Almost 71 years ago, from March 24 to April 20, 1942, a group of conscientious objectors and Japanese nationals were incarcerated in the Vancouver Immigration Building.
These men were unofficially arrested and detained at the building for almost four weeks, at which point they rioted and were declared "enemy aliens" and sent to Petawawa and Angler, Ontario, to live in the only prison camps in Canada.
In contrast, the "prison camps" of the Interior of BC were closer to the truth of being "internment camps". Though the American Japanese and even their Latin American contingent at Crystal City, Texas, were not forced to pay rent to live in American internment camps.
Yet revisionists within the Japanese-Canadian community have excised any reference to the 28 days these Japanese were in the Immigration Building. There is only a prison camp memoir and a fictionalized account of one person's time in the camp, but reference to these 28 days are missing from most Japanese-Canadian websites on the matter.
IMHO the reason for this "revisionism" is to honor the tradition of covering up a smell so it doesn't stink.
Well, I am uncovering the smell because this revisionism needs to be opened up to the world.
The Japanese-Canadian war experience taught the Canadian government that its War Measures Act was an anarchronism which it got rid of after the apology in 1988.
However, the following questions remain: Why has the BC government not apologized for the acts of racist BC MLAs during the war era? What really motivated the Christian Japanese Canadians to falsely claim the Japanese Buddhist community were potential enemy aliens? Was it done to make themselves feel patriotic or was the real reason to scapegoat the Shin Buddhists needlessly?
Historically, in Japan during the war era, pacifists among the Buddhists were spied on and arrested for "not supporting the war effort." In the end, the leader of Soka Gakkai, a grassroots peace movement based on Nichiren Buddhism and the ideas of its founder, Tsunesaburo Makiguchi, were pro-peace and suffered for it in Japan. Tens of thousands of Japanese Buddhists were imprisoned for supporting peace.
In light of this, the false charges of the Christian Japanese-Canadians against the Buddhists show that the war had actually fractured the Japanese-Canadian community among religious lines.
Reference:
Tsunesaburo Makiguchi: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsunesaburo_Makiguchi
Japanese Canadian Internment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese-Canadian_internment
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