UBC Press Blog

Defending North American Citizens of Japanese Ancestry, 1942-1949

Stephanie Bangarth, 2008, Chapter 4, p.113-115, Chapter 6, p.183-184.

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.

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The Japanese and Chinese in Canada, 1941- 67

Patricia E. Roy, 2007, Introduction, p. 4, Conclusion p. 303-305, 309.

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.

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Chinese Canadian and Chinese American Political Mobilization

Shanti Fernando, 2006, Chapter 6, p. 127-130.

Author’s Comment:
Conversations about Equality and Hope

My book Race and the City is a story found in a framework created by history and scholarly studies and theories about racialization in Canada and the US. The story inside this framework is born of many conversations with leading members of the Chinese American and Chinese Canadian communities who wanted to share their community and personal stories. These were not stories of despair but stories of hope for a better, more equal future. They were generous in sharing with me the pride in gains and accomplishments as well as the frustration with barriers they continue to face. The goal of many of these groups was to “get into the conversation” of politics and make others aware of the common interests they have with all other groups. The commonality of interests is something that I hope that we can celebrate while still acknowledging histories and differences. I think that my book calls on all of us to be vigilant in remembering that common ground and protecting equality gains within that common ground. I always ask my students to do what I believe to be the most important thing in life which is to put themselves in someone else’s position. This is the only way to gain understanding. Political mobilization is not a narrow concept.  It can be protest, interest group or community group involvement or just the ability to contribute to a conversation in a way that affirms the equality of racialized minorities and asks for others to respect and support that equality. It is about self awareness. Awareness of how issues of race affect us all.

Excerpt, 2006, Chapter 6, p. 127-130.

I have attempted to define the place of racialized minorities in both a Canadian and an American context and have tried to articulate how racialization has denied them full access to political participation and substantive citizenship. I chose urban multicultural settings, where “governance units can best encourage and enable the active participation of citizens in raising issues, shaping the political agenda, making decisions, and implementing them,” because these sites had the greatest concentration of racialized minorities and theoretically had the most easily accessible political system. Continue reading…