World War II: Canada and the Road to Japanese Internment.
As an American now attending University in Canada, this is the first time I have ever heard of Japanese Internment anywhere other than the United States. This is my first Canadian History course, and throughout the course I have found so much of the history parallels with American History. I also find a lot of Canadian History excluded from American History, but why? When the United States is so closely tied to Canada, even though it may seem that American History should only deal with events concerning America and vice versa. But after analyzing these two scholarly articles about Japanese Internment in Canada, American and Canadian influence on the Japanese during World War II was basically one in the same. Whatever moves the United States made, Canada tried to follow in their footsteps and vice versa as well. The shared west coast of America and Canada played a major role concerning the ties between American and Canadian History. Even though this information is somewhat irrelevant to what will be discussed in this paper, I still believe it has major importance that Canadian History should be recognized in the United States and this is a prime example of why it should be. .
In August 1944 Prime Minister King told the House of Commons that "no person of Japanese race born in Canada has been charged with any act of sabotage of disloyalty during the years of war." In his account, Ken Adachi added that "no alien Japanese or naturalized citizen had ever been found guilty of the same crime." Those statements are undoubtedly true, but they do not tell the whole story. (Granastein and Johnson 111).
These two articles, "British Columbia and the Japanese Evacuation" and "The Evacuation of the Japanese Canadians, 1942: A Realist Critique of the Received Version", do tell us the whole story. Both show the hysteria and hatred of the Japanese in Canada during World War II, but they demonstrate how in various ways.