WHEN YON SHIMIZU HEARD THE news that Japanese forces had bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941, he was on his hands and knees, scrubbing his family’s linoleum floor. Living in a rented house in Victoria, British Columbia, with his sister, two brothers, and their widowed mother, he was listening to the radio while completing his chores. He raced from the room to tell the rest of his family. “I was frightened and dismayed,” he recounts in the prologue to his book, The Exiles. Life had never been easy for his family, he adds, “but none of us were really prepared for the devastating events which were to unfold in the coming months.”In 1942, the Canadian government declared a “protected area” along the Pacific Coast—a buffer zone between the water and the Japanese-Canadian communities that had flanked it. Under pressure from officials such as Ian Mckenzie, a cabinet minister from British Columbia, elected officials at federal, provincial, and local levels insisted that the Japanese Canadians who lived there be forcibly relocated. Nearly 22,000 people—roughly 90 percent of the Japanese Canadian population at the time—were uprooted.
Source: How Japanese Canadians Survived Internment and Dispossession – Atlas Obscura
