Canada’s exile of Japanese Canadian citizens: A shameful 80-year anniversary few remember |
In the closing weeks of 1945, months after the Second World War had ended, the Canadian cabinet enacted executive orders to banish more than 10,000 Canadians of Japanese descent to Japan, stripping many of them of Canadian citizenship in the process.
At the same moment that Canada began to turn its attention to the importance of human rights in the post-war world, it contemplated a brazen rights violation at home of enormous scale and cruelty. Canadian history has mostly forgotten about the exile of Japanese Canadians.
Our book Challenging Exile: Japanese Canadians and the Wartime Constitution delves into those dark days.
The end of a crisis often draws less attention than its onset. Dec. 7, 1941 has become, as United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt predicted, a date that lives in infamy.
Japan’s attacks on Hong Kong and Pearl Harbor plunged Canada and the Allies into war in the Pacific. In the months that followed, amid fears that the North American West Coast might become a new front in the Second World War and following decades of entrenched racism in law and policy, Canada ordered the uprooting of every Japanese Canadian from their home in coastal British Columbia.
The uprooting is largely remembered for the internment of more than 22,000 Japanese Canadians in more than a dozen sites scattered........