Japanese Canadian Research Articles

The Canadian ‘War of the Two Sugars’: Homegrown Sugar Beets and the Racial Stratification of Labour

Abstract This paper provides a history of more than a century of efforts to establish and maintain a homegrown Canadian sugar supply – a twentieth-century version of what Eric Williams called the ‘war of the two sugars’, or the global competition between sugar beet and cane. To resolve beet sugar’s so-called ‘labour problem’, the industry has collaborated with the Canadian state to produce new classes of temporary workers, mobilising incarcerated Japanese Canadians, migrant Indigenous families, and Mexican and Caribbean workers employed through the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program. At the same time, the sugar industry has sought to refine itself of the racialised workers upon whom it relies by promoting the figure of the white Canadian worker. The Canadian ‘war of the two sugars’ has been fought through the stratification of the labour force along the lines of citizenship, resulting in the production of unique racial forms.

Expanded Model of Everyday Information Practices with Information Avoidance in Digital Environments

ABSTRACTUntil recently, research on information behavior and practices has focused on a series of actions, including having information needs, seeking information to satisfy those needs, and using the acquired information to varying degrees. However, in digital environments with an enormous distribution of information, it is necessary to consider information practices by focusing on their relationship with negative behaviors, such as information avoidance. Based on the discourses by Japanese Canadian seniors on information behavior during the COVID‐19 pandemic, this study attempted to construct an expanded model of everyday information practices (EIP) that incorporates the concept of information avoidance into the EIP model proposed by Savolainen. Findings suggest that information avoidance is likely related to an individual's social context and that, as a result of information avoidance, different means of information acquisition are chosen from a person's stock of knowledge, resulting in different aspects of the individual's information practices.

Forced displacement and migrants' location choices: Evidence from the Japanese-Canadian experience during World War II

This paper examines whether a forced displacement of an ethnic group can lead to long-run changes to their spatial distribution and whether this shock can also lead to changes in where new migrants settle. I use the Canadian government’s internment of Japanese Canadians during World War II, as well as their post-war forced resettlement, as a natural experiment. I find that the policy led to dramatic resettlement patterns; areas where Japanese Canadians were removed from had far fewer Japanese Canadians after World War II, with this effect persisting for decades. Despite these displacement patterns, I find that both the pre-war and post-war settlement patterns drive where new Japanese migrants settle within Canada, suggesting that the disruption of the connections and networks formed by Japanese migrants before World War II were not fully dismantled by the Canadian government’s wartime policies. Reinforcing this mechanism, I show using Facebook’s social connectedness data that Japanese population shares from both 1931 and 1951 predict whether a Canadian Census Division is more socially connected with Japan today. The results from this paper show that, despite Canada’s forced dispersal of its Japanese population across the country, networks and forces that connect Census Divisions to Japan and draw in new migrants continued to persist.

“After All Our Efforts at Good Citizenship”: Propriety, Property, and Belonging in the Dispossession of Japanese Canadians, 1940s

This article argues that in the early twentieth-century evolution of citizenship in Canada, property persisted as a site wherein national belonging could be claimed and performed. It contextualizes a Japanese Canadian family’s performances of property and protests at their wartime dispossession within the ideals that Canadian urban reformers, planners, and property theorists set out in the 1920s and 1930s. In doing so, this article reveals the unequal access to citizenship that property ownership afforded and thus introduces a complex portrait of hierarchies of membership and belonging in Canada at this time.

Embryonic Citizenship: Disidentifications of Asian Racialized Settlerhood

This essay tracks an allegorical figure termed the "child-citizen" in order to consider how the nonlinear temporality of Asian racialized development illuminates the ambivalent logic of Asian North American citizenship as one premised on a simultaneous identification with and disavowal of settler colonial erasures of Indigenous presence. The primary literary work under consideration is the 2001 novel The Kappa Child by Japanese Canadian author Hiromi Goto. Informed by the critical lens of new materialism, this essay reads The Kappa Child through and as a feminist and queer reckoning with Darwinian evolutionary theory that provides an asynchronous model of development, which ultimately figures Asian racialized settlerhood as an uneven (dis)identification with the circuits of citizenship.

Reconsidering the Past

Those in power often use carefully constructed historical narratives to justify past injustices. Nevertheless, with the rise of postmodern literature, including historiographic metafictions, fiction authors have challenged traditional historicism while problematizing historical justifications for past injustices. Joy Kogawa uses postmodernist literary devices in her novel Obasan, presenting her novel as a work of historiographic metafiction. However, the political, social, and historical contexts in which Kogawa uses such devices reveal that Obasan’s historiographic metafictional qualities self-reflexively evoke a reconsideration of the official historical accounts that attempted to justify Japanese Canadian internment.

Schooling in Western Canada, 1870–1923: An Anti-racist Interpretation

This essay is about the history of schooling in Western Canada for Indigenous peoples, non- British and non-English-speaking White settlers, and Chinese Canadians and Japanese Canadians. It brings their different schooling experiences into conversation with one another using an anti-racist approach to history. Different racisms, the essay argues, determined the different policies governments used to school these groups in Western Canada, which contributed to different racializations of the groups. Yet Indigenous peoples, non-British and non-English-speaking White settlers, and Chinese Canadians and Japanese Canadians believed schooling was the best chance the next generation had to access skills and knowledge that would help them thrive in Canada, a society they recognized treated their children as inferior. Racist school policies at many times obstructed their children’s access to schooling and the opportunities it provided. Policies also circumscribed to different degrees their chances to protect their languages and cultures in schools. An anti-racist history of this topic exposes racial inequalities at the heart of settler societies, and schooling, at a critical juncture in their development. Anti-racist histories also help teachers, teacher education students, and the public to understand that racisms are plural; how racialization occurs and confers privileges and disadvantages in the past and present; and Canadians are treaty people with obligations, particularly in education. This history helps to unpack racist and colonial baggage and to see better the journey ahead to a different and just educational future.

Jordan Stanger-Ross, ed. Landscapes of Injustice: A New Perspective on the Internment and Dispossession of Japanese Canadians

Jordan Stanger-Ross, ed. <i>Landscapes of Injustice: A New Perspective on the Internment and Dispossession of Japanese Canadians</i>

Japanese Exclusion and Environmental Conservation in the BC Salmon Fisheries, 1900-1930

Abstract: Between 1900 and 1930, fishermen, cannery workers, investors, fisheries officials, and federal commissioners in British Columbia knew that the salmon in the Fraser and Skeena Rivers were overfished. They saw the solution in hatcheries, controlling when and where people could fish, and limiting the number of fishermen engaged in the commercial fisheries. Yet while the first two solutions relied on a certain scientific logic, the last issue was highly influenced by racial ideologies. In the immediate aftermath of Canada’s 1908 Gentlemen’s Agreement with Japan and with greater force after the First World War, the government and white nationalists sought to curtail the presence of Japanese immigrants and Canadians of Japanese heritage in the BC salmon fisheries. They explicitly described their goals as a strategy for fish conservation and as a way to make the fisheries more accessible to white fishermen. This article shows that local contingencies made the workforces and racial anxieties different not only in BC and California or in Alaska and Hawai‘i, but also on the southern and northern coasts of the same province. Merging the often-separate histories of environment and Asian exclusion, this article argues that between 1900 and 1930, government policies in British Columbia aimed at conservation and public concerns about resource depletion were infused with racial ideologies. It demonstrates how state efforts to regulate the fishing industry, and more specifically human responses to changing environmental conditions, became highly linked with the anti-Asian agitation that had already taken hold on the Pacific coast of North America.

Japanese Canadian Family Memories in the “Landscapes of Injustice” digital archive

Japanese Canadian Family Memories in the “Landscapes of Injustice” digital archive

Figurational Life Writing and Indigenous Lives in the Rain Forests of the Americas

Norbert Elias’s figurational sociology lends itself to an analysis of autobiographies by the Japanese Canadian scientist-ecologist David Suzuki, the ethnographer-sociologist Claude Lévy-Strauss and the humanist Michel de Montaigne. This figurational reading focuses on their contact with Indigenous peoples in the Americas and their transformation of life writing from an individualist Eurocentric perspective to a longed for reversal of Elias’s established-outsider relation..

Local Indigenous ways of knowing and learning in the classroom through Community-engaged learning

This paper reflects on the impact of community-engaged learning (CEL) in post-secondary education, as guided by local Indigenous community members, specifically members of the Anishinaabeg Nation and more specifically Mississauga peoples. This CEL way of educating highlights a fundamental difference between Indigenous axiology, where localized relationships and community contributions are paradigm, with traditional Euro-Western hegemonic pedagogies. Within this framework, we hope to contribute to the larger discourse in revising the axiological foundation applied to knowledge within the Academy, based on authentic expressions of an Indigenous way of knowing and learning. We seek to recapitulate the ways that knowledge in the field of anthropology (and post-secondary education in general) is valued and assessed through the first-hand experiences of two cis male Anishinaabe academics, and one cis female Japanese Canadian academic, involved in the development and delivery of community-engaged learning on Turtle Island.

Daffodils and Dispossession: Nikkei Settlers, White Possession, and Settler Colonial Property in Bradner, BC, 1914–51

This article focuses on the forced sales of property, namely daffodil bulbs and farms, owned by Nikkei farmers before 1943 in the rural community of Bradner, British Columbia, known as the “daffodil capital” of Canada. By centring the microhistorical workings of property dispossession in one local context, it connects fields commonly treated as distinct – settler colonialism and Japanese Canadian history – to reveal how settler colonial property logics and practices were employed by the state and ordinary settlers to secure white possession. Drawing primarily on state records, I trace how the federal government dispossessed four Nikkei daffodil-farming families in the 1940s by using contradictory, uneven, and contested rationales and strategies. More specifically, I identify three property characteristics – definition, value, and boundaries – that the state manipulated to reconfigure Nikkei property for white ownership. In doing so, I denaturalize common narratives of property as stable and argue that the dispossession was not an anomalous moment of state racism, as has been largely understood, but a project that renewed a regime founded on the elision of Indigenous sovereignty and the construction of white settler property. By highlighting the state’s lies, both big and small, this article demonstrates the fundamental fictions of the settler property regime in British Columbia. These were fictions that Nikkei settlers were both invested in and were betrayed by in the 1940s.

Marginal Citizens: Interracial intimacies and the incarceration of Japanese Canadians, 1942–1949

AbstractFollowing Japan’s 1941 attacks on Hawai’i and Hong Kong, Canada relocated, detained, and exiled citizens and residents of Japanese ancestry. Many interracial families, however, were exempted from this racial project called the internment. The form of the exemption was an administrative permit granted to its holder on the basis of their marital or patrilineal proximity to whiteness. This article analyzes these permits relying on archival research and applying a critical race feminist lens to explore how law was constitutive of race at this moment in Canadian history. I argue that the permits recategorized interracial intimacies towards two racial ends: to differentiate the citizen from the “enemy alien”; and to regulate the interracial family according to patriarchal common law principles. This article nuances received narratives of law as an instrument of racial exclusion by documenting the way in which a new inclusive state measure sustained old exclusions.

A History of Contested Narratives: The National Film Board of Canada’s Evolving Cinematic Treatment (1945–2018) of the Internment of Japanese Canadians during World War Two

The National Film Board of Canada (NFB) is world-renown for its documen- taries and animations. This article examines how the NFB dealt with one specific topic – the internment of Japanese Canadians during World War Two. By analyzing the films produced by the NFB between 1945 and 2018, this study seeks to understand how and why its narratives of the internment changed dramatically over three-quarters of a century. The study deals with six NFB films: Of Japanese Descent (1945), Enemy Alien (1975), Minoru: Memory of Exile (1992), Freedom Has a Price (1994), Sleeping Tigers: The Asahi Baseball Story (2003), and East of the Rockies (2018). Drawing on the postcolonial concepts of the colonizing gaze and hegemony, as well as poststructuralist concepts of the trace and discourses of power, it probes the evolution of the NFB’s cinematic culture and concludes that the NFB’s film legacy parallels a changing public discourse in Canada on this traumatic historical violation of human rights.

J. Stanger-Ross (ed.), Landscapes of Injustice: A New Perspective on the Internment and Dispossession of Japanese Canadians

J. Stanger-Ross (ed.), <i>Landscapes of Injustice: A New Perspective on the Internment and Dispossession of Japanese Canadians</i>

The Nikkei Called it Gon Island: A Story of Settlement and Dispossession on Mayne Island

Like recent community research and scholarly analysis, this article aims to open new doors in our understanding of the Japanese Canadian experience in Canada by focusing on the experiences of two Mayne Island families, Kadonaga and Nagata, the latter in the context of their greenhouse operation at Campbell Bay where my family now lives. I hope, through this microhistory of two Mayne Island families, their pioneering experience and consequent dispossession, and then placing that in the context of their declarations to the Bird Commission in 1948, to give focus to the experience of these Islanders and reveal details and truths that are lost in the big picture. Reclaiming this and how it relates to my family property on Mayne Island has been a way for me to confront and acknowledge the racism and white supremacy woven into the fabric of our Province and our communities.

Unsettling Claims of Belonging:

Starting from the premise that we have to know where we have been to know where we are going, this piece looks heavily to the past and considers the effects of differently experienced belonging in Canada across generations. This autobiographical reflection questions how we might read migrant-settler narratives of belonging alongside Indigenous struggles for sovereignty in such a way that desires for belonging do not displace or erase such struggles but rather support them. Reflecting on my experiences of belonging and shame as a Japanese Canadian of mixed Japanese and British ancestry, the article seeks to deconstruct and disrupt settler-migrant stories by examining citizenship and belonging from these different perspectives.

Scattered Memories of Difficult History and Museum Pedagogies of Disruption

ABSTRACT Public museums are increasingly exhibiting difficult histories that aim to challenge traditional national narratives of exclusion. This paper examines the Being Japanese Canadian: Reflections on a Broken World exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum to provide insight into how innovative museum pedagogy might challenge hegemonic narratives and provoke new lines of thought. Using theories of difficult history and social justice pedagogy, this article argues that exhibits of difficult history have potential to shock visitors to thought; however, attention must be paid to how they also are co-opted to reinscribe the authority and legitimacy of public museums.

Hearing Beyond What Is Spoken: Collective Grief at the Nikkei National Museum & Cultural Centre

ABSTRACT For museums and historic sites that grapple with the legacies of historical trauma, collective and intergenerational grief can become embedded in both the museum’s identity and practices. In this article, the authors discuss collective loss and grief through the case of the Nikkei National Museum & Cultural Centre in British Columbia, Canada. We discuss the lasting legacies of racial trauma experienced by Japanese Canadians during the Second World War. We draw from psychological research about empathy, grief, and trauma to offer approaches of self-awareness, nonverbal attending, and reflective listening that will support museum educators in their encounters with grief at the museum.