Lucy Warrington & Benjamin Bryce
WPS 2022/2
Abstract
The internment of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War has been a muchresearched topic, and it has become more present in Canadian public memory thanks to the active efforts of Japanese Canadians since the 1970s to seek redress from the Federal Government. This article seeks to add to this discussion the importance of recognizing the range of carceral experiences in Canada during the war. Both academic research and popular memory of Japanese Canadian “internment” often unconsciously promote uniformity in prisoners’ experiences. This obscures the gendered nature of wartime incarceration and discourse. Men and women were often separated; only male Japanese Canadians were sent to Ontario road camps. Age and class were also crucial in forming carceral sites, as only young men were sent to road camps, and wealthier Nisei could afford to live in ghost towns in the BC interior to avoid forced labour, underlining how the degrees of immobility depended on one’s affluence. Despite the popular perception that road camps were voluntary, the Canadian-born men labelled “enemy aliens” were nonetheless imprisoned.
KEYWORDS: enemy aliens; Japanese internment; carceral sites; Nisei; Schreiber-Jackfish road camp