Japanese fishermen at Steveston, British Columbia.
After 1877, Japanese immigrants began to enter Canada. Many had been fishermen in Japan, and, like these gillnet fishermen drying their nets at a Steveston cannery on the Fraser River delta, they found the West Coast a congenial place to establish fishing communities. Steveston, aside from being a relatively stable community, served as a staging point from which Japanese families moved to coastal fishing villages. The 1900 strike of salmon-fishermen revealed the shape of future relations between whites and Japanese in the industry, and presaged the continuing agitation which was, many years later, to see the Japanese banished altogether from the fishing industry.
