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

Landscapes of Injustice, edited by Jordan Stanger-Ross, is an excellent and important collection of essays about the internment and dispossession of Japanese Canadians during and after World War II. This book builds upon histories of Japanese Canadian internment. Yet, to date, there have been few studies as comprehensive and detailed as this one, and none that focus so specifically on the devastation brought on by the dispossession of homes and belongings. The book is particularly timely and urgent, since, as the editor, Jordan Stanger-Ross, states in the epilogue, millions of people are currently being displaced, and "the politics of security, migration, and race [are] perpetually entwined" (485). The book addresses hard questions about how states and citizens can protect human rights during times of national insecurity, and what is at stake when they fail to do so.

Based on an impressive array of archival materials, photographs, personal interviews, and oral histories, and balancing personal stories with public ones, Landscapes of Injustice demonstrates how the Canadian state did not serve to protect but rather actively and intentionally broke apart Japanese Canadian families by violently dismantling their homes, their livelihoods, and their goods. The authors explain that the Canadian state was not monolithic in its actions. They offer nuanced readings of dispossession, in part by drawing upon a "Foucaultian interpretation of power" (189) that understands the complexities of power and its intertwinement with structures and systems.

Within those systems, particular individuals were responsible for creating and enacting policies that facilitated dispossession. Chapter five, for instance, provides a detailed account of how Glenn McPherson, the executive assistant to the Custodian of Enemy Property, ensured the widespread sale of Japanese Canadian property and was directly responsible for it. Analyzing hundreds of archived letters between the Nagata family and offices of the Canadian state, and tracing the family's moves from Vancouver to Edmonton to Toronto, chapter six outlines how dispossession did not happen under a single and unified administrative state, but rather through various and ongoing interactions between individuals and administrators. It was a process, in other words, that involved continual and sustained actions. In this chapter, the authors depict the Nagatas not only as victims but also as agents who were motivated to act against their dispossession and who made decisions within the confines of their circumstances.

The book goes well beyond examining the movement of Japanese Canadians from their homes. It examines how their belongings were sold too, and it takes into account not only the fiscal impact of that theft, but also the emotional, spiritual, and familial impact of loss. It theorizes on the meanings of home, what it means to move and to settle, and how colonialism is evident in the history of Japanese Canadians and their movement within Canada. Chapter seven explains how the Canadian state mismanaged and auctioned Japanese Canadian property in the 1940s, even as officials promised Japanese Canadians that they were keeping their belongings safe. This understudied part of the story is important, as it delineates the explicit racism in both systems and individuals. "Every two weeks for nearly three years," the authors note, "hundreds of people attended the auction of Japanese Canadians' belongings in the Fraser Valley" (213). Drawing upon philosophers such as John Dewey, chapter seven analyzes the devaluation of the goods, the bureaucracy of the Canadian state, and the haphazard ways in which Canadian officials stole and sold properties and items that were not their own.

Landscapes of Injustice analyzes and critiques the legalities surrounding the dispossession of Japanese Canadians, and so the book is of interest to legal scholars as well as historians. As the authors note in chapter eight, the story of Japanese Canadians' dispossession is one of "law's capacity to carry multiple meanings—protection and coercion, trust and duplicity, justice and...