Chapter Nine: The Time of Decision

We should be protected from treachery,
from a stab in the back.
– Howard Green, January 30, 1942

There is only one thing to do – what any civilized
country does in the time of war – intern them!
– Kamloops City Council, March 5, 1942

With the attack on Pearl Harbor and Japan’s subsequent victories in the Far East, the “problem” of the resident Japanese in British Columbia was, of course, immediately set into focus. Canada formally declared war with Japan – even before the United States observed that formality – with Mackenzie King stating that Japan had “wantonly” and “treacherously” attacked British territory and that “Japan’s actions are a threat to the defence and freedom of Canada.”¹ But it was quite apparent that King was conscious of what the advent of the war might mean to the resident Japanese. Immediately after the framing of the draft order-in-council in which Canada committed herself to war, King was writing in his diaries that the Cabinet had discussed “at some length” the desirability of “expressing the Government’s belief in the loyalty of Japanese nationals and Canadian-born Japanese in B.C.”²

Immediate action taken by the federal government included the arrest and subsequent internment of 38 Japanese allegedly dangerous to national security, all of whom were on dossiers previously compiled by the RCMP. Some 1,200 fishing boats, all owned or operated by naturalized citizens or Nisei, were impounded. The 59 Japanese-language schools in the province and the three vernacular newspapers published in Vancouver were closed, on the advice of the RCMP, as “precautionary measures,” though the English-language weekly, The New Canadian, was allowed to continue publishing. By Order-in-Council P.C. 9591, December 7, provisions of the Defence of Canada Regulations were extended to require Japanese nationals to register by February 7 with the Registrar of Enemy Aliens. They were to sign an undertaking guaranteeing their “good behaviour” and requiring them to obtain permission for any movement from one locality to another. This was to be expected, for since the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939, German and Italian aliens had been required to report regularly to the Registrar. On December 16, however, the registration of all persons of Japanese origin in Canada, regardless of citizenship, was made mandatory by P.C. 9760, a much tougher move than the special registration carried out earlier in the year. Penalties for not complying with this compulsory registration included fines up to $200 or imprisonment of two months. Each person on request had to produce his registration card at any “public assembly,” at ticket or telegraph offices or in car, train or steamboat. It was soon apparent, then, that official classification of members of the Japanese minority coincided with public failure to make any differentiation between Japanese on the basis of citizenship. And by December 16, the status of Nisei and naturalized immigrants as Canadian citizens was already being clearly eroded in favour of their status as descendants of the Japanese enemy. And this was more and more to be a feature of official government policy until it culminated in the orders for mass evacuation.

For a period of about a week following Pearl Harbor, there was almost no organized public agitation against the resident Japanese and no massive attempts to molest them. Then almost immediately the CPR dismissed section hands and red caps and Vancouver hotels discharged employees, as did many mills and factories throughout the west coast, all adding to the sudden spectre of unemployment faced by 1,800 fishermen whose boats had been tied up and immobilized. “Black hand” notes warned proprietors to close their stores, arson was attempted at a rooming house in Vancouver’s Little Tokyo district, and tradesmen and merchants who depended on white clientele suffered an inevitable drop in business. And when plate glass windows were broken as bricks and coal oil lamps were thrown into grocery and confectionery stores, insurance companies promptly cancelled policies carried by Japanese.

These first shocks and symptoms of public hostility were ameliorated, to some extent, by editorial pleas for tolerance. Newspaper readers were assured that federal authorities “have the situation well in hand,”³ that an attack upon the Pacific coast was unlikely, and that citizens ought to “let national policy rather than individual alarms have the right of way.”⁴ Editorialists conceded that there were undoubtedly some who were disloyal among the Japanese, but as in an editorial that appeared in the Daily Province of December 8, the main emphasis was in keeping the public calm and in suggesting that Canada’s quarrel “is with Japan, not with the Japanese nationals here or people of Japanese blood. To these, in a very difficult situation they are compelled to face, is due every consideration.”⁵ But the early calm soon dissolved into fears and alarums. Individual and organized hostility against the resident Japanese, going back to the turn of the century, was too deeply rooted and ingrained for such pleas by newspapers and some individuals for “tolerance” and “fair play” to shift public thinking.

The bombing of Pearl Harbor provided anti-Japanese interests in the province with a savoury propaganda item which far exceeded their most optimistic hopes. The very nature of the attack – its “treacherous” and “sneak” method of execution – seemed to underscore indelibly all the principal charges about the resident Japanese and their “character,” charges and insinuations which had been carefully nurtured and proselytized on the west coast for decades. If ever there was an opportunity to achieve the ultimate objective of ridding the province – and Canada – entirely of its Japanese minority, this was certainly it. And if there was a relative period of inaction immediately after Pearl Harbor, it was probably owing to the shock engendered by total war, to the disasters suffered by the Allies and to the belief that Ottawa would soon act to make measures more repressive than those immediately carried out.

The immediate “precautionary” measures, recommended by the Standing Committee on Orientals, were bound not to satisfy the public. The Committee itself could not but be divided over future policy, including as it did members like Lt.-Col. MacIntosh who had espoused, even in 1938, the total “deportation” of all persons of Japanese race, and Professor Angus who for the past decade had sustained a belief in the trustworthiness of the Japanese. Thus the Committee itself reflected, in miniature, the spectrum of opinion among British Columbians. But those voices advocating either a “tolerant” or even a “moderate” attitude were quickly submerged in the wave of anti-Japanese protest.

Until mass evacuation was announced late in February, 1942, then, hostility towards the resident Japanese was organized and concentrated as it never had been in preceding decades, at least in its fever pitch of initial emotionalism and ultimate hysteria. Even “partial” evacuation of Japanese nationals, as announced on January 14, was not enough: all must go. Within a week of Pearl Harbor, as firings and acts of vandalism continued apace, irate writers of letters-to-the-editor were demanding that all Japanese be at once interned because of the danger of fifth column activity; shortly after, this suggestion, in a modified form, was beginning to be tentatively reflected in the editorial columns. Then, stung into action by what they felt to be inexcusable dilatoriness on the part of Ottawa to institute removal and detention, a multitude of political, economic and social organizations and other pressure groups – from all cross-sections of British Columbian society – began to release a constant stream of propaganda against the Japanese and to make demands for immediate action. It was the pressure of these regional groups, who were anxious to seize the opportunity to expel the Japanese forever, that was eventually to dictate the federal policy.

At the forefront were the politicians of the province, on all levels of government, and their political organizations. Just as they had formulated and presented anti-Japanese demands to Ottawa for at least 40 years, so they continued in this historical role, realizing that unless they exerted great pressure, Ottawa would remain inactive. By the end of December, such traditional anti-Japanese members of Parliament as Ian Mackenzie, A.W. Neill, Thomas Reid and Howard Green were leading a massive campaign designed to force Ottawa to remove all Japanese “east of the Rockies,” an action they had all hotly espoused at one time or another during the past decade and, in the case of Neill and Reid, for the past twenty years. They were supported by local Conservative and Liberal associations and various municipal councils. The “Pacific Coast Security League,” formed in Vancouver on December 17, was sharply critical of Ottawa’s moderate handling of the Japanese population. Early in January, Vancouver alderman Halford Wilson, one of the league’s most active members, put before the city council a motion demanding immediate removal; as the Standing Committee on Orientals was on its way to Ottawa after a telephone summons by the Prime Minister, Wilson warned members that unless some action were not quickly taken, there would be widespread anti-Japanese riots. And about the same time, the Conservatives passed a resolution at their annual provincial conference, urging mass evacuation of all Japanese to locations in Canada “where no danger to national defences could exist from their presence.”⁶

“Those fellows in Ottawa are asleep at the switch. They should do something,” Vancouver alderman George Buscombe said in advocating removal of the Japanese east of the Rockies and “shipping them back to Japan when the war is over.”⁷ Major-General R.O. Alexander, Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Command, reported on December 30 that the situation was “assuming a serious aspect …. I am being bombarded by individuals, both calm and hysterical, demanding that something should be done.”⁸ “Something should be done” – this statement epitomized the theme of anger over Ottawa’s inaction and misgivings over the continued Japanese presence. But public feeling might have remained less hysterical if the politicians had not inflamed it in the first place and had not influenced the cluster of professional patriots, veterans associations, service clubs, farm groups and labour unions who began to present organized demands for expulsion around the middle of January.

The first phase of the showdown between British Columbia and Ottawa came when the Standing Committee and a delegation of political representatives from the province met officials of the Department of External Affairs and representatives of the armed forces and the RCMP in Ottawa on January 8 and 9 to discuss national policy on the Japanese Canadians. It was an explosive meeting, for no one outside of the British Columbian politicians and those in the Standing Committee whose views had always been anti-Japanese took the view that evacuation and detention – for any reason whatsoever – were necessary.

Under-Secretary of State Hugh Keenleyside wanted to protect the Japanese from the demands for complete evacuation. And apparently, all of the civil servants were united in advocating that the Japanese not be interned. Major-General Maurice Pope, Vice-Chief of General Staff of the Canadian Army and member of the Permanent Joint Board on Defence, gave the view of the army. Before the meeting was convened, Pope had asked Lt.-General Ken Stuart, Chief of General Staff, what view he should express. Personally, Pope had never been worried about the presence of the Japanese, either aliens or citizens, and he was delighted when Stuart told him: “From the Army point of view, I cannot see that they constitute the slightest menace to national security.”⁹ Thus at the time when Allied forces were reeling from their defeats – and when the danger of attack from Japan was presumably at its greatest – the Canadian Army was showing no interest in the proposed evacuation.

At the meeting, the RCMP representative reported that the few potentially subversive Japanese had already been interned and that no further internment was necessary; he expressed no concern over the Japanese presence. Vice-Admiral of the Navy, H.E. “Raustus” Reid, “cheerfully” stated that there was no problem, for all Japanese fishermen had been removed from the sea on the day of Pearl Harbor. Pope then declared that if the RCMP was in no way perturbed, then neither was the army and, as a consequence, the army had no recommendations to offer. What the RCMP, the navy and army were saying, then, was what British Columbia had been told since Pearl Harbor: that the “situation” was well under control as far as they were concerned and that there were no grounds for panic or stringent measures. Moreover, federal representatives of economic agencies even declared that it was in the interests of the war effort that the Japanese fishermen should be allowed to continue to fish off the west coast.

Ian Mackenzie, federal Minister of Pensions and MP for Vancouver Centre, whose anti-Japanese views were well-known, had a difficult, equivocal role to play as chairman of the proceedings, but he took a cool enough view. Later, one newspaper demanded that he resign as a Cabinet member in support of his acknowledged view that Japanese should be evacuated. But the delegation from British Columbia, headed by provincial Minister of Labour George Pearson, was “breathing fire”; as spokesmen for non-evacuation were putting forth their case, the delegation intervened and “all hell broke loose,” their rage “a sight to behold.”¹⁰ The British Columbians argued that no Japanese could be trusted and that they must all be driven out of the province and interned. Escott Reid, an External Affairs official, said: “I felt in that committee room the physical presence of evil.” They were speaking of the Japanese “in the way that the Nazis would have spoken about Jewish Germans.”¹¹ In a private conversation, one member from British Columbia admitted that war with Japan had been a “heaven-sent opportunity” to rid the province of the Japanese economic menace forever; nothing was mentioned of “national security.”

It was clear, however, that the British Columbian delegates were determined, by whatever means, to see their wishes carried out. Several days after the meeting was adjourned, the National Defence Headquarters in Ottawa received an urgent message from the Pacific Command recommending “positive action” against the Japanese in the interests of “national security,” thus completely reversing the Command’s previous stand.¹²

Whatever the private moral indignations expressed at the time by civil servants and armed forces representatives, the single-minded extremism of British Columbian politicians was obviously much the stronger force. At any rate, no public record of this conference was ever published, so no one knew of the existing divisions of opinion and the opposition to evacuation. British Columbia appealed to Mackenzie King and won at least a compromise: a “partial” evacuation of all Japanese aliens from a “protected” area of the west coast, announced on January 14. King himself had noted earlier that “the Japs … will, I believe, make some landing on the coast.”

Sensational rumours of fifth column activity were rife all along the Pacific coast. When U.S. Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox remarked at a press conference in Washington on December 15, 1941, that “the most effective fifth column work of the entire war was done in Hawaii, with the possible exception of Norway,”¹³ the statement was immediately taken to mean that acts of sabotage were carried out by Japanese-American residents. This was an implication that Knox had not intended to make, for the police, military intelligence and the FBI all specifically denied that Japanese Americans were involved in any manner. What Knox had in mind was that espionage activity had been carried out by special agents sent from Japan and by members of the diplomatic staff. To the average newspaper reader, however, Knox seemed to be saying that residents in Honolulu had carried out a carefully planned campaign to sabotage Pearl Harbor defences and that the efforts of this treacherous element had been uncommonly successful. And many rumours – for which not one iota of substantiating evidence was found – were being circulated by the end of December and accepted as truth by west coast citizens. Japanese vegetable trucks had been purported to have blocked roads between Pearl Harbor and downtown Honolulu; a truck had been reported to have roared down the runway at Hickam Field and knocked the tails off several army bombers; a milk truck was said to have driven onto Hickam Field and let down its sides to reveal a concealed machine gun, presumably manned by resident Japanese. Numerous other stories, in a similar vein, gained increasingly wider currency. But one of the chief ironies of the war was that persons of Japanese descent in Hawaii were never interned.¹⁴ Closer to British Columbia borders, William Randolph Hearst’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer ran, on December 11, a front-page headline: “Fifth Columnists Set Plane Beacon Fires Near Pt. Angeles.” The story told of how fires in the shape of arrows, just across the Strait of Juan de Fuca from Victoria, had been pointed towards Seattle. Buried in an inside page, however, was an item in which the governor’s office was quoted as saying that the arrow shapes were accidental and that they were ordinary brush fires set off by foresters.

The irreproachable conduct of the resident Japanese in Hawaii during and after the attack on Pearl Harbor unequivocably answered questions about loyalty. Geography should have shown, if the actual attack on Pearl Harbor did not, that the danger of an invasion of Hawaii or an assault upon it was far greater than upon the mainland of North America. There were 160,000 persons of Japanese ancestry in Hawaii and they constituted not a mere 2.7% of the population as in British Columbia but approximately 38%. Despite the greater imminence of the danger and the fact that they remained at liberty and at work during the entire war, not one single act of espionage or sabotage in Hawaii was ever traced to them. All the arguments advanced to justify evacuation in Canada were many times more pertinent to Hawaii where no evacuation took place. Anti-Japanese interests liked to say that the resident Japanese on the west coast were “significantly” concentrated in “strategic” and “vulnerable” areas, but in Hawaii the resident Japanese blanketed all areas and actually made up a large part of the labour force in naval yards and military depots before and after Pearl Harbor. But military officers in Hawaii did not consider mass evacuation a necessity.

But the false stories of sabotage at Pearl Harbor – in all their richness of detail and wealth of pseudo-documentation by unidentified “eyewitnesses” – were repeated as matters of fact. The Vancouver Sun quoted Secretary Knox’s statement. The Canadian Legion was saying that “B.C. Japs held rejoicing parties when Hong Kong fell” and that “openly sympathetic” residents were predicting “a Nipponese invasion” of Canada.¹⁵ Howard Green was envisioning an invasion of Prince Rupert and the Queen Charlotte Islands, and, chastising the federal government over its delay in removing the Japanese, he declared in the House on January 29 that Japanese forces could well use Prince Rupert or Port Alberni as bases for attacks on the entire Pacific coast. Warming up to his task, Green continued: “It would be possible to make the whole of British Columbia a battleground, and even to bomb the prairie cities such as Edmonton and Calgary.”¹⁶ Guiding the invaders to “strategic” points on the coast would be the resident Japanese. Green concluded:

We should be protected from treachery, from a stab in the back …. There has been treachery elsewhere from Japanese in this war, and we have no reason to hope that there will be none in British Columbia …. The only complete protection we can have from this danger is to remove the Japanese population from the province.¹⁷

During the same week, as British Columbian MPs flexed their muscles in debates over west coast defences, R.W. Mayhew, the Victoria MP, capped his argument for evacuation by referring to Pearl Harbor as evidence that citizenship meant nothing; “blood is thicker than water.”¹⁸

The myths and lies died hard. As late as November, 1943, such newspapers as the Calgary Albertan were still circulating stories of Pearl Harbor sabotage. And in 1944 the Montreal Star was to publish a long editorial espousing complete “repatriation” of all Japanese because:

We know now that the Japanese in British Columbia have from the very beginning been secret agents of Tokyo …. We believe the future interests of Canada will be served by rooting out entirely from the Canadian scene this definite and dangerous menace…. We can well spare them.¹⁹

When Hirozo Fujita, a resident in Canada for 34 years, bought farm land six miles north of Oliver in the Okanagan Valley, white residents were highly indignant. Fujita not only had moved too close to Oliver, a town which had a “whites only” policy for 23 years, but he was also now on a straight line between Vancouver and Trail, the important smelting centre. As he and his three sons piled heaps of brush in clearing parts of the farm, white farmers declared that he could easily set them off at night as “flaming beacons” to guide enemy bombers to Trail. “Call Out The Army – Oliver Invaded,” the Vernon News announced.²⁰

Reports – both fanciful and authentic – of enemy submarine activity off the California coast in the last weeks of December, 1941, greatly fortified fears of an invasion. A few American freighters were shelled and one tanker, the Emilio, was sunk. But these attacks were puny in contrast to the Nazi U-boat campaign in the Atlantic, and though there were no further attacks after December, many coastal citizens felt that they were under virtual siege by a whole fleet of submarines. There was no hysteria along the eastern seaboard over an Axis “invasion” – and, of course, no evacuation was ever suggested for the Germans and Italians, aliens or citizens, on the Atlantic coast where submarines and defence installations were far more numerous, and the dangers of espionage and sabotage possibly much greater.²¹ The closest that the continent came to war on its own soil occurred when a Japanese submarine, the I-17, surfaced on February 23, 1942, off the California coast at Goleta and lobbed 13 rounds of 5½-inch shells in the general direction of an oil-tank complex. The bombardment caused little damage but forced William Randolph Hearst, one of the populizers of the “Yellow Peril” myth in North America, to “evacuate” his fabulous castle of San Simeon for fear that Japan had specific aims of retaliation against him. And on February 25, like the panic engendered by the Martian invasion dreamed up by Orson Welles, the “Battle of Los Angeles” took place. When coastal defences picked up what was likely a weather balloon, anti-aircraft guns fired off some 1,440 rounds of 3-inch shells into the night air at some enemy which existed only in the defenders’ imagination.

The same panic and extravagant rumours circulated on the west coast of British Columbia. On December 11, 1941, the headquarters of the Pacific Command was informed that “the main Japanese fleet” was 154 miles west of San Francisco and headed northeast.²² And as the Japanese army swept forth relentlessly in Asia, as British forces were unable to halt the Japanese advance at any point in Malaya, and as Singapore, with a great force of troops, fell on February 15, 1942, anxiety in the province grew steadily. The day before Singapore fell, Ian Mackenzie wrote to King:

I am receiving repeated representations from British Columbia in regard to our Pacific Coast defences …. My definite impressions are, after having information in regard to what has been done, that the preparations on the Pacific Coast are entirely inadequate …. We should have at least two mobile divisions on the Pacific Coast … and we should not send any more troops overseas until we have adequate defences for our own coast.²³

Other politicians and newspapers took the same line. Meeting with the senior officers of the three services in the province, Premier Hart stated that the people were “obsessed” with the necessity of the adequate protection for British Columbia, and that, until this was assured, they did not appreciate the necessity of the war effort abroad.

Mainly to allay public apprehension, a great expansion of the army was approved by the War Committee in March, and troops were moved from Eastern Canada to augment the mobilization of new divisions in B.C. Certainly the expenditures for the armed services for the fiscal year 1942-43, which were nearly double those for 1941-42, were owing in no small measure to the unpleasant situation that had evolved on the west coast. No real menace to Canadian soil, however, developed at any time during the war. The Japanese occupied the two Aleutian islands of Kiska and Attu, not as the beginning of an offensive move against the North American continent, but as a defensive tactic.

In May, 1942, General Alexander received information that Japan was planning a thrust at Midway combined with a secondary operation against the Aleutians, and he told the Chiefs of Staff that the enemy might attempt something against Prince Rupert.²⁴ But later, in a meeting of the Pacific War Council in Washington, it was clear from the discussions among Roosevelt, Churchill and King that Japan’s foothold in the Aleutians was primarily designed to offset any situation that might develop with Russia and that the threat to the Pacific coast was negligible.

There was no invasion of Canadian soil, no landings from the sea or bombings from aircraft, nor was there any evidence that Japan ever seriously considered such enterprises. At no time during the war did a coastal defence gun fire a single shot in anger. Large numbers of soldiers and material were mobilized on the west coast without cause, whereas they could have been used in the distant war theatres where the outcome of the war was actually decided. Thus, inflamed public pressure in British Columbia – and the fact that Ottawa yielded to demands for precautions against menaces which were almost imaginary – was of distinct advantage to Canada’s enemies. Except for some ineffective, unmanned bomb-carrying balloons which Japan floated into the prevailing winds over the Pacific in the last two years of the war, hopefully to carry over Canada and the United States, no more serious threat developed to Canada’s own shores than the shells which fell on June 20, 1942, from a Japanese submarine. When the I-26 shelled the isolated wireless station and lighthouse on Estevan Point on Vancouver Island, causing virtually no damage, it was the first and last time that enemy shells fell on Canadian soil in either World War. The only casualty arising from the incident was an RCAF bomber which crashed soon after takeoff from a nearby airbase to hunt for the submarine. None of the crew was hurt, and the submarine moved unmolested northward to the Aleutians.

If “considerations of military necessity”²⁵ lay at the root of the decision to evacuate the Japanese, it was a rationalization at odds with the professional knowledge and cool judgement of the military. Writing in his diary during a trip in July, 1943, to the west coast and Alaska as a member of the Permanent Joint Board on Defence, General Pope noted:

At no time in the last ten years have I ever wavered in the conviction that the West Coast of America, no less than the eastern seaboard, could not possibly be exposed to anything exceeding a minor nuisance raid …. Other military operations … would constitute an overseas expedition against a continent, the home territory of 150 million people. The absolute absurdity of such a notion can best be brought home by picturing to oneself the consternation of a board of combined planners if during the past year they had been instructed to plan a sea-borne invasion of Japan.²⁶

The campaign of British Columbian politicians to raise the spectre of an invasion – and the collaboration of the resident Japanese population in such an operation – was, to a large extent, an artificially created and manipulated situation. But the vigour with which they pursued it was quite remarkable – as was their success in achieving their ultimate aims.

The compromise of “partial” evacuation which Ottawa struck with British Columbia was announced on January 14, 1942. Designed as a “moderate” policy, it meant that all Japanese male nationals, aged 18 to 45 years, would be removed from the coast by April 1. An Order-in-Council, P.C. 365, January 16, empowered the Minister of National Defence, with the concurrence of the Minister of Justice, to make any area of Canada a “protected area” from which enemy aliens could be excluded. As defined two weeks later, this area would be some 100 miles wide extending from the Pacific Ocean to the Cascade Mountains, including all the islands off the coast, and bound by the Yukon on the north and the Canada-United States border on the south. The policy was “moderate” only insofar as Ottawa hoped that the promulgation of prohibited areas would quiet the rising clamour for mass evacuation. Of the major principles set down to guide the movement and to relieve tensions, the statement that “national defence and victory are the first overriding considerations” loomed most important, as it was the basis on which this and subsequent actions were rationalized. The government promised “just treatment” to Canadians of Japanese ancestry and Japanese nationals and asked citizens to adopt “a calm and reasonable attitude.”²⁷ But though the promise of “just treatment” was given in all sincerity at the time, no statement could have been more misleading as far as subsequent action was concerned. And while the government announced that it would encourage a “reasonable” attitude among white Canadians, it did not follow this statement with a public relations programme designed to reassure the population that the new measures provided adequate protection and that sterner action was unnecessary.

The government also proclaimed that all Japanese would be prohibited “during the period of the war” for reasons of “national defence and security” from fishing, serving on fishing boats or holding licences.²⁸ Moreover, the impounded fleet of 1,200 boats, lying idle near New Westminster and elsewhere, would be put back into operation.²⁹ Order-in-Council P.C. 288 also arranged for a three-man committee to act in the disposal of the boats; that is, to arrange for sales, arbitrate on price disagreements and report on claims for damage or deterioration of the boats while under detention. Japanese nationals were also forbidden to possess or use short-wave radio receiving sets, radio transmitters and cameras. It was also announced that the “intensive surveillance” of nationals would be continued. A vague and rather grandiose notion about a voluntary “civilian corps of Canadian Japanese” to be used on “projects designed to further the war effort of Canada”³⁰ was probably conceived as a relief measure in the light of a huge unemployment problem which was besetting the communities. But it was later deferred and never brought into being. “Special consideration” – not defined then or later – was to be offered to Issei veterans of the Canadian Expeditionary Force of World War I, though none of them was exempt from the new regulations. These arrangements, combined with the previous steps taken in December, were deemed – in the opinion of the government and its “technical advisors” – to be “very much in the interests of the Japanese residents of British Columbia themselves.”

What the government officials failed to realize was that the selective evacuation to which they had now committed themselves would result in enormous anxiety when families were separated – especially male family heads from wives and children – and that this alone would constitute a major opposition to evacuation among the Japanese. Not even the fundamental question of whether or not funds would be made available to assist separated families was made clear. Indeed, the new hodgepodge of proposals was not guided by an overriding plan of action, at once clearly and logically conceived and presented. And in the new wave of unrest that quickly followed the evacuation announcement of January 14, the lack of a well-defined plan was to be a potent factor in exacerbating emotions and increasing confusion.

An important factor guiding federal policy-making at this time was the fall of Hong Kong and the capture of the British, Colonial, Indian and Canadian garrison. Moreover, inside the ring of Japanese-controlled territory and in Japan’s home islands, Canadian civilians were under Japanese control, and the future attitude of the Japanese government was uncertain and difficult to predict. But it was abundantly clear that Japan might seize almost any pretext to justify tightening restrictive measures and increasing harsh treatment. Indeed, unlike the often admirable treatment of prisoners and civilians during the Russo-Japanese War, the Japanese attitude towards enemies in the Pacific War resulted in bitterness against them for the haphazard and ruthless way in which prisoners were neglected or exploited. Many Japanese commanders had the attitude that their captives were lucky to be alive; the very fact that they were prisoners showed that they were “without shame” and thus entitled to little consideration. Canadian soldiers who were prisoners-of-war at Hong Kong camps until 1943, and then forced to work in various industries, chiefly mining, in Japan until the end of the war were to face harrowing experiences.³¹ And reports of Japanese treatment of prisoners at Hong Kong greatly aggravated hostility towards the resident Japanese on the west coast. Still, Canadian civilians caught behind enemy lines were visitors – businessmen, missionaries, educators – who happened to be in the Far East and, of course, were not the true counterparts of Japanese nationals in Canada who were immigrants. And three-quarters of the Japanese to be removed from the west coast were Canadian-born or naturalized citizens, a fact which never guided the vengeful thinking of those who later wrote to newspapers demanding that evacuees be treated as Canadians were being treated by the Japanese government, or who complained to officials that evacuees were being handled too leniently.³² Some MPs even declared in the House of Commons that the Hong Kong prisoners-of-war should be the final arbiters of the ultimate fate of the Japanese in Canada.

Department of External Affairs officials were highly sensitive to what Japan might do if the Canadian government adopted a policy of extreme action, one which could be defined as racial persecution. In its announcement of “partial” evacuation, then, the government proposed as a guiding principle that:

No action will be taken or permitted which would give any excuse to the Government of Japan for mistreating Canadians under Japanese control. Nor will any action be taken or permitted which would help the Japanese anywhere to arouse Asiatic hostility against the white race.³³

This anxiety over the possibility of Japanese reprisal was one of the grim realities only faintly understood or appreciated by the general public. But no matter how “moderate” its policy, the government was playing into the hands of the Japanese propagandists who were telling the vast millions of people in the Orient that the white democracies had a deep-rooted bias against all Asiatics.

Later, on February 19, Mackenzie King – from a somewhat different point of view – was recording in his diary that he was fearful of riots occurring on the west coast over reports of Japanese atrocities: “Once that [rioting] occurs, there will be repercussions in the Far East against our own prisoners.”³⁴ And it was partly in fear of such reprisals that King decided that all Japanese must be evacuated, possibly reasoning that the extreme decision of complete evacuation might be of lesser value as propaganda for Japan than the occurrence of a race riot far outrivalling that of 1907 which had caused a great deal of resentment in Japan. King’s fear of reprisal against Canadians in Japanese-held territory was no doubt genuine. But to preclude the possibility of reprisal by evacuating those threatened with riots and placing them in detention camps was to replace the possibility of evil by an act of greater evil. The way to meet the threat of mob violence – and Japanese reprisal – was to have taken strong preventative measures against those who violated the law, not against those who might have suffered the violation.

The people of Japanese descent – regardless of their individual intentions and loyalties – had become, for the government, a burdensome, distracting element in the early months of 1942. Their mass removal, it might well have been argued, would greatly simplify the task of defending the coastline against possible invasion, of removing the source of widespread apprehension among the white population which might become the focus for localized, but nonetheless serious, community disorders, and permit the concentration of energies and resources on the war effort. Harassed by domestic problems such as Quebec’s attitude towards the conscription referendum, critical by-elections and by a Royal Commission inquiry into the ill-handled Hong Kong expedition, King was only conjecturing that it would be a “very great problem to move the Japanese and particularly to deal with the ones who are naturalized citizens or Canadian-born.”³⁵ It was clearly not a time for taking chances on the side of civil liberties and the problem of the people of Japanese origin loomed small when weighed against other considerations.

Although Premier Hart of British Columbia declared himself satisfied with the programme of “partial” evacuation, it was hardly to be expected that a policy of moderation would be espoused by anti-Japanese politicians and the motley assortment of groups which pressed for complete removal. For six weeks, from the middle of January, 1942, to the announcement of mass evacuation, these groups accelerated their drive. They considered the “compromise” policy the result of their own efforts and pressed to take full advantage of the situation. Municipal councils, most notably those of Vancouver and Victoria, urged Ottawa to remove all Japanese. The coalition provincial government, through Attorney-General R.L. Maitland, pressured Cabinet member Ian Mackenzie to get something done. Thomas Reid urged, at a Burnaby Liberal Party Association meeting, that all Japanese be “deported.” “Patriotic” veterans associations like the Canadian Legion were joined by Boards of Trade, local labour unions, farm groups and fraternal businessmen’s associations in holding a series of mass meetings and dispatching letters and telegrams to Ottawa. Petitions, supposedly “spontaneous” but containing the same wording, were circulated throughout Vancouver.

The intent of these groups was singleminded to the extent that such apparently disparate groups as the Canadian Legion, the IODE, the Gyro Club, the United Commercial Travellers Association and even the Canadian Lady Foresters held joint mass meetings, at which anti-Japanese political leaders would exhort the audience to co-ordinated efforts. The “Immediate Action Committee” of the Canadian Legion, Victoria District Council, circulated a poster, captioned “News Flashes After We Are Dead,” which darkly portrayed the Japanese as a threat to strategic areas – a theme possibly inspired by Brigadier Sutherland Brown’s inflammatory rhetoric at the Conservative Association’s annual meeting on January 11, when he declared that “every little slant-eyed Jap will wave the flag of the Rising Sun if his countrymen invade this coast.”³⁶ None of these groups attempted to make distinctions between the Canadian-born and Japanese nationals; indeed, the Provincial Command of the Army and Navy Veterans of Canada resolved that all Japanese “regardless of sex or citizenship” must be removed.

Giving an aura of respectability and prestige to the agitation was the Citizens’ Defence Committee, made up of 20 of the province’s “most prominent” citizens, who set up an office in the Marine Building in Vancouver and attempted to force immediate action by co-ordinating public expression. As a self-appointed “guardian of B.C. defences, civilian morale and public safety,” the committee – whose membership included P.A. Woodward and Col. Victor Spencer of Vancouver’s major department stores – apparently caused a “deep impression” in Ottawa.

When the 100-mile wide “protected area” was announced, interior sections of the province, particularly the Okanagan, became incensed, fearing that the government would dump the Japanese there. The tremendous labour shortage had convinced some farmers, mainly in the northern sections of the Okanagan, to support a move to import Japanese labour from the coast, provided that they be put in “concentration camps” when not at work in fields and orchards and placed under “strict” police supervision.³⁷ But most farmers violently opposed hiring Japanese labour, ventilating the same arguments used for decades on the coast against immigration from Japan. And when an Okanagan Mission farmer, for example, hired two Japanese to prune his orchard, “Get Rid of the Japs” signs were posted on his gate.

The Japanese controversy took up a great deal of front-page and editorial space in the interior newspapers, and city councils, fruit and vegetable organizations, the Canadian Legion and boards of trade went on record as being “utterly opposed” to “infiltration” by the Japanese. “Better a small crop of onions than a large crop of Jap trouble,” neatly intoned Alderman G. Sutherland of Kelowna.³⁸ A harvest of “bruised and damaged fruit” would be the outcome of hiring “sullen and resentful” Japanese fruit pickers, a member of the Penticton Board of Trade stated – a prediction that was not far from the truth. And well into the end of February, there was talk among residents of “vigilante” action, of taking matters into their own hands if the Japanese were allowed to move into the interior. Throughout the duration of the war, then, the Okanagan Valley was an area which bristled with unbridled hostility, and anti-Japanese agitation was no longer merely a coastal aberration.

It was obvious that the federal programme was a complete failure in calming public tempers or in decreasing demands for sterner measures; indeed, it was producing exactly the opposite effect. In part, this was the result of the hasty and ill-prepared manner in which it was inaugurated. No time was allowed for an adequate public relations scheme to make clear the basis of the proposed movements or to prepare areas for the evacuees. Inland politicians and groups, no less than those on the coast, were moved by racial animus and indulged in a blanket condemnation of the Japanese. The result was suspicion and violent opposition. Finally, the very fact of “partial” evacuation provoked a reasonable belief that if at least certain classes of the group were considered dangerous enough to be evacuated, then it was impossible to distinguish the loyal from the disloyal.

But having announced “partial” evacuation on January 14, the federal government then proceeded to ignore it. The Japanese, for their part, were reluctant to leave the “protected” area because no plans had been announced for the care of their families as well as the disposition of property and chattels: and indeed, the seeds of resistance were being sown because of the government’s incredibly inept mishandling of that aspect of the evacuation.

The federal government was reluctant to use force to compel nationals to remove themselves from the defence zone. But did it expect them to do so voluntarily? Agitators, on the other hand, were incensed since not one Japanese had as yet been removed from “strategic” or “vulnerable” points. They pointed out that the Japanese were still clustered near dams, power lines, factories, searchlights and anti-aircraft guns, that they could easily wreck the dykes along the Fraser River in order to damage airports and military installations, and that they still lived well within sight of coastal shipping. The first group of 100 nationals was scheduled to leave on February 2, 1942, but they were only finally induced to leave Vancouver on February 23 after some persuasion by the RCMP. When they disembarked at Rainbow and Lucerne, deep in the snows of the Rockies, they were the vanguard of some 1,700 male nationals who were removed from the coast and dumped into road projects. But agitators felt this initial movement was far too slow and limited and sent a flood of telegrams, letters, petitions and resolutions to Ottawa.

The federal government obviously had no precedents on which to operate. No one department, among those of State, Labour, Justice, External Affairs and Mines and Resources, had been delegated with complete authority. No one Cabinet member had been appointed as the responsible minister. Ian Mackenzie was attempting to act informally in this role, though as Minister of Pensions and Public Health, his portfolio had little relevance to the task. The Standing Committee, appointed on January 7, 1941, was dissolved on February 9, 1942, having been proven inadequate to handle the increasing stresses and tensions. It was a move that disappointed British Columbian politicians who wanted to maintain the sphere of influence that Mayor Hume of New Westminster and Lt.-Col. MacIntosh could exert as members. But although the government was assuming full responsibility and control, and King, in a Commons speech of February 9, reaffirmed the policy of a selective evacuation, it was clear that British Columbia was in no mood to accept moderation or compromise.

Providing that the government had furnished adequate machinery for family care, temporary housing and care of property, the compromise of a “selective” evacuation between the extremes of non-evacuation and mass evacuation might have been workable. Expelling Japanese nationals was harsh treatment and would give a racial colour to the action, since no similar plan involving other enemy aliens was even contemplated. But it might well have been argued that it was justified and administratively feasible in the spring of 1942.³⁹ But by not evacuating Nisei and naturalized Issei and by allowing them to serve Canada, in the armed forces or in occupations for which they were best adapted, the government could have had the advantages of the maximum use of manpower and the minimum of economic dislocation, and could have thereby established a basis for post-war reconstruction. Of course, this plan depended on other Canadians exercising a high degree of tolerance under trying circumstances and on pressure groups renouncing an ideal opportunity of removing Japanese from the province. Appraised politically, the difficulties of non-evacuation were overwhelming – especially at a time when the military potential of Japan was overrated – but the policy would have enhanced the prestige of democracy, “British justice” and Christian ethics. These were exalted standards which perhaps could not have been expected to be applied by political leaders in a country at war, and, in any case, would have required a bold and generous course on their part. In the end, the alternative extreme policy – based on distrust and a line of least political resistance – prevailed. It was one that accepted the will of a local majority as a reason for harsh treatment of a racial minority. Established under strong political pressure, it clearly represented expediency rather than conviction, for the announcement of mass evacuation on February 26, 1942, represented a complete retreat from earlier policy and constituted a capitulation to racist pressure.

Meanwhile, the way in which the United States handled its 113,000 resident Japanese, living in the states of California, Washington, Oregon and Arizona, was being scrutinized with keen interest. The U.S. Department of Justice had begun, on January 29, to clear all Japanese aliens from a number of strategic coastal areas designated by the Western Defence Command of the U.S. Army. But this policy only resulted in shrill complaints that much more far-reaching action was required immediately. On Lincoln’s birthday, the influential columnist Walter Lippmann summed up the thinking of many west coast people when he wrote:

The Pacific Coast is in imminent danger of a combined attack from within and without …. Since the outbreak of the Japanese war there has been no important sabotage on the Pacific Coast …. This is not, as some have liked to think, a sign that there is nothing to be feared. It is a sign that the blow is well organized and it is held back until it can be struck with maximum effect.⁴⁰

In so postulating the inevitability of fifth column activity, Lippmann had an impact which could scarcely be overestimated, though he was only one of many well-known commentators and politicians – including California’s Attorney-General Earl Warren who echoed Lippmann in his phrase that the Pacific coast faced an “invisible deadline of sabotage” – who were denouncing the “unwillingness” of Washington to adopt a policy of mass evacuation and internment.

In many details, the pattern of pressure for mass removal in both countries was similar, though there were remarkable differences in the manner in which it was carried out and in the ultimate aims envisaged.⁴¹ But since evacuation of Canada’s west coast was a logical outcome of decades of public and political agitation, Canadians did not require an American precedent either to justify their own action or to claim that the American evacuation plans had influenced their decision. Indeed, the Canadian decision to remove the alien Japanese preceded the American order by two weeks, and some American newspapers held up Canadian policy as the pattern to follow.

The thesis of “potential sabotage” held that the resident Japanese were only holding off because Tokyo had ordered some kind of mass uprising or individual acts of treachery at a later and more critical moment, just as Thomas Reid grumbled in the House of Commons that there had been no sabotage committed in Canada because the time was “not yet ripe.” This argument rested not on facts but on the lack of facts, contravening the precept that a person is innocent until proved guilty, and damning the Japanese not for suspicious activities but for the complete absence of activities. No factual evidence whatsoever existed on which Lippmann, Reid and others could base conclusions about the lack of sabotage on which to postulate the thesis of potential sabotage.

But clearly, Canadian politicians and pressure groups could easily utilize American propaganda and action for their own purposes.⁴² In the U.S., however, the ultimate impetus for mass evacuation lay in the hands of the military, chiefly in Lt.-General John De Witt, Commanding General of the Western Defence Command, whose statements demonstrated that he shared the prejudices of the public. The prejudices, if any, of Canadian military leaders had no influence on Canadian policy. But for De Witt, “a Jap’s a Jap …. It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen or not …. I don’t want any of them …. There is no way to determine their loyalty.”⁴³ After De Witt’s recommendation and after congressmen from the Pacific states had urged evacuation, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942. Under the terms of this order, which was without precedent in American history, on March 2 De Witt was able to designate the entire western half of California, Oregon and Washington as a “military area” and to announce that all persons of Japanese ancestry would eventually be removed from that area “in the interest of military necessity.”

Roosevelt’s action ensured the success of the massive pressure for complete evacuation in Canada. It was, on the surface, the final and most powerful argument, though Mackenzie King had already decided to go ahead with mass evacuation by the time Roosevelt signed his executive order. And while Roosevelt rather easily and uncritically accepted the evacuation programme as it was presented to him by the War Department, he was not responsible for the programme as it developed. King, in contrast, took personal initiative after he had judged the situation and was ultimately responsible for the decision.

On February 24, then, after the previous day’s secret session of the Commons from which press and spectators were barred, the federal government issued the first of a series of orders-in-council which were to completely regulate the lives of all persons of Japanese origin, regardless of citizenship, and set into motion the mechanics of forced evacuation and detention on the basis that they were “necessary for the security and defence of Canada.”⁴⁴ The trail that led to ghost towns in the interior, isolated road camps and sugar beet farms – and for many, to a filthy and desolate set of barracks near Uraga in Japan – was marked long before this event; however, the major crossroad had been reached.

Order-in-Council P.C. 1486 empowered Minister of Justice Louis St. Laurent to control the movements of all persons of Japanese origin in certain “protected areas.”⁴⁵ That is, they could be forced to leave, prohibited from entering, leaving or returning to the 100-mile wide coastal strip, already excluded to Japanese nationals, and now also excluded to Japanese-Canadian citizens, either native-born or naturalized. The area around Trail, the location of the most important smelting works in the country, was also designated, on February 27, as a “protected” zone. What P.C. 1486 did was to extend the provisions of the earlier order-in-council which had authorized the removal and restricted the activities of Japanese nationals to include all persons of Japanese origin so that everyone was now restricted in “their employment or business”, “their associations or communications with other persons” or “their activities in relation to the dissemination of news or the propagation of opinions” and prohibited from possessing specified articles such as cameras, firearms and radio sets. Formal announcement of mass evacuation followed on February 26.

The British Columbia Security Commission was established on March 4 to “plan, supervise and direct” the evacuation. It was comprised of three members: Chairman Austin Taylor, a Vancouver industrialist; Assistant Commissioner of the RCMP F.J. Mead; and Assistant Commissioner of the Provincial Police John Shirras. An “Advisory Committee” of 21 members, including Attorney-General R.L. Maitland and Minister of Labour George Pearson, two members of the provincial Cabinet well-known for their extreme anti-Japanese views, and Leader of the CCF Opposition Harold Winch, were appointed to assist the BCSC. Under Order-in-Council P.C. 1665, the Commission was given wide and sweeping powers,⁴⁶ limited only in that Minister of Labour Humphrey Mitchell had to approve their plans, and any expenditures of more than $15,000 at one time had to be sanctioned by Cabinet. It was to be assisted by all federal departments and agencies – National Defence, Transport, Munitions and Supply, Labour and the RCMP. It was empowered to make by-laws, hold property, enter into contracts and employ staff including federal civil servants of any department.

Within its “duties and powers,” the Commission was empowered

to require by order any person of the Japanese race, in any protected area in British Columbia, to remain at his place of residence or to leave his place of residence and to proceed to any place within or without the protected area at such time and in such manner as the Commission may prescribe in any such order, or to order the detention of any such person, and by any such order may be enforced by any persons nominated by the Commission to do so.⁴⁷

While the Commission had to provide “for the housing, feeding, care and protection” of evacuees, its peremptory powers allowed it to determine “the time and order” of the evacuation and “all matters relative to the placement” of the evacuees as well as to regulate their “conduct, activities and discipline.” The punishment of persons who contravened or failed to comply with these and other regulations was set at a maximum fine of $500 or a term of 12 months or both.

A critical provision of the order-in-council stated that all property which the evacuee “is unable to take with him” was to be placed in the custody of the Custodian of Alien Property. This custody, it was emphasized, was “a protective measure only” – a phrase to remember in light of the government’s open breach of trust in the later compulsory sale of property. Control over movement was extended by Order-in-Council P.C. 2483, placing those persons who had voluntarily left the “protected area” under control⁴⁸ – a move prompted by indignant demands from the white population in the interior and in other provinces, particularly Alberta, which felt that the movement of evacuees should be stringently checked. Later, on September 11, through P.C. 8173, authority was exerted over all Japanese in Canada. Meanwhile, curfew locked the Japanese in their homes from sunset to sunrise, censorship of mails was imminent, and all automobiles were to be impounded.

Girded with absolute power, the Commission undertook the first steps towards total evacuation about 10 days after it was organized, initially displacing some 2,500 people, mainly fishermen and their families living along the upper coastline as far as Prince Rupert and on Vancouver Island. The Department of National Defence expropriated the Hastings Park Exhibition Grounds in Vancouver and turned it over to the Commission to be used as a “clearing station” or “assembly centre” to house the evacuees until arrangements could be made for placing them outside the “protected area.” As 75% of the Japanese population were already resident in the Vancouver area and therefore could be moved directly from their homes, Hastings Park was a convenient place in which up to 4,000 Japanese could be confined under guard.

The use of former stables and cattle stalls of the Livestock Building, only perfunctorily and hastily improvised for human habitation, was perhaps symbolic of the entire evacuation movement as the RCMP, with the assistance of the army, transported the first group of coastal Japanese to the Park beginning March 16, there to be “herded together like a bunch of cattle” as many complained. By March 25, as the RCMP accelerated the process of removal, 1,593 persons had been shipped to the Park. At the same time, men were being moved directly to road camps in the interior and in Ontario.

As the Commission moved to implement policy, the assumption that evacuation was based on “national security” or was a matter of “military necessity” was not questioned by policy makers, by administrators, by political opponents of Mackenzie King, by newspaper editors and columnists, by the churches, by Canadians in general, nor by men and women dedicated to the protection of civil rights. The fact that a group of people was expelled from a large area of the country, without hearings or trials and merely on the grounds of racial ancestry, and that all rights of citizenship had been abrogated, excited little comment across the country. In fact, outside of British Columbia, the evacuation went almost unnoticed. Not one effective voice of protest had been raised by white Canadians; even the CCF party, for some years an uncompromising champion of citizenship rights for the Japanese, expressed itself in favour of the evacuation “for reasons of defence.”⁴⁹ Canadians outside the province assumed, uncritically, that the west coast Japanese were the most dangerous element in the domestic population, and for a period of several years this assumption was almost entirely unchallenged.

Ottawa made no attempt to define publicly what was meant by “national security” or “military necessity” and what the “defence of Canada” involved. As no opposition to the evacuation was forthcoming, and as no explanations were given, the issues were left to be explained by the same British Columbia men who had their own interests to hone, and who had no objections to stating publicly their reasons why evacuation was necessary. Privately, the policy formulators might have been walking around Ottawa with heavy consciences and, harassed by other pressing questions demanding immediate and decisive action, they may have been unable to study the concept of the evacuation as carefully or think through its consequences as fully as they may have liked to. But no member of the Cabinet was ever to debate evacuation policy in the Commons or make statements that were other than blandly noncommittal or anti-Japanese.

The churches in Canada did nothing. The policy formulated by the Executive of the General Council of the United Church of Canada was, at best, equivocal. At once stating that “our government must protect us so far as it is possible from insidious attacks,” thereby suggesting that evacuation was justified on the basis of potential treachery, at the same time it assured the evacuees of the church’s “sympathy” and pledged to “withdraw itself from vicious and unchristian attitudes, and to hold fast that in Christ there is no distinction of race and colour.”⁵⁰ The Vancouver Presbytery of the United Church could only offer “regret” to the Japanese that “the exigencies of war necessitated this complete disorganization of their way of living” while declaring its belief in their loyalty.⁵¹ It seemed apparent that the Church was trying to have it both ways, contrary to a few individual churchmen, like Rev. W.R. McWilliams and Rev. Howard Norman, who did more than merely parrot the official line.⁵² Even “liberal” newspapers like the Winnipeg Free Press felt that evacuation was a “wise” move on the part of the Canadian government.⁵³ And there was no evidence that the faith of Canada’s other minority groups was being shaken or that they looked uneasily at the passing events.

The rather far-reaching implications of the evacuation, then, never evolved into a nation-wide issue. In February and March of 1942, as Canada was involved in total global warfare, even such a drastic programme was reduced to relative insignificance in terms of national interest. Newspapers in Eastern Canada reported the evacuation in brief dispatches tucked away on the inside pages. In the context of war, Ottawa’s statement that national safety was the overriding consideration to which all else was subsidiary was sufficient to silence students of public affairs and the more analytical minds.

The simple statement that a particular line of action was needed for the effective prosecution of the war probably had an almost incalculable effect in winning widespread and uncritical public acceptance for even this unprecedented event. In time of war, the phrase “national security,” uttered by high-ranking policy-makers, tends to become sacrosanct and unchallengeable. Those rash enough to challenge it ran the risk of being considered unpatriotic or worse.⁵⁴ No one questioned the fact that there was no statement from Ottawa to the effect that the evacuation had been ordered and was being carried out with conscious reluctance, with a clear recognition of its drastic curtailment of civil liberties, and with a firm determination to revoke the exclusion orders at the earliest feasible opportunity. These qualifications might have softened the blow – and were the least that thinking Canadians could have demanded. But within a climate that fostered the public acceptance of stereotypes, of ignorance and disinterest, there was no need for the government to work out a clear-cut policy with definite ends in mind or to ensure that during the period of detention or displacement certain rights – such as those of property – might be safeguarded and that some of the harsh restrictions of the programme might be liberalized.

The Security Commission’s authority to evacuate and detain citizens and to impose a series of restrictions was clear-cut and virtually unassailable. The series of orders-in-council, phrased in terms of “members of the Japanese race,” were issued under the authority of the War Measures Act, Chapter 206 of the Revised Statutes of Canada, 1927, which gave sweeping powers to the Cabinet “in the event of war, invasion, or insurrection.”⁵⁵ To protect “the security, defence, peace, order and welfare of Canada,” the Cabinet could pass regulations and orders affecting a wide variety of matters, including “censorship and the control and suppression of publications,” “appropriation, control, forfeiture and disposition of property” and “arrest, detention, exclusion and deportation.” All orders-in-council had “the force of law,” and thus the government did not need to have constitutional qualms about detaining citizens or controlling their movements to whatever extent might be found “necessary.” Nor did the government need to have qualms about singling out and treating citizens of Japanese descent as a class differently from all other citizens. Unlike Americans, whose rights and immunities of citizenship were clearly spelled out in the first ten amendments of the Constitution – though even these were overridden by the powers given to the President in time of war – Canadians had no constitutionally-guaranteed rights that rested on any real legal foundation.

Thus the government had complete legal authority to restrict, control, evacuate and detain – and even deport – Japanese without bringing charges against them. Whether Japanese imposed a real danger to national security and whether their restraint was a reasonable one for the purpose of meeting that danger was not a matter, under the language of the War Measures Act, that could be challenged in the courts. The Cabinet was the sole judge of the necessity of the measures and was not subject to review by any court.

In the United States, in contrast, the constitutionality of the restrictive measures became the subject of at least three important cases. In one of them, the case of a Nisei who had been arrested for having violated both curfew and evacuation orders, the Supreme Court ruled that the curfew regulation was a valid exercise of the war power of the United States. But though the Court did not consider the legality of the evacuation orders, it was apparent that it entertained doubts about the constitutionality of evacuation insofar as American citizens were concerned. Justice William Douglas, for example, said: “Detention for reasonable cause is one thing, detention on account of ancestry is another.”⁵⁶ In another case, again involving evasion of evacuation orders, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of evacuation and detention on the basis of the military urgency of the situation. In a dissenting opinion, however, Justice Frank Murphy remarked that evacuation fell “into the ugly abyss of racism.”⁵⁷ The case was itself sponsored by the American Civil Liberties Union which had characterized the evacuation and detention of citizens as the “most catastrophic” of all inroads upon the civil rights of American citizens arising out of any war. No similar move, of course, was ever championed on behalf of Japanese Canadians by any body in Canada during wartime. Expanding on his opinion, Justice Murphy said:

The main reasons relied upon by those responsible for the forced evacuation … [does] not prove a reasonable relation between the group characteristics of Japanese Americans and the dangers of invasion, sabotage and espionage. The reasons appear, instead, to be largely an accumulation of much of the misinformation, half-truths and insinuations that for years have been directed against the Japanese Americans by people with racial and economic prejudices – the same people who have been among the foremost advocates of the evacuation …. It was asserted merely that the loyalties of this group ‘were unknown and time was of the essence.’⁵⁸

And the American decision of December 17, 1944, to rescind the exclusion orders and to close all detention centres within one year followed closely a decision of the Supreme Court which ruled that the War Relocation Authority – the counterpart of the British Columbia Security Commission – had no authority to detain citizens “who are concededly loyal.”

Time after time, it was emphasized that protecting the rights of the individual was part of the inherited traditions of “British fair play and justice” and hence part of the Canadian national ethos, and that arbitrary and unreasonable interference with those rights were repugnant to national instincts. But this ideology was expounded by Canadian-born Nisei and not by other Canadians.

If evacuation and detention had occurred in December, January or February instead of in the spring and summer of 1942, it might have appeared reasonable as a decision taken on the spur of the moment, taken in haste and in the light of the rapid progress of Japanese arms in the Pacific and in the weak and haphazard preparations for defence on the Pacific coast. But mass evacuation was a deliberate act taken after the shock of the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor had worn off and amid a diminishing war crisis.

The sequence of events greatly diminished the claims of overwhelming urgency. Pearl Harbor occurred on December 7, 1941, but it was not until February 26, eleven weeks later, that Mackenzie King ordered mass evacuation. Still another three weeks elapsed before the first people were evacuated, and by that time the coastal defences had been greatly strengthened. The evacuation went on during the summer of 1942 and was not completed until October 31 – close to eleven months after the beginning of the Pacific War. This slow march of events hardly suggested an all-engulfing military urgency or an acute apprehension of any sense of danger from the group being evacuated.

While evacuation proceeded at its leisurely pace, the progress of the Japanese military reached its peak and began to decline. The Battle of Midway on June 6, 1942, almost decisively disposed of any possibility that the Japanese might marshall the naval effort necessary for an invasion of North America or for sustaining their precarious foothold on the Aleutians.

Yet despite the immediate recognition of this military fact, the evacuation was remorselessly continued and accelerated, and no attempt made to mitigate its harshness. Protests by other provinces against acceptance of Japanese evacuees would surely have been swiftly and incisively overcome with an appeal towards patriotism had there been a real military urgency; the Commission would have accelerated its search to find accommodation for women and children much earlier than it did and would have ignored the sensitivities of the white population over having the evacuees thrust into their localities. But in the summer of 1942, the permanent housing in the “interior settlements” had not yet been constructed. Could “military necessity” or “national security” justify mass evacuation after Midway had removed the last threat of sustained attack, as Allied military leaders had judged at that time?

Even before Midway, military leaders – in Canada and the United States – did not expect an invasion. Admiral Stark, U.S. Chief of Naval Operations, testified before a Congressional committee in February, 1942, that he did not believe it would be possible for the enemy to engage in a sustained attack on the Pacific coast at that time, although sporadic raids were probable. Despite losses at Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Navy did not expect Japanese naval attacks east of Hawaii, but believed that strikes on Puget Sound, San Francisco or the Panama Canal were not beyond the range of possibilities.⁵⁹ This was apparently the view of Roosevelt, Churchill and the British, Canadian and American Chiefs of Staff as well. During the series of eight meetings between Roosevelt and Churchill and concurrent meetings of Chiefs of Staff, there was serious discussion over the possibility of attacks on the west coast by naval bombardment, mine-laying, attacks by “human torpedoes” or even carrier-borne air attacks or actual seaborne expeditions of troops, though the last seemed highly fanciful. Churchill stated that although the west coast might be “insulted” on occasion, he could see little likelihood that the Japanese would attempt an invasion of the continent. But beyond conjecture over spectacular “nuisance” raids, the main concern was with the possibility of a major attack on the Panama Canal. As even this was considered as “purely local” and “incidental,” all apparently agreed that the main problem was still on the far side of the Pacific.

Even in February, when the Japanese were making spectacular progress, Allied leaders still felt no concern about an invasion; on the contrary, the greatest anxiety was over containing the south and westward thrust of Japan from enveloping Australia and India. And in the April 14, 1942, meeting between Churchill and British and American military leaders, it was reported that “full provision” had been made by the Chiefs of Staff in Washington for measures necessary to hold the Alaska-Hawaii-Australia line in the Pacific.⁶⁰ Thus the danger of invasion after Midway was practically non-existent and before Midway was fairly remote – contrary to the claims of civilians in British Columbia. And hence, if “military necessity” for the vast programme of uprooting, removal and imprisonment of resident Japanese could be rationalized at all, it had to be premised on the receding “possibility” of nuisance raids, sporadic bombings and submarine shellings – far removed from the image of enemy forces scrambling over the wharves at Prince Rupert or up the beaches of Vancouver. In the absence of any compelling evidence of the disloyalty or subversive tendencies of the resident Japanese, then, the drastic measure of mass evacuation could scarcely be justified as a means necessary to cope with the danger that diminished rapidly as the war in the Pacific proceeded.

All the arguments for evacuation were mobilized under the waving banner of national security. But this veneer was thin; below its surface and visible at many points was the more substantial framework of racial animosity and economic and political aggrandizement. And to shore up this jerry-built facade, any and all supporting claims were seized upon, no matter how dubious their source and how tenuous their reasoning. Under the impact of regional pressures, the removal of the Japanese became an end in itself and no longer a means of achieving national security. The position of the Japanese in British Columbia had little relevance to their potential role as saboteurs, but great relevance in the eyes of the province to their desirability as residents and to their role as economic competitors.

The most convincing proof of the manner in which the expulsion of the Japanese became an end for and in itself was the astounding phenomenon at the end of the early phases of the evacuation period. The entire Japanese population had been removed and incarcerated, and further repressive measures against the group had no direct relation to military security. It was at that point that British Columbia began to accelerate its efforts to permanently exclude the Japanese. The evidence supported one conclusion only: the dominant element in the development of the evacuation programme was racial prejudice, not a military estimate of a military problem. Some 21,000 persons were evacuated on a record which, as one commentator put it, “wouldn’t support a conviction for stealing a dog.”⁶¹

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Notes

1. Order-in-Council P.C. 9592. See Canada, Privy Council, Proclamations and Orders in Council, 5 (Ottawa: King’s Printer, 1942), pp. 349-50. ↩
2. Pickersgill, J.W., The Mackenzie King Record: 1939-1944, 1 (University of Toronto Press, 1960), p. 299. ↩
3. Vancouver Province, December 19, 1941. ↩
4. Vancouver News-Herald, January 5, 1942. ↩
5. Vancouver Province, December 8, 1941. ↩
6. Vancouver Province, January 12, 1942. In the January 5 issue, Ottawa correspondent Charles Bishop quoted officials of the Department of External Affairs as being highly disturbed by “the continuing anti-Japanese campaign” in Vancouver and that “nothing so silly” as evacuation was being planned. He also quoted officials as saying that Wilson was “a thoroughly bad influence” and that if he and others were to incite riots, “we might have a hell of a mess on our hands.” ↩
7. Vancouver News-Herald, January 5, 1942. ↩
8. Alexander to Chief of General Staff, December 30, 1941. Stacey, C.P., Six Years of War: the Army in Canada, Britain and the Pacific (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1955), p. 169. ↩
9. Pope, M., Soldiers and Politicians (University of Toronto Press, 1962), p. 177. ↩
10. Ibid., p. 177. ↩
11. 11. Reid, R., “The Conscience of the Diplomat”, Queen’s Quarterly, 84 (Winter, 1967), p. 587. Reid writes of this meeting and the decision to evacuate the Japanese as one of two actions of the Canadian government in which he was involved “which were not clean or decent, which were indeed, in my opinion, evil.” ↩
12. Pickersgill, op. cit., p. 307. ↩
13. United States Department of the Interior, WRA: A Story of Human Conservation (Washington: G.P.O., 1946), p. 10. ↩
14. Several of these stories were presented with an air of impressive authenticity in the Warner Brothers’ film Air Force. One of them was repeated in Walter Winchell’s column as late as December, 1945, on the fourth anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack. Hollywood was a potent influence in presenting the classic stereotype of the Japanese as sly, villainous and untrustworthy. One of the few sympathetic characters was Mr. Moto, a Japanese secret-service agent played in a series of films by Peter Lorre during the thirties. But unlike Charlie Chan who remained a favourite, he was taken off the screen “because anti-Japanese feeling is running so high in America that audiences can no longer take pleasure in the courage and astuteness of a member of that nation.” See Thorp, M.E., America at the Movies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1939), p. 129. ↩
15. E.g., Cash, G., A Million Miles From Ottawa (Toronto: n. pub., 1942), p. 49. ↩
16. Vancouver Province, January 30, 1942. ↩
17. Canada, House of Commons Debates, 1942, p. 156. ↩
18. Ibid., p. 433. ↩
19. “Clear the Japanese Out of Canada”, Montreal Star, May 17, 1944. ↩
20. Vernon News, December 13, 1941. ↩
21. Stacey, op. cit., pp. 176-7. ↩
22. War Diary, General Staff, Headquarters Pacific Command, December, 1941, Appendix 58, “Operational Report on Events … December 6th to 11th, 1941.” Stacey, op. cit., p. 169. ↩
23. Stacey, op. cit., p. 170. ↩
24. War Diary, Headquarters, Prince Rupert Defences, 20 May, 1942. Stacey, op. cit., p. 173. ↩
25. Department of Labour, Report on the Re-Establishment of Japanese in Canada, 1944-1946 (Ottawa: King’s Printer, 1947), p. 24. ↩
26. Pope, op. cit., pp. 219-20. Cf. Stacey, op, cit., p. 173, who quotes Major General Simon Buckner, U.S. Army Commander in Alaska, who denied the possibility of Japanese invasion of the U.S. by way of Alaska: “They might make it, but it would be their grandchildren who finally got there; and by then they would all be American citizens anyway!” ↩
27. The New Canadian, January 14, 1942. ↩
28. Order-in-Council P.C. 251. Canada, Privy Council, op. cit., 6, pp. 33-4. ↩
29. Order-in-Council P.C. 288, January 13, 1942. Ibid., pp. 35-6. ↩
30. Order-in-Council P.C. 1271, February 17, 1942. Ibid., pp. 120-3. ↩
31. Stacey, op. cit., pp. 488-9. ↩
32. E.g., Vancouver Province, December 12, 1942; Vancouver Sun, June 20, 1942. ↩
33. Press release, January 14, 1942. ↩
34. Pickersgill, op. cit., p. 354. ↩
35. Pickersgill, op. cit., p. 354. ↩
36. Vancouver Province, January 12, 1942. ↩
37. Kelowna Courier, January 15, 1942; Vancouver Province, January 15, 1942. ↩
38. Kelowna Courier, January 22, 1942. While the Courier editorials were vehemently anti-Japanese, using epithets like “brown boches” (March 19) and claiming that “every Jap is an alien enemy; every Jap is a menace to our security,” the Vernon News was taking a different view, asking for a solution to the problem on “a fair, equitable basis” (Dec. 18), based on “British ideals of freedom, tolerance and personal liberty” (Jan. 29). ↩
39. Cf. U.S. Department of the Interior, op. cit., pp. 182-3. Also see Angus, H.F., “Asiatics in Canada”, Pacific Affairs, 19 (December, 1946), pp. 402-8. ↩
40. New York Herald Tribune, February 12, 1942. ↩
41. On Dec. 7, 1941, there were in the continental U.S. about 127,000 persons of Japanese descent. Of the 113,000 on the West Coast, some 80,000 were American-born. The total number forcibly removed from the West Coast was 109,650. See O’Brien, R.W., “Evacuation of Japanese from the Pacific Coast, Canadian and American Contrasts,” State College of Washington, Research Studies, 14 (1946), pp. 113-20; O’Brien and Thomas, N., “Fate of the Japanese in North America and Hawaii,” Pacific Affairs, 16 (March, 1943), pp. 92-5. ↩
42. E.g., “Ottawa and our Japanese,” Vancouver Province, February 17, 1942. ↩
43. Los Angeles Times, April 14, 1943. ↩
44. Order-in-Council P.C. 1665, March 4, 1942. Canada, Privy Council, 6, op. cit., p. 167. These reasons have been variously worded: e.g., P.C. 1457, February 24, which restricted acquisition of land and growing of crops by Japanese in Canada, stated that this was “necessary for the security, defence, peace, order and welfare of Canada.” ↩
45. Canada, Privy Council, 6, op. cit., pp. 136-7. See Canada, House of Commons Debates, February 24, 1942, pp. 809-10, for King’s announcement of evacuation and for summary of previous orders-in-council. ↩
46. Order-in-Council P.C. 1665, March 4, 1942. Canada, Privy Council, 6, op. cit., pp. 167-171. ↩
47. Section 11 (1), P.C. 1665, ibid., p. 169. ↩
48. Order-in-Council P.C. 2483, ibid., pp. 252-3. ↩
49. MacInnis, G. and A., Oriental Canadians – Outcasts or Citizens? (Vancouver: Federationist Publishing Co., 1943), p. 18; LaViolette, F.E., “Japanese Evacuation in Canada,” Far Eastern Survey, 11 (July 27, 1942), p. 166. ↩
50. The New Canadian, January 8, 1944. ↩
51. The New Canadian, March 12, 1942. ↩
52. E.g., McWilliams, W.R., “What the Government Has Done,” Reconciliation (Toronto: Fellowship of Reconciliation, 1944), pp. 6-7; Norman, H., What About the Japanese Canadians? (Vancouver Consultative Council, 1945). See also Berton, P., The Comfortable Pew: A Critical Look at Christianity and the Religious Establishment in the New Age (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1965). ↩
53. “Wider Distribution Urged,” Winnipeg Free Press, March 25, 1944. ↩
54. Canada, House of Commons Debates, 1942, pp. 718-19. ↩
55. See Revised Statutes of Canada, 1927, 4, Ch. 206, pp. 4085-7. ↩
56. McWilliams, C., Prejudice, Japanese Americans: Symbol of Racial Intolerance (Boston: Little, Brown, 1944), p. 162. ↩
57. tenBroek, J., Prejudice, War and the Constitution (Berkeley; University of California Press, 1954), p. 290. ↩
58. Smith, B., Americans from Japan (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1948), p. 289. ↩
59. Morison, S.E., The Rising Sun in the Pacific, 1931-April 1942, History of U.S. Naval Operations in World War II, 3 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1948), pp. 219, 220, 257. ↩
60. Sherwood, R.E., Roosevelt and Hopkins (New York: Harper, 1948), p. 535. ↩
61. Rostow, E.V., “Our Worst War-time Mistake,” Harper’s, September, 1945. See also his “The Japanese American Cases – a Disaster,” Yale Law Journal, 54 (1954), p. 1302; Corwin, E.S., Total War and the Constitution (New York: Knopf, 1947); Freeman, H.A., “Genesis, Exodus and Leviticus: Genealogy, Evacuation and Law,” Cornell Law Quarterly, 28 (1943), p. 414; Konvitz, M.R., The Alien and the Asiatic in American Law (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1946). ↩

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