Preface
I had two aims when I began to write this book. First, having been the victim since childhood of a particularly virulent strain of racism, I wished to reveal the demon in all its scaly ugliness and perhaps exorcise it. Secondly, I wished to set down the nearly century-old story of the Japanese in Canada in the general context of the age, particularly against the background of the rattling of sabres in the Far East and the stresses generated by an immigrant group entering an unstable, volatile society which was then emerging from its pioneer stage. My two aims converged and the resultant work is an attempt to indicate, with as much documentation as possible, what it was like to have immigrated to Canada or to have been born in this country as a member of an unpopular minority group.
There is something about the wartime evacuation and detention of nearly 21,000 people, three-quarters of whom were Canadian citizens, that had always disturbed me. It is something more complicated than a reaction to the suspect morality of the acts of a nation supposedly fighting to uphold democratic ideals but rounding up children, middle-aged men and women from their homes on the West coast of Canada, incarcerating them in detention and labour camps, confiscating and selling their property and then threatening to “deport” them unless they dispersed themselves across Canada. Those acts were rationalized on the need to maintain Canada’s “national security” following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. But that excuse became rather threadbare when restrictive measures were maintained for almost four years after the end of World War II, denying the right of Japanese Canadians to live and work where they chose.
More recently, many Canadians were appalled by the federal government’s use of emergency powers embedded in the War Measures Act to quell an “apprehended insurrection” in Quebec. But unlike that episode, the ramifications of which have been thoroughly discussed, the story of the use of the War Measures Act to expel, incarcerate and deport Japanese Canadians lay buried beneath the weight of wartime events. Few people outside British Columbia took notice or, if they did, casually justified such actions by accepting the premise that Japanese Canadians were poised on a campaign of sabotage. And today, it is almost as if a conspiracy of silence has hidden the facts from Canadians. For the most part, the episode has been ignored in major Canadian historical texts, buried among a few random sentences or paragraphs or relegated to dissertations and articles by social scientists.
Obviously, it is the central fact of the evacuation which makes the story of this tiny minority carry much wider resonance than do those of most other minorities in Canada. The evacuation was a major event in the history of Canadian democracy, without precedent in the past and with disturbing implications for the future. I have therefore considered it of first importance to set forth the historical record and to trace the manner in which the evacuation policy came to be formulated. And since none of the wartime acts is explainable without reference to the decades of prejudice and suspicion which had evolved ever since the first Japanese immigrant landed on the Pacific coast, I have attempted to trace that background.
Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that a similar cataclysm will not happen again, for Canadian law still provides for its repetition, and a loaded weapon is ready for the hand of an authority that can bring forth a plausible claim of an urgent need. What happened to the Japanese Canadians is an enduring monument to the fragility of democratic ideals in times of crisis in which, given the right circumstances, people so easily lose their perspectives on civil liberties.
I know that what follows is far from the whole picture. Indeed, I am conscious upon finishing the book that it could be rewritten from an entirely different point of view; and then a third time, still without repeating. My object, however, was never to write a general history of the Japanese in Canada, detailing their aspirations and chronicling their achievements, although I hope I have shown what they have accomplished in the face of almost insuperable odds. Then, too, no one can write about the history of his own times – or perhaps of any time – without bringing to the task the preconceptions which spring out of his own experience. This present study is no more exempt from this limitation than other accounts of the recent past.
I wish to acknowledge my debt to the Canada Council for providing a research grant and the staff of institutions and libraries whose facilities at various times I have used, particularly the Library of Canada House in London, England, the Provincial Archives in Victoria, the University of British Columbia Library and the City Archives of Vancouver. I wish to express special thanks to the staff of the Reading Room of the British Museum, not only for their efficiency, but also for providing that great boon, an undisturbed and stimulating place in which to write.
I should also like to thank those people – too numerous to mention individually – whose keen interest was an inspiration, especially those who agreed to interviews and insisted on providing hospitality during a tour across Canada and others who supplied me with photographs and unpublished documents. None of these individuals, of course, is responsible for any statement of fact or opinion in this book; these are my responsibility as are, to the best of my knowledge, the conclusions reached and the propositions advanced. Emphasis should be given to this conventional prefatory confession, for many readers may not agree with those conclusions and propositions. John Roberts was a skillful editor, and for that I am also grateful. Finally, I must thank my wife, Mary, for her painstaking help in difficult areas of research and for her abiding patience and encouragement, without which this book would not have been written.
Ken Adachi
Toronto, 1976