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Redeeming the War on the Homefront: Alberta's Japanese Community During the Second World War and After

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David ]. Goa

Reprinted with permission of the author and publisher of For King and Country: Alberta in the Second World War

For King and CountryLocal and regional opposition did arise when the growers' request became known and the first Japanese arrived.8 The argument that British Columbia was exporting its problems to Alberta was put forward from a number of quarters. Ann and David Sunahara describe the situation in early 1942:

In March 1942, the Beet Workers Union, city and labour councils, local Canadian Legion branches, boards of trade, and citizens' committees throughout southern Alberta demanded that Japanese ji"O/11 British Columbia not be admitted to the province, and if they were admitted, that they be guarded by the army and removed from the province after the war. Southern Albertans, who for years had Japanese neighbours, were not immune to the wartime hysteria. Careful to distinguish between “their” Japanese and Japanese British Columbians, residents of Raymond, Lethbridge and Taber held public meetings to protest the proposed movement of Japanese British Columbians into southern Alberta. This, they felt, was just a way of exporting British Columbia's problem to Alberta.9

The Sunaharas have suggested that the beet growers played both ends against the middle in their argument for bringing this potential labour force to Alberta. In Alberta, they argued that the Japanese were not a threat to public security, while in British Columbia they argued that the Japanese were a security threat and should therefore be moved to the interior of Canada. It was a convenient argument calculated to acquire cheap labour.10 The government of Alberta also entered the debate and made a formal request to the federal government that they insure that relocated Japanese be returned to British Columbia following the war.11

For many within the Japanese community, coming to Alberta and working in the beet fields was preferable to the internment camps and working on road gangs.12 It offered the possibility of reuniting family members, working in agriculture for a wage, and with the promise of reasonable housing and schooling for children, it seemed preferable as an interim solution to the shacks in ghost towns in the isolated mountain valleys of British Columbia.

Many of the Japanese who came to Alberta had family farms in the Fraser Valley, while others had been involved in the fishing industry along the coast. They saw the journey to Alberta as a short exile which offered a reasonable standard of living and more freedom than the alternatives in British Columbia. This image was short-lived, however. When they disembarked at places like Picture Butte in southern Alberta, they were received by local farmers and driven, usually by horse and buggy, to the farm. Characteristically they were housed in granaries or chicken coops, and almost immediately began the demanding and backbreaking labour in the sugar beet field. They were required to work on the farm to which they were assigned.13 Travel was restricted, and internees were not allowed to augment their income when the sugar beet season was over with work in the local urban centres. There were also local ordinances prohibiting Japanese families from moving into town. The Sunaharas poignantly describe the immediate response of the Japanese labourers.

The response of the displaced Japanese to the conditions on the sugar beet farms was typically Japanese. After lodging their protest with the British Columbia Security Commission, they worked to better their lot. With building materials given them by the Commission, they tried to repair the granaries and shacks they were living in. Even after making repairs, however, their housing remained woefully inadequate for a prairie winter. Often three generations would be crowded into an uninsulated granary. A coal stove would occupy one end of the shack and a sleeping platform the other. In. this one room, grandparents, parents, and children ate, slept, and worked. One mother of ten remembers that the conditions: “made you very angry. But anger killed the sorrow and the hurt, and the anger itself was destroyed by making a living. I became too busy to be angry.”14

Ann and David Sunahara have analyzed the conditions closely and argue that ninety per cent of the 2664 Japanese from British Columbia “were virtually impoverished by the spring of 1943”. Only fifteen per cent had found work during the previous winter; forty-two percent were on relief, and many more “were borrowing against their next year's beet contracts to avoid the humiliation of having to ask for relief.”15

The Japanese community responded to these challenges early in their tenure in Alberta.16 Led by Seiku Sakamoto, the English-language secretary of the Japanese Camp and Mill Workers Union in British Columbia prior to the war, they tried to join local vegetable growers' cooperatives. When this attempt was frustrated they organized the Beet Workers' Association for the workers living north of the Oldman River, as well as a second organization, the Shinwa Kai or Benefit Association of Raymond, Alberta. These organizations took up a variety of issues and worked for better conditions. In the 1943 contract negotiation between beet growers and their Japanese workers, they requested that workers have the right, which had been prohibited under the initial agreement, to move to other farms.17 Their other major concern had to do with the education of Japanese children. Since the Alberta and federal governments could not agree upon which level of government was responsible for their education, they sought a solution in the delegation of that responsibility to the local school boards. These boards, ignoring the contribution made by the Japanese workers to the local tax base, charged $70 a year for each Japanese high school student.18

Notes

8. For a remarkable account of the evacuation experience, see the unpublished memoir by George Takeyasu, 1942 Evacuation: A Recollection, available in the Folklife Archives of the Provincial Museum of Alberta.

9. Ann and David Sunahara, op. cit., p. 403.

10. Ibid.

11. Premier Ernest Manning was lobbied by civic groups, the Union of Alberta Municipalities, and the Alberta Federation of Labor to insure that displaced Japanese be returned to British Columbia at the end of the war. The sugar beet industry, faced with another labour shortage at the end of the war, pressured the Premier to keep the Japanese in Alberta. Manning agreed in March 1946 to permit them to stay, but kept his decision quiet. On the 26 March 1948 Premier Manning announced that all Japanese residents of Alberta were entitled to full citizenship rights.

12. Many of the women who came to Alberta in the spring of 1942 commented that a primary motivation for coming was the possibility that their husbands would be freed from internment and be able to join them. See recorded interviews in the Folklife Collections, Provincial Museum of Alberta, conducted during 1994.

13. Most of the Japanese I have interviewed on this issue speak well of the Farmers for whom they worked. Their contracts, however, could make it extremely difficult for anyone who was working for a difficult and abusive farmer to seek an alternate place of employment.

14. Ann and David Sunahara, op. cit., p. 405.

15. Ibid., p. 406.

16. Ibid., pp. 406-408.

17. The Growers' Association refused this request, arguing that its agreement with the British Columbia Security Commission compelled each Japanese family to stay on the farm to which they were assigned. In 1943 after the beet contracts were negotiated and completed, all the workers refused to work until permission was given for those workers who wished to transfer to other farms.

18. Ann and David Sunahara, op. cit., p. 407.

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