Talk:Internment of Japanese Canadians

message: when did this all start?
:right after Pearl Harbour, duh.Skookum1 (talk) 16:31, 14 June 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Skookum, play nice. Wikipedia:Please do not bite the newcomers. We are actually missing a date in the article for a declaration of the "protected area." Besides, you could easily argue that it was simply the end result of a build-up of resentment against Japanese fishermen, and that Pearl Harbor was just a pretext, not the beginning.  - TheMightyQuill (talk) 21:32, 15 June 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I jut thought it was fairly obvious when, but then I was raised in towns with a high awareness of this and/or the war (Lillooet, where family friends included(d) t he Yadas, well-known in local grocerydom, and Mission, where there had been many Japanese before the war).  And in my own readings in BC history, for quite a long time and in other writings elsewhere (on the Tyee as I recall) I laid out a theory that the seizures' roots date right back to the '07 riots, when the Japanese successfully held off the Knights of Labour mob from doing anything to Japantown, whereas Chinatown got ransacked as the Chinese for the most part showed no resistance; the one thing a bully doesn't like, and will nurture a grudge for, is not getting away with their bullying; I've never done the research but donuts to dollars some of those instigating the seizures, in authority or otherwise, were connected to the events of '07...evil has a long memory.....you should try and find Dr. Miyazaki's book btw, about other Japanese neighbourhoods in Vancouver, e.g. Tokyo Mura, which was in the 2nd & Manitoba area.....Skookum1 (talk) 21:58, 15 June 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Time Line? 

message: * I added this here because of the relevancy of the discussion.  Your thoughts?
:I decided to be bold and removed this bit: "In 1999 King was ranked by historians to be the greatest of Canada's Prime Ministers. (Granatstein & Hillmer, Prime Ministers: Ranking Canada's Leaders.)" Yeah, whatever, Granatstein and Hillmer.Bobanny(eyes rolling) 14:31, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: * With all due respect, Granatstein and Hillmer are pretty good historians. King would certainly be among the greatest PMs, whatever the criteria, especially if longevity was a main criteria.Moomot 05:38, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: * Indeed, Granatstein and Hillmer aren't historians whose judgement we should should scoff at. I think you need to justify the edit with more than with just an eye roll. Boubelium 07:47, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I think mylesmalley made a good point above that justifies removing that claim from the article. Granatstein and Hillmer's claim that King was the greatest PM is a value judgement and has nothing to do with their skills as historians. Besides, scoffing at Granatstein is a proud tradition of Canadian historians, and vice versa. Personally, I find that kind of gushing reverence for any Prime Minister nauseating, especially when it's cloaked as an objective fact, but don't worry, I'll keep my personal opinions out of the article. And please, don't remove the bit about Japanese Canadian being interned during WWII just because Granatstein says it never happened. Bobanny 07:09, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

text: * You obviously are intelligent, perhaps if you were less sarcastic and more informative you would have found less issues with your edit. Having read your argument, I agree. You are correct that the greatest PM title does not belong in this article. As for your condescending comments about the Japanese internment, ironically, I spent some time expanding the racism section of this article. Regarding the Granatstein article, he does not claim that "it never happened" but instead argues the semantics of the term 'internment'. Your paraphrasing is either quite careless or malicious; you're essentially making him sound like a Holocaust Denier, which is far from the case. I do appreciate you pointing out the article though, because we (likely) both agree that Granatstein is on dubious ground. When Granatstein argues that there was a 'unanimous call for evacuation" he is exaggerating. See my racism edits on King for evidence. Then again perhaps those that didn't actually fear the Japanese could have supported the internment out fear for their safety, especially given the long history of anti-Asian violence in Vancouver. But, whatever, I don't agree with Granatstein's general perspective here. He's still a great historian even if we don't agree with him that the word 'internment' should be replaces with 'evacuation'. This reminds me, the internment article needs a lot of work. Perhaps we should be discussing this there. Regards Moomot 18:48, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

text: * I see that you did read my additions to "Racism," and you improved the writing. Thank You. Moomot 19:19, 8 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Okay, I'll try and put my smarminess aside. I stand by my opinion that Granatstein's point about Japanese internment is more than semantics, because behind those words are the meaning of the event. "Evacuation" and "internment" are two different things. Yes they were evacuated, but it was quite a different circumstance than, say, an evacuation of an area during a flood or forest fire threat. In the connotation of the word "evacuation," it's purely circumstantial, or an unfortunate event, where no one is to blame but the forces of nature or history. "Forcible displacement" would be more precise to describe the actual removal of those people from their homes. "Internment" on the other hand, is an act of war, defensive or offensive, in which people are confined under threat somewhere and dispossessed of their property and belongings. If the Japanese had resisted the internment, it probably would have looked more like what Granatstein claims the word implies. The scale of the holocaust makes that comparison unfair, but the underlying principle is the same: a nationalist glossing of the past, and that's what I'm accusing Granatstein of. He's defending a view whereby the true or authentic "Canadian" identity or experience is represented by the most privileged people in society, the "great men" of history like King. Hence the unanimous call for evacuation. Japanese-Canadians were not calling for evacuation, nor were the RCMP operatives who reported that no national security threat existed from west coast Japanese. Local white entrepreneurs who scored some great deals on Japanese property and were able to take over that portion of the coastal fishing industry as a result were the voice of Canada in the national pride version. It's also worth pointing out that some Italians, who actually did have fascist sympathies and affiliations, were interned as well, but only for a short while and then in relatively swanky conditions in Ontario. The things I feel are most worthy of Canadian pride are where past mistakes are not forgotten or minimized, but are openly acknowledged and measures are taken to ensure they aren't repeated. This discussion is also relevant to the current issue of redress for the Chinese head tax, which has brought out some of that old racist sentiment here in Vancouver. But, the average Chinese or Japanese on the west coast are as prosperous, if not more, than whites, and that's a change to be proud of. I don't believe, as Granatstein does, that highlighting past injustices constitutes a chronicle of shame, as if it somehow cancels out the positive things in the past, just like King's racism doesn't cancel out his accomplishments. Similarly, again, I'm not questioning Granatstein's abilities as a historian or his notable contributions to Canadian historiography because of my opinion of him on this, just as, hopefully, your opinion that I'm condescending doesn't cancel out the one that says I'm intelligent (you could probably add "wordy" to that list :) Bobanny 20:21, 8 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  F.Y.I - a discussion on King 

message: Did the Canadian government ever apologize?
Nope. The government offered the money, but no official apology.
-CLOWND
Incorrect, the government made a public apopolgy the same day that the Japanese people were offered compensation for their losses.  The government payed all citizens of Japanese culture who had been affected.  A rather large sum considering the property values.  Although that doesn't justify the internment it shows very clearly that the government was sorry.  The government was not all at fault, the government was pressured by people who were racially discriminating the Japanese.
I don't side only with the government because what happened was wrong and unfair.  I don't believe that giving a man $140.50 for his house is correct, but the government compensated the individuals for their extreme loss.
-Kay Lee
$21,000 is not a rather large sum. As well, grants from the human rights fund is for arts only. - Stephen Kawamoto
I agree with this, my grandparents were put away into prison camps, and when they were released, (even though they had not done ANYTHING) their land had been auctioned off by the government at cheap prices, and were not allowed to have it back! (PS- now that land is worth MILLIONS)
They had to work for cheaper salaries, they had nowhere to live, and they had done nothing to deserve that!
The Canadian government should have bought back the land and given them the apology. 
-Isabel Cathleen  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Isabelcathleen (talk • contribs) 02:34, 25 November 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Apology?

message: This article needs to be expanded and converted to proper style.
It should include information about the massive confiscation of Japanse boats and property, as well as internment of people into camps.
More pictures are available here.
-- TheMightyQuill 18:43, 18 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Cleanup 

message: List_of_concentration_and_internment_camps#Japanese Canadian internment_and relocation centres
I just added a section on this page, which previously had only had information on the Ukrainian Canadian internments in WWI.  I didn't want to copy the intro overleaf so "winged it" and wrote a new one; edits welcome, as well as formatting of listed camps/centres and expansion of info on those in other provinces, which I'm not familiar with.  Somewhere I've seen a map by one of the Japanese Canadian associations which I'll link once I find it again.Skookum1 00:53, 20 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  New item on [[List of concentration and internment camps]] 

message: :Unlike Japanese American internment, where families were generally kept together, Canada initially sent its male evacuees to road camps in the British Columbian interior, to sugar beet projects on the Prairies, or to internment in a POW camp in Ontario, while women and children were moved to six inland British Columbia towns [citation needed]. There, the living conditions were so poor that the citizens of wartime Japan even sent supplemental food shipments through the Red Cross.[citation needed] During the period of detention, the Canadian government spent one-third the per capita amount expended by the U.S. on Japanese American evacuees.[citation needed]
*The last of those sentences I can deal with, so long as a formal statistic is provided to back up the claim.  
*The sentence before it, about the Red Cross relaying food to the relocatees, I can also deal with, but aspects of the scale of such relief should be included, and also the reasons why; it is a given, for instance, that Japanese foodstuffs, particularly staples, could not be imported via regular means during the war, and such packages from the Japanese Empire's side vaulable propaganda were not just "a touch of home" for the internees, but also efforts to sway them in their exile; but also because no doubt some Japanese elders, like First Nations, elders, cannot live without their traditional foods because of lifelong adaption to a certain menu; it's not as if the Canadian government or the camp's neighbours were deliberately starving the internees, as happened in Japanese concentration camps as well as, more recently, in Bosnia; in other words this sentence is overblown in its scope and implications; and rings of brow-beating as if it were yet another instance of white injustices against non-whites; I wonder how many Red Cross packages were delivered to foreign POWs and other internees in the Japanese Empire in the same period, for instance?  No doubt the packages included imperial propaganda as well as wasabi paste, and may have been viewed as skeptically by their recipients as the broadcasts of Tokyo Rose (which, granted, weren't available in the camps as if I recall radios were forbidden...not that there was anything but CBC, if that, in the valleys in the Kootenays they were interned in; at the relocation centres in the Lillooet Country radios were useless - in the '50s and until the mid-'60s you could only get fuzzy microwave and AM late at night because of the depth of the valleys, and I don't think there was a transmitter in the local metropolis of Lillooet until after the war; the only relocation centre that was a tarpaper camp was in East Lillooet, near today's airport, although coming and going to town for shopping and work outside the camp were permitted until after the war...Skookum1 04:49, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Given that these citation requests were placed on 6 September (first sentence) and 18 May (second and third sentences), it would appear no references are forthcoming. As their accuracy is either in question or disproven, I recommend the sentences be deleted. Victoriagirl 05:20, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The reason I was waiting to see if someone might provide them is because there are echoes of academic literature and some of the popular-historical literature (Suzuki and others) in some of what was said; so I was curious to see if any papers or particular books might be the sources of this material; which as noted in my exegesis on them are more interpretations of facts, if there are facts, than the facts themselves; and only certain facts, y'see, which is my overall problem with current historiography (academic and popular-press/journalistic history).  Anyway, I wouldn't be surprised if the cheap-o Canadian regime spent less per capita; or you could see that as efficiency (in the case of US spending I'd guesstimate there was your typical military/civil graft going on, the equivalent of the $200 toilet seat; here it was more targeted confiscations based on old commercial rivalries and personal hostilities; a much more "small town" kind of operation, vs the huge numbers and logistics in the US, and of course the more heightened state of war-consciousness down there (as usual).Skookum1 05:40, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

text: The problem with the blame-game with Japanese Canadian internment is that blame is directed entirely too much against the government. If I recall correctly, the government first resisted then finally caved to public pressure. The head of the Canadian military was totally opposed to widespread internment, as he saw it was totally unnecessary. The Japanese in Hawaii, for instance, we not rounded up in the same way they were in BC. Confiscations of Japanese businesses, fishing boats, and homes were instituted as part of the legislation, but laws encouraging confiscations of businesses and fishing boats were already on the books (or had been struck down) in BC, not due to war hysteria, but pre-existing racist hysteria. -- TheMightyQuill 05:32, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: It's not just the blame game, MQuill; it's the over-generalization of "all men were sent to the Prairies and women were sent to the six towns in the Kootenays so as to break up families" gist of the opening sentence; the implied cruelty of starvation and the need for the Red Cross to supply them with food (that's an outrageous claim, but the kind of thing that's all too common in revanchist personal histories like Suzuki's); likewise the bitch about Canada spending less on its camps (one good reason is they didn't have to build camps per se, as we had lots of empty towns - Sandon, Kaslo, New Denver, Rosebery, Minto, McGillivary Falls, Bridge River - with complete houses).  As with the history of Chinese Canadians there's a lot of one-sided and quite pejorative generalizations being made that constitute a combination of white-bashing and white-guilt pandering; there's also a certain myopia as mentioned in NAJC publications, which focus on David Suzuki's and Joy Kogawa's childhood perceptions vs. the experience of Dr. Miyazaki and the very different experiences of the relocation centres around Lillooet vs the intermment camps in the Kootenays (a similar bias-of-omission operates in Chinese Canadian history re successes in the goldfields and ranching which are obscured so as to focus on railway labour issues).Skookum1 20:00, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

text: Not in the same number; BC has 1500 ghost towns, at the opening of WWII hundreds were still standing; despite the archetypal image of ghost towns in the US West, there were not as many, and in many cases they failed for lack of water, etc. - it's just certain ones became very famous (Deadwood, Virginia City etc).  But I think the difference in spending - if it can be cited - has more to do with a combination of American military-budget squandering and graft vs. Canadian "thriftiness"; ditto that there's another side to the Red Cross packages from Japan, which here are presented, alongside the rest of this paragraph, to show the meanness of the Canadian internment/relocation, but there are clearly other issues at play (special dietary needs, the role of the Red Cross in general); it's not as if Imperial Japan were feeding BC's internees/relocatees because BC wouldn't, which is what it's made to sound like.  Same with the splitting up of the families; I don't know the history of the Kootenay camps in detail, but in the case of the Lillooet relocation centres this is absolute nonsense; but again it's presented as if Canadians were so much worse than Americans.  THAT's the white-bashing or white-guilt-pandering I'm talking about, and why I think this article is POV; the connection to the Chinese Canadian stuff is the similar biases and implicit white-bashing on History of Chinese immigration to Canada and on the various Chinatown and American/Canadian Chinese cuisine pages and others ("Patterns of Chinatowns in North America" is yet another article of the ethno-tub-thumping variety).  Someone somewhere said, I think on the talk page of the immigration article, that I should provide cites; but everything I bring up is already in books cited, it's just ignored by the latter-day politically-correct blinkers-on mentality; and as far as current academic papers go, if you try and get a history or other degree WITHOUT agreeing with the prevailing ideology/version of history, you WON'T get a degree, or get published.Skookum1 21:07, 12 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: BTW since it's out of print and was only ever gestetner-published anyway, I'm going to typetransfer Dr. Miyazaki's book (booklet really) to a sandbox page for ref purposes; I'll be checking with the Lillooet Historical Society as to its copyright as, since it's out of print and maybe copyright-expired, I might just put it up as a webpage on my own site (www.cayoosh.net).  Always wanted to find someone to translate it to Japanese, partly because of the Japanese bus tours that roll through there regularly....Skookum1 20:05, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

text: My Sixty Years in Canada - see Masajiro Miyazaki.Skookum1 21:07, 12 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Issues, issues, issues....somebody has issues

message: In Canada, as both an actual US Territory and a legal British Dominion, Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King declared war to nazi Germany just a day after Great Britain and carried out immediately in Canada the FDR Executive Order 9066 on Japanese Relocation, but under the name of the British “War Measures Act” to please to both the FDR Administration and to the British Columbia trend for ethnic cleansing against the prosperous Asian settlement on the West Coast. The British “War Measures Act” has been carried out by the British troops for the first time in 1755 with the Acadian deportees. The last time has been in 1970 against French Canadians for fear of armed upraise in Quebec. Evacuation from the West Coast of Japanese Canadians and their relocation inland as far as Montreal followed the same path as the one in the USA. The militaries built barrack compounds and a cheaper way was to repopulate Canadian ghost towns with a newer population of internees. As the war drew to a close, the US relocation centers were slowly evacuated in 1945. But, in Canada, internment went as long as 1949, 4 years after le unconditional surrender of Japan on August 1945. In 1949, some hundreds of Japanese Canadian juveniles, born in Canada (the “Nisei” and "Sansei" or second and third generation of Japanese immigrants), have been deported. Fortunately for Canada, the young boy becoming Dr. David Suzuki was not among them. In 1988, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, after the US Public Law 100-383 passed by the US Congress during the Reagan-Bush years, acknowledged in Canada the injustice of the internment of Canadian citizens deprived of their civil rights, apologized for it, and provided a cash payment to each person who was interned and has lost wealth and property confiscated and sold by the government or to descent.
 The above paragraph sounds more like a rant than anything else... Denis (talk) 18:07, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Overview 

message: "The internment began in December 1941, following the attack by the Japanese air force on the American base at Pearl Harbour, Hawaii and was justified on grounds of national security."
In this sentence, the word "justified" would mean one of two things:
# those demanding/organizing the interment believed and/or claimed it was necessary for national security (but may have been incorrect)
# they did so, and they were correct in that assumption
This should be clarified. 
Similarly, the sentence in the "Internment/Isolation Camps" section:
"Prime Minister Mackenzie King decided to intern Japanese Canadian citizens based on speculative evidence, because both the RCMP and defense department lacked proof of any sabotage or espionage."
"Lacked proof" suggests that that they believed it, but could not prove it. My understanding is that both the RCMP and Defense Department specifically denounced the accusations as unfounded.
- TheMightyQuill (talk) 20:09, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  "justified" is ambigious 

message: Added several citation requests, many of the claims made seem to be accurate, but absolutely need to be sourced and cited or they come across as EXTREMELY POV.  I'm not saying they aren't true, or accurate, but the citations are absolutely necessary for such claims to avoid POV accusations.
How did the BC government know which households were Japanese owned?  My first guess is the census data but if someone can clarify, thanks.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 207.54.97.130 (talk) 22:42, 21 January 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Added citation requests 

message: Flagged section for cleanup. 
This entire section feels like a high-school essay that was copied and pasted...some information is repeated elsewhere in the article, none of the section is linked, the grammar is rather poor, and the writing style is not up to par. Also, I don't think it in any way qualifies as actual "historiography..." I suspect the author thought it sounded like a cool word. Please, someone who actually knows the topic...take a look and see if any of this should even stay up.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 184.175.22.237 (talk) 13:21, 1 December 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Historiography" 

message: “Prior to the dropping of the bomb, Prime Minister King was not considered a racist.” (Under Mackenzie King's attitudes) Can we clarify which bomb? Maybe one with a link? --Lord Don-Jam (talk) 16:37, 3 May 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Which Bomb? 

message: Re this it's not just the Japanese immigrants who were resented; Yugoslavs and Italians who came over as refugees during the War had taken up work also, and their numbers were similar and maybe greater.Skookum1 (talk) 03:55, 16 March 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  re new expansion 

message: Whoever wrote this doesn't know the difference between a legislature (law-making body, such as parliament) and legislation (laws). I've corrected this twice.213.127.210.95 (talk) 15:25, 9 August 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Legislature/legislation 

message: As an addition to the statement that the apology to Japanese Canadians created a reform in society, I have mentioned the use of the public school system as an outlet to encourage community involvement and acceptance of the past. Through this system wronged individuals were able to share their stories and create a more connected and supportive community.Sarah.Monk (talk) 05:11, 23 January 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Public School Addition 

message: Reviewing the Japanese Canadian internment page, there is a large section on pre-war history that is not directly relevant to internment, though sets important context. Could there be enough info to create a separate page on Japanese Canadian history to house this material and provide room for expansion?
Penandparchment (talk) 21:15, 24 January 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Creating Japanese Canadian history page? 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: I polished up the article, feel free to take a look and leave suggestions on further improvements. Rgo94 (talk) 17:07, 28 May 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Copy-edited the article