In the closing weeks of 1945, months after the Second World War had ended, the Canadian cabinet enacted executive orders to banish more than 10,000 Canadians of Japanese descent to Japan, stripping many of them of Canadian citizenship in the process.
At the same moment that Canada began to turn its attention to the importance of human rights in the post-war world, it contemplated a brazen rights violation at home of enormous scale and cruelty. Canadian history has mostly forgotten about the exile of Japanese Canadians.
Our book Challenging Exile: Japanese Canadians and the Wartime Constitution delves into those dark days.
