From 1942 to 1949, Canada forcibly relocated and interned over 22,000 Japanese Canadians—comprising over 90% of the total Japanese Canadian population—from British Columbia on the grounds of national security. The majority were Canadian citizens by birth and were targeted based on their ancestry. This decision followed the events of the Empire of Japan's war in the Pacific against the Western Allies, such as the invasion of Hong Kong, the attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, and the Fall of Singapore which led to the Canadian declaration of war on Japan during World War II. Similar to the actions taken against Japanese Americans in neighbouring United States, Japanese Canadians were also subjected to government-enforced curfews and interrogations, job and property losses, and forced repatriation to Japan.
From shortly after the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor until 1949, Japanese Canadians were stripped of their homes and businesses, then sent to internment camps and farms in British Columbia as well as other parts of Canada, mostly towards the interior. The internees had their property seized and sold, including houses, farms, businesses, fishing boats, motor vehicles and personal belongings. The proceeds of these sales were used to pay for their basic needs of the internees during the internment.
In August 1944, Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King announced that Japanese Canadians were to be moved east out of the British Columbia Interior. The official policy stated that Japanese Canadians must move east of the Rocky Mountains or be deported to Japan following the end of the war. By 1947, many Japanese Canadians had been granted exemption to enter the no-entry zone. It was not until April 1, 1949, that all Japanese Canadians were granted freedom of movement and could re-enter the "protected zone" along British Columbia's coast.
On September 22, 1988, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney delivered an apology, and the Canadian government announced a compensation package, one month after President Ronald Reagan made similar gestures in the United States following the internment of Japanese Americans. The package for interned Japanese Canadians included $21,000 to each surviving internee, and the reinstatement of Canadian citizenship to those who were deported to Japan. Following Mulroney's apology, the Japanese Canadian Redress Agreement was established in 1988, along with the Japanese Canadian Redress Foundation (JCRF; 1988–2002), to issue redress payments for internment victims, with the intent of funding education.
The tension between Canadians and Japanese immigrants to Canada existed long before the outbreak of World War II. Starting as early as 1858 with the influx of Asian immigrants during the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush, beliefs and fears about Asian immigrants began to affect the populace in British Columbia (BC).
Canadian sociologist Forrest La Violette reported in the 1940s that these early sentiments had often been "organized around the fear of an assumed low standard of living [and] out of fear of Oriental cultural and racial differences." It was a common prejudiced belief within British Columbia that both Japanese and Chinese immigrants were stealing jobs away from white Canadians. Canadian academic Charles H. Young concluded that many Canadians argued based on this fear that "Oriental labour lowers the standard of living of White groups." It was also argued that Asian immigrants were content with a lower standard of living. The argument was that many Chinese and Japanese immigrants in BC lived in unsanitary conditions and were not inclined to improve their living space, thereby proving their inferiority and their unwillingness to become truly Canadian. Violette refuted this claim by stating that, while Japanese and Chinese immigrants did often have poor living conditions, both of the groups were hindered in their attempt to assimilate due to the difficulty they had in finding steady work at equal wages.
In reference to Japanese Canadians specifically, human geographer Audrey Kobayashi argues that prior to the war, racism "had defined their communities since the first immigrants arrived in the 1870s." Starting in 1877 with Manzo Nagano—a 19-year-old sailor who was the first Japanese person to officially immigrate to Canada, and entering the salmon-exporting business—the Japanese were quick to integrate themselves into Canadian industries. Some European-descended Canadians felt that, while the Chinese were content with being "confined to a few industries", the Japanese were infiltrating all areas of industry and competing with white workers. This sense of unease among white Canadians was worsened by the growing rate of Japanese fishermen in the early 1900s.
Japanese immigrants were also accused of being resistant to assimilation into British Canadian society, because of Japanese-language schools, Buddhist temples, and low intermarriage rates, among other examples. It was asserted that the Japanese had their own manner of living, and that many who had become naturalized in Canada did so to obtain fishing licences rather than out of a desire to become Canadian. These arguments reinforced the idea that the Japanese remained strictly loyal to Japan.
The situation was exacerbated when, in 1907, the United States began prohibiting Japanese immigrants from accessing the mainland US through Hawaii, resulting in a massive influx (over 7,000 as compared to 2,042 in 1906) of Japanese immigrants into British Columbia. Largely as a result, on August 12 that year, a group of Vancouver labourers formed an anti-Asiatic league, known as the Asiatic Exclusion League, with its membership numbering "over five hundred". On September 7, some 5,000 people marched on Vancouver City Hall in support of the League, where they had arranged a meeting with presentations from both local and American speakers. By the time of the meeting, it was estimated that at least 25,000 people had arrived at the City Hall and, following the speakers, the crowd broke out in rioting, marching into Chinatown and Japantown.
The rioters stormed through Chinatown first, breaking windows and smashing store fronts. Afterwards, the rioters turned to the Japanese-Canadian neighbourhood. Alerted by the previous rioting, Japanese Canadians in Little Tokyo were able to repel the mob without any serious injury or loss of life. After the riot, the League and other nativist groups used their influence to push the government into an arrangement similar to the United States' Gentlemen's Agreement, limiting the number of passports given to male Japanese immigrants to 400 per year. Women were not counted toward the quota, so "picture brides", women who married by proxy and immigrated to Canada to join (and in many cases, meet for the first time) their new husbands, became common after 1908. The influx of female immigrants—and soon after, Canadian-born children—shifted the population from a temporary workforce to a permanent presence, and Japanese-Canadian family groups settled throughout British Columbia and southern Alberta.
Japan during World War I was an ally of the United Kingdom and opinions of Japanese Canadians improved slightly. Some Japanese Canadians enlisted in the Canadian Forces. On the home front, many businesses began hiring groups that had been underrepresented in the workforce (including women, Japanese immigrants, and Yugoslavian and Italian refugees who had fled to Canada during the war) to help fill the increasing demands of Britain and its allies overseas. Businesses that had previously been opposed to doing so were now more than happy to hire Japanese Canadians as there was "more than enough work for all". However, by the end of the war, soldiers returning home to find their jobs filled by others, including Japanese immigrants, were outraged. While they had been fighting in Europe, the Japanese had established themselves securely in many business and were now, more than ever, perceived as a threat to white workers. "'Patriotism' and 'Exclusion' became the watchwords of the day."