SPRING 2025
ISSUE 02

₁ I use the term “Japanese immigrants” and “Japanese immigrant workers” throughout this introduction. Because the mass incarceration of Japanese immigrants and their descendants was justified by representing them as aliens and foreign agents – regardless of their citizenship status – the terms “Japanese Canadian” and “Japanese American” are increasingly preferred for referring to the pre- as well as post-World War II Japanese diaspora in North America (see, for example, this sound explanation by Densho: Terminology, “Japanese vs. Japanese American,” https://densho.org/terminology/#japanese_american). While I appreciate the reasons for this preference, the JCMWU understood the struggles of its membership to be specific to their status as immigrants. My use of the term “Japanese immigrants” is for faithfulness to the “Founding Declaration” translated here and is not intended to imply anything about the citizenship status of individual workers, let alone the legitimacy of mass incarceration, which is an undeniably contemptible episode of racism in North America’s history.

₂ Few copies of even the JCMWU’s newspapers exist in archives in Canada. This introduction, and the translation of the “Founding Declaration” published in the inaugural issue of the union’s newspaper, Rōdō Shūhō, is deeply indebted to the research and archival efforts of Norio Tamura, who reproduced the “Founding Declaration” in full in his article, “Umezuki Takaichi and the Nikkan Minshū: Japanese Canadian Camp and Mill Union’s Newspaper Activities,” Tokyo Keidai Gakkaishi 151 (June 1987): 235–272.

₃ On the Bows and Arrows, see Andrew Parnaby, “‘The best men that ever worked the lumber’: Aboriginal Longshoremen on Burrard Inlet, BC, 1863–1939,” The Canadian Historical Review 87, no. 1 (2006): 53–78. On the Chinese Labour Association, see Winnie Ng, “Early Chinese Worker Militancy in BC: Excavating Narratives of Resistance,” Our Times, December 21, 2020, https://ourtimes.ca/article/early-chinese-worker-militancy-in-bc. On the Native Brotherhood, see Chantal Norrgard, “Indigenous Labor, Settler Colonialism, and the History of the Fraser River Fishermen’s Strike of 1893,” Native American and Indigenous Studies 7, no. 2 (2020): 114–144.

₄ The OBU has a unique history in Canada, particularly in the west. See David J. Bercuson, Fools and Wise Men: The Rise and Fall of the One Big Union (McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1978). On the IWW, see Mark Leier, Where the Fraser River Flows: The Industrial Workers of the World in British Columbia (New Star Books, 1990).

₅ For a thorough overview of anti-Asian racism and its manifestations in legislation and in organized labor, see Patricia Roy, A White Man’s Province: British Columbia Politicians and Chinese and Japanese Immigrants 1858–1914 (University of British Columbia Press, 1989). For an insightful account of the relationship between Japanese Canadian history and settler colonialism, see Laura Ishiguro, Nicole Yakashiro, and Will Archibald, “Settler Colonialism and Japanese Canadian History,” report for Landscapes of Injustice, September 2017, https://www.landscapesofinjustice.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Ishiguro-Yakashiro-and-Archibald-Settler-Colonialism-and-Japanese-Canadian-history-2.pdf.

₆ See the Government of British Columbia’s helpful overview, “Discriminatory Legislation in British Columbia 1872–1948,” https://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/british-columbians-our-governments/our-history/historic-places/documents/heritage/chinese-legacy/discriminatory_legislation_in_bc_1872_1948.pdf.

₇ Tamura, “Umezuki Takaichi,” 261.

₈ Quoted in Tamura, “Umezuki Takaichi,” 243–44. Translation my own.

₉ On campaigns against labor contractors and the interventions of the Japanese consulate, see Rolf Knight and Maya Koizumi, A Man of Our Times: The Life-History of a Japanese Canadian Fisherman (New Star Books, 1976): 45–47, and Ken Adachi, The Enemy That Never Was: A History of the Japanese Canadians (McClelland and Stewart, 1976): 123.

₁₀ The “Lemieux Agreement,” also known as the “Gentlemen’s Agreement,” refers to the 1908 agreement between Canadian Labour Minister Rodolphe Lemieux and Japanese Foreign Minister Tadasu Hayashi to restrict the number of passports issued to Japanese migrant laborers who sought work in Canada to 400 – a dramatic decrease from the more than 8,000 Japanese immigrants who entered Canada for work in 1907.

₁₁ The “recent forestry labor issue” may refer to the 1913 Crown Timber Act, which prohibited Asian immigrants from working in logging operations on Crown lands. Most of British Columbia’s forests are publicly held “Crown” (rather than privately owned) lands, so the law applied to massive sections of the lumber industry. At the same time, amendments to the Land Act in 1909 and 1911, alongside the passage of the 1912 Forest Act, restricted hand logging licenses to those on voting lists. While facially neutral, these laws disqualified Asian immigrants from holding licenses.

In the wake of a failed strike of Japanese, Chinese, and white millworkers in the summer of 1920, Japanese immigrant workers in British Columbia formed a labor organization. First called the “Japanese Labour Union” (日本人労働組合), and later the Japanese Camp and Mill Workers’ Federal Union No. 31 (JCMWU), the organization lasted until the mass incarceration of Japanese Canadians in 1942.¹ 

The JCMWU was organized along the lines of race rather than trade or industry, recruiting Japanese immigrant workers from sawmills and logging camps, but also from farms, coal mines, salmon canneries, and other industries. At its peak in the 1930s, the union had 1,600 members, a daily newspaper, a purchasing cooperative, an independent employment office, and branches throughout British Columbia. The JCMWU therefore played an important role in the life, work, and culture of interwar Japanese immigrants. As an explicitly leftist, socialist, and anti-imperialist organization, the union was perhaps the only meaningful counter to the institutionalized conservatism and nationalism of the Japanese consulate, the influential Canadian Japanese Association, and the Japanese immigrant community’s business class. Still, the JCMWU is a barely recognized part of the region’s labor history, and it makes few appearances in ethnic histories of the West Coast. Local labor histories all too often treat racialized workers simply as the subjects of violence and discrimination, as scabs, or as dispossessed and displaced people at the sidelines of the region’s celebrated confrontations between labor and capital. Meanwhile, the history of Japanese Canadians focuses so closely on the mechanics of mass incarceration and subsequent efforts to redress it that I, at least, had never imagined that an organization like the JCMWU once held so much sway within the community. Caught somewhere between these discourses, the Japanese immigrant workers who sought to transform the region’s labor movement by fighting the racism within its ranks have been almost entirely forgotten.

Apart from historiographical blind spots, the fact that very few union records survived the displacement and dispossession of mass incarceration has contributed to the JCMWU’s obscurity. Those that do remain – mainly in the form of the Japanese-language newspapers that the union published throughout its existence – offer a unique window into the ideologies and operations of one of the many labor organizations formed by racialized workers in the resource industries of the Pacific Northwest in the early 20th century.²

Indeed, the JCMWU was part of an ecosystem of formal and informal ethnic and Indigenous labor organizations that were as diverse as the region’s workforce. Among these were the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) longshoremen’s union in Vancouver, colloquially referred to as the “Bows and Arrows”; the Chinese Labour Association, formed by Chinese immigrant shingle mill workers; and the Native Brotherhood, which represented Indigenous fishermen along the West Coast.³ Workers in these organizations were active participants in the labor militancy that came to define the region in the early 20th century, and their organizations variously departed or gained momentum from the interracial organizing programs of unions like the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the One Big Union (OBU), which initiated labor actions among itinerant workers in lumber and other previously unorganized industries.⁴ What makes these organizations stand apart are the ways that they articulated their struggle at the intersection of race and class: as immigrants who faced anti-Asian racism, manifest in both organized labor and in legislated forms of exclusion, or as Indigenous peoples who were met simultaneously with the dispossession of their lands and the exploitation of their labor. In doing so, they stretched the affordances of labor unions towards a variety of political ends, from defending Indian reserve lands and fishing rights to fighting the ubiquitous labor contracting schemes that trapped Asian immigrant workers in miserable living and working conditions. These organizations selectively took up the strategies and tenets of the labor movement, articulating them with their particular analysis of racism, rooted in the specific conditions they struggled against.

As is evident in the JCMWU’s “Founding Declaration,” the union understood Japanese immigrant workers in British Columbia to be facing a situation that was “more complex and dangerous than we can find anywhere else” because, while they shared in the exploitation of workers everywhere, theirs was overlaid by a virulent anti-Asian racism. One of the union’s primary goals was to combat the Asian exclusion movement, which emerged on the West Coast from within organizations like the Knights of Labor and maintained a stranglehold on the region’s labor politics through the early 20th century. Thousands of Japanese immigrants began arriving in Canada in the 1880s alongside many more from China. Both groups – as well as the South Asian immigrant workers who joined them at the turn of the century – were met with anti-Asian riots in Vancouver’s Chinese and Japanese neighborhoods in 1907 and with the introduction of restrictive immigration legislation and plentiful calls from organized labor to limit the jobs that Asian immigrant workers could hold.⁵ Agitation on the part of organized labor resulted in laws that prohibited Asian immigrants from working underground in mines and in many areas of the lumber industry and, ultimately, greatly reduced the number of Japanese immigrant fishermen in the salmon fishing and canning industry.⁶ The JCMWU, witnessing the steady erosion of the already meager rights and opportunities of Asian immigrant workers, insisted that Japanese exclusion was not evenly directed at all Japanese immigrants. That is, exclusion was not simply an instance of “racial prejudice,” but was targeted at workers specifically and, indeed, arose from within the ranks of the working class.

In its “Founding Declaration,” the JCMWU argues that the racism that Japanese immigrant workers experienced on and off the job was rooted in the particular structures and workings of capital in the region, which depended on a labor force increasingly stratified by race. The union argued that the way to “break through the obstacle” of anti-Asian racism was to raise the consciousness and quality of life of Japanese immigrant workers to that of white Canadian workers, which is posited in the declaration as a kind of prerequisite to forming meaningful associations with white workers and taking labor action together. Leadership therefore conceived of the union, perhaps more than anything else, as a political education project that would awaken Japanese immigrants to their status as workers, bringing them into the national and international labor movement. Towards this end, beyond the production of its newspapers, which published a range of editorials, translations of local labor news, and Japanese news, the union organized reading groups and circulated leftist literature to remote work camps and union locals.⁷

At the same time, leaders of the JCMWU energetically petitioned the Vancouver Trades and Labour Council (VTLC) and the Trades and Labour Congress of Canada (TLC) for the union’s inclusion. After seven years of arguing that white labor’s power was undermined by the commonplace practice of hiring Japanese and Chinese immigrant workers as scabs during strikes, the JCMWU was finally admitted to both organizations in 1927. In an editorial celebrating the JCMWU’s affiliation with the VTLC, one of the union’s early leaders, Takaichi Umezuki, recorded the union’s argument for inclusion as follows: “The more forcefully you exclude us, the more we are exploited by the capitalists. In order to survive, we have no choice but to settle for being cheap labour, and endure the shame of being scabs . . . We are not just Japanese or Asians, but workers of the world, and we sincerely hope that you will be able to replace exclusion with fraternity.”⁸

Finally, the “Founding Declaration” identifies repressive forces within the community as an “obstacle” that the union had to “break through.” The closing section of the declaration lambasts manifestations of classism within the Japanese immigrant community and explicitly links them to Japanese imperialist ideology – the hubristic idea, gestured towards at the end of the declaration, that the Japanese military could forcefully overcome anti-Japanese racism in British Columbia. More importantly, the union understood that Japanese immigrant business owners and contract bosses were more aligned with capital than with their compatriots. In the case of labor contractors, they made their living as middlemen who recruited and managed Japanese workers on behalf of white bosses, controlling their pay and often also their room and board. In response, the union waged explosive campaigns against labor contractors and openly criticized Japanese immigrant business owners and the Japanese consulate, who fought the union and promoted Japanese nationalist and imperialist ideology in the diaspora.⁹

While Japanese immigrant workers struggled on the shop floor, within their community, and within the broader Canadian labor movement, the JCMWU, as a union organized along racial rather than trade or industrial lines, was never able to gain enough of a foothold to represent workers in negotiations with their employers. Union members were still subject to the whims of both the contract boss and the white boss as they labored on farms and for logging companies, sawmills, canneries, and coal mines. Even though the JCMWU had successfully joined the VTLC and TLC, the intensity of anti-Japanese racism only increased as the Second World War approached. Ultimately, mass incarceration may be understood as the triumph of longstanding calls to exclude Japanese immigrant workers from coastal industries. The union’s efforts to raise Japanese immigrant workers to the level of white workers and finally “shake hands with them” therefore reads, retrospectively, as tragic. Not only would the Asian exclusion movement foment the extraordinary displacement and dispossession of Japanese Canadians and Americans, but the JCMWU and its records would be almost entirely expunged from the archives and from the historical memory of Japanese Canadians and partisans of the region’s labor movement.

But this translation of the JCMWU’s “Founding Declaration” is intended as more than a corrective to the historical record and is relevant to workers beyond those who stepped into the same woods, rivers, and mines that Japanese immigrant workers labored in before their incarceration. When I first encountered the union’s writing, I was most struck by its analysis of the relationship of race and class; its expansive view of the connection between labor and imperialism; and the fierceness with which it contended with “obstacles” to worker self-organization on the job, within the Japanese immigrant community, and at the level of local, national, and international politics. Today, as anti-immigrant sentiment reaches new heights, we are confronted by the very real possibility of new legal and extralegal measures to exclude, marginalize, and imperil immigrant workers. Our task, then, is not all that different from the one that the JCMWU set itself more than a hundred years ago: to grapple with the relationship between the working class, the labor movement, and anti-immigrant feeling and policy. Like the JCMWU, we are still confronted with the question of the relationship between race and class, and we must ask ourselves, as the union did, about the “real reasons” for racist exclusion and exploitation. Like the JCMWU, there are battles to be fought at every level that will require creativity in the use of the structures and legacies of organized labor, bending them towards expansive political goals rooted in the everyday struggles of the most marginalized workers. Like the JCMWU, we might understand our situation to be one that is “more complex and dangerous than we can find anywhere else,” and yet we might also find renewed purpose and energy to subject that situation to rigorous critique and to fight back with every possible means.

We are workers. The position of workers today has not yet reached the status that we should rightfully enjoy as members of the human race. Workers in developed Western countries have improved their standing significantly over the past hundred years through their own self-awareness and efforts. But, in spite of this, today they are still only receiving a meager share of the blessings that every member of humanity should enjoy equally. They are still in the midst of their efforts to attain their rightful position. They are still on the march.

Why, though, would anyone exclude us at all? There are those who think we are excluded only because we are yellow. Whenever the question of exclusion arises, some people give only “racial prejudice” as the reason for it. “Racial prejudice” is a kind of idiom that has been used by Japanese people in general. Of course, there is some truth in it, but racial prejudice alone does not constitute a reason to exclude Japanese people. We must also be aware that these words carry a very dangerous meaning for ourselves – they are a distraction from self-criticism and reflection. Calling it “prejudice” gives the impression that Japanese people are not being seen as we really are, that we are being looked at sideways or through tinted glasses. On the other hand, this means that we feel that if they would only look at us straight on, there would be no reason to exclude us. We are too proud in that we assume that they hate us for irrational reasons and in spite of the fact that we are just as good as they are. Are we Japanese immigrants good enough? Are we as good or better than the Americans and Canadians? No matter how smug we may be, our people are not aware of the facts of life, so there is nothing we can do. It is easy to overlook the fact that it is difficult to explain Japanese exclusion with only the term “racial prejudice.” This is why there is a danger of falling into the trap of avoiding self-criticism and self-reflection. Without self-criticism and reflection, there can be no true improvement and no true development.

Besides racial prejudice, a far more important reason for exclusion is that our quality of life is so much lower than theirs. This can be clearly understood by anyone who is able to quietly observe themselves from a third-person perspective. The fact that the life of Japanese immigrants is generally lower than that of their Canadian counterparts means that the cultural level of Japanese immigrants is lower than that of their white counterparts. If we limit this to our own workers, then the life of our Japanese laborers is lower than that of their white counterparts, and the degree of self-consciousness and awareness as laborers is also lower. This is to say that the life of our Japanese laborers is of a lower class than that of their white counterparts and that the degree of their awareness of themselves as human beings, and of their labor, is of a lower class. Racial prejudice itself, if we look at its roots, can also be said to have its origin here.

In summary, these are the reasons for our exclusion. Who, then, is it that excludes us? Internationally, it is of course the Canadians themselves, and from the viewpoint of racial prejudice, all Canadians should bear this responsibility. But, as mentioned above, just as Japanese exclusion means mainly exclusion of Japanese workers, it is correct to think that it is mainly Canadian workers who are doing the excluding.

To put it simply, we are being excluded because of our low level of self-education and awareness. The question then becomes, why are we excluded if our standard of living is low?

There is a group of Japanese residents in Canada who reject our claims, believing that they only needlessly provoke the animosity of this country’s capitalists. These are the contract bosses and their superiors. They believe that the capitalists in this country are glad to have our cheap and obedient labor, and they say that if we get close to white workers, it will only arouse bad feelings on the part of the capitalists. They insist that we rely solely on the kindness of the capitalists.

There are two major errors underlying this assertion. The first is that it completely overlooks the masses of workers in the modern world and the state of affairs in the labor world in this country. This would be understandable in an age when the power of the labor world was weak and relied solely on the will of the capitalists. Of course, there have been such times, but they are far in the past. Now, the will of the laborers can sway the will of the capitalists. And this tendency is increasing day by day.

It is common for people to ignore or be completely ignorant of the great fact of human progress. There was a time when people did not wonder at slavery. But that was a long time ago. Human knowledge is constantly advancing. People will not remain unaware forever. Therefore, those who advocate such paternalism are ultimately opposed to the awakening and betterment of Japanese workers, and it is almost as if they are telling us to be content to live in slavery. What kind of foolishness is this, to be unashamed to preach disregard of personhood in a society that should be striving for progress and betterment?

They also believe that the only solution to the anti-Japanese problem is force. If anti-Japanese sentiment becomes too strong, they say, we could just invade the province of British Columbia and take it over. It is truly astonishing. Such an outrageous act, not to mention the fact that they even entertain it as a thought, is what is worthy of exclusion. This is not a solution to Japanese exclusion – it will only strengthen it. To offer such an anachronism at this point is to make themselves a laughingstock.

We must be peace loving, enjoy our lives in peace, and provide an eternal foundation for our children. This is not possible unless we are educated enough to be at least equal to the workers of this country, who are of the same class as we are, and to shake hands with them on a friendly basis. In other words, only by doing so will we be able to achieve the rightful status of workers and overcome the obstacle of Japanese exclusion. We say again, this is the path that we must take. Although there may be times when we face oppression from the capitalists for our actions, this is merely a hardship shared by workers all over the world.

We established the first Japanese labor union in Canada in order to achieve the above-mentioned goals, and this newspaper is published in order to support them.