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Social Psychological Characteristics of Evacuated Japanese

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2014

Forrest E. La Violette*
Affiliation:
McGill University
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Extract

There is current in Canada very little accurate information about the evacuation of Japanese from the defence area of the Pacific coast between February and October, 1942. Widely in use across the Dominion, but in the process of change, are the pre-war stereotypes of Japanese character which are still basic to some proposed solutions for the settlement of the so-called Japanese problem. This paper deals with aspects of the problem on which there is no recorded information, namely the reaction of the Japanese people to the handling of the Japanese problem since December 7, 1941.

In the process of working out a status for people of Japanese ancestry in British Columbia, the main historical effort of the Caucasians has been to limit as much as possible their acceptance in British Columbian society. These desires for total rejection have been supported by three major stereotyped rationalizations: the Japanese maintain a low standard of living, the Japanese are penetrating peacefully into this country, and the Japanese are unassimilable. We did not know before the Pearl Harbor attack just how widely these stereotypes were distributed, nor did we know their potency. But as a result of years of agitation and manipulation by politicians together with the breakdown of international security, vague fears, although not always verbalized, came to be widely held. Thus the war crisis made the historically developed stereotypes suddenly effective among many more people than they were before Pearl Harbor. As a result, attitudes based upon traditional conceptions of rights of citizenship and civil liberties were more than neutralized: they were completely ineffective in the presence of individual and organized demands for stringent action, justified by these rationalizations, especially by the one regarding peaceful penetration.

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Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association 1945

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References

1 A grant from the Canadian Institute of International Affairs has made passible research in this aspect of Canadian war problems.

Some details of evacuation and the subsequent programme of relocation are given in two reports of the Department of Labour, Removal of Japanese from Protected Areas, March 4 to October 31 (Ottawa, 1942)Google Scholar; Report on the Administration of Japanese Affairs in Canada, 1942-1944 (Ottawa, 1944).Google Scholar

There has been little periodical literature on this problem since the beginning of the war, and what there is tends to be anti-Japanese. The pamphlets of the C.C.F. and religious organizations are much more objective and are aimed towards facilitating he assimilation of the Japanese into Canadian society.

2 The major works dealing with those developments are: Young, C. H., Reid, H. R. Y., and Carrothers, W. A., The Japanese Canadians (Toronto, 1938)Google Scholar; Woodsworth, C. J., Canada mid the Orient (Toronto, 1942)Google Scholar; Lower, A. R. M., Canada and the Far East—1940 (New York, 1940).Google Scholar

3 In 1875 British Columbia passed legislation which struck Chinese names from the voters' list. In 1895 this legislation was made applicable to the Japanese. For eleven years about two hundred Japanese veterans of the First World War agitated for the franchise and were successful in 1931. In 1936 a delegation of young Canadian-born Japanese appeared at committee hearings in Ottawa, asking for federal interference in a provincial right, even though a test case had been taken to the Privy Council in London. The decision of the Privy Council supported provincial legislation. As soon as it seemed likely that in this war Orientals would serve in the military forces, the Legislative Assembly stated that the new veterans would not be enfranchised. For details of the significance of this legal position in the province, see Woodsworth, , Canada and the Orient, pp. 137–42.Google Scholar

4 It is reported that Buddhist priests arriving after 1937 brought with them strong attitudes of nationalism and Japanese racialism. Japanese war propaganda was from that year distributed widely in all communities. How this confusion compares with that in the American-Japanese communities, we do not know. In all likelihood it was somewhat similar but perhaps nat yet so intense. See LaViolette, F. E., “The American-born Japanese and the World Crisis” (Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, vol. VII, 11, 1941).Google Scholar

5 In 1934 Japan scrapped the naval parity ratios of 5:5:3 which had been established in 1922; in 1932 she had walked out of the League of Nations and by 1938 had signed a Cultural Agreement with Germany; in the latter part of that year she announced a three-year plan for industrial expansion. In 1936 Japan bad signed the Anti-Comintern Pact, while Manchukuo signed it in 1938. Owing to the treaty with Russia, this Pact could not remain in effect, so Rome, Berlin, and Tokyo signed the Tripartite Axis Pact on September 27, 1940.

6 The Japanese are extremely hostile about the “fishboat deal.” The boats were disposed of by a committee on which there were Japanese representatives, and evidence indicates that prices were equitable. The federal government provided a special fund to pay for repairs necessitated by rough handling by the Navy. At least in the summer of 1944 fishermen who had had to spend money to return home after taking their boats to the mouth of the Fraser River for impounding had not yet received reimbursement for those expenses, according to their claims. In spite of what appears to have been “fair” treatment under such circumstances, the Japanese are still extremely hostile. First, they were all citizens of Canada and hence felt that they should not have had boats and gear sold without their consent. Second, they have been occupationailly dislocated and will quite likely never be able to return to fishing, and because of their independent and vigorous mode of life, this results in many personality disturbances; third, in the disposal of their equipment, they valued it higher than the market price would bring and so feel ithat it has been “unfair” with respect to price.

7 For the distinctions between fear and anxiety, see Horney, Karen, New Ways in Psychoanalysis (New York, 1939), pp. 193–5Google Scholar; also MacKinnon, Donald, “A Topological Analysis of Anxiety” (Character and Personality, 03, 1944)Google Scholar, in which it is claimed that “… anxiety is the complex emotion which results from a conflict between hope and despondency; it is the emotion which is experienced when some strong drive appears to be in danger of missing its goal” (p. 165).

8 At one point the Japanese Canadian Citizens' League had thought that it could provide leadership, but the process of the younger generation succeeding the older one had not gone far enough for his to be effective even in such a grave crisis. Furthermore the disintegration of the community had gone so far tot until a clarified and satisfactory programme had been developed, no leadership an a community level would have been feasible. This never did occur.

9 In Report on the Administration of Japanese Affairs in Canada, 1942-1944, it is reported that 8,000 people were sent through the Hastings Park clearing centre to Interior Settlements while 3,500 went directly from their homes to the Settlements; 3,600 went from their homes directly to the sugar-beet areas; 3,000 left voluntarily for self-supporting projects and employment; 2,150 left for road camps in British Columbia and Ontario; 750 were sent to internment camp in Ontario. This totals 21,000 people handled by the British Columbia Security Commission.

10 On this date there were 3,559 in Alberta, 157 in Saskatchewan, 1,502 in Manitoba, 2,914 in Ontario, and 532 in Quebec.

11 For the most comprehensive statement of those psychological problems of the confined but not resettled Japanese see Leighton, Alexander H., The Governing of Men (Princeton, 1945).CrossRefGoogle Scholar