Vancouver drops plan to name govt. building after racist politician
In a major victory for Japanese-Canadians and others who don’t like honoring politicians with racist pasts, Canadian authorities recently decided to drop their plans to name a government building after former Cabinet Minister Howard Charles Green:
Green is notorious to Nikkei in Canada for his racist attitudes during the World War II era. The National Association of Japanese Canadians (NAJC) notes statements he made during the war, such as, “Orientals should be excluded from Canada” and “we won’t have Japs in the province.”
In defense of the proposed building name, many, including Conservative Senator Hugh Segal and Green’s family, argued that Green’s views were consistent with the time period.
The NJAC, however, feels that Green’s racism was exceptional in its malevolence.
Grace Aiko Thompson noted that when the Canadian government forcibly removed and incarcerated 21,000 Japanese Canadians, Green felt it was insufficient and called for their deportation. Thompson, the president of the Greater Vancouver Japanese Canadian Citizens Association for Human Rights, added that she was troubled that Green never publicly reconsidered his racist views or issued an apology.
Great work, NJAC!
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From what I understand, the official treatment of Japanese Canadians during (and after) the war was in many respects worse than than of Japanese Americans at the time, despite the fact that it was the Americans who took a direct hit at Pearl Harbor.
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Why did some of the Canadians treat the Japanese badly when they weren’t involved with the Pearl Harbor incident?
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I have read that the prime minister of Canada said, “It is lucky that it was the yellow monkey who were attacked with A-bomb!” or so at that time.
This tale would be transmitted like following video that Korean made the tragedy an attraction of party.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gX-JbBYkiZ8
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Please recheck your sources, no comment of this sort were ever noted from a Canadian pm and to put it in direct quotations is wholly misleading.
However, the political climate of the time were indeed very anti-japanese, mainly because it’s a democracy and the people saw the Japanese (or even asians in general) as the enemy. I find the most poignant moment to be:
“The bitterness… the anguish is complete. You who deal in lifeless figures, files and statistics can never measure the depth of hurt and outrage dealt out to those of us who love this land. It is because we’re Canadians that we protest this violation of our birthright. -Japanese Canadian citizen, 1942
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Kazu: That’s a good question. While the political reason for such treatment can possibly be traced to the close links between Canada and the U.K. (whose territories – such as Hong Kong – were attacked in the Pacific), the underlying reason is quite simply the sort of racist attitude commonly held by people in British Columbia at the time, as exemplified by the subject matter of this post. Interestingly, British Columbia has changed considerably since that time. Despite Canada’s two national languages being English and French, the main tourist drag in Vancouver features only two languages in many stores: English and Japanese.
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You need to understand, Kazu, that while Canada was never officially at war with Japan, many thousands of Canadian soldiers fought in the war, many in the Pacific Theatre, and many hundreds of those were held in POW camps in Japan, abused, tortured and never seen again.
Does that excuse the Canadian Government of maltreating Civilians, some of them 2nd or even 3rd generation Canadians, by virtue of their genetic ancestry? No
Even if the move to Internment camps seemed justified at the time (and I’m not arguing whether it was or not) under no circumstances should innocent people have lost all their property and belongings. Someone profited, most likely the misguided government.
You need to understand the situation in Context– it was not “simply” a matter of racism. On some level, I’m sure the Gov’t thought they were protecting the Japanese-Canadians…
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The notion of protecting the Japanese-Canadians at the time may have been valid to some degree, as it was in the United States, but Japanese-Americans – in contrast to Japanese-Canadians – got their property back after the war and were allowed to return to the west coast.
One thing that has always puzzled me was that – as far as I know (I could be wrong) – people of Japanese descent in Hawaii were not negatively affected in the same way that people of Japanese descent were on the mainland during the war. I suppose the logistics of rounding them up were too overwhelming.
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Yes–I don’t know as much about the Hawaiian-American angle–perhaps after Pearl Harbour it seemed as if the damage was done, and no extra resources to create a police state– I’m not too sure. You’re right, it is odd– they seemed to have under-reacted and in the PNW we overreacted.
Not a part of Canadian history I’m terribly proud of,,.,,
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You know these groups in Canada and in the US are quick to point out discriminiation against Japanese. But in Japan, we don’t have such groups to point out all the discriminiation and racist crap that gets heaped on foreigners everyday.
The Japanese go to other countries and are suddenly offended when they are discriminated against but don’t lift a finger to fight discrimination in Japan.
Point in case is the fact that Ishihara (Xeno-Hara) is still the Gov of Tokyo.
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Helly:
There are activists like Debito out there, fighting for the rights of people who aren’t ethnically Japanese. Perhaps the “non-Japanese” community in Japan need to better organize themselves to fight discrimination, as those Japanese-Canadian groups did.
Another point: Many of those Japanese-Canadians have been in Canada for generations and there are a great many Canadian citizens of Japanese ethnicity. On the reverse side, there are very few non-Asians who have decided to permanently settle in Japan, so they are still somewhat invisible to the Japanese. Maybe in a few decades it will become more obvious that such people exist….
Helly: You seem to be making a lot of assumptions in the form of blanket statements and conflating different issues. (Without getting into details, the comment by James is a good one.) You seem to be taking a rather defensive stance in a post that hardly seems to invite such a prickly attitude. Just saying….
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Debito has received death threats for fighting for the right to take his daughter to a public bath. I see no indication whatsoever that the Japanese-Canadian groups concerned experience anything of the sort. On the contrary, they were listened to, had their concerns addressed and the building’s name was changed.
Howard Green made these comments during wartime, 60 years ago, and he has been dead for almost 20 years. Right now, in the 21st century, Japan has Shintaro Ishihara, governor of an area with almost the same population as Canada, who is as bad or worse, and he doesn’t get censured, he gets re-elected with landslide victories.
I think Helly has a valid point. Japan does lag woefully when it comes to respect and rights for its minorities.
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“Howard Green made these comments during wartime, 60 years ago, and he has been dead for almost 20 years. Right now, in the 21st century, Japan has Shintaro Ishihara, governor of an area with almost the same population as Canada, who is as bad or worse, and he doesn’t get censured, he gets re-elected with landslide victories.
I think Helly has a valid point. Japan does lag woefully when it comes to respect and rights for its minorities.”
I beg to differ. You are right in that the Japanese-Canadians got what they lobbied for. But this post is about something that happened to Japanese-Canadians in the past. They and their descendants have no relevant ties to anything happening in Japanese to foreigners in that country and can hardly be expected to give a damn about what the governor of Tokyo says and does.
In any case, when one considers that Japan is not a country built on immigration, I would say that the Japanese treat foreigners (especially those of fairer skin) relatively well. It is true that there is much room for improvement, but that’s a topic for a different post.
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I meant to write: “They and their descendants have no relevant ties to anything happening in JAPAN to foreigners in that country and can hardly be expected to give a damn about what the governor of Tokyo says and does.”
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Let me also summarise what I believe Helly’s position to be: Japanese-Canadians should stop bitching about something that happened sixty years ago because they aren’t doing anything to protest the mistreatment of foreigners in Japan.
It’s an odd point to be making in a post that celebrates a small but symbolic victory for a subset of Canadian citizens.
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RYO wrote: “Let me also summarise what I believe Helly’s position to be: Japanese-Canadians should stop bitching about something that happened sixty years ago because they aren’t doing anything to protest the mistreatment of foreigners in Japan.”
I can’t see the point of summarizing a post that was already brief and to the point, unless you intend to change the meaning completely, which is what you have done. This is called a strawman argument, and it is disingenuous.
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I certainly took “The Japanese go to other countries and are suddenly offended when they are discriminated against but don’t lift a finger to fight discrimination in Japan.” to mean that the Japanese Canadians who are complaining about this problem in Canada are somehow hypocritical/have a weak position because they are not doing anything to stop discrimination in the country they immigrated from. It was a pretty ridiculous point, so I bypassed it completely when responding to that comment.
As a Canadian I find it sad that we would even consider a person like that to be given an honor as the one mentioned here. The entire purpose is to celebrate people who stood out and spoke out against things that we now know were wrong… Not to go with the mainstream as Green did.
Now Japan certainly has problems with the way they see foreigners. But thats not what we’re talking about and I think Helly’s point is off the mark.
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The timing aside, I actually find Helly’s comment to be quite interesting because I find that exact same attitude in the Chinatowns here as well as on the Mainland. Funny how the more people claim they’re different, the more they’re the same.
btw Alex, that’s a nice point you’ve made about being careful who to honour. Plus it might also give off the false impression that the Canadian government currently endorse his views.
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I am new here, I still think Helly has a point but I agree this is not really the place to discuss it, seems on consideration a sort of thread-hijacking, sorry.
Anyway, glad the building name will be changed I think that was the right thing to do.
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What happened to the Japanese Canadians in the 40’s was much more complex than racism especially with Howard Green. He was sincerely afraid of a Japanese attack..google Nanking, the attack on Hong Kong and what happened to the Canadians, Yamamoto’s plans for the Aleutians and the subsequent war in the Aleutians, the I 8 submarine off Cape Flattery, the MAGIC Code (which he had knowledge of), FDR’s decision to intern American Japanese, and the fact that the BC Coast was virtually undefended and no one in Ottawa was listening…. He misjudged the loyalty of Japanese Canadians to their Empire…he, like thousands of others, had gone halfway around the world to fight for their empire (Britain) in World War I and he expected the same loyalty from the Japanese Canadians should Japan attack the coast of BC.
His words were similar to virtually all the politicians in BC – however his were more moderate which is why he was frequently quoted and SUPPORTED by the local media. Were they right? In hindsight, no but he was not motivated by racism rather fear.
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It is amazing that people on this board get into a uproar over the wartime treatment of Japanese Canadians. If this were a board about Canada, this would be a valid point, but this is a board about Japan. This is a board where rationalization stands for reason. This is a board where numerous spurious arguments are used to obfuscate the truth.
I would agree that what happened to Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians are horrible in the context of them being Americans and Canadians. But to see such outrage on this board where people routinely defend the rape of 200,000 women and give various rationalizations for it is ridiculous. Even on this thread, people rationalize away with poor jokes and bad reasons about the treatment of foreigners in Japan, many of whom have lived there for generations.
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