39. Ibid., pp. 292-3. A study of the 1928 production of 933 white and 430 Japanese berry growers revealed that the white growers produced 675 tons of strawberries and 409 tons of raspberries whereas Japanese produced 1,205 tons of strawberries and 287 tons of raspberries. But in many cases, berry-growing was only part of the total farm occupation in the case of the whites while more generally, it formed the complete operation for the Japanese. ↩
40. Ibid., pp. 293-4. ↩
41. Yamaga, Y., My Footsteps in British Columbia, p. 5. ↩
42. “Report on Oriental Activities”, op. cit., p. BB 3. ↩
43. Hope, C.E., “British Columbia’s Oriental Problem”, Maclean’s, March, 1931. Hope further advocated that nationalization laws be changed so “that no one of unabsorbable alien descent or parentage … could acquire Canadian citizenship by virtue of having been born in Canada.” ↩
44. MacInnes, T., Oriental Occupation of British Columbia (Vancouver: Sun Publishing Co., 1927), pp. 35-6, 51. ↩
45. Hope, C.E., and W.K. Earle, op. cit., p. 54. ↩
46. MacInnes, op. cit., p. 19. ↩
47. Vancouver Province, October 4, 1932. Total number of births, including Japanese, was 11,466 in 1931. ↩
48. Shaw, C.L., “The Oriental Wants to Vote”, Maclean’s, April 1, 1937. ↩
49. “Report on Oriental Activities”, op. cit., p. BB 3: “In three years, the number of Japanese children in the public schools has increased by 74%, while in the same time the number of white children has increased by 6%.” That is, in 1922-3, there were 92,120 whites and 1,422 Japanese in the public schools; in 1925-6, these totals had increased to 97,794 white and 2,477 Japanese children. See pp. BB 4, 21. ↩

50. Birth Rates in B.C. by Racial Groups, 1931

    	Per 1,000 Pop.	Per 1,000 Women Age 20-44
    British	13.3	76.5
    French	14.1	89.4
    Scandinavian	15.7	97.6
    German	17.4	102.8
    Italian	20.2	126.8
    Chinese	5.7	219.8
    Japanese	36.4	229.4

    (Seventh Census of Canada, 1931).

    Cf. birth rate of Japanese in California which reached a maximum of 68 per 1,000 population in 1920, a rate four times as high as the white population in the state. It was a consistently held theory there that the Japanese government sent women to California to “live with Jap men for the sole purpose of breeding … children” in order “to gain control of this state.” See Grizzly Bear, official publication of the Native Sons of the Golden West, September, 1923. ↩
51. Victoria Colonist, March 31, 1931. ↩
52. Vancouver Province, April 1, 1931. ↩
53. Victoria Colonist, April 3, 1931. ↩
54. Vancouver Province, March 16, 1938; Vancouver News-Herald, March 1, 1938. When the vote for Issei veterans was debated in the Legislature in 1921, British Columbians were warned that if the franchise was granted to them, it would be the “thin edge of the wedge.” In 1925, there would be “10,000 Jap votes”; in 1929, “Jap candidates”; and in 1933, “a Jap majority at Ottawa.” See Danger: the Anti-Asiatic Weekly, December 1, 1921. In 1944, R.M. Edgar, Vancouver returning officer, told a meeting of the Vancouver Centre Liberal Association that if the Japanese ever got the vote, “first thing you’d know we’d have a Jap sitting in the House at Victoria.” See Vancouver Province, March 24, 1944. ↩
55. Shinobu memoirs, p. 4. ↩

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