Japanese-Canadian Internment Camps

The core of the Japanese experience in Canada lies in the shameful and almost undemocratic suspension of human rights that the Canadian government committed during World War II. As a result, thousands of Japanese were uprooted to be imprisoned in internment camps miles away from their homes. While only a small percentage of the Japanese living in Canada were actually nationals of Japan, those who were Canadian born were, without any concrete evidence, continuously being associated with a country that was nothing but foreign to them. Branded as “enemy aliens”, the Japanese Canadians soon came to the realization that their beloved nation harboured so much hate and anti-Asian sentiments that Canada was becoming just as foreign to them as

After the attack on the Pearl Harbor in 1941, a surprise military strike by the Japanese Navy air service, United States was thrilled and it provoked World War II. Two months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, U.S. President FDR ordered all Japanese-Americans regardless of their loyalty or citizenship, to evacuate the West Coast. This resulted over 127,000 people of Japanese descent relocate across the country in the Japanese Internment camps. Many of them were American Citizens but their crime was being of Japanese ancestry. They were forced to evacuate their homes and leave their jobs and in some cases family members were separated and put into different internment camps. There were ten internment camps were placed in “California, Idaho, Utah, Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado, and Arkansas”(History.com). However, until the camps were fully build, the Japanese people were held in temporary centers. In addition, almost two-thirds of the interns were Japanese Americans born in the United States and It made no difference that many of them had never even been to Japan. Also, Japanese-American veterans of World War I were forced to leave their homes and relocate in the internment camps. Japanese families in internment camps dined together, children were expected to attend school, and adults had the option of working for earning $5 per day. The United States government hoped that the internment camps could make it self-sufficient by farming to produce food.

In many times throughout history groups of people have been discriminated against based on race or religion. These people receive inferior rights because of the discrimination. In some cases they do not get citizenship, in others they are segregated from others, and physically harmed. Two groups of people that faced discrimination near World War II (WWII) were the Jewish people and Japanese Americans. Both groups faced very different types of discrimination by different oppressors with different motives yet their treatment was very similar and many events paralleled each other. The treatment of Japanese in WWII internment camps was as harsh as the Holocaust's treatment of the Jewish people.

When Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942,1 thousands of Japanese-American families were relocated to internment camps in an attempt to suppress supposed espionage and sabotage attempts on the part of the Japanese government. Not only was this relocation based on false premises and shaky evidence, but it also violated the rights of Japanese-Americans through processes of institutional racism that were imposed following the events of Pearl Harbor. Targeting mostly Issei and Nisei citizens, first and second generation Japanese-Americans respectively,2 the policy of internment disrupted the lives of families, resulting in a loss of personal property, emotional distress,

On December 7th, 1941 Japan bombed Pearl Harbour, "a date which will live in infamy"(http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5166/), sending America into a widespread panic, and anger. This day is what caused us to do something that no one would of thought we would ever do. We created internment camps here in America after signing executive order 9066, which authorized the relocation of all Japanese here in the US to those dreaded internment camps. The conditions were bad but not as bad as they were in Germany where millions of Jews died. After the war the remaining internees were freed to go rebuild their lives, during their captivity they were many legal cases against the Japanese internment, but fear overcame what was right.

The Japanese living in Canada during World War II (WWII) faced one of the harshest and inhumane living conditions in Canadian history. One unidentified woman remembers, “it was terrible, unbelievable. They kept us in the stalls where they put the cattle and horses.” Before WWII, the Japanese were targeted for their culture. An example is the Anti-Asiatic League that was created to limit the number of Japanese men that could immigrate to Canada. Canadians did not want the potential competitors in farming and fishing. 22,000 Japanese Canadians were interned during WWII, even though 14,000 had been Canadian born citizens. This was because the Japanese had bombed Canada’s ally, the United States. With this in mind, the Canadians viewed the

Our president during World War II was Franklin D. Roosevelt. On February 19, 1942, he “authorized the internment of ten of thousands of American citizens of Japanese ancestry and resident aliens from Japan.”1 The attack on Pearl Harbor incited the fear against Japanese Americans, because the United States believed that Japanese Americans would turn their backs on the U.S. and be a threat to the security. This authorization was called the Presidential Executive Order 9066. Even though there was no evidence that they imposed threat, the military’s command was to take over and invade Japanese homes. The Japanese were ordered to live in internment camps in the West Coast. These camps were in horrible conditions and fenced with barbed wire. In the camps, the Japanese-American civilians created their own small city with their own doctors, food, and teachers.

Was the Japanese American internment right to create? In some people’s opinion they agreed that the internment camps were justified. “On February 14, 1942, I recommended to the War Department that the military security of the Pacific Coast required the establishment of broad civil control, anti-sabotage and counter-espionage measures, including the evacuation, there from of all persons of Japanese ancestry” (Dewitt 1). Some people may have thought it was the wrong choice, but at the time the president did what had to be done. These camps in a way helped the U.S. The internment for Japanese Americans,during World War 2, is either justified or unjustified.They may have taken the Japanese American’s Farms, businesses and homes, but they did for the reasons of segregating them from their ancestry. To keep the U.S. safe. Also to show that being a citizen of America was hard. If the internment camps were justified then, they were made to keep the U.S. safe, segregate Japanese Americans from Japanese ancestry, and being an American citizen was hard work.

BC politicians were furious and proceeded to speak of the Japanese like Nazi Germany would talk about Jewish Germans, Escott Reid, a Canadian Diplomat said, “when they spoke I felt… the physical presence of evil” (James H. Marsh Japanese Internment: Banished beyond tears)

The Canadians had no right in putting Japanese Canadians into internment camps. The first reason is that most of the Japanese Canadians were born in Canada and had little to no connection to Japan. This meant that they were not able to spy for the Japanese whom were an enemy with Canada at the time. It also meant that the Japanese Canadians were unable to help Japan strategize an attack against Canada due to the fact that they were unaware of what Japan had been up to. Another reason is that, the Japanese Canadians were fighting against their own ethnicity to serve Canada. They risked their lives fighting a war against Japan because they believed that they were Canadian. Finally, the Japanese had no suspicious activity going on indicating that

The purpose of the internment camps in BC during World War II, was to detain Japanese Canadian citizens who were believed to be working with and aiding Japan’s military in their war against Canada. While the Canadian government was unable to conclude the innocence of the Japanese citizens, the lack of evidence supporting their involvement with Japan’s military make their acts unjustified. While giving his perspective on Japanese Canadians in British Columbia, Major General Ken Stuart stated that he could not “see that Japanese Canadians constitute the slightest menace to national security” (Marsh). The statement made by the General demonstrates how the government disregarded the truth of the matter, by interning innocent Japanese Canadians because of pressure from fearful British Columbians. The response shown by the government proves how they failed to see that the majority of the Japanese Canadians living in BC had no relations with Japan or its government and military. After Japanese Canadians citizens were once again given full freedom, it was discovered through several surveys that 75% of the 22,000 people interned were Canadian-born citizens, who had never previously been to Japan (Wright et al. 144). The surveys helped emphasize how the government’s actions were unjust because the majority of the

The Japanese-Americans were kicked out of their homes and were forced to live in internment camps.

With the start of the war, the government put some time restrictions on Japanese people for being in public, Japanese fishermen were ban from Canadian waters. The government also introduced the War Measure Act in order to remove all people of Japanese origin from coast of British Columbia into internment camps in the interior parts of B.C. (Porter & Uyeyama, 1984). Those who showed even a mild resistance to this policy were sent to Prisoners of War Camps in Petawawa and Anglerin in Ontario (Sugiman, 2004, p. 54). In the internment camps people were forced to live in shacks that were hastily prepared (Sugiman, 2004, p. 54), faced daily hardships (Sugiman, 2004, p. 63), and some Japanese women were subjected to sexual harassment by RCMP guards (Sugiman, 2004, p.64). In addition, while Japanese Canadians were at the internment camps, the federal government sold all their properties such as homes and fishing boats, for less than half of their price (Porter & Uyeyama, 1984). Thus, even though many of these people were neutralized Canadians and Canadian born, the federal government failed to recognize their loyalty to Canada as Canadians, simply because of the way they looked, and treated them as enemy aliens and betrayed them during the

During the beginning of WWII, there were a lot of Japanese Canadians living in Canada, all of which were either second-generation Canadians, Japanese people who had taken Canadian citizenship or those who were still Japanese nationals. These Japanese Canadians mainly inhabited British Columbia and smaller villages in the coastal regions of the west coast. Prior to their internment, Japanese Canadians suffered great prejudice, discrimination and racism. White people were fearful that they would lose their dominance due to competition in industries such as fishing, farming, markets and even in education. The Canadian Government created laws stating that Japanese Canadians were not allowed to vote, they also had fishing and farming permits denied, which were supposed to motivate them to move back to Japan. On top of that, White people also feared that Japan would attempt to expand into Canada and take it’s natural resources due to Japan’s expansionist policies that existed at the time. On December 7th, 1941, Japanese Air Forces attacked the US forces at Pearl Harbor, pulling the US into the second world war. On the same day, 50,000 Japanese troops attacked Hong Kong, which was a British Colony at the time. After events the events at Pearl Harbour, anyone living in Canada of Japanese immigration or descent would be considered an “enemy alien”. Around this time, Japan also launched attacks on the Philippines and Malaya, the victories in these

The government had interfered with their legal rights and did not give them equal protection under the law. Simply, the decision of putting the Japanese Canadians into these camps where they were racially discriminated, which negatively impacted on the Japanese Canadians. The Japanese Canadians cannot simply change the color of their skin or who they are due to something others are responsible for, and not the responsibility of them individually. The discrimination that Japanese Canadians faced psychologically damaged the brains and had isolated them from the rest of the world because they were categorized as inadequate individuals. Japanese Canadians were being stereotyped as “enemy aliens” even though they had not done anything which would harm anyone. According to (Marsh, 2012), during 1943, Alberta needed workers, but refused to hire the Japanese, some of the Alberta farmers that did hire Japanese workers crowded them into small shacks, and cheated them of their wages. This negatively impacted the money of the Japanese Canadians earned for survival, and it also interfered with their well-being and health. According to the National Museum of American History in 1943 every resident in the internment camps were required to complete one of two questionnaires misleadingly entitled “Application for Leave Clearance” to distinguish whether they were “loyal” or “disloyal”. After Pearl Harbour all of the citizens of Japanese ancestry had been classified 4-C “enemy aliens”. This