Canada's Struggle with Illegal Entry on Its West Coast: The Case of Fred Yoshy and Japanese Migrants before the Second World War

Abstract

On  July , at the Merritt Sawmill in British Columbia’s interior, rcmp inspector L.J. Sampson picked up two Japanese labourers for questioning. Inspector Sampson needed to know if the nervous brothers, Katsuzo and Kimatsu Suzuki, were legally resident in Canada. In their statement to the police, the brothers admitted that “they had entered Canada illegally through the connivance of Maruyama and [Fred] Yoshy.”1 In the early s each had obtained, for a fee, Canadian naturalization certificates from a man in Yokohama, Japan. For another fee, Mr. Maruyama, an employee of the British Consulate, had sold them visas and then booked passages for the brothers, under their new false identification, on the Canadian Pacific Railway steamship line. On the final leg of their journey between Victoria and Vancouver, Fred Yoshy, the Vancouver Immigration Branch Japanese interpreter, took their fraudulent naturalization certificates and gave them the address of a boarding house in Vancouver, also for a fee. Having successfully reached their BC destination, the brothers quickly found work and established new lives for themselves. One married a Canadian-born Japanese woman, and the other brought his wife and child over from Japan. The illegal entry of the Suzuki brothers was not an isolated incident. Fred Yoshy (Saburo Yoshiye), who had been the Japanese interpreter in Vancouver since , had for years been smuggling Japanese into British Columbia, probably in collaboration with one or more Canadian immigration officials. A police investigation revealed that the numbers Canada’s Struggle with Illegal Entry on Its West Coast: