Canada Japan

Patricia E. Roy is the winner of the 2013 Lifetime Achievement Award, Canadian Historical Association. Canada's early participation in the Asia-Pacific region was hindered by "contradictory impulses" shaping its approach. For over half a century, racist restrictions curtailed immigration from Japan, even as Canadians manoeuvred for access to the fabled wealth of the Orient. Canada's relations with Japan have changed profoundly since then. In Contradictory Impulses, leading scholars draw upon the most recent archival research to examine an important bilateral relationship that has matured in fits and starts over the past century. As they makes clear, the two countries' political, economic, and diplomatic interests are now more closely aligned than ever before and wrapped up in a web of reinforcing cultural and social ties. Contradictory Impulses is a comprehensive study of the social, political, and economic interactions between Canada and Japan from the late nineteenth century until today.

In contrast to the widely known experiences of Asian immigrants who came to Canada, this book looks at movement in the opposite direction. Using text and images, it is a collection of stories about how Canadians “found Japan,” the first place they reached when travelling westward across the Pacific. These connections began as early as 1848, when the adventurous son of a Hudson’s Bay Company trader tempted fate by smuggling himself, disguised as a shipwrecked sailor, into the closed and exotic land of the shoguns. He was followed by an intriguing cast of characters—missionaries, educators, businessmen, social activists, political figures, diplomats, soldiers and occasional misfits—who experienced a rapidly changing Japan as it underwent its remarkable transformation from a largely feudal society to a modern state. Now, when the world is becoming more Asia-centric, Finding Japan provides glimpses into an earlier era that challenged conventional perceptions about Canadian connections across the Pacific.

The Politics of Racism: The Uprooting of Japanese Canadians During the Second World War is the first book to fully document the politics behind the 1942 expulsion order that saw 20,000 Japanese Canadians evicted from their homes in British Columbia and sent inland to work camps, detention centres and farms in Alberta and Manitoba. The book details the relationship between racism and political expediency, and shows how political parties and the affairs of the nation were controlled by a small group of politicians who scapegoated minorities to hang on to power. Most alarmingly, The Politics of Racism shows how easily Canadians allowed themselves to be manipulated by a political process that used fear and war hysteria in a very cynical and calculated way. Ann Sunahara has used previously classified government documents and the wartime records of the Liberal government to reveal a startling new portrait of political connivance that shows Mackenzie King bowing to the pressures of a small number of B.C. politicians who saw the “Japanese problem” as a useful tool to enhance their status and win favours in Ottawa. Branded as traitors in the eyes of many of their countrymen, unaware that the military had opposed their uprooting, without political friends and allies except for the CCF, the Japanese Canadians were powerless – a muffled minority within a country at war. Ann Sunahara has woven together her analysis of government documents with the personal memories of victims of that shameful period. The accounts of the victims and the official records provide a poignant and powerful indictment of the politicians who used racism and fear to further their own careers and of a society whose indifference let it happen. Since the 1981 version of The Politics of Racism (POR1981) was published, it has undergone two further editions: an HTML version in 2000 (POR2000) with an additional afterward about Redress; and an e-book edition (POR2020) with an additional photo essay by the author. Both are published at japanesecanadianhistory.ca.

The papers in this volume were developed for an informal symposium held in Vancouver in April 1988. The papers range from descriptions of possible realigned world political orders to questions of international trade and domestic economic priorities; and from the "greying" of the population of the industrial world and associated social policy issues such as health care and pensions to the imperative of implementing sustainable economic development worldwide.

In 1942, the Canadian government forced more than 21,000 Japanese Canadians from their homes in British Columbia. They were told to bring only one suitcase each and officials vowed to protect the rest. Instead, Japanese Canadians were dispossessed, all their belongings either stolen or sold. The definitive statement of a major national research partnership, Landscapes of Injustice reinterprets the internment of Japanese Canadians by focusing on the deliberate and permanent destruction of home through the act of dispossession. All forms of property were taken. Families lost heirlooms and everyday possessions. They lost decades of investment and labour. They lost opportunities, neighbourhoods, and communities; they lost retirements, livelihoods, and educations. When Japanese Canadians were finally released from internment in 1949, they had no homes to return to. Asking why and how these events came to pass and charting Japanese Canadians' diverse responses, this book details the implications and legacies of injustice perpetrated under the cover of national security. In Landscapes of Injustice the diverse descendants of dispossession work together to understand what happened. They find that dispossession is not a chapter that closes or a period that neatly ends. It leaves enduring legacies of benefit and harm, shame and silence, and resilience and activism.

Acerbic, moving, and formally astonishing, Michael Prior's second collection explores the enduring impact of the Japanese internment upon his family legacy and his mixed-race identity. Canada-Japan Literary Award, Winner Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, Winner Raymond Souster Award, Shortlist Amid the record-breaking wildfires that scorched British Columbia in 2015 and 2017, the poems in this collection move seamlessly between geographical and psychological landscapes, grappling with cultural trauma and mapping out complex topographies of grief, love, and inheritance: those places in time marked by generational memory "when echo crosses echo." Burning Province is an elegy for a home aflame and for grandparents who had a complex relationship to it--but it is also a vivid appreciation of mono no aware: the beauty and impermanence of all living things. "The fireflies stutter like an apology," Prior writes; "I would be lying to you / if I didn't admit I love them."

A collection of essays, written by scholars and policymakers from the countries involved, explores the evolving alliance among Canada, Japan, and the United States. The book examines the three market-oriented democracies in their changing roles toward each other and show how they have moved beyond their separate, special, bilateral relationships into a dynamic three-way engagement.

The Dominion and the Rising Sun is the first major study of Canada's diplomatic arrival in Japan and, by extension, East Asia. It examines the political, economic, and cultural relations forged during this seminal period between the foremost power in Asia and the young dominion tentatively establishing itself in world affairs. An overview of Canada's initial foray into Pacific affairs, it begins with the opening in 1929 of the Canadian legation in Tokyo - Canada's third such office overseas - and concludes with the outbreak of hostilities in 1941. Primarily a diplomatic history, the book also explores the impact of traders, interest groups, and missionaries on Canadian attitudes toward Japan during the interwar years. More fundamentally, it examines Canada's diplomatic coming of age closely, revealing its important Pacific dimension - a fact overlooked by historians until now - as well as the disjunct between Canada's commitment to peace and its trade with an aggressor. Meehan suggests that Canada's initially benign view of Japan, its reluctance to adopt positions in advance of its Anglo-American allies, and its lucrative Pacific trade led to a credibility gap in its policies towards East Asia. The Dominion and the Rising Sun charts Canada's relationship with Japan, and is essential reading for those interested in Canadian history, international relations, and Asia-Pacific studies.