in detail the social and psychological effects of evacuation on the ethnic Japanese community in Canada. Once more, though, the author declined to make recommendations for government action in support of the rights of Japanese Canadians.35 Although critics were unanimous in praising LaViolette's detailed and judicious presentation of the record of the wartime events, Tomatsu Shibutani, himself a former inmate, perceptively remarked that he was disappointed by LaViolette's failure to examine how the program appeared from the point of view of those affected.36
Paradoxically, given his neutral stance on Ottawa's wartime policy on ethnic Japanese, LaViolette emerged during the wartime and postwar years as a major supporter of Japanese Canadians and their citizenship rights. He started by welcoming Nisei students such as Kim Nakashima to McGill and supervising their work.37 When in 1944 McGill became the first Canadian university to officially bar students of Japanese ancestry, LaViolette helped guide the protests by students and community activists that led to the successful repeal of the policy the following year. While he made no public comment against the policy—no doubt he felt constrained by his position—he privately organized students and helped gain publicity for their efforts. Meanwhile, as early as February 1945 LaViolette gave a well-publicized public lecture in which he claimed that the government's seizure of the property of Japanese Canadians was “open to criticism” and had done more than anything else to arouse racial hostility on an international scale.38 He asked whether Canadians intended “to try to keep in Canada people who feel that this is their home, or…to send to Japan people who are Canadian citizens, among them young people who can neither speak nor write the Japanese language.”39 Shortly after, he termed mass removal a “complete defeat” for the efforts of Japanese Canadians to assimilate, and noted that community members, despite surface acceptance, remained inwardly hostile.40 Yet in an article that explored the movement for total deportation of Canadian citizens, he declared against all evidence that the initial willingness of Issei and Nisei to go to Japan was due more to prewar prejudice in British Columbia than to the Canadian government's war time confinement and impoverishment of ethnic Japanese.41 The following year, LaViolette helped form the Montreal Committee on Canadian Citizenship to oppose government deportation policies. (Again, presumably because of his professional position, LaViolette did not officially join the committee, and he was careful to leave his name off its public manifestos). The committee was successful in finding jobs and housing for Nisei migrants and in challenging the government's policy of involuntary mass postwar deportation of Japanese Canadians.42
In 1949, LaViolette accepted the chairmanship of a joint department of sociology and anthropology at Tulane University. During his years at Tulane, he pursued projects on diverse aspects of race relations, including urbanization in South America, Nazi war crimes against Jews, and housing for minorities.43 His most significant contribution was the 1961 book The Struggle for Survival, on the adaptation of First Nations in British Columbia. After retiring from Tulane in 1967 he served as visiting professor at the University of Toronto, and later at the University of Guelph. In 1973, he returned to Portland, Oregon, with his wife, where he died on September 28, 1989. Over the last forty years of his life, LaViolette maintained an almost total public silence on the question of Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians, After 1949 he largely ceased to publish research on either group, although in a series of brief book reviews he made a limited attempt to engage the new scholarship on government actions during World War II. Curiously, he made no public comment in support of the redress movement that grew up in both countries in the 1970s and 1980s. Whether his turning his attention to other projects following his return to the United States in 1949-50 was based on a sense that he had completed his work or on the feeling of being stymied by the complexity of the problem is impossible to know.
To conclude, what can we make of the contributions of Forrest LaViolette? An unorthodox academic in his research and career trajectory, he nonetheless held to a strict objectivity in his writing. His approach aroused strong disagreement among later scholars. Ann Gomer Sunahara criticized his impersonality as false objectivity.
When Forrest E. LaViolette wrote…in the 1940s, wartime censorship hindered his efforts. In addition, as a sociologist LaViolette was primarily interested in the exile of Japanese Canadians as a social phenomenon, one that paralleled a similar exile of Japanese Americans. Accordingly, he accepted the explanation of the government of the day—that it had merely responded to a mistaken but overwhelming surge of public opinion in British Columbia. LaViolette was unable—or lacked the interest—to determine how that surge of public opinion materialized, or how it came to be translated into the repressive policies applied to the innocent Japanese.44
On the other hand, Rolf Knight credited LaViolette with putting racial issues on the table amid a hostile postwar climate:
In retrospect, the era was the golden age for obscurantist social science and retailored history.…Whole fields of enquiry had been silenced by self-imposed taboos and it became bad form even to mention whole classes of events. When a book like Forrest LaViolette's…arose in class discussion it was sniffily dismissed as unscholarly—meaning that it stuck its nose into a topic which then had been expunged.45
What is more difficult to understand is why LaViolette was such a weak reed in the defense of Japanese North Americans against official race-based wartime exclusion and discrimination. On one hand, he was clearly supportive of Japanese Americans and gladly joined in community life. Believing that he could help the Nisei by giving them guidance so that they could more easily be absorbed into mainstream society, he was a generous mentor and friend. In the prewar years, he also took their side, recommending to those in the larger society that they foster assimilation of minorities to bring an end to racial prejudice. Yet out of his interest in the abstract question of resettlement, and perhaps also his fear of alienating orthodox academics by pol itical activism that could appear to slant his work, he remained aloof from overt political activity, despite his behind-the-scenes presence in the fight to protect Japanese Canadians from postwar deportation. Worse, he remained an outspoken apologist for official confinement of ethnic Japanese, even as concerned citizens in both nations deplored the wartime policy and the former inmates campaigned for reparations. Still, both for its qualities and for its ambivalences, LaViolette's work merits further study.
3. Japantown Born and Reborn
Comparing the Resettlement Experience of Issei and Nisei in Detroit, New York, and Los Angeles
The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and the unleashing of World War II in the Pacific wiped out the thriving Japanese communities on the Pacific coast of the United States. In the weeks that followed the onset of war, military officials on the West Coast became increasingly terrified of a Japanese invasion. They proceeded to single out the region's Japanese American population as potential spies and saboteurs on the basis of their ancestry, and called for the mass “evacuation” of both Issei and Nisei from the West Coast.1 The movement was further fomented and abetted by white nativist organizations and agricultural and commercial groups, who saw an opportunity to rid themselves of their long-despised economic competitors, and by opportunistic politicians. The fact that there was no documented case of any disloyal activity by any person of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast, and that two-thirds of the community's members, the Nisei, were American citizens did not ease the fears of their panicked neighbors. Rather, as West Coast defense commander General John DeWitt stated, the very absence of evidence only proved that a concentrated campaign of subversion had been prepared for the future. Anyway, DeWitt insisted, it was impossible to tell a loyal Japanese American from a disloyal one. “A Jap is a Jap,” he told his War Department superiors, Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy and Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson. McCloy and Stimson soon overcame their initial doubts about the necessity and constitutionality of mass removal of Japanese Americans, and brought the matter into the White House.2
In response to the pressure from the military and West Coast political leaders, President Franklin D. Roosevelt
