Talk:Japanese Canadian internment

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Contents 1 F.Y.I - a discussion on King 2 Apology? 3 Cleanup 4 New item on List of concentration and internment camps 5 Issues, issues, issues....somebody has issues 6 Questionable edit

[edit] F.Y.I - a discussion on King

• 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)

• 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)
• 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)

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)

• 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)
• I see that you did read my additions to "Racism," and you improved the writing. Thank You. Moomot 19:19, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

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)

[edit] Apology?

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

[edit] Cleanup

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)

[edit] New item on List of concentration and internment camps

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)

[edit] Issues, issues, issues....somebody has issues

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)
• As for the first sentence, I don't know which mock history/pamphlet that came from, but in Canada, also families were generally kept together, at least with the Relocation Centres (not the same as internment camps); if there are exact stats and cites on the notion that families were split up - here implied to have been deliberately split up, as a form of cruelty and more proof of general white nastiness - then they should be provided. There's too much popular myth about the internment as also about other race issues in BC past, and many of these myths take things out of context, or outright invented contexts; that first sentence didn't sit well with me because the Japanese in my area (Lillooet) were relocated as families and not split up, other than the guys from McGillivary Falls who were brought back inside the 100-miles-from-the-coast line to work for Frank Devine at his mill and logging operation near D'Arcy, while their wives held down the old resort at the Falls, a few miles down the lake from D'Arcy (cite My Sixty Years in Canada, by Dr. Masajiro Miyazaki.Skookum1 04:38, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

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)

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)

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)

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)

First, I don't see why you're drawing links between Chinese Canadian history and Japanese-Canadian internment. All history is full of biases, so I'm not sure what the connection is between these groups, aside from their perceived asian "race." Second, if there are factual errors, please feel free to correct them, but I find your suggestions of "white-bashing" and "white-guilt" pandering a little silly. The motivations behind interning (or "relocating" as you seem to favour) people whose families had lived in Canada for generations were clearly racial, not military. As far as I'm concerned, that's the core issue. Like the internment of Ukrainians during WWI, many of whom had left Europe to escape oppression under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, most of these people were not interned for legitimate reasons. In the case of Japanese-Canadians, however, the financial gains for white citizens was an important extra factor in internment/confiscation. As for the comparison of costs between Canadian and American internment, I would say your explanation may well be true, but unless you can back it up, it's just as POV as the current phrasing. It doesn't seem impossible that Americans may also have had empty towns. -- TheMightyQuill 20:52, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

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)

Dude, I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but the majority of Americans (and I'd assume the entire American government in 1941) were white. How suggesting that "Canadians were so much worse than Americans" could be construed as "white-bashing" is beyond me. As for your perceived bias among academic historians (I assume you'd exclude Jack Granatstein?) that may be a systemic bias inherent to wikipedia, but this is hardly the place to debate that. If you make changes and include specific footnotes, I'm pretty sure there won't be major complaints. Your changes so far seem fine to me. TheMightyQuill 21:17, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

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)

Awesome. I'm not sure I've heard of it. What's it called? --TheMightyQuill 20:52, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

My Sixty Years in Canada - see Masajiro Miyazaki.Skookum1 21:07, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Questionable edit

I have just reversed the following addition:

"For the duration between 1946 and 1949 remaining detainees could be released if they could obtain a canadian sponsor/guarantor, a number of these were offered by opportunist types via arranged marriages to buy freedom for family members; a prison with different walls."

I find this information and the accompanying edit summary ("just something I saw on tv. women selling themselves to end the 5-6 years of imprisonment already served") suspect. I would appreciate input on this matter. Victoriagirl 01:44, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

the show was Canada: a people's history. a woman interviewed explained the sponsorship and her arranged marriage to a friend of the family being part and parcel for her father/brothers release. this JC internment page is pitiful I'm glad you find time to say "I've never heard that" rather than contributing something.

It was never my intention to offend. And it is, of course, perfectly fair for a user to remove an unreferenced piece of information. I encourage you to reintroduce the information with relevant reference.

In fact, I have made several contributions to this entry - all in the interests of improving and providing information on this very important episode.

I recognize that you are a new user and am sorry if my edit appeared unfair. Rest assured, it was performed in good faith. Before proceeding you may wish to read about this policy. Victoriagirl 03:49, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

-so... you recommend I edit the page and remove all content that reads "citation needed"?? that'll be fairrrrrrrrr huh why don't you find another flavour of the day "episode" to play crossing guard on and let others who want to share with us all the insults that followed the initial injury that was imprisonment post what they want. and if I'm posting secondhand from them it's sure better than nothing