Incarceration or internment?: Japanese Canadians reflect on the choice of words

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Grace Eiko Thomson has fond memories of being a child in Vancouver, awestruck by the colorful flower shops and confectionaries that lined Powell Street and sold sugary ginger candy in a cultural enclave of migrant tradespeople, business owners and their children.

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“Japantown was thriving,” recalled the 88-year-old. “Every morning, I waved goodbye to my father who wore a three-piece suit to work at the docks as a buyer of codfish.”

The family’s future looked bright. “My parents were happy to have migrated to Vancouver in their 20s. They never imagined they’d be uprooted,” she said.

Shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, Canada stripped Thomson’s family and around 22,000 other Japanese Canadians — 70 per cent of whom were born in the country — of not only their homes, possessions and businesses but also detained them in camps as prisoners .

Although the forced wartime exile has historically been referred to as “internment,” many Japanese Canadians have been debating the use of the term.

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The growing preference is to refer to the seven-year upheaval as “incarceration” because of the term’s use in the US, said Susanne Tabata, the director of the National Association of Japanese Canadians Redress project, which BC committed $100 million to last week to fund new health, wellness, education and culture programs.

“America calls it ‘incarceration’ because the Japanese descendants born and detained there were considered legal citizens by 1924. By the time the war ended, they got their homes back, and they were free — unlike those imprisoned in Canada.”

One of the arguments was that internment had been used to describe detaining foreign nationals caught in the US when the war started and shouldn’t be used to describe locking up American citizens.

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Organizations pushing for change include the Japanese American National Museum, the Japanese American Citizens League, the Asian American Journalists Association and Seattle-based Densho, a non-profit whose declared mission is to spread awareness about the treatment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War.

A Vancouver proponent of the term “incarceration,” Mary Kitigawa, is one of 6,000 British Columbians of Japanese descent who lived to tell the tale of the displacement.

At age seven, the Canadian-born child was removed from her family’s large estate on Salt Spring Island and moved to a barn in Vancouver’s Hastings Park.

In March 1941, Ottawa required all Japanese Canadians to register with the government based on a recommendation from the Special Committee on Orientals, a federally appointed advisory group. In effect, this declared Japanese Canadians to be enemy aliens.

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Because of the suffering she and hundreds of other Japanese Canadians experienced, such as being forced to defecate in barn troughs and sleep in bunk beds amid the feces, Kitigawa prefers the word “incarceration.”

“Calling it anything but incarceration would be to continue that false, racist narrative that we were potentially dangerous foreign enemies,” said the 86-year-old.

By the time Kitigawa’s family was freed, four years after the war, her family’s property had been sold.

“I lost my childhood,” said the Tsawwassen resident. “I still feel the pain and suffering of my grandparents and parents.”

Thomson, who was born in Canada, said she never doubted her identity as a Canadian. “I thought I was the same as everybody else.”

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However, she uses the term “internment” because “that’s what it was we, as Japanese Canadians, were treated like by the Canadian government. We were called aliens and denied the right to vote until 1948.”

From 1942 to 1945, her family was unable to leave the BC Interior’s self-supported Minto Mines incarceration site without permission from the RCMP.

“We weren’t even allowed to own a car,” Thomson said.

In the four years after the war, Japanese Canadians were further banned from returning to the Coast.

“We were given two options: either move east of the Rockies or be deported to war-torn Japan,” she said.

Thomson’s family moved to Manitoba with her father taking jobs at sawmills in rural areas for weeks at a time in order to support his family.

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“The only time I ever saw him wear a suit after internment was for a funeral,” Thomson said. Only in her 50s did she return to Vancouver, following her in the footsteps of her parents who moved back to the coast in 1962.

Thomson hopes BC’s promised funding will be used to spread awareness about the rich cultural history of Vancouver, which was populated with 8,328 people of Japanese origin before their displacement.

“I want people to be told the story of the families and communities who were displaced, both the First Nations and Japanese Canadians,” she said.

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