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Forced Removal, Dispersal, and Internment of Japanese Canadians
After Canada's declaration of war on Japan on 8 December 1941, many called for the uprooting and internment of Japanese Canadians under the Defence of Canada Regulations. Since the arrival Japanese, Chinese, and South Asian immigrants to British Columbia in the late 1800s, there had been calls for their exclusion. Vancouver MP Ian Mackenzie saw the war as an opportunity to expel Japanese Canadians from British Columbia. He wrote to a constituent that "their country should never have been Canada . . . I do not believe the Japanese are an assimilable race." British Columbia borders the Pacific Ocean, and was therefore believed to be easily susceptible to enemy attacks from Japan. Even though both the RCMP and the Department of National Defence lacked proof of any sabotage or espionage, there were fears that they supported Japan in the war. Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, for example, agreed with the view that all Japanese Canadians "would be saboteurs and would help Japan when the moment came." In total, 22,000 Japanese Canadians (14,000 of whom were born in Canada) were interned starting in 1942.

Widespread internment was authorized on March 4, 1942, with order-in-council 1665 passed under the Defence of Canada Regulations of the War Measures Act, which gave the federal government the power to intern all "persons of Japanese racial origin." A 100 mi wide strip along the Pacific coast was deemed "protected", and men of Japanese origin between the ages of 18 and 45 were removed. Thereafter, the entire Japanese Canadian population was uprooted from this designated zone. By November 1942, 22,000 people were displaced.

Sites of Forced Relocation: Hastings Park, Road Camps, Sugar beet farms, Labour Camps, Prisoner-of-War camps, Self-supporting Projects, Internment Camps


Japanese Canadians on the west coast were forcibly moved to interior British Columbia or to other provinces. Some were sent to Hastings Park in Vancouver while others were sent immediately for various destinations eastward.

Many of the Japanese nationals removed from the coast after January 14, 1942, were sent to road camps in the British Columbia interior or sugar beet projects on the Prairies, such as in Taber, Alberta. Despite the 100-mile quarantine, a few Japanese-Canadian men remained in McGillivray Falls, which was just outside the protected zone. However, they were employed at a logging operation at Devine (near D'Arcy in the Gates Valley), which was in the protected zone but without road access to the coast. Japanese-Canadians interned in Lillooet Country found employment within farms, stores, and the railway.

The Liberal government also deported able-bodied Japanese-Canadian labourers to camps near fields and orchards, such as the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia. The Japanese-Canadian labourers were used as a solution to a shortage of farm workers. This obliterated any Japanese competition in the fishing sector. During the 1940s, the Canadian government created policies to direct Chinese, Japanese, and First Nations into farming, and other sectors of the economy that "other groups were abandoning for more lucrative employment elsewhere".

The forced removal of many Japanese-Canadian men to become labourers elsewhere in Canada created confusion and panic among families, causing some men to refuse orders to ship out to labour camps. On March 23, 1942, a group of Nisei refused to be shipped out and so were sent to prisoner-of-war camps in Ontario to be detained. The Nisei Mass Evacuation Group was formed to protest family break-ups and lobbied government organizations on the topic. However, their attempts were ignored and members of the group began going underground, preferring to be interned or sent to Ontario rather than join labour groups.

By July 1942, after strikes occurred within the labour camps themselves, the federal government made a policy to keep families together in their removal to internment camps in the BC interior or sugar beet farms across the prairies.

In early March, all ethnic Japanese people were ordered out of the protected area, and a daytime-only curfew was imposed on them. Various camps in the Lillooet area and in Christina Lake were formally "self-supporting projects" (also called "relocation centres") which housed selected middle- and upper-class families and others not deemed as much of a threat to public safety.

Before being sent off to road camps, sugar beet farms, or prisoner-of-war camps, many Japanese-Canadian men and their families were processed through Hastings Park in Vancouver, BC. Many of the men were separated from their families and sent into the B.C. interior or across Canada, but most women and children stayed in the park until they were sent to internment camps in the interior or decided as a family to join the sugar beet farms in the prairies.

Camp conditions
Many Canadians were unaware of the living conditions in the internment camps. The Japanese Canadians who resided within the camp at Hastings Park were placed in stables and barnyards, where they lived without privacy in an unsanitary environment. Kimiko, a former internee, attested to the "intense cold during the winter" and her only source of heat was from a "pot-bellied stove" within the stable. General conditions were poor enough that the Red Cross transferred fundamental food shipments from civilians affected by the war to the internees.

Some internees spoke out against their conditions, often complaining to the British Columbia Security Commission directly whenever possible. In one incident, fifteen men who had been separated from their families and put to work in Slocan Valley protested by refusing to work for four days straight. Despite attempts at negotiation, the men were eventually informed that they would be sent to the Immigration Building jail in Vancouver for their refusal to work. Their mistreatment caused several of the men to begin hoping that Japan would win the war and force Canada to compensate them.

Tashme, a camp on Highway 3 just east of Hope, was notorious for the camp's harsh conditions and existed just outside the protected area. Other internment camps, including Slocan, were in the Kootenay Country in southeastern British Columbia. Leadership positions within the camps were only offered to Nisei, or Canadian-born citizens of Japanese origin, thereby excluding Issei, the original immigrants from Japan.

The internment camps in the B.C. interior were often ghost towns with little infrastructure to support the influx of people. When Japanese Canadians began arriving in the summer and fall of 1942, any accommodations given were shared between multiple families and many had to live in tents while shacks were constructed in the summer of 1942. The shacks were small and built with damp, green wood. When winter came, the wood made everything damp and the lack of insulation meant that the inside of the shacks often froze during the night.

Very little was provided for the internees – green wood to build accommodation and a stove was all that most received. Men could make some money in construction work to support their families, but women had very few opportunities. Yet, finding work was almost essential since interned Japanese Canadians had to support themselves and buy food using the small salaries they had collected or through allowances from the government for the unemployed. The relief rates were so low that many families had to use their personal savings to live in the camps.

By the spring of 1943, however, some conditions began to change as Japanese Canadians in the camp organized themselves. Removal from the coast to ghost towns had been done based on location, so many communities moved together and were placed in same camp together. This preserved local communal ties and facilitated organizing and negotiating for better conditions in the camp.

Effects of internment camps on women and children
Japanese-Canadian women and children faced a specific set of challenges that greatly affected their way of life and broke down the social and cultural norms that had developed. Whole families were taken from their homes and separated from each other. Husbands and wives were almost always separated when sent to camps and, less commonly, some mothers were separated from their children as well. Japanese-Canadian families typically had a patriarchal structure, meaning the husband was the centre of the family. Since husbands were often separated from their families, wives were left to reconfigure the structure of the family and the long-established divisions of labour that were so common in the Japanese-Canadian household.

Post-war
Oftentimes after internment, families could not be reunited. Many mothers were left with children, but no husband. Furthermore, communities were impossible to rebuild. The lack of community led to an even more intensified gap between the generations. Children had no one with whom to speak Japanese outside the home and as a result they rarely learned the language fluently. This fracturing of community also led to a lack of Japanese cultural foundation and many children lost a strong connection with their culture. Mothers had also learned to be bolder in their own way and were now taking on wage-earning jobs, which meant that they had less time to teach their children about Japanese culture and traditions. The internment camps forever changed the way of Japanese-Canadian life.

Camp locations and Relocation Sites

 * Camps and relocation centres in the Kootenay region of British Columbia
 * Bay Farm
 * Greenwood
 * Kaslo
 * Lemon Creek
 * New Denver
 * Popoff
 * Rosebery
 * Sandon
 * Slocan City
 * Camps and relocation centres elsewhere in British Columbia
 * Bridge River (South Shalalth)
 * McGillivray Falls
 * Minto City
 * East Lillooet
 * Sunshine Valley
 * Tashme
 * Camps and relocation sites elsewhere in Canada
 * Alberta and Manitoba Sugar Beet Farms
 * Chatham, Ontario
 * Petawawa, Ontario
 * Schreiber, Ontario
 * St. Thomas, Ontario
 * Toronto, Ontario
 * Hull, Quebec
 * Minto, New Brunswick
 * Amherst, Nova Scotia