Regrettably, Canada's involvement in the Second World war exacerbated long-standing animosities towards various racial groups in the country. For example, Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor and Canada's declaration of war on Japan afforded an opportunity to exercise repressive measures against persons of Japanese ancestry. The wartime treatment of Japanese-Canadians is now recognized as a violation of the principles which the country had supposedly gone to war to preserve.
Personal freedom and human rights were denied Japanese-Canadians in February 1942 when the federal government used the War Measures Act to order a mass evacuation of all British Columbians of Japanese descent to internment camps in the province's interior. This announcement followed an earlier directive to remove all male Japanese nationals between eighteen and forty-five years of age from the West Coast. By the fall of 1942, some nineteen thousand people had been moved to the interior where they were interned for the duration of the war.
In their removal from the coast, many Japanese-Canadians lost their personal possessions, property and livelihood. These industrious and law-abiding citizens had been resented by some of their Caucasian neighbours for their enterprise and success. Japanese immigrants who had come to Canada before the First World War were generally well-established along the southern British Columbia coast and in the Fraser and Okanagan valleys by the outbreak of the Second World War. Leaving behind farms, fishing boats, or small businesses, many evacuees found their families divided in the move. Most were housed in makeshift accommodation; a large proportion lived in shacks in the Slocan Valley.
After the war, most of those who had been interned were dispersed across the country. Forced to choose between settlement east of the Rockies or "repatriation" to Japan, nearly four thousand went to Japan in 1946 and the rest tried to rebuild their lives in other parts of Canada.
This photograph was taken in the kitchen of a camp in British Columbia in 1943.
