Japanese Canadian Internment

On December 7th 1941, Japan launched a surprise attack against the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. On February 19th, 1942 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, under the pressure of military and intelligence, which suspected the presence of Japanese spies and saboteurs, and with the full support of the American peaple, issued Executive Order 9066, authorizing the exclusion of enemy aliens from the West Coast for national security reasons. The residents of Japanese ancestry, made up two-thirds of American citizens, were given little time to sell their homes and close all activities before being interned in relocation centers, where many of them lived until summer of 1945. Japanese-Canadians were also removed from their homes and businesses, and sent to labor camps by the government of Ottawa. In this case, the experience for the Japanese community was even more devastating because of the separation of the families and the dispossession of their property. In this article, I focus on the internment experience of the Japanese families in the United States and Canada, especially through the narratives of four women of Japanese ancestry.

Co-authored equally with Jordan Stanger-Ross, this paper appears in Human Rights Review 2018 (online first), DOI: 10.1007/s12142-018-0491-9

It can be accessed on my personal web page here:  https://www.uvic.ca/socialsciences/politicalscience/assets/docs/faculty/james/james-impermanent-apologies_final.pdf

Political apologies are commonly imagined as gestures of finality and closure: capstone moments that summate public knowledge. One manifestation of these assumptions is the position that apologies should be timed to come only after appropriate investigation into the wrongdoing has been completed. This article takes a different view, for two reasons. First, even apologies that seem based on robust knowledge can come to seem incomplete or inadequate in the light of subsequent learning and knowledge. Second, because apologies are complexly embedded in longer-term processes of activism and response, they can contribute to their own unravelling by encouraging further consideration and inquiry. We develops these arguments by considering two Canadian cases that illustrate these dynamics:  apologies that addressed, respectively, the wartime internment of Japanese Canadians and the policy of forcing Indigenous children to attend residential schools.

This article situates the reception of Joy Kogawa’s Obasan within a comparative North American context, tracing the divergence and conver- gence of US and Canadian racial discourses in the canonization of Obasan in Asian American and Canadian literary studies. Through a consideration of how the novel both affirms the oppositional politics of Asian American literary studies and the fragmented nationalism of Canadian literary studies, this article argues that the politics of reception, appropriation and recogni- tion that underwrite the text’s cross-border canonization are prefigured by the text’s own engagement with passing and recognition. While Obasan’s blurring of Japanese Canadian and First Nations experiences can be read as a critique of Canadian racialization and the presumed universalization of US racial formations, such representational strategies are not immune to the colonizing gestures that inform the text’s inclusion in Asian American and Canadian literary studies.

This is a report from "Revitalizing 'Japantown'?: a unifying exploration of Human Rights, Branding and Place in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside".  Based on over fifty interviews and oral histories with past and present Downtown Eastside residents and their families, we find compelling parallels between the experiences of the current Low Income and former Japanese Canadian communities there. The story of these communities' struggles against dispossession and uprooting are told through the four elements of the Right to Remain.

For many, toponyms, or place names, appear to provide objective descriptions of locations on the earth. But for geographers, names and naming practices are imbued with meaning, and a recent literature of critical toponymy has emerged that studies and recognizes place names as discursive agents of power and resistance that perform active roles in the ongoing production of place. However, the critical toponymy corpus had produced very little theoretically rich empirical research focusing how urban planning and policymaking processes mobilize place names, or how residents fight against such activities. This thesis fills that lacuna, first by generating a novel theoretical framework (toponymic assemblage) that describes the emergent, relational, and spatially grounded properties of place names. It then outlines a robust, extended, and mixed method case study approach that uses archival/newspaper documentation, discourse analysis, and interview data to form a historically based, theoretically driven, and structurally aware study of toponyms in relation to planning and policymaking. The thesis then presents two empirical case studies based in Vancouver, Canada’s impoverished Downtown Eastside (DTES) that are centred around the name “Japantown,” a toponym that recalls the neighbourhood’s long-time inhabitation by a community of Japanese Canadians who were forcibly uprooted from the Pacific coast during World War II. Specifically, this thesis situates contemporary neighbourhood conflicts within a historical context by constructing an interwoven analysis of toponymic assemblages in the DTES (including “Japantown”), noting how they emerged over time in relation to interventions such as planning, policymaking, the media, and activism while highlighting their fluid, malleable, and potential qualities. It then focuses on a recently enacted Local Area Planning Process (LAPP) in the DTES to illuminate how toponymic assemblages like “Japantown” were mobilized through planning to change understandings of place at the expense of current low income residents. The thesis concludes by considering the theoretical and positional limitations of the research, then suggests directions for future study and activism by highlighting how a more complete understanding of toponymic power and its limits can inform rights-based engagement among disparate groups.

Maps of World War II Japanese American and Japanese Canadian internment sites: USA, Hawaii, Arizona, Canada. Free to use with citation: "www.academia.edu/43978128/WWII_Japanese_American_and_Canadian_Internment_Sites_Maps_" or just "Courtesy of Jeff Burton"

Following Japan’s 1941 attacks on Hawai'i and Hong Kong, Canada relocated, detained, and exiled citizens and residents of Japanese ancestry. Many interracial families, however, were exempted from this racial project called the internment. The form of the exemption was an administrative permit granted to its holder on the basis of their marital or patrilineal proximity to whiteness. This article analyzes these permits relying on archival research and applying a critical race feminist lens to explore how law was constitutive of race at this moment in Canadian history. I argue that the permits recategorized interracial intimacies towards two racial ends: to differentiate the citizen from the “enemy alien”; and to regulate the interracial family according to patriarchal common law principles. This article nuances received narratives of law as an instrument of racial exclusion by documenting the way in which a new inclusive state measure sustained old exclusions.

Keywords: critical race theory, coverture, mixed race, exemption, the internment.

Archaeological and archival data from a World War II internment camp where a predominantly Japanese American population was incarcerated offers a glimpse into the United States government’s compliance with the Geneva Prisoners of War Convention of 1929. The Geneva Convention outlines the basic necessities afforded to prisoners of war and non-citizens, such as access to leisure activities; alcohol; dental and ophthalmological care; and medical facilities. The study of vision and eye-related artefacts, such as safety goggles and eye medicine, provides an opportunity to examine how prisoners’ health was managed by the United States government during World War II.

During the Second World War Howard Charles Green (Progressive Conservative MP for Vancouver-South) advocated the evacuation, as well as subsequent repatriation of Japanese Canadians and continued to support restrictionist immigration policies well after the war’s completion. In 2007 the Canadian Federal Government named a new tower at 401 Burrard St. in Vancouver for Green, only to rename it following public opposition alleging Green’s “relentless hatred” of Japanese Canadians. This article challenges this characterisation by demonstrating that Green’s peacetime antipathy to Japanese Canadians was soon eclipsed by security concerns. Although these concerns continued after Japan’s defeat, Green’s beliefs did moderate. Labelling Green a racist fails to capture this complexity and change.

With co-author Desiree Valadares, this piece is a conversation about intersecting historic dispossessions that invites readers to situate Indigenous and Asian migrant demands for justice alongside each other. It is a reflection reflect on the relationship between the colonization of Indigenous territories and the histories of mass incarceration and displacement of Japanese North Americans during, and in the aftermath of, the Second World War. We started this conversation through our overlapping time as graduate students with the Landscapes of Injustice, and decided that we would interweave two stories about distinct spaces of dispossession in the Pacific Northwest and the Hawaiian archipelago for a contribution to graduate student zine prepared by Scholarship and Activism Forum for the project's research assistants. https://scholarshipandactivism.com/

Midi Onodera is a well-recognized award-winning Toronto-based Canadian filmmaker. The numerous films that she has written and directed in her more than thirty-year career have been screened at venues such as the Andy Warhol Museum, the International Festival of Documentary and Short Films, the Rotterdam International Film Festival, the Berlin International Film Festival, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Toronto International Film Festival.

When Onodera wrote and directed the intercultural feminist experi- mental film The Displaced View (1988), it marked a shift away from the subject matter of her earlier work, which was largely focused on sexual identity. Her experimental documentary style in this film explores auto/bio- graphical subjects and filmmaking practices as a means to disrupt dominant narratives of Japanese-Canadian histories and identities. The subject of
the film is the intergenerational story of three Japanese-Canadian women represented visually by Onodera, her mother, and her grandmother. Their stories revolve around various moments of displacement resulting from immigration, wartime relocation (commonly referred to as “internment” or “evacuation”), or from being visibly “other,” woman, or queer...

Nanaimo, British Columbia, on the east coast of Canada's Vancouver Island, was one of the places where Japanese Canadians settled during the twentieth century. In 2018, I published an article in the Canadian Geographer titled, "An anti-racism methodology: The Native Sons and Daughters and racism against Asians in Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada", with the goal of using my family's involvement in organizations associated with racism against Asian Canadians to modestly contribute to developing an anti-racism methodology. More recently, I have reconnected with other relatives (small-scale fishermen) who developed close relationships with Japanese Canadian fishing families, both before and after the 1940s. This article considers one Japanese Canadian family in Nanaimo before World War II, during "internment", and after the war in Japan and then in Canada upon their return to their "homeland" in the 1950s and 1960s. I am particularly interested in everyday acts of friendship, particularly during tense periods, as it is important to not only reveal past injustices, but also to recognize and better understand cases when white people treated Japanese Canadians with respect, and also advocated for them when such actions were not fashionable. This sort of non-racist behaviour can constitute part of an anti-Asian racism methodology. This article also has implications for thinking about present-day immigration and deportation politics.

This draft paper develops further our "impermanent apologies" perspective, asking how scholarly research and public knowledge more generally can be used to both challenge and deepen the official accounts of responsibility for injustice that are proferred in political apologies.  We conceive this process of challenging official apologetic accounts not as a way of indicting bad apologies (although sometimes this is obviously necessary) but of engaging apologies to enhance their democratic potential as tools of social accountability.  To this end, we first compare the responsibility claims in Canada's 1988 Japanese-Canadian internment apology with the ideal-typical requirements of responsibility-taking in the political apology literature.  Then we deploy archival and secondary research on the internment, showing not only the relative weakness of the 1988 apology as an act of responsibility-taking but the potential utility for social accountability of establishing a dialogue between the apology's claims and what we have learned about responsibility for the injustices of the internment.  The result, we hope, is a kind of sketch of how the inevitable defeasability--the impermanency--of apologies in light of critical research can be used to help make political apologies ongoing resources of social accountability for their polities.

During the Second World War Howard Charles Green (Progressive Conservative MP for Vancouver-South) advocated the evacuation, as well as subsequent repatriation of Japanese Canadians and continued to support restrictionist immigration policies well after the war’s completion. In 2007 the Canadian Federal Government named a new tower at 401 Burrard St. in Vancouver for Green, only to rename it following public opposition alleging Green’s “relentless hatred” of Japanese Canadians. This article challenges this characterisation by demonstrating that Green’s peacetime antipathy to Japanese Canadians was soon eclipsed by security concerns. Although these concerns continued after Japan’s defeat, Green’s beliefs did moderate. Labelling Green a racist fails to capture this complexity and change.

Racialization of crime and the criminalization of race are key mechanisms through which the legal justice system and cultural representations maintain the status quo (Jiwani). This article examines the racialization of war crimes and the particular representation of landscapes in the 21-minute National Film Board documentary The Mask of Nippon (dir. Margaret Palmer, 1942) by comparing it with Profile of Nippon, a 25-minute tourist documentary produced by Tōhō Films in 1936.