Children of Japantown
On this much quieter Canada Day - amid the coronavirus pandemic and a growing conversation about systemic racism - I’d like to call attention to the darker side of our nation’s history.
The above photo depicts a group of Japanese children gathered on a patch of grass in downtown Vancouver in 1937. These children were likely the children or grandchildren of Vancouver’s earliest Japanese residents who came to the city to work in sawmills, canneries and on fishing boats. They set up a vibrant Japanese neighbourhood centred around today’s Oppenheimer Park. This area became known as “Little Tokyo” and it had the biggest concentration of ethnic Japanese in Canada.
Vancouver’s Japanese community were subject to all kinds of racism that caused significant hardship. Despite this, they worked hard to integrate into Canadian society and prove their loyalty to Canada. About 200 Japanese men from Vancouver tried to enlist with the Canadian Army in the first world war. The B.C. government rejected them, fearing that if they were allowed to fight for Canada, they would demand the vote.
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the Japanese community still struggled to gain acceptance in British Columbia. While denied the vote, they were able to compete on an equal footing with white Canadians on the baseball field. In both photos, there are little boys sporting baseball caps - I’m guessing they were fans of the Vancouver Asahi, an all-Nikkei team based at Oppenheimer Park. They won the league championship five years in a row and were celebrated all around British Columbia.
A few years after these photos were taken, Japan attacked Pearl Harbour. Canada entered the war and everything changed. Fearing a Japanese invasion, the public demanded the removal of all Japanese people from the coast so they could not act as spies or saboteurs for the Japanese. In 1942, all Japanese people in B.C. had their property confiscated and were sent to internment camps in the Rocky Mountains..
Little Tokyo ceased to be a distinct Japanese area. Although some Japanese returned to the area after the war, the community never revived as the properties confiscated by the Canadian government were never returned.
I hope these colourized photos sheds some light on one of the most disgraceful events in Canadian history.
