by Mark Collin Reid

Many Canadians today are aware that their federal government rounded up Japanese Canadians during the Second World War and shipped them off to internment camps the interior of British Columbia.

Considered a threat due to Japan’s involvement in the war, these citizens were ordered removed from coastal areas — a decision that proved both traumatic and life altering for the internees. But what ever happened to the homes and property seized during the internments?

Historian Dr. Jordan Stanger-Ross of the University of Victoria is studying that very question. He is researching an event that occurred between 1943 and 1945 in a section of the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver that forever changed the complexion of the community. Four hundred properties were seized from their rightful Japanese-Canadian owners and sold.

“It’s one of the low points of Canadian history,” Stanger-Ross told a group of historians attending his presentation, titled “Who Bought Vancouver’s Japantown?” at the annual Canadian Historical Association meeting in Fredericton, New Brunswick.

He says the seizures took place during a period of “racist political culture” in British Columbia. In a way, it was a form of slum clearance with the ultimate goal of placing the community back in the hands of “white” British Columbians.

“There are clearly people who envision this as an opportunity to consolidate white holding of B.C., to eradicate Japanese ownership, to realize longstanding racist goals in B.C.,” he says.

“In the case of the east end… a transfer to white ownership would have been a fashion of slum clearance, and that was part of the excitement of city aldermen about the process.”

Ironically, this transfer to white ownership didn’t totally occur. Stanger-Ross says that the advisory board created to oversee the process of selling the seized homes usually sold to the highest bidder, regardless of the buyers’ race, thereby thwarting the goals of the provincial and federal officials who sought to create white homogeneity in the community.

The study is part of a larger project on real estate and the urban history of east Vancouver. Stanger-Ross, whose research and teaching examines the history of immigration, race, and ethnicity in Canada and the United States, hopes his study shines new light on policy and how it is implemented, taking into account the complexity of these types of events.