Japanese Canadian Research Articles

The Nation Dreamt Whole: Mid-Century Canadian Political Fantasy and the NFB’s “- -Of Japanese Descent”: An Interim Report (1945)

Through an analysis of the NFB’s 1945 film“--Of Japanese Descent”: an Interim Report this article explores aspects of a specifically Canadian mid-century political imaginary characterized by very particular economic and racial anxieties. Faced by the emergence of new political economies—fascist and communist models that seemed capable of re-imagining the nation—as well as a broad sense for a debility or limit proper to capitalist liberal democracy, many people in this period began to fantasize about openly post-liberal Canadian futures. At the same time, the Canadian state was attempting to manage and control a narrative of national identity in the context of new flows of non-white immigrants. “--Of Japanese Descent”—a film produced by the Canadian state to positively re-frame the internment of Japanese Canadians during the war—attempts to resolve both vectors of anxiety simultaneously. The internment camp comes to be imagined as a kind of post-liberal utopia, a space of national fulfillment and purpose de-linked from the risks and aporias of liberal capitalism. What we call the “liberal concentration camp”, then, models an alternative, idealized Canadian future while simultaneously functioning as a kind of school or machine for the naturalization of “inadmissible” Japanese bodies. However, even as the film channels fascist and communist desires—for national oneness and economic solidarity respectively—it operates as a means of preparing the Canadian viewer for the re-integration of interned Japanese into their communities and in this sense is a very early snapshots of the limits and contradictions of liberal state multiculturalism in Canada.

Can Muslims Fly? The No Fly List as a Tool of the “War on Terror”

The securitization phenomenon is based on a racialized logic that predates 9/11 and has roots in the discourse of Orientalism, the practices of European colonialism and, in the more recent times of the 20th century, the internment of Japanese Canadians during World War II. This article analyzes the “no fly list” as a counter-terrorism tool used by the Canadian government in the “war on terror.” It situates the analysis in the political context of the securitization of Muslims, the social and political processes that construct them as threats to the nation. It examines the evolution of the “no fly list” since 2001 and analyzes its impact on Muslims in Canada, drawing on well-publicized cases. It critiques the list's effectiveness based on the distinction between information and knowledge as tools to fight the “war on terror.” The “no fly list” contributes to Islamophobia through disproportionately profiling racialized Muslim and Muslim-looking passengers as members of a suspect community.

Suspect Properties

In 1943, after Japanese Canadians were uprooted from coastal British Columbia, federal officials commenced selling all of their property without consent. This article argues that the dispossession of Japanese-Canadian-owned property has an urban history that has been largely overlooked, as arguments for the dispossession emerged from the Vancouver municipal government, which focused federal attention on the historic Japanese-Canadian neighborhood in the city. Federal officials seized upon the condition of a small number of deteriorating “slum” properties as a justification of wholesale dispossession. An initiative town planners in Vancouver thus helped to motivate the wholesale dispossession of Japanese Canadians.

Uprooting Community: Japanese Mexicans, World War II, and the US-Mexico Borderlands

Uprooting Community is the second study on the Japanese in Mexico in as many years. My own book, Looking like the Enemy: Japanese Mexicans, the Mexican State, and US Hegemony, 1897–1945 (2014), examined the same subject matter. In recent years there has been a flourishing of studies on Asians in the Americas, especially Latin America and Mexico. The Japanese in Mexico are one of the least studied ethnic groups, especially in comparison to the Japanese in the United States, Brazil, or Peru, which is why Uprooting Community is a welcome addition to scholarship on the immigrant experience in Mexico.Uprooting Community utilizes national archives in the United States and Mexico. In addition, Selfa A. Chew examined newspapers and magazines to gauge popular sentiments of Japanese people on both sides of the US-Mexican border. Of great interest will be the 15 interviews conducted by the author of Japanese Mexicans who were interned during World War II or their descendants. This type of oral history is essential in uncovering Mexico's internment of Japanese Mexicans. The author does not appear to use Japanese-language sources, which may have proven useful in gaining a better understanding of the position of the Japanese government and how Japanese historians and others have examined and interpreted Japanese Mexican internment in Mexico.Uprooting Community has several objectives. First, Chew examines the racialization of Japanese Mexicans leading up to and through the World War II period. Chew argues that Japanese in Mexico have primarily been viewed through a racialized lens, regardless of time period, and as a result the majority suffered under intense anti-Asian racism that culminated in internment during the war. Chew delves deeply into the experience of Japanese Mexicans residing along the US-Mexican border and examines the disruption of those communities caused by their uprooting, relocation, and internment. Finally, Uprooting Community sheds new light on the importance of gender and what Chew calls “differential gendered treatment” (p. 22). Chew illuminates a broader understanding of the Japanese Mexican experience during this period.Part of the complexity of the Japanese Mexican experience during the war period is separating reality from fiction, and Uprooting Community does an excellent job with this endeavor. Three chapters are particularly strong. Chapter 5, “The Road to Concentration Camps,” obliterates any notion that Japanese Mexicans' lives were not disrupted by World War II. Chapter 6 continues the unmasking and is central to Uprooting Community's argument that Japanese Mexicans endured internment in concentration camps, which resulted in various forms of resistance on the part of the community. The discussion on the Temixco concentration camp in chapter 7 is a detailed examination of this camp and broadens our understanding.Uprooting Community is a well-researched study. Unraveling this experience is difficult to navigate due to dynamics at play that require an understanding of multiple histories, the interconnectedness of US racialization of Asians across the hemisphere, the turbulent history of Mexico leading up to World War II, Japanese involvement in Mexico, and the nuances of Mexican political culture at the local, regional, and national levels. By and large, Uprooting Community meets this challenge. Yet I do have some concerns regarding interpretations and perceptions of the internment campaigns at the hemispheric level as well as for the Japanese Mexican community. For example, Chew writes that “material conditions of ethnic Japanese in US internment camps were no doubt better in general than those experienced by the Japanese Mexicans and Japanese Canadians who were uprooted” (p. 129). We tread on a slippery slope when we, as historians, begin to categorize one country's internment camp as worse than another. Additionally, elite Japanese Mexicans, no doubt self-serving as observed in Uprooting Community, did serve a useful role for Japanese Mexicans and the Japanese and Mexican governments as well. However, at times Uprooting Community appears to view this particular group monolithically and demonizes those who were able to buy themselves opportunity and create a different reality. After all, this was not the United States. Mexico's political culture, even during times of crisis, allowed for a level of flexibility. Everything was negotiable, even internment. My own work on this topic offers a different analysis and interpretation of Japanese Mexican elites.Overall, Uprooting Community is a strong addition to the small but growing body of research on the Japanese Mexican diaspora and the immigrant experience in general. This volume is necessary reading for Latin American, Mexican, Latino, and Asian American historians. This book is easily adopted for graduate courses and would also work in undergraduate classes. Lastly, because of the uniqueness of the topic, the focus on World War II, and a relatively unknown history of internment, the general public will have a strong interest.

Social inclusion of Japanese Canadians: a view from Toronto

Although generally an immigrant-friendly country with high immigration levels, Canada also had racially-motivated policies of discrimination, as seen in the mass internment of Japanese Canadians (JCs) during the Second World War. Today, JCs constitute a relatively small ethnic group, mainly made up of descendants of pre-war immigrants, as well as post-war immigrants and their offspring. With the highest rate of mixed unions among any ethnic group in Canada, JCs and the issues that they face are very diverse. Drawing from the experience of the Japanese Social Services in Toronto, a reconstituted case of a JC senior is presented and discussed. Implications for social work practice are presented.

Collective Experience of Political Violence as Identity

At the beginning of the Second World War, the Canadian government forcibly removed Canadians of Japanese ancestry from their homes in British Columbia. During and immediately following their internment, many Japanese Canadians converted to Christianity. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork among aging Japanese Canadians, this article contextualizes the wartime conversion to Christianity in the wider sociocultural milieu of the 1940s. Discussing contemporary participation of Japanese Canadians in both Buddhist and Christian services in a long-term care facility, this paper suggests that the radical segregation and racialization of this group during wartime gave rise to a collective identity of Japanese Canadians irrespective of their religious affiliation.

Japanese-Canadian wartime history through Joy Kogawa’s Obasan

This article intends to investigate the narration of historical facts under new perspectives trough the novel Obasan, from the Japanese-Canadian author Joy Kogawa. The choice of the mentioned novel is due to the fact that it enables the observation of the manners the concepts of identity, memory and representation interact to portray new representations of a determined people by the reinterpretation of historical facts. Throughout the article it will be analyzed the varied narrative strategies Joy Kogawa employs to represent new versions of facts related to Japanese Canadians and their internment promoted by Canadian government in inner Canada during World War II. It will also be observed the manners through which fiction can collaborate to a people’s search for redemption with their traumatic past and consequent actions towards improvements for their present.

Butch Bodies, Big Drums: Queering North American Taiko

Butch Bodies, Big DrumsQueering North American Taiko Angela K. Ahlgren (bio) The sound of drumming rumbles from the stage as the five Asian, Asian Canadian, and Asian American women of Jodaiko move and sweat with each other in the physically demanding art of taiko. On the first weekend of August each year, white canvas tents dot the perimeter of Vancouver’s Oppenheimer Park, where attendees sit spread on blankets or wander through the festival’s offerings.1 Food stalls line one end of the park, offering yakisoba (fried noodles), takoyaki (octopus fritters), and other Japanese fare. Artisans sell cards, jewelry, T-shirts, and other wares from underneath tents. And in one corner of the park, on the dusty baseball diamond, sits the stage, covered in red-and-white striped canvas, the words powell street festival in bold black-on-white capital letters across the apron of the platform. Throughout the day, musicians, martial artists, and minyo and butoh dancers animate this corner of the park as the crowds watch, wander, and move through the festival. The Powell Street Festival has its roots in Japanese Canadian community activism, and its founding marked the hundredth year of Japanese Canadians’ presence in Canada, an anniversary that was not lost on its founders.2 In 1977 socially engaged Sansei (third-generation Japanese), some of whom were already involved in providing social services in their community (such as through the senior center Tonari Gumi), coordinated the first festival, part of a larger effort to reclaim the area surrounding Oppenheimer Park on Powell Street, a neighborhood east of [End Page 1] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Left to right, Eileen Kage, Leslie Komori, Tiff any Tamaribuchi, Toyomi Yoshida, and Kristy Oshiro perform “Kokorozashi” at the 2009 Powell Street Festival. Photograph by the author. [End Page 2] downtown where many Japanese Canadians lived until they were evacuated and interned during World War II. The inaugural festival marked the beginning of what would become a long-standing Vancouver tradition.3 The Pride in Art (PiA) festival, a series of performances and art exhibits by and for lgbtq community members and renamed the Queer Arts Festival in 2010, takes place the same weekend.4 Its several weeks of programming coincide with Vancouver’s lgbt Pride festival, which itself overlaps precisely with the dates of the Powell Street Festival. Since 2006 Jodaiko has been performing in Pride in Art and since 2007 at both festivals. When the women of Jodaiko (roughly, “woman taiko” in Japanese) take the stage, they perform a mix of their own compositions and “traditional” taiko music, following the conventions of many North American taiko groups.5 Much of the group’s repertoire showcases the strength and power of the drummers. Their costumes yoke to one North American taiko custom of performing in tapered indigo pants, matching aprons, and colorful happi coats (informal coats fastened with an obi, or sash). In these ways, Jodaiko is a typical taiko group, but it is unique in other ways. Unlike many North American taiko groups that are based in a city and rehearse together regularly all year round, Jodaiko functions as more of a pick-up group. Its geographically dispersed members seldom rehearse together except in the days leading up to a performance. One of the peculiarities of playing with Jodaiko is its fluid and ephemeral nature. In contrast to more established groups such as San Jose Taiko and Sacramento Taiko Dan, which both have 501(c)(3) status, staff members, and a fairly regular membership, Jodaiko operates without the financial resources to compensate performers or sometimes even to cover travel expenses. Jodaiko’s provisional and temporary nature provides space for a type of queer intimacy by bringing people together across national and ethnic borders in a community that is both fleeting (just one week a year) and ongoing (every year).6 Despite the fact that the majority of North American taiko players are women, Jodaiko is one of only a few all-women’s groups. During my fieldwork between 2006 and 2009, Jodaiko was the only group I was aware of comprised entirely of [End Page 3] queer-identified women.7 While the group...

Jobs and Justice: Fighting Discrimination in Wartime Canada, 1939–1945 by Carmela Patrias (review)

Reviewed by: Jobs and Justice: Fighting Discrimination in Wartime Canada, 1939–1945 by Carmela Patrias Dennis Molinaro Carmela Patrias. Jobs and Justice: Fighting Discrimination in Wartime Canada, 1939–1945. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. 256pp. 12 Images. $25.95 sc; $62.00 hc; $24.95 EPUB. Studying race and racism in Canadian history has become a mainstay of the discipline. There are numerous studies detailing all manner of how racism operated in Canada’s past and what effect it had on the Canadian nation and identity. Even still, works that detail how racialized groups battled against this discrimination and hostility are not as abundant. In Jobs and Justice: Fighting Discrimination in Wartime Canada, 1939–1945, Carmela Patrias investigates race and racism during the Second World War and how it operated as a barrier to employment for immigrants and Canadians of various ethnic backgrounds. But Patrias goes further than documenting examples of racism in employment, she also demonstrates how people who faced racism organized and fought back against it. Aside from some minor issues around the organization of some of the content, Patrias’ book excels at demonstrating how marginalized groups had a voice and how they used it to fight against the barriers they faced. The book is divided into four parts with the first two examining the job discrimination immigrants and racial minorities faced, while the others explore the Anglo critics and allies of government racial policy. The book is at its best when detailing the discrimination and racism immigrants and minorities such as blacks, natives and Jews experienced during the war when labour demands were high, when these workers tried to fill that demand and when they fought back. A key element to Patrias’ study is her reminding readers that immigrants of different ethnicities today were considered different races in the past. Different ‘Slavic’ peoples were considered races and were often barred from working in war industries. Foreigners faced work-place barriers and social ones as many were labeled as unpatriotic or dangerous. The state often did not prevent employers from firing or refusing to hire workers because of their race and was even complicit in the practice. Patrias outlines how the National Selective Service (NSS) and Unemployment Insurance Commission, groups created with the purpose of maximizing civilian labour for the war effort, used “racial origin” information to discriminate against minorities and support stereotypes. Even though unions reported that Chinese workers were doing well at a Ford plant, the NSS was instead moving them to work in the laundry or restaurant industry. When African Canadian community organizations complained about the low rate of hiring black workers, the head of Montreal’s NSS replied that “I can’t do anything for your people, their I.Q. is too low (33).” Another strong element of the book is the resistance workers put up against this discrimination. Patrias reveals how workers took militant action such as when Polish workers went out on strike during [End Page 177] the Kirkland Lake Gold Miner’s strike in 1941–42. Many of the strikers were also women and the determination of the foreigners in maintaining this strike helped inspire the labour movement in Canada. As well, Patrias documents the fluidity of race and racial categorization such as when eastern Europeans asserted their “whiteness” when faced with workplace discrimination. While historians are certainly well acquainted with the racism expressed towards Asians in Canadian history, Patrias does well at documenting how significantly disenfranchised groups like Asians, blacks and Natives resisted the discrimination leveled against them by employers and the state. Barred from joining most trade unions, Chinese workers created their own organization, the Chinese Trade Workers’ Association in 1942. Chinese workers also became militant in demanding equal pay for equal work. Fifteen hundred Chinese shipbuilders and shingle workers threatened to strike in 1943, demanding the same pension benefits for their families that white workers received. Three CIO unions intervened on their behalf, averting the strike and offered support to resolve their grievances. While discrimination against the Japanese during the war is also well known, Patrias reveals how Japanese fought for their right to vote through groups such as the Japanese Canadian Citizens’ League (JCCL). The group...

Disrupting the National Frame: A Postcolonial, Diasporic (Re)Reading of SKY Lee's Disappearing Moon Café and Denise Chong's The Concubine's Children

SINCE ITS EMERGENCE IN THE 1980s AND 1890s, Canadian Studies has gained recognition as a field of inquiry that could mount a wide-ranging and radical critique of mainstream Canadian history, society, and culture. Originally inspired by rights-based movements of 1960s and 1970s, Canadian Studies grew out of community level activism against race and class oppression (Lai 1). Its principal modality has been to construct a collective self, or Canadian identity, through which to challenge representation of Asians as perpetual outsiders or aliens and to rewrite existing Canadian history to acknowledge such racist policies as Chinese Exclusion Act, Japanese Canadian Internment, and Komagata Maru Incident (Chao 18). In this way, field has historically unfolded within a nationalist framework, locating nation-state as primary interlocutor of Asian/alien body in Canada and taking up a kind of (Lai 5). Nonetheless, as field increasingly becomes drawn into academy, critics have noted some possible limitations of this framework. One such limitation is that focus on domestic identity politics, and promotion of citizenship and national belonging as political goals, runs risk of reinforcing a reductive pluralism which cannot shake up systemic historical conditions and ... ideologies of normativity that have produced racialized subjects and minoritized cultures (Kamboureli 64). In exploring ways to expand on Canadian national frame, Lily Cho has posited that Canadian Studies could be situated more clearly within a postcolonial, paradigm. Such a paradigm, she contends, could generate insights into how construction of Asian-ness in Canada is deeply connected to Asian-ness elsewhere (188). Indeed, Cho points out that there is a need to think about formation of Canadian through imperialism and and to see Canadian history within a wider, global context of capital and labour migration (188). Focusing specifically on Chinese Canadian communities, Cho illustrates how a diasporic can highlight links between Chinese migration and British imperialism (186). That is, a perspective can consider how early Chinese immigrants to Canada came from South China, where Opium Wars had disrupted local economy [and] provid[ed] much of push for emigration (Stanley 56). Furthermore, it can stress how many of these immigrants were indentured workers, imported via coolie trade which burgeoned in British Hong Kong after Atlantic slave trade went into decline (Peter Li 20). Importantly, then, a postcolonial, paradigm can productively complicate history of Canadians by acknowledging that this history is not only shaped in Canadian context; rather, it is part of a larger history of imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism. If Cho's arguments gesture to benefits of a global, historical, and comparative framework, Larissa Lai's book, Slanting I, Imagining We, emphasizes perils of relying too heavily on a fixed notion of Canadian identity. Lai argues that tactic of strategic essentialism has become seriously problematic due to pressures of state incorporation currently informing Canadian Studies (6). Underlying these pressures is an investment in liberal multiculturalism that reinforces static notions of racial and national difference and works to recirculate logic of colonialism in newly embodied forms (23). This logic becomes all more insidious in a post-9/11 Canada, where narratives of citizenship, nationalism, and security have become intertwined in ways that reproduce Orientalist images of Others as unassimilable and anti-democratic foreigners. As Lai points out, 2010 Maclean's article entitled Too Asian suggests that the trope of 'yellow peril' has been reinvigorated in national imaginary (Lai 17). …

CYP2E1*1D regulatory polymorphism: association with alcohol and nicotine dependence.

CYP2E1 bioactivates environmental protoxins and metabolizes alcohol. CYP2E1 is induced by alcohol and cigarette smoking and may contribute to metabolic tolerance in alcoholics. The CYP2E1*1D polymorphism has been associated with greater CYP2E1 inducibility. One objective was to determine the frequency of the variant allele in eight ethnic groups. Further, the Canadian Native Indian, South-east Asian Canadian and Caucasian Canadian groups were stratified by alcohol and nicotine dependence (as measured by DSM-IV criteria) to examine the potential association of CYP2E1*1D with drug dependence. We found a significantly greater frequency of the CYP2E1*1D allele among Indo-Asian Canadians (0.31), Chinese Canadians (0.19), Taiwanese (0.20), Japanese Canadians (0.18), African Americans (0.13), African Canadians (0.10) and Canadian Native Indians (0.09) compared to Caucasian Canadians (0.02). Although the power of the association study was low among some subgroups, the CYP2E1*1D genotype (subjects with at least one variant allele) was associated with alcohol as well as nicotine dependence. Specifically, Canadian Native Indians dependent on nicotine alone or alcohol alone exhibited significantly greater CYP2E1*1D frequencies compared to non-drug dependent controls, while the variant frequency among Southeast Asians dependent on nicotine was greater than their non-drug dependent counterparts. We also found that CYP2E1*1D genotype was associated with significantly greater 3-hydroxycotinine per cigarette in African Americans. The variable frequency of CYP2E1*1D among ethnic groups suggests a greater risk for diseases putatively related to CYP2E1 in some non-Caucasian ethnic groups. The association of CYP2E1*1D with alcohol and nicotine dependence suggests that CYP2E1 may contribute to the development of these dependencies.

After Camp: Portraits in Midcentury Japanese American Life and Politics by Greg Robinson (review)

Reviewed by: After Camp: Portraits in Midcentury Japanese American Life and Politics by Greg Robinson Nancy Kang (bio) After Camp: Portraits in Midcentury Japanese American Life and Politics, by Greg Robinson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. Viii + 328 pp. $29.95 paper. ISBN 978-0-5202-7159-3. Readers who approach Greg Robinson’s After Camp: Portraits in Midcentury Japanese American Life and Politics hoping for a collection of Issei and Nisei survivor stories will be sorely disappointed. Only the third chapter (“Japantown Born and Reborn”), a triangulation of case studies based on resettlement experiences in New York, Detroit, and Los Angeles, inclines in that direction. There are, however, no sustained personal perspectives. Those seeking a non-chronological, “broad-based investigation” (2) of Japanese American pre- and postincarceration life will be gratified by the scope and conscientiousness of this ambitious historical project. After Camp resembles a patchwork quilt of discrete yet cohesive pieces. Divided thematically into five sections, the twelve chapters tackle such diverse issues as President Roosevelt’s plans for postwar resettlement and dispersal of former internees; the negotiation of citizenship values by Nisei (second-generation) intellectuals, politicians, artists, and activist collectives like the Japanese American Citizenship League (JACL); the imperatives of assimilation amid public mistrust and discrimination; and the pre- and postwar connections forged among Japanese Americans, Mexican Americans, and African Americans. There is no core thesis to be proven so much as a multidirectional reconstruction of the cultural milieus into which the former “enemy aliens” found themselves released and expected to thrive. Robinson’s writing is eminently readable, with ample examples conveyed in an accessible yet erudite style that would appeal to general readers as well as fellow historians. Particularly strong are the chapters devoted to the “uneasy” [End Page 104] and “fragile” alliance between African Americans and Japanese Americans from the mid-1950s onward (217). The author traces the evolution of black–Asian solidarity based on common experiences of oppression such as media-fueled racism, housing discrimination, and restricted access to schooling, employment, and property ownership. Robinson deftly calls attention to the precedent-setting cooperation between the JACL and the Legal Defense Fund of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Discussing Brown v. Board of Education (1954) in the context of Korematsu v. United States (1944) and Oyama v. California (1948), he expertly underscores how Japanese American legal struggles laid the foundation for postwar civil rights legislation at the national level. The author then dissects frictions that arose between the two groups as the 1960s progressed. Attitudes ranging from avoidance and indifference to “bitter disdain” (226) characterized Nisei reactions to African American civil rights agitation. Others remained loyal to the spirit of camaraderie and mutual striving. Challenges were exacerbated by model minority discourses in the media that pitted assimilated, seemingly unobtrusive Asian Americans against “troublemaking” racial Others. Added to the fray were disagreements over controversial legislation like California’s Proposition 14 (on housing discrimination based on race and religion) and the fallout from the Watts Riots of 1965. This urban upheaval resulted in significant damage to Nisei-owned businesses and corroded the spirit of intergroup dialogue and cooperation. Overall, these incidents acted to diminish the closeness that had germinated decades earlier when, in the wake of Executive Order 9066, a “disproportionate” amount of support was offered by black intellectuals and communities for their Japanese American compatriots (157). Although African American institutional leadership remained largely silent on the matter, voices such as Harvard-educated lawyer Hugh E. Macbeth, writers George Schuyler and Langston Hughes, singer Paul Robeson, reporter Erna P. Harris, and attorney Pauli Murray challenged the long-held misconception that these two populations were largely uninvolved in each other’s historical strivings (161). Robinson’s inquiries whet the scholarly appetite for further investigation on this underexamined topic. In the spirit of crossing barriers, boundaries, and borders, this U.S.-born Canadian academic displays a refreshingly hemispheric approach to the preand postwar struggles of the internees. He does not omit commentary on Japanese Canadian incarceration and also focuses an entire chapter on the career of McGill University sociologist Forrest LaViolette, whom he describes as a political “paradox” (4) and “weak reed in...

Rethinking Cooperatives: Japanese-Canadian Fishing Cooperatives

Drawing on a case study of Japanese Canadian fishing cooperatives on Canada’s West Coast at the beginning of the 20th century, this article examines Canadian cooperative historiography and discourse through post-colonial, anti-racist, Foucauldian and feminist frameworks. There has been an absence of Japanese Canadian and other minority ethnic groups’ experiences from the Canadian co- operative literature. We argue this lacunae is linked to the politics of knowledge production that has resulted in a narrow view of cooperatives. Fishing cooperatives enabled Japanese Canadians to successfully compete in a restricted market, and resist racial exclusion and discrimination. The article draws implications for reconceptualizing cooperative theory and practice.

“This is our Alabama”: Racial Segregation, Discrimination, and Violence in Tamio Wakayama's <em>Signs of Life</em>

This essay examines the civil rights photography of Tamio Wakayama. In 1963, Wakayama, a twenty-year-old Japanese Canadian philosophy student, left the University of Western Ontario and joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). A self-taught photographer, he shot pictures of SNCC’s grassroots organizing activities in Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama. Upon returning to Canada, Wakayama became the photographer for the Student Union for Peace Action (SUPA). In 1965 and 1966, he toured Canada taking pictures of SUPA’s community empowerment projects in urban slums and on reservations. The majority of photographs collected in Wakayama’s first photography book, Signs of Life (1969), come from his time as a field photographer for SNCC and SUPA. In this essay, I argue that Wakayama’s representations of race in Signs of Life encourage his audience to see civil rights activists’ demands for meaningful racial reform and redress as both legitimate and urgently necessary. Wakayama’s photographs of African American and Native struggles against racial segregation’s material and psychological effects reveal the US South and Canada’s shared histories of racialized dispossession, dehumanization, and discrimination.

Rebuild or Reconcile: American and Canadian Approaches to Redress for World War II Confinement

In 1988, the US and Canadian governments extended an official apology and issued financial compensation to persons of Japanese ancestry (Nikkei) for their removal from the West Coast and confinement without trial during World War II. Whereas many US public institutions have since participated in educational projects that emphasize the historical significance of Japanese American confinement, efforts to inform the public about the Japanese Canadian WWII experience have frequently encountered resistance. These developments stem from critical distinctions in the wartime and post-WWII Nikkei experience in Canada and the US, but also to point to important differences in American and Canadian approaches to addressing past wrongs.

Oral history off the record: toward an ethnography of practice

Foreword Steven High Introduction: Toward an Ethnography of Practice Anna Sheftel and Stacey Zembrzycki PART I: REFLECTIONS ON A LIFETIME OF LISTENING Section Introduction: Henry Greenspan 1. From California to Kufr Nameh and Back: Reflections on Forty Years of Feminist Oral History Sherna Berger Gluck 2. On and Off the in Shifting Times and Circumstances Julie Cruikshank and Tatiana Argounova 3. Politics and Praxis in Canadian Working-Class Oral History Joan Sangster PART II: ENCOUNTERS IN VULNERABILITY, FAMILIARITY, AND FRIENDSHIP Section Introduction: Hourig Attarian 4. The Vulnerable Listener Martha Norkunas 5. Listen and Learn: Familiarity and Feeling in the Oral History Interview Alan Wong 6. Going Places: Helping Youth with Refugee Experiences Take Their Stories Public Elizabeth Miller 7. Not Just Another Interviewee: Befriending a Holocaust Survivor Stacey Zembrzycki PART III: THE INTERSECTION OF ETHICS AND POLITICS Section Introduction: Leyla Neyzi 8. Can Hear Lois Now: Corrections to My Story of the Internment of Japanese Canadians - For the Record Pamela Sugiman 9. Third Parties in 'Third Spaces': Reflecting on the Role of the Translator in Oral History Interviews with Iraqi Diasporic Women Nadia Jones-Gailani 10. If you told me you wanted to talk about the '60s, wouldn't have called you back: Reflections on Collective Memory and the Practice of Oral History Nancy Janovicek 11. The Ethical Murk of Using Testimony in Oral Historical Research in South Africa Monica Eileen Patterson PART IV: CONSIDERING SILENCE Section Introduction: Erin Jessee 12. Toward an Ethics of Silence? Negotiating Off-the-Record Events and Identity in Oral History Alexander Freund 13. The Heart of Activism in Colombia: Reflections on Activism and Oral History Research in a Conflict Area Luis van Isschot 14. I don't fancy history very much: Reflections on Interviewee Recruitment and Refusal in Bosnia-Herzegovina Anna Sheftel Afterword Alessandro Portelli

Book Review: Oikawa, Cartographies of Violence: Japanese Canadian Women, Memory and the Subjects of the Internment, by John Price

Book Review: Oikawa, Cartographies of Violence: Japanese Canadian Women, Memory and the Subjects of the Internment, by John Price

Mona Oikawa, Cartographies of Violence : Japanese Canadian Women, Memory, and the Subjects of the Internment, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2012, 492 p.

Mona Oikawa, Cartographies of Violence : Japanese Canadian Women, Memory, and the Subjects of the Internment, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2012, 492 p.

Cartographies of Violence: Japanese Canadian Women, Memory, and the Subjects of the Internment by Mona Oikawa (review)

Cartographies of Violence: Japanese Canadian Women, Memory, and the Subjects of the Internment by Mona Oikawa (review)

Rite of Redemption.

Abstract Across Canada, people commemorate the lives of fallen soldiers by wearing red poppy flower pins for Remembrance Day on November 11. In recent years, Canadians have increasingly taken pride in the symbols used in Remembrance Day, such as poppy flowers and a poem called In Flanders Fields. The day celebrates the notions of sacrifice, belonging, and the nation state of Canada. Japanese Canadians also celebrate this holiday by wearing poppies and remembering the war dead. World War II, however, marked a turning point for the lives of second generation Japanese Canadians. The majority of them were interned in the “relocation camps” during the war years as “enemy aliens” irrespective of their Canadian citizenship status. This paper will describe a present-day Remembrance Day service held in a Japanese Canadian Christian congregation in Ontario, in which its veterans are remembered. The article argues that this ritual of remembrance reverses the historical and social location of Japanese Canadians from those who were the victims of the war to those who were contributors to it, enabling Japanese Canadians to assert their rightful position in Canadian society. This paper also includes a discussion of the author’s personal transformation of historical consciousness about World War II and being Japanese in Canada during this research.