Seventy-five years ago today, planes from the Japanese navy attacked the U.S. Pacific Fleet anchored in Hawaii’s Pearl Harbor, “a date which will live in infamy,” in the words of U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt.
It was indeed a day of infamy, and was followed within hours by Japan’s attack on Hong Kong, where about 2,000 Canadian troops were stationed, 290 of whom were killed in the two-week battle that followed, with another 264 dying over the next four years because of the inhumane conditions in Japanese prison camps.
But the infamy, sadly, was not confined to the Japanese military. Within months, Japanese immigrants and citizens of Japanese descent were interned in Canada and the U.S., deprived of their property and rights and treated as enemies.
The supposed justification was that they posed a threat to security as potential enemy agents, despite the complete lack of evidence.
“From the army point of view, I cannot see that Japanese Canadians constitute the slightest menace to national security,” wrote Maj.-Gen. Kenneth Stuart, the head of the Canadian army.
The RCMP, too, saw no reason to question the loyalty of Japanese-Canadians.
Yet the pressure to intern people of Japanese descent grew, and most of that pressure came from B.C., where it was clear the motivation was long-standing racism, not national security.
The roundup of Japanese fishing boats began the day after the Pearl Harbor attack. Following the impoundment of the fishing fleet, other Japanese-Canadians began to feel the effects of the war. The Canadian Pacific Railway began firing porters and section hands. Other businesses followed suit in discharging Japanese-Canadian employees, and Japanese businesses were vandalized.
On Jan. 8, 1942, a delegation of B.C. federal and provincial politicians attended the “Conference on Japanese Problems” in Ottawa and pushed for internment and other measures. Canadian diplomat Escott Reid said the B.C. politicians spoke of the Japanese “in the way that the Nazis would have spoken about Jewish Germans. When they spoke, I felt … the physical presence of evil.”
“The politicians appealed to the prime minister against the civil servants,” said Reid. “The politicians won and Canada committed an evil act.”
And so, following a cabinet order issued on Feb. 24, 1942, the detention and removal began. About 21,000 people of Japanese heritage, most of them Canadian citizens, were uprooted, sent to detention camps in B.C.’s Interior or to work as labourers on Prairie farms. Their property and possessions were confiscated and then sold at give-away prices. It was legalized thievery.
It’s 75 years later. The Canadian and U.S. governments have apologized and paid token compensation. It has been fully acknowledged that interning innocent people of Japanese heritage and stealing their property was wrong.
The disease that afflicted British Columbians and others in 1941 has not been eradicated, though. People who are “different” are still too easily labelled as enemies, still too readily blamed for all manner of society’s woes. Those differences could be based on ethnicity, race, gender or politics.
We should not forget the atrocity that was Pearl Harbor. Neither should we forget the atrocities that happened in Canada, summed up by Hugh L. Keenleyside, Canada’s B.C.-raised assistant undersecretary of state for external affairs, who was a defender of the Japanese-Canadians.
In words that are relevant today, he called the Japanese uprooting “a cheap and needless capitulation to popular prejudice fanned by political bigotry or ambition or both.”
