ABSTRACT
IN A LITTLE over two months after the outbreak of the Great Pacific War in December 1941, both North American democracies-the United States and Canada-began the process of rounding up and incarcerating, in one way or another, persons of Japanese ancestry who happened to live in the coastal strip between the mountains and the Pacific Ocean in the province of British Columbia and in the states of Washington, Oregon, and California. The similarity in the actions of the two nations is not surprising. For over half a century each country had been dealing with small Asian minorities on the West Coast in quite similar ways, and, in each society, Asians had played the same kinds of economic roles. First Chinese and then Japanese arrived to become, figuratively, hewers of wood and drawers of water, or , if one prefers to be literal, builders of railroads, performers of stoop labor and domestic chores , and, particularly in British Columbia, fishermen . In each nation economic and racial hostility arose first among workingmen and their allies and then spread across most of western society .
