The Triumph of Citizenship: The Japanese and Chinese in Canada, 1941 – 67 (review)

This is the third instalment in Patricia Roy’s trilogy on the experiences of Chinese and Japanese immigrants and their descendants in Canada. While British Columbia was the focus of her first two volumes, this book’s treatment of their story during and after the Second World War adopts a national perspective, not least because of the well-known displacement of Japanese Canadians from their centres of settlement along the bc coast. The book is not a systematic comparative history of all aspects of the two groups’ fortunes during this period, however. Instead, Roy concentrates on the interrelations between politics and (largely white English-Canadian) public opinion and how these shaped and reshaped attitudes towards her two groups of study and, ultimately, the place of ‘race’ in Canadian immigration policy and notions of citizenship. Through the use of a wide range of sources (mainly provincial and federal departments’ records, private papers of politicians, newspapers, and associational records), she thoroughly and effectively charts the long trudge towards full citizenship for both Chinese- and Japanese-Canadians that ended only in 1967 with the introduction of an immigration policy in which race was no longer a consideration.

Of the seven main chapters, five concentrate on Japanese Canadians, and for understandable reasons. The first half of the book traces a rising climate of fear among white British Columbians about the possible arrival of Japanese bombs after the fall of Pearl Harbor, Singapore, and Hong Kong, which in turn translated into a general atmosphere of hostility towards the Japanese residents of the province and their locally born descendants. Long-held white assumptions about the ‘British way of life’ and the ‘Oriental mind’ now mixed with accusations of disloyal ‘fifth-column’ activity, eventually resulting in the upheaval of the Japanese to the provincial interior and points further east. While a grudging acceptance of the Japanese was the norm in their new locations, Chinese-Canadians’ wartime experiences were far less dramatic, and their wearing of national buttons in public served further to convince the majority that not all ‘Orientals’ were the same.

With the cessation of hostilities, a new Canadian Citizenship Act granted Chinese Canadians the vote and in 1947 repealed the 1923 act banning immigration from China. In 1949, Japanese Canadians regained the freedom to move within Canada. New conceptions of citizenship and human rights and a general revulsion of racist Nazi ideology did not immediately herald a new era of civic inclusion for the Chinese and Japanese in Canada, however. Even with Canadian citizenship, they could not sponsor as wide a range of relatives as could white Europeans, and those stranded in Asia during the war with family members in Canada had difficulty returning. These frustrations, and the political efforts made to counter them, are recounted in the second half of the book. In an effort to improve conditions for family reunification, tireless Chinese lobbyists such as Foon Sien contended with persistent fears of a new ‘flood’ of immigration from Asia (not helped by newspaper headlines of Chinese immigrant racketeering in 1960), while economic prosperity in postwar Japan reduced the attractiveness of Canada as an emigrant destination. Though these later chapters highlight increasingly liberal attitudes and sympathies towards the Chinese and Japanese by white Canadians and their politicians, a mixture of caution and inaction by successive governments clouded prospects for immigration policy reform. ‘Opening the gates’ could still be seen as problematic, and Roy’s use of political cartoons is suggestive of how politicians’ instincts did not always gel with more widely held opinions. But politicians were not the only influential state-based actors in this regard. As Roy notes, officials in the Department of Immigration ‘did not share the same liberal ideas as the politicians,’ offering useful insight on how long-held visions of a white Canada enjoying ‘British-style’ freedoms were not easily turned around. These bureaucratic dimensions of the history of Canadian immigration policy emerge as factors of...