File 16: Vancouver Office - Reports, Correspondence, memoranda re administration and operations of the Vancouver Office. 1941/12-1950/01.

This file contains a textual record.

This file consists of numerous reports and memoranda pertaining to the administration and operations of the Vancouver Office of the Custodian of Enemy Property from 1941 to 1950. The records from the latter half of the decade are primarily concerned with costs (storage, operations, etc.) associated with the "evacuation" of the Japanese and the Japanese properties vested in and sold by the Custodian. The earliest records date from December 1941 in the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor, and demonstrate the intense and pervasive racism towards "persons of the Japanese race." Conversations among "white people" are included in this file as are mentions and lists of suspicious (and detained) persons and companies (e.g., Shimsei Ikuta). This is one of McPherson's several statements regarding "the Japanese": "[they] must have developed a high inferiority complex and realize, even those Canadian born, that the only way the Yellow Race can obtain their place in the Sun is by winning the war, and I believe that if the worst comes and an invasion is attempted, we will find hundreds of the Japanese, regardless of the nationality helping the invader – as I would do myself in Japan.”

Canada. Office of the Custodian of Enemy Property created this archive.

The digital copies of the records were acquired by the Landscapes of Injustice Research Collective between 2014 and 2018.

This record was digitized in full.