#japanese internment camps

anatomy-lesson:

“There is a received wisdom concerning Japanese internment in schoolbook Canadian history that goes something like this. Following Pearl Harbor, Japanese Canadians were rounded up for deportation to the interior. They were stripped of their property, concentrated, and removed. Following quiet train rides, they spent their war years in camps, ghost towns, and farms, often subjected to forced labour. Later, their confiscated property was sold at resale prices, and eventually they were released. As the Canadian Encyclopedia clearly states, “the Japanese did not resist the internment.” Some fifty-odd years later, they received redress from the Canadian state. The moral quandary was resolved, and all was right within capitalist, liberal, multicultural Canada. 

[Since publication of this book the Encyclopedia has completely changed their analysis of Japanese incarceration operations, de-emphasizing complacency and putting in examples of resistance where none had been before.]

Unfortunately, this schoolbook narrative is overly simplistic, and quite frankly wrong. Such a telling offers a far too neat correlation between history, myth, and memory. Given the prevalence of wildcat and illegal strikes throughout Canada during the Second World War—actions often punctuated by multifaceted and legally proscribed tactics—it is hard to believe that the exceptionally violent act of throwing masses of humans into camps (many of whom had experience in unions, community organizing, and political formations) and the confiscation of property—all encompassed within lives lived inside of the deeply racist province of British Columbia and the intrinsically racist Canadian state—could have precipitated no self-activity.

A more careful analysis of the actual removal and carceral operation shows not resignation, but intense self-activity and confrontation—including strikes  protests, riots, and mass non-compliance. When examining the collection/concentration of Japanese for evacuation, we find not quietism, but riot and resistance. Later, in the work camps, there were extensive strikes of many different flavours and articulations. Indeed, in treating the Japanese Canadians as workers, rather than a disarmed racial totality, the idea of evacuation/internment shifts to a dialectic of negotiated discipline and active resistance, much the same as with other Canadian workers, albeit under exceptionally difficult and dangerous circumstances.

[There was widespread] resistance to the government’s original concentration and removal operations, and the ubiquitous strikes, riots, and protests of 1942 and 1943 in the work and concentration camps. As will be made clear, these actions involved thousands of people, with women and children playing prominent roles throughout. The protestors and strikers consciously leveraged their social and labour power for significant gains both in material conditions and in regard to the recognition of fundamental dignity.

Although petitions and legal arguments were extant, they exerted power and won concessions through direct action, not pleading. By articulating these workers’ activities in this fashion, [this work] will examine the self-activity of the evacuees, the internal logic of capitalist democracy and racism, and the politics of education and redress—even as it challenges some of the historiographical understandings that surround the Japanese experience during the Second World War. In particular, the idea that Japanese Canadians were a “model minority” who dealt with extreme violence and racist injustice with a quiet resilience will be shown to be false. This trope needs to be replaced with the actual story of remarkable pushback both during the removal operations and within the detention centres and labour camps. Moreover, it needs to be made clear that in this latter struggle, the Japanese had much in common with workers on the other side of the fence.

As was the case for the remainder of the Canadian workers, the state only had armed men available to put down strikes and protests in the most extreme cases, true even in armed camps. Although the government had gifted itself “extraordinary powers unprecedented in Britain or the United States,” to control strikes and domestic resistance, it had little ability to actually use these broad legislative powers. In this dance of activity and marginal disciplinary powers, the Japanese were able to make impressive gains through direct action, no matter how dire, grotesque, and fundamentally unjust their situation.

There has been no lack of writing on the plight of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War. Indeed, before the removal operation had even finished, Forrest La Violette penned a short monograph on the Japanese wartime experience. The shameful tale is now well-known: 

“In February 1942 the federal Cabinet ordered the expulsion of 22,000 Japanese Canadians residing within one hundred miles of the Pacific coast. That order marked the beginning of a process that saw Canada’s Japanese minority uprooted from their homes, confined in detention camps, stripped of their property, and forcibly dispersed across Canada or shipped to a starving Japan.”

This core narrative has been relatively well fleshed out by historians since.

Attention to strikes and resistance, however, has been a notable lacuna within the historiography of wartime Japanese displacement and incarceration. the difficult nature of activist history, in this case providing the strongest foundations for the case for redress, meant that some narratives within the story have been minimized. This is unfortunate but not uncommon… The histories of Japanese mass incarceration have not had the same opportunistic and historically questionable quality that imbues the work on other internment operations. However, the nature of pushing for redress elevated and focused some ideas and histories over others. 

The stoic “survivors’ narrative” or the spirit of resignation (“shi-kata-ga-nai”) is far more compelling, and sympathetic to a liberal audience, than those of the sit-down striker, the rioter, the protestor. There are notable exceptions, of course; namely Ann Gomer Sunahara and Pamela Sugiman, the latter who noted that “much of the publicized literature on the internment has promoted the idea that Japanese Canadians generally, and Japanese Canadian women especially, have been a passive and acquiescent lot.”

Butmuch of the literature, if it mentions self-activity at all, speaks of “passive resistance,” or of the state “fearing sit-down strikes,” instead of actual resistance and real sit-down strikes. Moreover, much of the recent historiography focuses on the legal/liberal tropes of “citizenship” and “rights.” Apart from decentring the Japanese themselves, these attempts at analysis produce a line of argumentation that requires a tremendous amount of diagnostic and theoretical gymnastics to force a narrative onto a trajectory where it does not really fit.  A more evidentially rigorous and theoretically informed examination rooted in understandings of power relations, of the instrumentalization of institutionalized racism by the state and capital, of the intrinsic problems of the “democratic” capitalist state, would be much more illuminating. 

It needs to be said that this is not an argument about “agency.” Agency is one of the theoretical-historical tropes that often manifests in deeply troubling ways,  and often swerves into intellectually bankrupt territory. Although certainly a corrective to the shoddy history that ignores people who build societies and keep them running, or simply writes them out of the story, this trope strains credibility. Hamfisted notions of agency are often predicated on the dubious foundation that regular people are generally an inactive and uncomplicated lot, prone to submission and simplicity, and that finding people acting otherwise is somehow anomalous rather than the norm. Any tropes of “an uncomplicated proletariat,” of course, do not stand up to rigorous inquiry; this is particularly accurate following the institutionalization and concretion of capitalist social relations. Moreover, the obsession with agency has significantly occluded the power of organization, to the effect that ineffective “deviations” or minor cultural “subversions” are elevated to the level of, or even above, effective or organized activity, with the latter ignored. This is liberal nonsense that celebrates and elevates amorphous notions of discourse and the action of the individual, no matter how ineffective, rather than of concerted class activity.

Such arguments dull the violence, exploitation, and deterritorialization being resisted and agitated against, positing false equivalency of liberal actors in its stead. For all of these reasons this essay’s core argument is not one pertaining to agency, but to action, activity, and organization, all of which are found in significant diversity and quantity within the story.”

- Mikhail Bjorge, “Destroying the Myth of Quietism: Strikes, Riots, Protest, and Resistance in Japanese Internment.” in Mochoruk, Jim; Hinther, Rhonda L., ed. Civilian internment in Canada: histories and legacies : an edited collection. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2020. pp. 180-183.