Dominion and the Rising Sun
Canada Encounters Japan, 1929-41
John Meehan, 2004, Prologue, p. 1-3
The hot, humid weather did little to stifle the jubilant mood that 1 July afternoon in Shibuya ward, Tokyo. For the hundred or so well-wishers gathered outside the new residence of His Majesty’s Canadian representative to Japan, Dominion Day, 1929 seemed unlike any other. Traders and diplomats mingled with missionaries, teachers and social workers, reflecting the diversity of Canada’s involvement in the Orient. A hush came over the crowd as A.E. Bryan, the president of the newly formed Canadian Association, rose to address the gathering. He opened the ceremony by welcoming Hugh Keenleyside, who had arrived in May as chargé d’affaires. Then, Dr. D.R. MacKenzie, the longest serving Canadian missionary in Japan, spoke to the crowd, impressing all with his sense of history. He surveyed Canada’s past, from Cartier’s search for a passage to Asia to the dominion’s newfound diplomatic status, and concluded the legation was an idea whose time had come. After a brief speech by Keenleyside and a phonograph recording of prime minister Mackenzie King’s remarks at the recent Peace Tower carillon dedication, the ceremony reached its finale. For the first time in Asia, Canada’s red ensign was hoisted atop the legation as all assembled sang ‘O Canada’ and ‘God Save the King’.
Mrs. Nishimura came to Canada from Japan after her husband died. She hesitated to leave her friends and home in a small coastal town, but her daughter and son-in-law in Victoria convinced her that she would be happy living with them, and they could help her as she grew older. When she first arrived, at age seventy-six, she did much of the cooking and worked in the small garden, a useful contribution because her daughter and son-in-law both spent very long hours in their corner store. She sometimes visited her son, who lived in Vancouver. Once a week when the family went to the Buddhist church, she was able to chat with other older women, some of whom lived nearby and came to see her. One friend convinced her to go to English classes at the church, where she learned enough to carry on a very basic conversation.
The Canadian authorities were alerted and waiting, having been informed by British consular officers in Japan of the steamer’s progress from Moji to Yokohama and of her departure for Victoria on Saturday, 2 May. They knew Gurdit Singh’s name, although not much else about him, and they had seen and translated one of his advertisements or placards which an informant, cultivated by Hopkinson, had taken from the gurdwara in Vancouver. Two days after the Komagata Maru left Yokohama, Malcolm Reid filed a wireless message asking for her expected time of arrival. The message was to be relayed by the Empress of India, then five days out from Vancouver, but the Komagata Maru, carrying no wireless, approached in silence.
Vancouver’s Japanese community developed around Powell Street because Powell Street was near Hastings Mill, the otasuke gaisha, where many Japanese worked. Parallel to Powell Street one block inland was Cordova Street, which until the early 1890s was Vancouver’s choice residential street. The adjacent streets offered hotels, boarding houses, saloons, shops, and entertainment houses. Then, during the depression of the 1890s, the small merchants along Cordova and Powell went bankrupt, the buildings emptied, and the Japanese slowly moved in, establishing their own community. After 1908, with an increase in female immigration from Japan, Powell became more settled. In April 1911, a writer for British Columbia Magazine described Powell Street, noting that it hardly appeared to be a Japanese neighbourhood:
From 1945 to 1947, Muriel Kitagawa wrote numerous articles exhorting the Japanese Canadian community to respond to injustice. She believed that if those who advocated the denial of Nikkei rights remained unopposed, other groups would soon feel the sting of oppression, with the wholesale curtailment of their human rights. Although the leading Canadian and American public advocates for the Nikkei were almost exclusively white males from religious or professional backgrounds, they were not alone. American and Canadian Nikkei did not sit passively while others defended their rights. Instead, they typically expressed their activism through the organizations that represented them: the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) and, in Canada, the Japanese Canadian Citizens League (JCCL), the Japanese Canadian Citizens Council (JCCC), and the Japanese Canadian Citizens for Democracy (JCCD). The Nikkei also conveyed their views through their community publications. In the United States, the Pacific Citizen, the so-called mouthpiece of the JACL, was perhaps the most important of these. In Canada, the New Canadian, initially Vancouver-based, voiced the opinions of the JCCL; the Toronto-based Nisei Affairs promulgated the largely Nisei views of the JCCD. These newspapers acted as important vessels for the Nikkei in North America, facilitating awareness of developments in both nations.
In 1968 Premier W.A.C. Bennett of British Columbia took Mayor Peter Wing of Kamloops, the president of the Union of British Columbia Municipalities, to a federal-provincial constitutional conference. While in Ottawa, Wing may have met another Kamloops native and fellow graduate of its high school, Thomas Shoyama, a senior economic adviser to the government. A quarter-century earlier their presence in any governmental role would have been unlikely. In 1941 Wing, born in 1914, was an active member of the Kamloops Board of Trade; Shoyama, born in 1916, had graduated from the University of British Columbia with a degree in economics and commerce, but until fellow Japanese Canadians appointed him editor of their newspaper in Vancouver he had worked as a labourer in a pulp mill.
What constitutes an “Asian Canadian”? Can the concept represent the broad spectrum of individuals and communities it is literally supposed to represent? What exactly does it mean to be “Asian Canadian” culturally? Conventional notions of ethnicity, which emphasize one’s cultural heritage, cannot adequately explain self-fashioned identities such as “Asian Canadian” or “Asian American.” Since its conception in the late 1960s Asian American Studies has conducted extensive research on the formations of Asian American communities and, in particular, on the formation of Asian American identity. Without a specific institutional space similar to Asian American Studies, Canadian studies of the Asian population in Canada have been restricted by single-discipline approaches and narrow conceptual frameworks. Asian Canadians as objects of study are largely treated as distinctive, separate ethnic groups, and their identities are analyzed mostly in terms of their maintenance vis-à-vis the dominant culture. Literary scholars’ recent engagement with “Asian Canadian literature” and “Asian North American literature” indicates a breakaway from conventional conceptual frames and approaches.
