Chapter Seven: Generations

powell street knows
it is fifth avenue
main street wall street and park
avenue

serves
as the centre of a social scheme
longs to be the nucleus of a
grander dream.
– Mark Toyama

Despite the youthfulness of the new generation, the decade preceding Pearl Harbor ushered in a period of self-scrutiny and of organized attempts to ameliorate their status as second-class citizens. Through the preceding decades, all citizens of Japanese origin – naturalized and Canadian-born alike – had been denied the right to vote, a denial that had important consequences. In the economic field, the Japanese had been hampered in making a living by legal and de facto exclusion from a series of occupations as well as by the imposition of quotas in various industries, effected in one way or another on the basis of race rather than nationality. These denials and restrictions seemed to be based on the belief that even the second and third generations were less “Canadian” than citizens of other racial backgrounds, and that fundamentally they were aliens, incapable of being “assimilated” into the rest of the population.

The franchise problem had taken on a great symbolic significance for the Nisei, and though the vote had been granted to the Issei war veterans, it appeared highly improbable that the right would ever be extended. A string of resolutions in the Legislative Assembly after 1931 made plain British Columbia’s “unalterable opposition” to any extension of the franchise. Yet the Nisei were being taught in the schools and the universities that taxation without representation was a form of oppression, and that those men who had struggled for political rights and for equality with those more privileged than themselves were praiseworthy. To be told that, because of their racial origin, they might never be able to vote was humiliating to a group brought up in the belief that the ideals of “democracy” and “fair play” were real and universally valid. Moreover, their parents had passed on the belief that they belonged to a worthy people with a centuries-old cultural heritage.

Denied the rights of citizenship in all but name, the Nisei were nevertheless fervent believers in representative government and individual rights. When their protests against discriminatory acts were disregarded, the Nisei felt that, if they possessed the right to vote, they might acquire redress or at least more attention to their plight. This belief grew into an exaggerated – and illusory – sense of the importance of political rights in a modern democracy. The growing sense of grievance and injustice, however, was still mitigated by the belief that a society which professed democratic ideals would ultimately practice them.

A cadre of Nisei, mainly members of the Japanese Students Club at the University of British Columbia, began to seek new ways to explain their harsh position in Canadian life. If more Canadians could be made aware of Japanese problems, especially if supported by hard facts and not through the rhetoric of politicians, Nisei thought that the principles of democracy would eventually be applied to them. From this point of view a Report of the Survey of the Second Generation Japanese in British Columbia emerged in 1935, a detailed study of all aspects of their current status and future aspirations.² The intensive field work was supervised by Nobuichi Yamaoka, a graduate in architecture from the University of Alberta. One of the “advisors” to the group was Henry Forbes Angus, Head of the Economics and Political Science Department of the University of British Columbia, and a forceful advocate of full citizenship rights for the Nisei. He provided one of the few sources of inspiration in the bleak climate of the day.

It appeared, however, that members of the committee which initiated the report could not agree on the interpretation of the materials which they had gathered, for in a curious prefatory statement they declared that

it regrets to state that through diverse considerations, it was decided that this report consists wholly of statistics … omitting the publications of the results of interviews with the representative people of both Japanese and Occidental origin … and the information obtained at different discussion meetings ….

and added, later in the text, that it was “to avoid the pitfalls of personal issues and opinions” that the Report was so limited.³

Indeed, the thrust of the report was cautious and reticent. Perhaps this seeming humility was a good tactic, but it was obvious that the individualistic reactions of the Nisei members were held in check by the authoritarian Canadian Japanese Association, the Issei group which had assumed the financial responsibility for publication. In 1936, when Nisei were organizing a delegation to appear before the Special Committee on Elections and Franchise Acts in Ottawa, the CJA, resenting the challenge to its authority, opposed the move, thus underlining the cleavage that existed between the two generations as to the “proper” ways in which to seek changes.

The belief of the Nisei in their “assimilability” was genuine and profound, contrary to the claims of politicians and others such as the “Native Sons of B.C.” who wrote that:

The Canadian-born Nipponese never has and never will think of himself as Canadian (100 percent or 1 percent).⁴

But unlike the parental generation, the Nisei could base their protests against the stigma of second-class citizenship upon the claims of an already well-advanced “assimilation” to Western ways. And so the Report, by giving an objective set of facts about themselves, attempted to demonstrate their fitness for franchise rights by suggesting that their intellectual and social attainment were at least equal to those of other immigrant groups and the general white population.

Indeed, the protest against their lowly status, coupled with the awareness that the immigrant generation was incapable of pressing effectively for legal and economic equality, was gradually, if spasmodically, taking firmer shape. Two attempts were made to establish an English-language newspaper in Vancouver, through which Nisei could articulate their attitudes to their problems. The first of these was Hozumi Yonemura’s six-page monthly, somewhat hopefully called The New Age, which folded after a year. Then, The Japanese Canadian, edited by Peter Masuda, who later toured the vaudeville circuit as a violinist under the name of “Mr. Chang, the Swing Laundryman,” collapsed after a short run.

But the pages of these early failures at least proselytized the belief: “We are Canadians – let us be thoroughly Canadian.” Proficiency, and even grace, in the use of the English language were earnestly demanded. They urged others to relinquish such Japanese habits and ways of life as might seem strange or offensive to delicate British Columbian sensibilities. “Better Canadianism” meant not only conforming to Canadian ways but “enriching” Canada with their own special talents and cultural inheritance.

These two short-lived newspapers prepared the way for an important event in the changing community: the establishment of The New Canadian in November, 1938. At the outset, the Nisei newspaper went to press only when funds were available, but soon managed to publish once a week. Although it devoted a considerable amount of space to community news, reporting on a plethora of social and athletic activities, its essential concern was with problems of race relations.

Most important of all, it led the drive for unconditional acceptance in Canadian life for Japanese Canadians. Often written with verve, the newspaper soon pricked the attention of the Vancouver dailies and, at times, of the national press. Its first issue, which carried reports of the Third National Japanese Canadian Citizens League Conference and its “keynote” theme of the need for Japanese to disperse themselves across Canada, was noted in the Vancouver newspapers and picked up by the Canadian Press wire service. Hence, it was through The New Canadian and its editorials that, for the first time in their history, the Japanese in Canada could present their views to the white majority.

A drive to organize all Nisei in the province under the aegis of the Japanese Canadian Citizens League (JCCL) already had begun. The founding members of The New Canadian in fact included the leaders of the drive for unconditional acceptance as Canadian citizens. The JCCL, in effect, was a challenge to the influence wielded by the traditional, immigrant-dominated and largely Japan-oriented community, though no one of the time expressed it in those terms. Organized in the spring of 1936, and incorporating an existing group in Vancouver called the Japanese Canadian Citizens Association, this was the first organized stage in the evolution of the Nisei, who saw that their problems could not be solved merely through individual efforts but must be channeled through a broad, collective front, as independently as possible from the parental generation, in order “to provide an adequate machinery which would ultimately enable [the Nisei] to qualify as an integral part of Canada.”⁵ When the League was formed, it consisted of seven chapters in the populous lower southwestern corner of the province and aimed to gain adherents from a potential membership of some 2,000 Nisei over the age of 18.

The first move undertaken by the JCCL was considerably ambitious for such a fledgling body. Moving rapidly, members collected funds in the spring of 1936 so that a brief, asking for the revision of law which would give Nisei the right to vote in British Columbia during federal elections,⁶ could be prepared by Vancouver lawyer T.G. Norris. A four-member delegation was then selected to appear in Ottawa before the Special Committee on Elections and Franchise Acts of the House of Commons.

The goad to this action had been the Commons debate in February when Angus MacInnis, CCF member for Vancouver East, had introduced, as part of his party’s agitation to grant the franchise to Orientals, a controversial resolution proposing that Canada ought to exclude all races to which the franchise was not awarded.⁷ MacInnis argued heatedly for the extension of the franchise to those “born and living in Canada,” but he found little support in the House and his motion was turned down, 186 votes to 15. Prime Minister Mackenzie King, who declared that he “was not aware that either the Orientals themselves or the public generally were advocating votes for Orientals,”⁸ maintained that the franchise question should be discussed when amendments to the Dominion Franchise Act were under consideration.

Norris’s brief, 62 pages of closely packed detail, was an uncommon marriage of magisterial detachment and unchecked emotion, of dry technicality and purple prose. Its main points were: (1) that the considerations which prompted the original enactment of the discriminatory legislation – for example, lack of education and a sufficient acquaintance with the English language – no longer existed (and that the maintenance of the disqualification was “a weapon of industrial expediency and an instrument of race oppression”); (2) that denial of the franchise tended to create sectionalism “contrary to the intention of the Federationalists who brought about the union of the Provinces under the British North America Act,” and that the Dominion government should represent the people of Canada without discrimination as to race between provinces; (3) that it tended to create an economic minority (“a minority which, if deprived of the franchise, will not be assimilated into the life of Canada, and living under a sense of oppression, will eventually become a source of difficulty”); and (4) that it created and aggravated international ill-feeling.⁹

Unlike previously published material, such as the sober-sided Report prepared by the Nisei, Norris’s brief minced no words:

We must either drive all people of the Japanese race from our borders or we must make every effort to assimilate them by granting them civil and political rights …. The present refusal of the franchise on the grounds of race is comparable only to the policy of Hitler with regard to the Jews. Does enlightened Canada really want a ‘blood purge’? The course we have entered upon is no more rational than that of Hitler and its cost to Canada will in the long run be greater than that which Germany will bear.¹⁰

Among protagonists for Japanese rights, to link Hitler’s treatment of the Jews with Canada’s treatment of the Japanese became a favourite tactic. But Norris’s apocalyptic vision of the frustrated Nisei turning into political extremists “striking our political life with a heavy shock” somewhat overplayed the issue and was not in line with the much softer, personal approach of the Nisei delegation to Ottawa.

When the four delegates appeared on May 22 before the Commons committee, one aspect confounded the 12 all-party members. Shortly before their arrival, Chairman Bothwell had inquired of MacInnis: “Do they need interpreters?” All were astounded at their fluency in English. Thus, for example:

MacNicol [John Ritchie, Conservative Toronto Davenport]: I should like to congratulate the various members of the delegation on their splendid command of the English language.¹¹

That “fluency” in itself should be a matter for comment was only one sign of the extent to which nearly all members of Parliament and most Canadians lacked any meaningful knowledge of the resident Japanese, especially of the Nisei. It was a mark of the ease in which Canadians could be taken in by the dark myths and stereotypes spun by anti-Japanese politicians and pressure groups in respect to their “inassimilability.”

It was also quite apparent, from the proceedings of the hearing, that although various aspects of the Japanese “problem” might come up for debate in the Commons, rarely if ever had members of the two major parties considered that there was a vital problem in British Columbia which involved matters beyond Empire policy or trade with Japan. At the end of the hearing, a statement by the member for Toronto Davenport summed up how little the Japanese “problem” had filtered into the consciousness of Eastern MPs:

It is a bit of a surprise to me to know that these conditions [disqualification from the franchise, statutory restrictions, etc.] exist in British Columbia. There may be reasons for it. I am passing no comment on the right or wrong of it whatever …. So far as I am concerned, my mind is wide open.¹²

The four delegates – teacher Hideko Hyodo, insurance agent Minoru Kobayashi, dentist Edward Banno and university lecturer S.I. Hayakawa – all stressed the “adaptability” of the Nisei, their “extraordinarily complete process of Canadianization” and their consequent fitness for exercising the franchise. Perhaps, in a strange way, the competence of the delegation in presenting their case turned against them; it obviously did not square with the carefully nurtured image of the Oriental in British Columbia. Hayakawa, a Vancouver-born Nisei who taught English at Wisconsin, pointed out:

You may also be wondering whether we are spokesmen of an exceptional and very small group among the Japanese of B.C., and whether or not the entire Japanese population is as much concerned about the franchise as we are. In answer to this, I should like to be able to show the list of contributors who have made this trip possible. Hundreds of young boys and girls, have been sacrificing ice-cream sodas and movies, and contributing their quarters and fifty-cent pieces, in order that we might appear before you …. One Japanese-Canadian parent said to me that he could die in peace if his children could have the franchise which he had been denied …. We can only point out that like yourselves, we are perhaps a little better endowed with the gift of the gab than those whom we represent, and we are therefore as representative of the Canadian citizens who have sent us, as you are of the less articulate Canadian citizens who have sent you to Ottawa.¹³

A.W. Neill took exception to Hayakawa’s claim, telling the committee that the “charming lady and the polished gentlemen … are not more representative of the population they represented than I am. They may represent a few people, but they do not represent the bulk of the people for whom they are seeking votes; they do not represent the condition of Orientals.”¹⁴ Indeed, the confrontation between the delegates and their two adversaries from British Columbia, Neill and Thomas Reid, who appeared at the hearing by permission of the committee, epitomized the ancient war between the province and its resident Japanese. During the hearing and in later meetings of the committee, the two MPs tried vigorously to discredit the Nisei delegation.

The following year, the committee met to hear the Reid-Neill team present their counter evidence with Reid presenting his own “Brief Opposing Oriental Franchise in the Province of British Columbia” and playing straight man to Neill’s comic. They made little attempt to deal directly with the case presented by the Nisei but tried to dismiss the “audacious” appeal on the grounds that there was no difference between the Canadian Japanese and Japanese in Japan. The whole amounted, Reid suggested, to a conspiracy:

It should be noted that no agitation to be given the franchise has come from the Chinese …. The present agitation for the franchise has been fostered entirely by the Japanese and by Japanese societies, and it is believed no momentous action such as this is ever undertaken without the full cognizance of the Japanese Imperial Government through its accredited mouthpiece in this country – the Japanese Consul.¹⁵

Reid insisted that the agitation was all part of Japan’s plan for conquest, along with illegal entry, the high birth rate, the planting of spies in the fishing industry. It was clear enough in Neill’s mind that assimilation could only come through miscegenation:

To cross an individual of a white race with an individual of a yellow race is to produce, in nine cases out of ten, a mongrel wastrel with the worst qualities of both races.¹⁶

For Neill, the plea for the franchise was merely “legal quibbling,” “sob stuff,” “claptrap” and “ piffle.”

Granting the federal franchise would be “the thin edge of the wedge” towards their asking for the provincial vote:

When that day comes, if it ever comes, we might as well pull up our stakes and seek pastures new, for they will then, by reason of numbers to a great extent be able to control affairs in the Province of British Columbia, political as well as economic …. Once the Japanese secure the franchise in British Columbia the next objective contemplated is to obtain legislative positions, such as municipal, Provincial or Dominion …. When that time comes, the Japanese Government will then have an active voice in Canada and so help to shape the policies of this country.¹⁷

Neill’s contribution to Reid’s closing peroration was that the committee ought not to “go against the deep-set wishes of British Columbia”; if it did, the Japanese would be well on their way to controlling “half of Canada to-morrow.” But when subjected to close questioning on the number of current potential voters, neither Reid nor Neill was able to produce accurate figures. Indeed, Neill’s loose grasp of facts was rather woeful.¹⁸ He visualized at least 25,000 Japanese rushing to the polls when, in fact, less than 5,400 would have been eligible.

The outcome of the hearings was predictable. Since the right to vote in provincial elections was determined by provincial legislation, it was only to be expected that Parliament would do nothing about it, for an amendment to the British North America Act to give the federal government power to act would have been required. The right to vote in federal elections, however, could have been granted if Parliament had so wished. But both major political parties remained irrevocably opposed to any extension of the federal franchise.

It was clear to the Nisei that the protest would have to be carried on, for the existing situation was part of the heritage that the oncoming generation would have to bear for an indeterminate period unless an entirely different philosophy of race relations was adopted by the provincial and federal governments. But the difficulties encountered by the JCCL in becoming recognized as the “official” second-generation organization were indicative of the varying attitudes within the community concerning the methods by which problems should be overcome and who should do the leading. Citizenship movements of this kind had never overcome their teething problems; the JCCA, which was organized in Vancouver in 1932, was “sacrificed,” according to one member, “upon an altar of Nisei apathy and indifference.”¹⁹ Part of the relative failure of the JCCL to “unify” the various existing Nisei groups was due to the makeup of its leadership, which consisted largely of a group of university students or graduates who were also affiliated with the Christian churches. Although these leaders tried to counter the accusations of “cliqueishness” levelled against them by stressing the need for all Nisei to join together to face common problems, the group was beset by adverse criticism and resignations. By 1939, when a special “Unity Conference” was organized to iron out problems of support and dissent, JCCL president Harry Naganobu admitted that his group laboured “under a cloud of suspicion ever since its inception.”²⁰

The JCCL considered that its chief function was be concerned in the field of political action and public relations and therefore sent delegates to various congresses of youth groups, and took every opportunity to interpret the aspirations of the Nisei to the public. It tried to aid in the development of articulate leaders by sponsoring oratorical and essay contests, by holding forums to provoke open discussion of various problems, and by engaging in research in the arena of vocational opportunities. It was a pressure group in the sense that it agitated for what it felt was “natural justice”; it also operated as a counter-pressure group, keeping a vigilant lookout for attempts to further restrict the economic possibilities of the Japanese. But it was not easy for an organization like the League to gain acceptance and it had to struggle against reaction to its views, views which were usually a few steps in advance of the majority’s.

The lack of a developed political consciousness, factionalism among themselves, social variations in their degree of assimilation and traditional dependence upon the Issei community retarded the development of a universal feeling of group responsibility. The JCCL rarely got support from the rank and file. The sprinkling of better educated Nisei in the forefront of the movement tended to arouse “suspicions” and feelings of rivalry or envy, perhaps as a reaction to the fact that these Nisei were carrying out the larger Canadian pattern in attending university and rebelling against family and community dominance. Instead of being a homogeneous racial bloc, which anti-Japanese agitators chose to envisage, Nisei society was unsettled by petty bickerings of faction and clique – a complex society, where interest and counter-interests clashed unnoticed by the outer society.

There was resentment within the community against editorial advice and criticism offered by The New Canadian.²¹ At no time before the war were the Canadian-born able to form a cohesive front and less than 20% of the Nisei in Vancouver, for example, were members of the JCCL. And though a campaign to publicize the work of the JCCL, to explain its aims and values, was instituted through the summer of 1941,²² the movement was not any more able to gain a mass appeal.

The ultimate aims of the two generations were not so widely different, but the Issei felt that they could not relinquish control to a group that by their own standards was incapable of purposeful action. And thus the spectacle arose, serio-comic in its way, of two groups at odds with each other and, within their own ranks, again split by conflicting attitudes. The widening “cultural gap” between the two generations made communication difficult; the Nisei’s scant knowledge of the polite Japanese forms of address and behaviour was offensive to the Issei; and often the economic dependency of the Nisei forced them to suppress open opposition to Issei-dominated community action. As the JCCL, for example, met in Victoria for the last time at its annual conference in 1941, it announced that its 10 chapters were to be assessed a total of $350 to cover expenses of the “national” treasury. This shoestring budget was evidence of the slender financial resources which not only the JCCL but other Nisei groups could muster up for their operations. At the same time, Issei groups during the year were donating comparatively large amounts to Canada’s war effort, oversubscribing Victory Bond quotas.

Although some Issei were sympathetic with the aims of the Nisei, many were resentful of what they construed as a namaiki (“impertinent”) group. In the deferential framework of their community life, in the hierarchical scale of prestige and power, which gave highest place to influential businessmen, the Nisei were looked upon as the group to whom least deference was due. They were the youngest group in an Oriental tradition which placed a great deal of prestige upon age; they were the poorest in a new milieu in which money wielded influence and provided the status in a group generally tracing its origin to the peasant class in Japan; they were socially the most inferior because they were considered not truly Japanese.

Indeed, the conflict was becoming much more explicit. As in other immigrant groups, the Japanese were undergoing sharp cleavages between the generations. In their case, however, the problems engendered were far more serious in light of their economic and political situation and of international trends. Despite the modifying influence of Canadian life and their own slow, piecemeal and often superficial assimilation to Western ways, the Issei remained essentially Japanese – especially in the eyes of their Canadian-born children – in terms of their personality traits, attitudes and ideals. Practical cessation of immigration also meant that the two generations were separated by a large age gap, and members of the two groups tended to live in two different worlds, neither understanding, literally or figuratively, the language of the other.

The gap between parents and children was fostered by the increasing absorption of the Nisei into the ways and ideas of the larger community as they attended school, learned English and acquired the cultural traits of white society – to a point where the influence of the Canadian environment almost transcended that of the Japanese home. This outcome was indeed ironical, for few immigrant groups placed as much value on education as did the Japanese. The Nisei’s preferred language was English despite almost compulsory attendance at language schools. With the difference in language came an absorption into a new world of knowledge and attitudes not generally available to the parents. And since they were unable to handle the Japanese language properly, the children came to look upon themselves as Canadians of Japanese origin, persons who did not know how to speak, act or think like Japanese. Although some of the older Nisei felt that the Japanese had cultural traits worth incorporating in the new land, the general tendency was towards a break with the past. The “proof” of assimilation was exemplified by the widening gulf, by the realization on the part of both generations that they were basically different. And like the “war” between British Columbia and the resident Japanese, this struggle was equally wasteful.

The life of the school and of the street widened the separation between generations. If it did nothing else, the school introduced a rival source of authority, the image of the teacher competing with that of the father. In the process, the child came to believe in a universe divided into two realms, one for school and one for home, each with rules and modes of behaviour of its own. As the children grew up, they felt an increased compulsion to choose between the one way and the other. The immigrants themselves were torn by a conflicting desire to have their sons and daughters be like themselves and yet lead better lives. Still, they rarely saw their children as mediators between the culture of the home and the culture of the wider society. Even if they did, they resented it, for it reversed the “proper” order of things. In their eyes, the second generation was undisciplined and ungrateful. When the children were young, it was still possible to curb their rebelliousness through, for example, the rather terrifyingly effective use of moxa, in which incense was slowly burned on nerve centres of the body. But as age increased their rebelliousness, they were not as amenable to authority.

The cleavages even became topics for discussion in public “forums” and “conferences,” and became a popular feature in the community newspapers. Feelings modulating between bewilderment and outrage were not uncommon among Issei for whom the Western world was loose and profligate, filled with sexual pitfalls and inferior to their own. The Issei vision was often distorted, filled with chimeras. The Nisei were pleasure-seeking upstarts who

lack the pioneer spirit, the ‘guts’ of their parents who at an early age crossed the Pacific without any money but after arriving in this country, through patience, industriousness, faith in life, and sheer determination, created something out of nothing. But these second generation are afraid to move on to other parts of Canada. They are not industrious. In fact, they are lazy and think that money and success are floating in the air and can be secured without effort.²³

Such comments were, in the main, neither accurate nor fair but were clearly symptoms of the malaise. Non-Japanese such as school teachers, who had limited contact with Nisei, would have been shocked, for to them the young Nisei were models of propriety, industry and decorum, exemplars of those very traits which parents found lacking in them. And to the adverse criticism of the parental generation, the Nisei, unsympathetic and hypersensitive to what they considered the Issei’s inept command of the English language, replied with their own:

We do most of our shopping at Woodward’s, but I hate to go there with my mother She tries to talk with the clerks half in Japanese and half in English, but it sounds so funny, and the clerks seem to be laughing at us all the time.

Whenever I go out with my parents, I do all the talking if there are any White people there …. But sometimes other Japanese people, especially the women, talk very loudly in Japanese and attract so much attention that I feel very embarrassed.²⁴

“Industry” and “thrift” appeared to be misplaced values for Nisei who questioned the choice of values in the distribution of family income. Nisei looked unfavourably upon the older folk who sent money back to Japan rather than building better homes, a practice which appeared to support claims that they were satisfied with a “low standard of living”:

If all the funds, which in the past have flown unnecessarily to Japan in the form of immigrant remittances, had been spent upon better housing facilities, conditions now would not be nearly so deplorable.²⁵

Some of the resentment expressed against parental attitudes were banal enough. Disapproval of ballroom dancing – a custom utterly alien to the Japan-born – was inveighed against:

We see no harm in dancing, and it is a valuable means of social communication. But our parents don’t care about social communication, and just to say ‘dance’ to them is to be met with ‘how disgusting’! We never go to rowdy dances, but even if we go to a private dance, the first generation all gossip about us. Only a very few understand the situation.²⁶

If a young man should put his arms around a girl when dancing, it was interpreted by Issei as a prelude to immoral relations, for from their limited experience, they believed that males sought women only to satisfy sexual needs. Having come from a culture in which the artificial segregation of the sexes came into force from an early age – even in the lower grades of primary schools – the Issei found the free intermingling of the sexes in Canada utterly incomprehensible and contrary to their sense of morality.

And as the concept of a “romantic” courtship and marriage was absent from their vocabulary and was contrary to their notion of a sensible marital arrangement, serious conflicts arose when parents attempted to dictate the choice of a mate. Since matters of sex and marriage were, in the traditional Japanese scheme, so intimately related to male superiority, parental dominance and family honour, attempts to follow new sexual patterns produced considerable friction. To many saddened Issei, it seemed that their offspring had moved gross passion to the centre of marriage on the basis of chance impressions – a madness of the reason.

Unmarried Nisei women had the harder lot since there was generally a surplus in both their ranks and in single Issei males. One girl protested:

I would hate to marry one of the Japan-born men. They are so stereotyped, hard-headed, despotic, and conceited that I would remain an old maid rather than become the slave of a Japan-born man. How can any enjoyment be found in life as the miserable wife of such a man?²⁷

The Issei male, on the other hand, felt the second-generation girl to be

a little bit too difficult for me to handle. They are all right for fun or pleasure outside the home, but … if I marry one of them I fear that there may be too many bosses in one home.²⁸

The position of Canadian-born females was especially difficult in light of the emphasis on male superiority and the parental anxiety that even the most innocent of sexual associations might compromise the daughter’s reputation and make it difficult to arrange a suitable marriage. Higher education was often forbidden in case it might jeopardize the daughter’s chances of marriage – the theory being that no Nisei would knowingly seek a wife with superior intellectual attainments. In a family of several daughters, it was usually the eldest who bore the brunt of parental disfavour if she had the fortitude to break the ancient moral norms. If she wanted to “date,” there was inevitable trouble at home, in contrast to the greater latitude given to sons in departing from the old ways.

Within the range of these rather extreme attitudes stood other gradations and deviations, and, of course, there were well-adjusted families. But the extreme contrast between Japanese and Western civilization served to give the Issei and Nisei different cultural perspectives through which to interpret their experiences. Each group placed different emphasis on the importance of family life, the relations between the sexes and those minutiae of correct conduct which the Japanese called “moral behaviour.” The position of the Nisei, then, in the midst of this intense cultural clash, exacerbated by the prejudices of white society, was unenviable.

The conflict between Japanese and Western standards was vividly illustrated by a survey made by Vancouver Japanese Language School principal Tsutae Sato, one of the few Issei spokesmen who tried to analyze the problem objectively. He interviewed a group of Issei and 45 public- and high-school teachers, asking them primarily what they thought of Nisei.²⁹ What the teachers criticized in Nisei was lack of initiative and an overabundance of reserve and social backwardness; but these were the very qualities that Issei prized, more or less conforming to the ideal of reverence and filial piety. On the other hand, what the Issei condemned as disrespect, impoliteness and disobedience, the white teachers interpreted as indicative of spiritedness and sociability.

In the late 1930s, as more Nisei were grasping for independence and searching for jobs, both generations looked for ways in which the cleavages could be resolved. The compromises, however, had to be based on the Issei’s well-defined terms. As more Issei, for example, were coming to accept dancing as a social necessity, a group of teachers of the Vancouver Language School, sitting in a round table discussion, drew up a list of rules “in order that mistakes and sorrow be avoided.” The location of the dances were to be “wisely chosen,” dancing to be strictly supervised and the consumption of alcohol banned.³⁰ Another Issei committee agreed that certain Japanese customs ought to be modified to make them more acceptable. Its concept of an “ideal” marriage, however, still included the use of a nakodo, or “go-between,” to guard against “immorality,” once it was established that there was a mutual interest between the prospective mates.

The Issei, however, were far less concerned over the happiness of their children than over propriety and decorum. Even in an unusual “forum,” sponsored by the Camp and Mill Workers Union, in which Issei and Nisei met to discuss their problems, the overriding theme was familiar: the suspect “morality” of the Nisei, ironical in a group in which delinquency was only noteworthy by its almost complete absence. Even these Issei from the union membership, generally more enlightened than other more conservative groups, were perturbed over the issues of “steady dates,” dancing and parties. Indeed, these Issei called themselves the “Community Morals Committee.”

Despite the reputation they had among Issei of being “pleasure-mad” extroverts engaged in a constant round of social activities, by 1941 the Nisei were a perplexed, generally introverted lot. Locked in devouring discontent, they were the products of a bleak and dispiriting era. Parents, family friends and other members of the community who looked upon them as “problem children” and as “poor Japanese” began the process that led the Nisei towards a split in orientation, towards a sense of instability. The discriminatory attitudes of the white community, which did not recognize the Canadian ways of the majority of the Nisei, added to that instability. And unable to prove that they were “good Canadians,” the Nisei were forced back into an uneasy dependence upon the Japanese community, to a situation in which feelings of insecurity and inferiority were impressed upon them.

The Nisei, on the whole, recognized themselves as Canadians of Japanese ancestry. They had no real wish to change or reject this basic identification and gradually, individual Nisei came to recognize the full social definition of this identification and therefore attempted to acquire the techniques of managing the frustration or conflict endemic in a bi-racial and bi-cultural milieu. But these techniques invariably involved a series of compromises which came to be incorporated into their personalities in the form of reserved conduct, often expressed in rigidity, timidity or shyness in association with other Canadians or even with Nisei of other backgrounds and interests.³¹ As the Nisei matured, and as the gap widened between youthful expectation and the grimmer realities of fulfilment, the process was one of progressive frustration. Those unable to accept a compromise were persons whose drives were leading them to be either completely “Canadian” or Japanese, thereby becoming hostile towards either Japanese or Canadian symbols. If there was a trend among Nisei towards rejection of group identification, this shedding of the skin could scarcely be achieved within the stale and confining womb of the Little Tokyo community. Only a few, moreover, had the desire or ability to make the radical break. For the much greater number, their ties with family and community were too binding, and they developed, perforce, a life of their own, an intermediary ground from which they could enter, when necessary, both worlds.

The typical fictional character seen in The New Canadian was a Byronic figure, full of frustration and resignation: a sensitive, rebellious introvert. And in the sense that art can be a mirror to nature, short stories containing this prototype provided an illuminating index to Nisei character. The stories were tortuously written but clearly reflected the problems that had become obsessional: the idea of being a misfit, the agonies of conflict between the generations, the painful humiliations of prejudice. The Nisei “hero” was typecast: a shadowy Vancouver Powell Street figure, standing at night in doorways smoking cigarettes, filled with unconsummated desire, while the real energy and will of the world swirled beyond him. This feeling of passivity and helplessness, the sense of being on the periphery, was part of the consciousness of a group accustomed to living on the fringes of the larger society. The note of frustration was sounded over and over:

Self-exiled or otherwise, Masao was definitely a social outcast. At least he considered himself so. But he didn’t know exactly why. ‘Oh why, o why was I ever born? Why did God make me a black-and-wirehaired kid?’ he thought bitterly as he tossed in bed trying to reconcile himself to the fact that he was exotic, that he was Japanese. Night after night he went through the same queries, the same torture ….³²

The outcome of these stories was never a happy one, but the Nisei “hero” usually subsumed his self-pity, strove towards an ideal or reconciled himself to things as they existed.

A small coterie of writers were, indeed, busily using The New Canadian to ventilate often-unexpressed emotions, and to talk of “The Great Nisei Novel” that was surely to come. There was scarcely an issue that did not carry commentaries or moralizing imperatives on the “Nisei problem.” Their self-criticism ranged over a wide field: Nisei were lacking in assurance and initiative, they were clannish, they were defeatist, they were consumed with the sense of futility. This frank recognition and discussion of problems and feelings was certainly far removed from traditional Japanese behaviour. The Issei were aware of their inferior status in Canadian life, but any feelings about it were repressed and surfaced only in a crisis. And discussion of their inadequacies in their own vernacular press was conspicuously absent. The lack of reticence among the Nisei – at least in their press – was one more example of the Issei failure to establish what they thought were Japanese perspectives in the second generation.

In the schools, contact between Nisei and other racial groups was relatively pleasant, in a situation in which adolescents had generally not yet fully acquired adult prejudices. Extensions of friendships were usually curtailed by attendance at Japanese-language schools which also minimized Nisei participation in after-school activities. But few Nisei would risk, for example, condemnation by parents for “dating” someone who belonged to another racial group. And relationships shifted perceptibly as students grew older. One Nisei, in a burst of maudlin self-dramatization, wrote of this contrast between innocence and experience:

Public school … accomplished its objectives, more or less thoroughly to make me a normal Canadian child. I remember singing with native pride ‘O Canada’ and ‘The Maple Leaf Forever,’ for Canada was the country of my birth …. Death came painfully in the last years of my high school life. The Canadian within me slowly became extinguished. Persistently, the fact that I was of Japanese origin was imposed upon me. Rather unsympathetic teachers, prejudiced, often thoughtless students treated me as a different being, because of my physical characteristics, which I … could never hope to alter.³³

Practically all Nisei personally experienced acts of social discrimination. Those who had not at least knew about places of business with a reputation for discriminating against them. Racial discrimination was generally expected, and experience reinforced this expectation:

One day my friend and I went to the Pantages Theatre [in Vancouver]. We had heard of the discrimination against Japanese but my friend doubted the stories he had heard. The usher directed us to one side of the theatre, but my friend purposely crossed to the other side where there were more seats. The usher then followed him and said that Japanese were not permitted to sit there.

In Woodfibre, if a Japanese walks in the ‘White town,’ he is insulted by all the children, and often by the adults. Japanese employees, Canadian-born or not, are refused admittance to the company tennis courts.³⁴

It was also galling to be told by the Parks Board of Vancouver that Orientals were restricted to the use of Crystal Pool on Tuesday mornings, from 10:30 to 12:30.

It was when the Nisei graduate began to search for employment that his world became even more restricted. He had inherited a bristling legacy of decades of restrictive legislation passed by all levels of government and a series of de facto restrictions from numerous occupations. To a large extent, then, the Nisei found that he had to follow the already severely limited occupational lines of his immigrant parents despite having received education or training which had qualified him for skilled employment or professional work.

A graduate who had majored in economics and business might be occupied in some form of clerical work in a produce market where he had no future; others were working as gardeners or mill hands. Graduates were thus finding almost no scope for their training, and practically the only professions were those of medicine and dentistry. Among the Nisei of this period, there was only one doctor, two dentists and one osteopath and they, for the most part, were dependent on the Japanese community for their livelihood. Only three nurses had found work, all of them in institutions operated by Japanese, and prospective nurses and teachers were soon discouraged from taking training.

Among all of the potential Nisei teachers, only Hideko Hyodo obtained an appointment in British Columbia. And that appointment was to teach at the Richmond elementary school in Steveston where the students were of preponderantly Japanese origin. Chitose Uchida, the first Nisei to graduate from the University of British Columbia in 1916, had to go to Alberta to find a teaching job. Teruko Hidaka, accepted as a “substitute” teacher in the municipality of Maple Ridge, was barred from working when a delegation of irate white parents and Canadian Legion officials demanded her dismissal. Although the school trustees admitted that she was “a fine Christian girl,” they acceded to the argument that her appointment might set a precedent for hiring “a teacher with Buddhist persuasions.”

Most Nisei, however, took the path of least resistance. By the outbreak of the Pacific war, the majority of Nisei were concentrated on the bottom rung of the economic ladder, mainly in the primary industries, despite their desire to rise to “white collar” status or to gain independence as farmers or fishermen.

Work was still scarce for most people in a province that was scarred from the Depression. Although the number of persons on relief was decreasing, the signs of unemployment were readily evident in the “tin-canners” camped near False Creek in Vancouver. Still more transients looking for work were coming into the province from the prairies on freight cars, joining those thousands in the relief camps. The situation, then, was doubly difficult for the Nisei, and though the province was to recover its economic equanimity, the future for the Nisei, even by the time of the Pacific war, was not hopeful, for the economic discriminations remained and the threat of more restrictions was always in the air.

By that time, many Nisei had been forced to look to the Issei-controlled business community for work. Family members, often unpaid, were working on parent-operated farms or as assistants on fishing boats. The abundance of shopkeepers and other independent proprietors, a situation which was giving the Issei urban group something of a lower middle-class aspect, provided some secondary jobs for Nisei. But as the Issei had attained their status by long hours of arduous work, the assumption of responsibility for the family enterprise would, in many cases, have augured an intolerable personal burden for Nisei and the perpetuation of a way of life incompatible with more desirable standards. For outsiders without contacts in family enterprises, the choices were usually limited to rough labour in the sawmills and other fields in which parents and relatives had long been established.

Few Nisei attempted to apply for jobs in white-operated firms, and those who were working in the clerical-sales category were doing so in Issei-owned firms. The few who had managed to obtain jobs elsewhere were rarely employed in any capacity that required contact with the general public. In the main, the immigrant generation had, by the outbreak of the war, made more satisfactory economic adjustments than had their children. The farmers had moved up to become owners or tenant-operators; in the trades and businesses, they were self-employed. But the Nisei, with few exceptions, were practically back where their parents had started some forty years previously, and were seeking jobs in the backwash of the Depression years.

Vocational problems quickly became one of the focal points around which conversations and group discussions revolved.³⁵ Frustrations widened out from individual experience to group concern, for if one or several Nisei were not able to enter a field, then it was felt, usually quite rightly, that no Nisei could. In the highly integrated community with its articulate press, everyone’s occupation was known to all other members. Since emphasis was on “getting ahead,” there was a great deal of bitterness over having to accept inferior social and economic status as symbolized by menial positions and labouring jobs.

Accepting employment in Issei-operated businesses was self-defeating because of the lack of opportunities for advancement. And since it drew back the Nisei into a dependent position, it aroused variations in generational conflicts and imposed constricting limitations based on Japanese traditional attitudes. Moreover, not all applicants were hired, as many Nisei found that their knowledge of the Japanese language was not up to the minimal standards of fluency.³⁶ In the larger businesses, Nisei employees also found themselves discriminated against by Issei employers in favour of the Japan-educated or the new arrival from Japan who would receive higher wages for the same work.

In family enterprises, the culturally stereotyped role of the parent dominated the child in all phases of his life and meant that some children were grossly underpaid for the amount of work done. Japanese tradition, filled with negative sanctions against independence and self-sufficiency, often resulted in the exploitation of family labour, though this practice was usually construed as a method of establishing the children in the business. Some parents, of course, realized the values of independence and self-confidence; but those very community leaders who condemned the Nisei for their “lack of guts” were usually businessmen who were themselves guilty of stifling the qualities which might have led more Nisei to break out of their encrusted shell of dependence.

Working for Issei firms or businesses often meant that the traditional syndrome of obligations and indebtedness came into play. Employees found it difficult to leave a position because they felt that they were under an obligation not to leave, even if better opportunities arose. Conversely, employers might feel obligated, having taken on an individual through family friendship or reputation, not to fire the employee, despite his incompetence, to avoid a face-losing situation for the employee’s family. Not all Nisei employees were faced with these problems, and good employer-employee relationships were not unusual. But traditional attitudes died hard and generally, employment in the Issei business community was a dead-end situation.

One of the popular ways in which parents attempted to solve the occupational problems was to send young children to Japan to undergo an extensive education.³⁷ Generally referred to as Kika Nisei, this group could be easily fitted into jobs in the Japanese community, since their training in Japan made them essentially Japanese in temperament and personality.

Although the Kika Nisei did not develop into a distinct, often highly disturbed group as they did in the United States,³⁸ the parental generation liked to point out the superiority of the Kika Nisei over the Canadian-born Nisei in terms of their adeptness in all the correct modes of traditional Japanese behaviour. But returning to Canada after spending their adolescent, impressionable years in Japan was to recapitulate the experience, in many ways, of the immigrant generation. And often the return of the Japan-reared child, usually the eldest in the family, resulted in strained relations, for he was obviously different from his siblings in almost every way, had linguistic difficulties, and had to face the problem of readjustment to the Canadian milieu.

The fact of their dual nationality, which was utilized by anti-Japanese propagandists to cast doubts on their loyalty, also hung over the Nisei. No claim had less relevance to the issue of allegiance, however, since dual nationality was simply the result of the conflict between nationality laws. Under Canadian law, predicated on the doctrine of jus soli (right of the soil), persons born in Canada were natural-born British subjects, without regard to the race or nationality of their parents. But until 1916, this principle conflicted with that of the nationality law of Japan, based on the doctrine of jus sanguinis (right of blood), whereby a child born abroad also took the citizenship of his parents.

In 1916, however, Japan enacted an Expatriation Law providing that a Japanese under 17 years of age who acquired another nationality might formally renounce Japanese nationality. But this privilege did not extend to males between 17 and 37 years of age, either Canadian or Japan-born, who were technically required to have fulfilled their military service before applying for renunciation unless they had been exempted for whatever the reason.

An even more liberal law in 1924 provided that a Japanese who had acquired Canadian (or certain other) nationality by birth automatically lost Japanese citizenship unless he declared his intention of retaining that nationality.³⁹ The time limit for parents to register the child was 14 days from birth. The amendment also provided that Nisei born prior to 1924 and who consequently possessed dual citizenship might cancel their Japanese citizenship at any time; even those whose parents had registered them as Japanese citizens after 1924 could renounce it whenever they wished. The stipulation relating to the obligation of military training was also waived.

Although after 1924 Nisei possessed only Canadian citizenship – unless their parents had taken steps to retain the Japanese citizenship – dual citizenship was still as much a fact as ever. Ten years after the amendment, some 86% of the Nisei in British Columbia were dual citizens.⁴⁰

Although most Issei regarded themselves as settled residents of Canada, their pride in Japan’s position as a world power, their nostalgia and sentiment for their homeland, and their adherence to the tradition of including the names of their children in the family tree to ensure the continuity of the family record had predisposed them to the practice of retaining Japanese citizenship for their descendents. Keenly aware of their marginal position in Canada, the Issei felt that by retaining Japanese nationality for their children, they counteracted that disadvantage and gave the children a sense of security.

Dual nationality had become an issue only because anti-Japanese interests claimed that it was irrefutable evidence of “disloyalty” and “untrustworthiness.” But Japanese amendments to the nationality law apparently represented an attempt to alleviate the troubled racial crisis in the United States and Canada. Japan had made it more difficult for Canadian-born children of its nationals to acquire Japanese citizenship and at the same time made it easier for dual citizens to renounce their Japanese, in favour of their Canadian, citizenship. In contrast, many European nations had no regard for the distance which a person might be removed from the land of his ancestors: he was still claimed as a citizen of that country. The Third Reich, for example, made the most extravagant and sweeping of all claims on Germans abroad: it attempted to impose duties and obligations wherever the individual might be – “Germans cannot lose, non-Germans cannot acquire, Germanhood.”⁴¹ Italian law also was strict in its application of the principle of citizenship by descent. Thus of the nationality laws of potential enemies of Canada, those of Japan were the least offensive.

There was also no good reason why dual citizens should have gone through the steps of renunciation. Whatever the claims of another government, Canada had exclusive jurisdiction over citizenship status – allegiance or alienage – of any persons within her own boundaries. The liability of Nisei – or even Issei who were Japanese nationals or naturalized Canadians – to the performance of the duties of allegiance was determined by the laws of Canada and no presumption of guilt could be attached to claims made upon their allegiance, if any, to Japan.

The imputation of disloyalty on the basis of dual citizenship made no sense, logically or morally, when it was applied only to Nisei and not to those of German or Italian descent in Canada. Renouncing Japanese citizenship, moreover, added nothing to Canadian citizenship; it left renunciants with the same practically meaningless status. Theoretically, by treaty arrangements with Japan, Japanese nationals were protected from discriminatory legislation, but since British Columbia drafted its anti-Japanese laws on the basis of race in order to circumvent those arrangements, Japanese nationality was of little utility.⁴² Under Canadian law, dual citizenship did not exist, and Canadian citizens of Japanese ancestry were really Canadian citizens and nothing else. No duty could be imposed on them by Japanese law; no laws or decrees by Japan could change their status in Canada or impose military service upon them. Contrary to extravagant claims, Japan employed no agents to whisk recalcitrant Nisei or Issei away to Japan to undergo military service.

As for the immigrant generation in Canada, the 1924 amendment provided for the loss of Japanese citizenship if they acquired Canadian citizenship by naturalization. The condition remained, however, that male immigrants between the ages of 17 and 37 were unable to renounce allegiance to Japan unless they had fulfilled their military service or were under no obligation to serve. What this meant was that Issei between those ages could not apply for Canadian naturalization, because Order-in-Council P.C. 1378 of June, 1931, stipulated that the issuing of naturalization certificates to persons of Japanese and Chinese origin be limited to those who produced evidence that they had already renounced their formal allegiance. The order-in-council was levied only against Orientals and not to other groups whose countries might have conflicting regulations.⁴³

Renunciation never advanced to the level of a community-wide movement but was undertaken individually, unlike the more concerted drive among American Nisei to divest themselves of the status. Even by 1941, it had not gone beyond the exploratory stage of discussion or debate, and there was no bold major drive on the part of the JCCL for renunciation. A considerable number of Nisei saw “advantages” and “psychological comfort” in the retention of Japanese citizenship, feeling that since Canada did not treat them as citizens they ought not to throw away their last connection, however weak the link, with Japan.⁴⁴ The central irony was that both Canadian and Japanese citizenship was an empty status.

By 1941, several lines of thinking had clearly been established. One solution to their burdens was to move east of the Rockies, out of the hostile social climate of British Columbia. Another was to remain where they were, to go through a “testing stage” by which their “true worth” – their “character” and their “Canadianization” – would eventually be recognized by other Canadians. To remain was by far the easier course, and similar rationalizations were used to justify their inability to make decisions.

Some Nisei felt that, as a final resource, they could go to Japan to find a social and economic place there. That this attitude was not more popular was partly owing to the degree to which Nisei felt they were “Canadian” and to other factors such as family responsibilities and reports of the low standard of living in Japan. Unless one had special aptitudes and training, moving to Japan would have been tantamount to emigrating to a foreign country; experience of family and community conflicts had already given them an image of the social difficulties they would encounter there. More and more Nisei, however, were thinking that in Japan there was, as some put it, “a fighting chance for success,” whereas in Canada it was like “pounding one’s head against a stone wall.”⁴⁵

University graduates who had gone to Japan to seek jobs otherwise unattainable in Canada had done well, finding work in commerce and industry, in banks, oil companies, in the civil service. A Bachelor of Science graduate was employed in the Mukden Consulate General’s office in Manchuria, and Shinobu Higashi, the first editor of The New Canadian, was on the staff of the Daily News, the largest English daily newspaper in Manchuria. A woman Arts graduate was teaching at a girls’ middle school in Tokyo. Each year, the University of British Columbia was turning out a few Nisei graduates until in 1940-41, the peak year, 10 Nisei received degrees and 43 undergraduates were studying for degrees. But few graduates were finding jobs in Canada in fields for which they had trained, even though most of them had gained degrees in “practical” courses such as engineering or commerce.

Generally, Nisei who had gone to Japan soon found themselves to be misfits. Having moved to escape racial prejudice, they encountered variations of social prejudice in Japan and were subjected to the censorious attitudes of the Japanese, to whom the Japanese Canadians were a very dubious lot. Their accents, Western ideas, and lack of knowledge or ease in the minutiae of Japanese behaviour soon set them apart.⁴⁶ Nisei women especially were quick to resent the often debasing and humiliating double standards that applied to women in Japan. Although Japan clearly offered a wider range of economic opportunities, it was not an entirely satisfactory choice. Many Nisei who were declaring that, if necessary, they could try their luck in Japan were rationalizing in an attempt to justify the fact that they had avoided taking definite steps to solve the impasse in which practically all Nisei found themselves. As a group, the Nisei were not taking an active interest in Japan as a permanent place of residence; although by December, 1941, there were some 1,500 Canadian-born Nisei living in Japan, most of these were young children.⁴⁷

There were encouraging reports of a few Nisei living elsewhere who had accomplished what was impossible in British Columbia.⁴⁸ Letters and articles written by Nisei who had moved to Toronto and Hamilton began to appear in The New Canadian, urging others to join them. Other Nisei, on the other hand, reported that there were few prospects for persons without specialized training, but they at least felt that racial prejudice was much less prevalent in Eastern Canada. “Going East” had only started around 1936, during the time the Nisei delegation had gone to Ottawa to appear before the parliamentary committee on the franchise issue. Since then, the idea of moving to Eastern Canada was labelled as “The Great Adventure”⁴⁹ – a phrase which perhaps underlined the degree to which Nisei had confined themselves to navel-gazing in their small circle and to wistfully discussing the awesomeness of cutting the umbilical cord which tied them to British Columbia.

The Nisei community had turned in upon itself, fearing the unknown, made introspective by prejudice, unable to take advantage of the knowledge that economic conditions were as close to ideal for “The Great Adventure” as possible. The opportunity was to come, but it was under conditions far different than anyone could have imagined at the time.

• Previous
• Home
• Next

Notes

1. 	British Columbia	Canada
   Canadian-born	10,728	11,081
   Japan-born	11,477	12,261
   Total	22,205	23,342

   (Seventh Census of Canada, 1931). ↩
2. Canadian Japanese Association, Report of the Survey of the Second Generation Japanese in British Columbia, Vancouver, 1935, pp. i-ii. See also Hayakawa, S.I., “The Japanese-Canadian: An Experiment in Citizenship”, Dalhousie Review (April, 1936), pp. 16-22. ↩
3. Report of the Survey, op. cit., pp. i, 3. ↩
4. Vancouver Province, June 3, 1934. ↩
5. The New Canadian, May 27, 1939. ↩
6. Specifically, the repealing of Clause XI, Section 4, of the Dominion Franchise Act, 1934, under which British subjects of the Japanese race were disqualified from voting in British Columbia at elections under the Dominion Elections Act and were incapable of being registered as electors in that province; i.e., “every person who is disqualified by reason of race from voting at an election of a member of the Legislative Assembly of the province in which he or she is residing and who did not serve in the military, naval or air forces of Canada in the war of 1914-18.” Section 5 of the Provincial Elections Act of British Columbia disqualified from voting “every Chinaman, Japanese, Hindu, or Indian” except returned World War I veterans. ↩
7. Canada, House of Commons Debates, 1936, pp. 376-80. ↩
8. Canada, House of Commons Debates, 1936, p. 417. ↩
9. Norris, T.G., In the Matter of the Dominion Franchise Act 1934 and the Dominion Elections Act 1934 and in the Matter of the Disqualification of Certain Persons in the Province of British Columbia From Being Registered and Voting Under the Said Acts (Brief, submitted in behalf of the Japanese Canadian Citizens’ League, Vancouver, B.C., May 12, 1936), pp. 8-15. ↩
10. Ibid., pp. 20-1. H.F. Angus also raises the issue of the “serious consequences” of embittering the second generation in his “Underprivileged Canadians”, Queen’s Quarterly, 38 (Summer, 1931), p. 452. See also Lower, A.R.M., Canada and the Far East – 1940 (New York: Institute of Pacific Relations, 1941), p. 86, in which he states that much of Norris’s reasoning was sound but that the brief overlooked the “tu quoque argument” constituted by numerous restrictions that Japan imposed on aliens or naturalized citizens. ↩
11. Canada, House of Commons, Special Committee on Elections and Franchise Acts, Minutes of Proceedings and Evidence, No. 10, May 22, 1936, pp. 217, 221. ↩
12. Ibid., p. 221. ↩
13. Ibid., p. 210. ↩
14. Canada, House of Commons, Special Committee on Elections and Franchise Acts, Minutes of Proceedings and Evidence, No. 10, March 16, 1937, p. 232. ↩
15. Minutes, No. 9, March 11, 1937, p. 204. ↩
16. Minutes, No. 10, March 16, 1937, pp. 224-5. Neill’s source was a Vancouver Evening Sun editorial, May 18, 1925. ↩
17. Minutes, No. 9, March 11, 1937, p. 208. ↩
18. Minutes, No. 10, March 16, 1937, p. 241. Cf. the figure of 24,000 Japanese ready to vote as a racial bloc visualized by Morton Bennett, “Outsider Views Japanese Menace in B.C.”, Victoria Times, December 7, 1940. ↩
19. The New Canadian, July 17, 1940. ↩
20. The New Canadian, July 15, 1939. ↩
21. E.g., editorial “Trouble in the Fishing Industry”, May 14, 1941, which stated that the Canadian public tended to judge the entire community by what transpired in the fishing industry and by the actions of Japanese fishermen. Some of the agitation, the editorial declared, centred around charges that the fisherman “is a threat to existing Occidental standards, refuses to co-operate with labour, and does not govern his organization democratically.” The implication was that there was some truth in these charges. ↩
22. E.g., series of articles in The New Canadian, beginning June 12, 1941, entitled “Just What is the Citizens’ League?” ↩
23. Sumida, R., The Japanese in British Columbia (Master’s thesis, Department of Economics, University of British Columbia), 1935, p. 393. ↩
24. Ibid., p. 400. ↩
25. The New Canadian, March 7, 1941. ↩
26. Sumida, op. cit., p. 404. ↩
27. Sumida, op. cit., p. 465. Out of 386 marriages surveyed, 213 (77.7%) of 274 married Nisei females were espoused to immigrant partners. There were only 60 instances, in 1935, of pure second-generation marriages. Six Nisei males and one female were married to non-Japanese: and 46 Nisei males married to Japan-born females. See Report on the Survey of the Second Generation JapaneseΩ, op. cit., p. 32. ↩
28. Sumida, op. cit., p. 465. A 1934 survey of 194 Nisei in Vancouver indicated that 38 preferred Japan-born mates. In Steveston, 73 of 107 interviewed wanted Japan-born partners in marriage, a reflection of the Japan orientation of the fishing village. ↩
29. The New Canadian, April 12, 1940. ↩
30. Tairiku Nippo, translated from the Japanese in , January 5, 1940. ↩
31. This was a recurring theme in articles and letters to the editor published in The New Canadian. E.g., the writer of “Nisei Bashfulness”, June 5, 1941, comments: “Due mainly to his own self-consciousness, and to his social background where there is the inevitable clash of two radically different cultures, the Nisei grows up to be a shy, retiring and socially backward individual.” In the same issue, another writes: “It is a well-known fact … that the Nisei are characteristically reserved, and that the ‘hail fellow well met’ attitude is one that is conspicuous by its almost complete lack …. Every Nisei organization in the city faces the same problem of breaking down the reserve of its members, and of ridding itself of the tendency for members to set themselves up in small cliques, which is so much a regrettable part of our group behaviour.” Such comments were often accompanied by a plea for a programme “to develop and broaden the Nisei personality.” ↩
32. Excerpt from “The Time Will Come”. See “The Second Generation Short Story – A Reflection of the Nisei Personality”, The New Canadian, December 25, 1940. ↩
33. Sumida, op. cit., pp. 405-6. ↩
34. Sumida, op. cit., pp. 407-9. ↩
35. The New Canadian, November 24, 1938. ↩
36. Report of the Survey, pp. 15-16, 25. Of those who expressed some cause for their vocational difficulties, 24.7% of males and 37.3% of females stated that “deficiency in the Japanese language” was the major drawback. These percentages were slightly higher than that of the group who listed “racial prejudice.” Cf. LaViolette, F.E., Americans of Japanese Ancestry (Toronto: Institute of International Affairs, 1945), pp. 77-83. He cites the “dual wage system” in 76 Japanese wholesale produce firms in Seattle which generally paid white workers $25-$30 a week while paying Nisei employees $15-$18. ↩
37. Report of the Survey, p. 14. ↩
38. See Thomas, D.S., and R.S. Nishimoto, The Spoilage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1946). ↩
39. Article 20, Section 2, Nationality Law, 1924. See Norris, op. cit., pp. 49-50, for full text. Also see Flournoy, R.W., and M.O. Hudson, eds., A Collection of Nationality Laws (London: Oxford University Press, 1929), pp. 363-4. ↩
40. Report of the Survey, pp. 6-8. ↩
41. Loewenstein, K., “Government and Politics in Germany”, in Shotwell, J.T., ed., Governments of Continental Europe (New York: Macmillan, 1940), pp. 493-4; Grodzins, M., Americans Betrayed: Politics and the Japanese Evacuation (University of Chicago Press, 1949), pp. 149-55. ↩
42. Many Nisei mistakenly claimed that dual citizenship gave them a measure of protection under treaty arrangements, a sign that they had not managed to sort out the implications. See, e.g., Hayakawa’s testimony in House of Commons, Special Committee on Elections and Franchise Acts, Minutes of Proceedings and Evidence, No. 10, May 22, 1936, p. 218: “If we in British Columbia have no vote and are discriminated against and have only one nationality, we are up against it; we have no one to whom we can appeal; but if we have a dual nationality, so long as there are certain restrictions against us we can get protection …. As long as there is this economic and social insecurity it is convenient for us to have dual nationality in case we are discriminated against.” ↩
43. Hancock, M., “Naturalization in Canada”, in Mackenzie, N., ed., The Legal Status of Aliens in Pacific Countries (London: Oxford University Press, 1937), p. 95: “If P.C. 1378 is merely a precaution against double nationality, why is it levied against Chinese and Japanese alone? Secondly, why was it necessary to pass an order-in-council at all? The discretion of the Secretary of State is unrestricted and absolute; since no provision is made by the act for controlling it by regulation, P.C. 1378 may even be ultra vires.” Also see Angus, H.F., “The Legal Status in British Columbia of Residents of Oriental Race and Their Descendants”, in ibid., p. 86. ↩
44. E.g., The New Canadian, July 17, 1940; March 28, 1941. ↩
45. Report of the Survey, pp. 50-6. Of 2,674 Nisei questioned in 1935, 403 or 14.9% declared that they wished to settle eventually in Japan, mainly because of “social and occupational difficulties” they were facing in British Columbia. Other reasons included: family ties, inheritance of land, marriage, health, parents’ wishes. ↩
46. E.g., Kobe Japan Chronicle, June, 1938, which quoted a Tokyo professor engaged in teaching Nisei as saying that the “mental attitudes” of his pupils raised almost insuperable difficulties in the way of their own proper instruction in the traditions of their forefathers.” See also Kawai, K., “Three Roads and None Easy”, Survey, 41 (1926), pp. 164-5, for a sympathetic discussion of the problem of untrained Nisei contemplating going to Japan. ↩
47. Canada, Department of Labour, Report on the Administration of Japanese Affairs in Canada (Ottawa, 1944), p. 4. Report of the Survey, pp. 7-8, lists 842 Nisei residing in Japan in 1935. ↩
48. E.g., George Tamaki, son of an Issei couple living in Sunbury, B.C., was awarded a law degree by Dalhousie University; Joichi Kato, son of Vancouver residents, was appointed as a house surgeon at Edmonton General Hospital; Dr. S.I. Hayakawa was teaching at the University of Wisconsin. ↩
49. The title of the prize-winning speech at an oratorical contest held at the Third Annual JCCL Convention in Vancouver, November 24, 1938. ↩

• Previous
• Home
• Next