Race

The dispossession of Japanese Canadians could not have occurred without the widespread racism of 1940s Canada.

When politicians created the internment and dispossession laws, they did not seek to identify disloyal individuals or even to target Japanese nationals. Instead, the policy captured all “persons of the Japanese race.”

Officials never contemplated similar approaches to all ‘persons of the German race’ or all ‘persons of the Italian race’ who also had cultural links to enemy countries. Instead, the internment policies directed against those populations, though also unjustified, were selective. Japanese Canadians, most of them citizens, were treated in this way because of the power of racism.

As the federal government made decisions to uproot, intern, and dispossess Japanese Canadians, important policy makers expressed their racism. In February 1942, for example, Prime Minister King wrote in his diary that, “no matter how honourable they might appear to be, or how long they may have been away from Japan, naturalized, or even those who were born in [Canada] … everyone [sic] of them … would be saboteurs and would help Japan when the moment came.”

Cabinet minister Ian Mackenzie, a vocal advocate of the dispossession felt similarly. He wrote “their country should never have been Canada … I do not believe the Japanese are an assimilable race.”

The same views were expressed at lower levels of the bureaucracy. Working for the Soldier Settlement Board to appraise farms for veterans, Ivan Barnet felt that “we must maintain the Pacific Coast as a white man’s country.” The first director of the Office of the Custodian in Vancouver, Glenn McPherson, believed that all Japanese Canadians felt “the only way the Yellow Race can obtain their place in the Sun is by winning the war.”

Key officials at every level of the dispossession justified their actions on the basis of an imagined competition among races.