What was the japanese property claims commission

Date: It is largely remembered for what it was not: that is, it was not a just resolution to the devastating material losses of the s. Community histories bitterly describe the Commission as destined to failure, with narrow terms of reference that only addressed a fraction of what was taken. Similarly, other historians have portrayed the Commission as a defensive mechanism, intended by the government to limit financial compensation and to avoid the admission of greater injustice.

Yet scholars have never fully investigated the internal workings of the Commission. Despite its failings, Japanese Canadians used the Bird Commission in their struggle to hold the state accountable. The time had come for Japanese Canadians to build anew. The time had come to seek compensation for the pain and trauma they had experienced, for the economic losses they had suffered and for the lies that had libelled them as traitors in the minds of their fellow Canadians.

Canada's Japanese minority realized that their wartime experiences must not be ignored. The Canadian government must be made to acknowledge the injustice they had suffered, to restore their civil liberties, and to pay compensation for their losses; to fail to do so, they knew, would mean that the wartime myths of Japanese Canadian disloyalty would continue. In January the federal government had no intention of either immediately granting Japanese Canadians full rights and privileges or of compensating them in any manner.

Publicly the federal government still clung to the stance that Japanese Canadians had suffered no injustice. The government maintained that the wartime measures imposed upon them were nothing more than necessary measures to alleviate the wartime emergency created by their presence on the Pacific coast.

There was, therefore, no obligation to compensate them for any inconvenience they may have suffered. The federal government wanted the Japanese question to die, and so sought to trivialize the remaining issues. On 24 January Prime Minister King explained to Parliament that restrictions on the movement of Japanese Canadians to and within British Columbia were being continued only to ensure the success of the resettlement program.

The government was satisfied, King reiterated, that the sale of Japanese property in B. King's rationalizations, however, did not appease the CCF. The war was over. The CCF saw no justification for continuing to prohibit Japanese Canadians from returning to the Pacific Coast as the Japanese Americans had been allowed to do two years before.

The debate on Bill C revealed subtle but important changes in attitudes toward Japanese Canadians. When replying to the CCF arguments, the B. Carefully acknowledging liberalizing post-war attitudes, several M. They claimed that the security of British Columbia demanded the continued exclusion of Japanese Canadians. The repatriation requests of two years previously, they argued, were proof that Japanese Canadians were loyal to Japan, not to Canada.

Ian Mackenzie, soon to be ousted from the Cabinet, argued that the rest of Canada had no right to interfere with British Columbia policies on Japanese matters. To deny British Columbia "the right to adequate internal security," he charged, "would be striking a blow against Confederation. While the restraint of the B. After two days of debate, the CCF motion was defeated. The shallowness of Prime Minister King's liberalism was revealed again in the spring of At that time King found himself in what he considered to be a tight political situation.

The election had given him only a 5-seat majority over the combined opposition, an opposition that was working well together in In late two vacancies occurred through the death of a Liberal member from Ontario and the resignation of a Conservative from Yale, British Columbia.

In mid-January King also finally decided that Ian Mackenzie's alcoholism had become so aggravated that he was neglecting his ministry and had lost the respect of Cabinet. After carefully weighing the odds, King decided to risk Mackenzie's seat and sought advice on how to minimize that risk.

Repealing that Order, Johnson replied, would make losing the Vancouver Centre seat a certainty. Deciding that in a choice between Japanese Canadian civil liberties and winning a by-election the civil liberties must suffer, King sought Cabinet approval for an extension of the restrictions on Japanese Canadians.

Cabinet approval, however, was not automatic. One had always to take the larger view. Staying in power was more important. The position of liberals like Ilsley, however, could not be ignored. Nor could the Canadian public be given a political explanation for the unwillingness of the Liberal government to allow Japanese Canadians the same freedom of movement as their American counterparts.

Accordingly, a compromise was reached. The restricting Order-in-Council was replaced by an Order-in-Council that revoked the restrictions on Japanese Canadians on 31 March C a full year later and seven years after their initial uprooting. King now had to convince the Liberal caucus to support the new Order-in-Council. Meeting with the caucus on 18 February King began by endorsing the principle of minority rights. However, he asked rhetorically, which minority should be first protected: Japanese Canadians or British Columbia's Liberals?

King informed the caucus that every one of the last group, "felt that the order should be extended and that if it were not, the consequences would be very serious for the party in British Columbia. The caucus concurred. To further assure that the new Order would not be annulled by Parliament, it was presented to Parliament at a poorly attended Saturday session.

It passed, over CCF objections, by a vote of 73 to In B. Three days after Premier Johnson had advised King to continue the restrictions on Japanese Canadians, he was chastised by the B. The occasion was the re-institution of a regulation prohibiting the use of Japanese labour in the logging industry, a regulation that had been suspended during the war in the interests of wartime production.

Public reaction took the provincial government by surprise. Instead of quiet agreement, the government found vocal opposition. The International Woodworkers of America charged that owners dismissing their Japanese employees because of the regulation would be violating their contracts with that union.

The operators affected by the regulation quickly and strongly protested the ban, both individually and through the Canadian Manufacturers' Association.

At the same time, the Vancouver branch of the Canadian Civil Liberties Union, the provincial executive of the Japanese Canadian Citizens' Association and the opposition CCF party all publicly condemned the regulation and sought to interview the provincial Cabinet. In addition, the Vancouver Trades and Labour Council and unions in other industries all supported the protesters. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, British Columbia's formerly anti-Japanese press condemned the regulation as "an act of deplorable discrimination.

The forest workers incident in January and the by-election defeats in May finally convinced the B. Liberal machine of the futility of an anti-Japanese stance. Unsupported, even he dropped his objections and Bill C passed unopposed on 15 June Passed amid minimal resistance, the bill became law on 24 March , thereby destroying the legal basis for all discriminatory laws against Japanese Canadians in British Columbia.

By the spring of only the question of compensation remained, and a partial solution to it was in progress. While the first impulse of the federal government had been to deny that any losses had occurred, federal officials knew as early as that that fiction would be impossible to maintain. By the Office of the Custodian of Enemy Property had begun to doubt the fairness of the bulk sale of Japanese Canadian farms to the Veterans' Land Act administration.

By farms withdrawn from that sale because of title difficulties had begun to sell for amounts considerably in excess of the VLA offer. By June sixty-five such farms had been sold to private buyers at an average price of more than double the VLA offer, an increase that could not be explained by wartime inflation alone. They knew only that their farms, homes and businesses had all too often been sold by the Custodian for less than the owners had been offered by neighbouring farmers when they were uprooted in Moreover, the disappointment over the low sale prices had been compounded by the fact that the government had deducted relief payments from the proceeds before forwarding the residue to the owner.

The paltry sums reaching the owners only reinforced rumours of profiteering, graft, and mismanagement by the government. In the fall of the Japanese Canadian Committee for Democracy in Toronto tried to determine just how true the rumours of unfair sales were. To find out, they undertook a comprehensive survey of the economic losses of the family heads who had resettled in Toronto. The respondents were asked to list all possible types of losses, keeping their estimates as accurate and as conservative as possible.

To ensure accuracy, the JCCD enlisted the assistance of knowledgeable Issei who had known the properties or had been in the same businesses. The results surprised even the most cynical Japanese Canadians. The portion that the owner recouped varied according to the type of property. The best returns, 55 per cent, were obtained on automobiles; businesses, personal property and Fraser Valley farms returned the least to their owners.

Returns on businesses were highest when the owner sold it himself, presumably because such sales occurred during or shortly after the uprooting, and before the business had suffered the neglect of an absentee owner or overworked administrator.

Similarly, those who liquidated their personal property on uprooting fared slightly better than those who, hoping to return soon, stored their belongings. By contrast, trucks and cars sold by their owners into the flooded market of the spring of returned slightly less than vehicles sold later by the Custodian of Enemy Property.

Only 16 per cent of the Japanese Canadian property surveyed, however, had been sold in forced sales. Please note that, for restricted material, release of personal information is not permitted without the written consent of the person concerned or proof that he or she has been deceased for more than 20 years or was born more than years ago. Proof of death can be provided by submitting a copy of a death certificate, funeral notice, newspaper obituary or photograph of the tombstone.

File includes lists of naturalized Canadians repatriated to Japan from to File A, parts 1 and 2, starts on microfilm C and continues on C Go to Mikan and access the photos from the link: lower level description s. The links below will take you to the record in our Collection Search database.

The reference numbers after the title of the collection are needed to order copies or to see the original documents when you visit us in Ottawa. You can also hire a free-lance researcher to consult records on your behalf. Fonds consists of individual claim files volumes 1 to 74 , transcripts of hearings, withdrawn and rejected claims, and a memorandum entitled "Appendix III, Fair Market Value," legal arguments and related material.

Enter the reference and a name, for example RG Sadamu. The case files are not digitized. Once you have the reference volume and file number , you can order a copy. Photograph album, Japanese internment camps in the Kootenays, British Columbia. The fonds consists of records of the JCCA and documents of business operations. It also contains briefs, files, literature, accounts and historical notes.

The Japanese Canadians collection includes various smaller groups of records from many donors. The fonds consists of documents, clippings, interviews, reports, issues, newspapers and photographs.

The fonds consists of personal papers, articles and materials concerning the rights of Japanese Canadian Citizens. Keitaro Matsubara immigrated to Canada in and settled in British Columbia. First, he worked as a merchant, and later became a clergyman with the United Church of Canada.

He was interned in in Holmwood, Manitoba. The fonds consists of diaries, photographs, certificates and documents.