Righting Canada S Wrongs Japanese Canadian Internment In The Second World War

During the Second World War, over 20,000 Japanese Canadians had their civil rights, homes, possessions, and freedom taken away. This visual-packed book tells the story.

Italians came to Canada to seek a better life. From the 1870s to the 1920s they arrived in large numbers and found work mainly in mining, railway building, forestry, construction, and farming. As time passed, many used their skills to set up successful small businesses, often in Little Italy districts in cities like Montreal, Toronto, Hamilton, and Winnipeg. Many struggled with the language and culture in Canada, but their children became part of the Canadian mix. When Canada declared war on Italy on June 10, 1940, the government used the War Measures Act to label all Italian citizens over the age of eighteen as enemy aliens. Those who had received Canadian citizenship after 1922 were also deemed enemy aliens. Immediately, the RCMP began making arrests. Men, young and old, and a few women were taken from their homes, offices, or social clubs without warning. In all, about 700 were imprisoned in internment camps, mainly in Ontario and New Brunswick. The impact of this internment was felt immediately by families who lost husbands and fathers, but the effects would live on for decades. Eventually, pressure from the Italian Canadian community led Prime Minister Brian Mulroney to issue an apology for the internment and to admit that it was wrong. Using historical photographs, paintings, documents, and first-person narratives, this book offers a full account of this little-known episode in Canadian history.

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.

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.

In 1914, Canada was a very British society with anti-Asian attitudes. Although Great Britain had declared that all people from India were officially British citizens and could live anywhere in the British Commonwealth, Canada refused to accept them. This racist policy was challenged by Gurdit Singh, a Sikh businessman, who chartered a ship, the Komagata Maru, and sailed to Vancouver with over 300 fellow Indians wishing to immigrate to Canada. They were turned back, tragically. Over the years, the Canadian government gradually changed its immigration policies, first allowing entry to wives and children of Indian immigrants and later to many more immigrants from India. The Indo-Canadian community has grown throughout Canada, especially in British Columbia. Many in the community continue to celebrate their Indian heritage which enriches Canadian culture.

#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER When the Second World War broke out, Ralph MacLean chose to escape his troubled life on the Magdalen Islands in eastern Canada and volunteer to serve his country overseas. Meanwhile, in Vancouver, Mitsue Sakamoto saw her family and her stable community torn apart after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Like many young Canadian soldiers, Ralph was captured by the Japanese army. He would spend the war in prison camps, enduring pestilence, beatings and starvation, as well as a journey by hell ship to Japan to perform slave labour, while around him his friends and countrymen perished. Back in Canada, Mitsue and her family were expelled from their home by the government and forced to spend years eking out an existence in rural Alberta, working other people's land for a dollar a day. By the end of the war, Ralph emerged broken but a survivor. Mitsue, worn down by years of back-breaking labour, had to start all over again in Medicine Hat, Alberta. A generation later, at a high school dance, Ralph's daughter and Mitsue's son fell in love. Although the war toyed with Ralph's and Mitsue's lives and threatened to erase their humanity, these two brave individuals somehow surmounted enormous transgressions and learned to forgive. Without this forgiveness, their grandson Mark Sakamoto would never have come to be.

From 1942 to 1949 some 23,000 Japanese Canadians were uprooted from their homes along the B.C. coast, dispossessed and dispersed across Canada. This passionate and compelling book - a creative blend of memoir, documentary history and critical examination - explores the Japanese Canadian redress movement of the late 20th century that resolved the violation of their citizenship rights during this mass expulsion. Governor General's Award-winner Roy Miki applies the concept of "negotiation" to the 20th century history of Japanese Canadians - a history formed out of complex mediations with a Canadian government that denied them fundamental rights. From the moment the first Japanese immigrants arrived in Canada, they had to confront, adjust to, and attempt to transform a system of laws and policies based on assumptions about race that predetermined the identities of all Japanese Canadian citizens. Miki recounts the prewar efforts of Japanese Canadians to counter racist policies and also revisits the turbulent period of their internment. He explores the complicated reactions and often bitter conflicts that emerged in a community being torn apart by the government's actions and policies. Dispelling the common assumption that Japanese Canadians simply acquiesced to their internment, Miki recounts dramatic attempts to negotiate with the federal government, which prefigured the redress efforts of the 1980s. The internal dynamics of the redress movement form the heart of Miki's book. Beginning with the acknowledgement of the settlement in the House of Commons, he unravels the history of the movement. Incorporating stories from his personal and family history, anecdotes of pivotal events, candid comments from interviews and documents only available in archival collections, Miki interweaves the strands of the movement that had to come together to create a redress language - and thus a voice - for Japanese Canadians. Book jacket.

Winner of the American Book Award Based on the author's own experiences, this award-winning novel was the first to tell the story of the evacuation, relocation, and dispersal of Canadian citizens of Japanese ancestry during the Second World War.