The Pacific Borderlands in Wartime

• Main Author: Geiger, Andrea
• Format: Book Part
• Language: unknown
• Published: University of North Carolina Press 2022
• Subjects: Canada; Pacific; aleut; Alaska
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469641140.003.0006

As World War II approached, the mobility of Japanese immigrant fishers gave rise to ever more strident allegations of smuggling and spying in both Canada and the US. Along the Alaska coast, reported intrusions into US waters by Japanese fishing vessels were depicted as the vanguard of a coming invasion. The growing pressure Japan brought to bear along the North Pacific coast, reflected in ongoing disputes over oceangoing fisheries and the pelagic sealing industry, combined with Japan’s resentment of the race-based exclusion and unequal treatment of Japanese immigrants by both the United States and Canada, heightened tensions among all three nations. Canada and the United States forcibly removed people of Japanese ancestry from the Pacific coast and interned or incarcerated them during World War II. Alaska Natives with a Japanese forebear were among those forcibly uprooted. Chapter 5 also addresses the forced relocation of the Aleut by the US government, as well as that of the Aleut taken prisoner by the Japanese Imperial Army during the Aleutian campaign and taken to Japan. Japanese Canadians were forced to choose between moving east or being repatriated or expatriated to Japan and were not permitted to return to the B.C. coast until 1949.