Voices Raised in Protest: Defending North American Citizens of Japanese Ancestry, 1942–49 (review)

Since the 1981 publication of Obasan, Joy Kogawa’s acclaimed novel chronicling the expulsion, internment, and dispersal of Japanese Canadians during and after World War II, readers have puzzled over the memorandum excerpted at the end of the novel. This memorandum, written by three white men on behalf of the Cooperative Committee on Japanese Canadians, implores the government to cease the post-war deportation of Canadians of Japanese origin. That this archival source is given the final word in a novel mired in issues of minority self-representation has unsettled many with respect to the significance of its inclusion. Some readers find closure in the newfound self-awareness exhibited by the novel’s protagonist in the final pages. Yet Roy Miki suggests that the memorandum thwarts any victory in self-representation by “clos[ing] the novel with Japanese Canadians framed as the ‘other’ with no voice and language, and who therefore have to be spoken for by white males.”⁵ Nevertheless, the document also testifies to the efforts of Anglo-Canadians who organized throughout the 1940s to defend the civil rights of Japanese Canadians. Stephanie Bangarth’s Voices Raised in Protest tells this important, though largely unacknowledged, history of white liberal advocacy, both in Canada and in the United States.

Bangarth’s book stands apart from numerous articles and book-length studies that examine the internment of Japanese Canadians and Japanese Americans during World War II or the redress movements of the 1980s. Most distinctive are its transnational Canada–US scope and its focus on predominantly non-Japanese wartime advocacy groups. By employing a comparative method, Bangarth brings into sharp relief the many similarities—and crucial differences—in policies directed at Japanese Canadians and Japanese Americans in the aftermath of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The book’s focus on hitherto overlooked white advocacy groups aims to demonstrate that in times of national crisis, interracial and interethnic solidarity are neither exceptional nor insignificant.

The book devotes the bulk of its attention to two non-Japanese advocacy bodies that “led the offensive in both countries” (p. 189). In the United States, this body was the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU); in Canada, the similarly white, male, and liberal Cooperative Committee on Japanese Canadians (CCJC)—the same body responsible for the memorandum that concludes Obasan. While its objectives evolved and expanded during and after the war, the ACLU focused much of its energy on interrogating the military necessity of removal, assessing constitutional violations, and sponsoring test cases that went before the US Supreme Court. The CCJC, lacking recourse to a similar bill of rights or other constitutional protections, directed its efforts toward protesting the forced expatriation of citizens of Japanese ancestry and their dependents by appealing both to the Supreme Court of Canada and to the public at large. Bangarth demonstrates how these efforts, along with the cooperation of other Japanese and non-Japanese organizations, contributed to expanding the fledgling discourses of human rights and civil liberties in North America.

The biggest strength of Voices Raised in Protest is its comparative methodological approach. Without overemphasizing the coordination of policies in Canada and the United States, Bangarth is adept at demonstrating the porosity of the border in times of crisis and at exposing the limits of racialized citizenship in North America. The main weakness of this carefully researched book is that at times the interracial solidarity of advocacy groups seems overstated. In particular, Bangarth’s optimistic account of trade unions’ wartime support of Japanese North Americans obfuscates a long history of anti-Asian labour union activism along the Pacific coast in the early twentieth century. Another tension surrounds the assimilationist and ethnocentric tendencies of the ACLU and the CCJC. Neither organization directly opposed either expulsion or incarceration; both actively promoted eastward dispersal and resettlement; and the ACLU excluded Japanese Americans from membership. While Bangarth repeatedly acknowledges these shortcomings as blind spots of a historical moment, it is not always clear whose interests...