Empty streets and abandoned cars show the tragedy of Canada’s Japanese internment
The program continued a racist effort to rid British Columbia of its Asian population
The first Japanese settler immigrated to British Columbia in 1877. It didn’t take long before he and those who followed were confronted by systemic racism. Canadians of Asian descent weren’t given the right to vote and were excluded from major industries; caps controlled the flow of Japanese, Chinese, and Indian emigrés; and at times the right to entry was denied wholesale. White mobs attacked Vancouver’s Chinese and Japanese neighborhoods in 1907 during anti-immigration demonstrations. Through it all people kept coming, built new lives and started families.
Roughly 22,000 Japanese Canadians lived in B.C. when Pearl Harbor and Hong Kong were attacked in 1941. Local politicians seized on wartime paranoia to fulfill their desire for a whites-only province, pressuring the federal government to enact an exclusion zone within 100-miles of the Pacific coast. On February 24th, 1942, Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King signed an order initiating the internment of citizens of Japanese descent.
This collection of photographs emphasizes the impact of that order on the people caught in its grasp and the emptiness and sense of loss left in their wake. Japanese communities throughout the Vancouver metro region, fishing villages and farm towns vanished as men, women, and children were shipped to camps or sugar beet farms inland.
In January of 1943, the government unloaded the seized property of internees. Houses, farms, shops, cars, fishing boats, and personal effects were sold off for pennies on the dollar, the profits used to offset the cost of internment. Once Japanese Canadians had no homes to return to after the war members of Parliament pushed for the deportation of all Japanese regardless of status.
In December of 1945 the federal government decreed that all Japanese immigrants who were not Canadian nationals would be deported. Naturalized immigrants and those born in Canada were forced to choose between moving to a bombed out Japan or to provinces east of the Canadian Rockies.
Before the order could be overturned in 1947, some 4,000 people were deported, half of whom had come from Japan and some 1,300 of whom were children; the rest were Japanese Canadians choosing to stay with their families. The following year, laws preventing Japanese Canadians from registering to vote were lifted. In 1949 the 100-mile coastal exclusion zone ended.
