CHAPTER
8
The captain of Suian Maru was content. Holding a glass of beer in his hand, he smiled as he looked around the high-class geisha house. How very nice of people who had chartered his ship to take him and his senior crew out the evening before they sailed. And, yes, a little more beer would be much appreciated.
The next day, hungover and exhausted, he was not so happy. After a glorious night at the geisha house, his hosts had poured him and his crew members aboard the boat. Then the ship had put out to sea with, thought the captain, some 50 men aboard for a fishing trip out in the islands far north of Japan.
Then the trap was sprung. While the captain had been imbibing, cronies of the hosts had brought aboard another 30 people, three of them women, and hidden them below decks. Now, out of sight of land, the gang leader explained the new plans to the captain. The fishing schooner was not going fishing. They were going to Canada. No one would ever believe, they said, that the captain had not been involved from the beginning in this conspiracy. He had no choice but to go along.
Chinese were not the only nationality to arrive illegally in Canada early in the 20th century. The first Japanese immigrant into British Columbia, Manzo Nagano, smuggled himself into Canada as a stowaway in 1877, but by 1900 the number of Japanese in British Columbia was still fewer than 5,000, almost all of them legal immigrants. Then, in 1906, Suian Maru sifted in through the darkness in the first known large-scale attempt to land Japanese immigrants illegally in British Columbia.
At night, Suian Maru hove to along the coast just northwest of Victoria and lowered her boats. Seventy-eight men clambered down from the deck and were rowed to shore. Under cover of darkness, the group moved from the beach to the nearby forest. At first light, they formed up into columns and began their quixotic quest to march the 30 miles (50 kilometres) or so from their landing place to the head of the Saanich Peninsula, near Sidney. There, they had been promised, a steamer would pick them up and take them across the strait and up the Fraser River, where they would work off the debt for their passage at a cannery and saltery co-owned by Oikawa Jinsaburo, who had arranged for the trip.
It must have been a strange sight. Many of the men had just emerged from the Japanese army and the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 and still wore some or all of their army uniforms. Off they marched in military fashion, “pockets bulging with army biscuits . . . with meat and condiments,” reported the Victoria Colonist. “The party was supplied with shelter, tents, hammocks and maps.” These important and detailed maps, in Japanese, showed them a route that avoided any main roads and marked the location of the Japanese section of Victoria and houses that were occupied by Japanese. Anyone who could not keep up with the column was left behind to make his own way to whatever destination he could find. Just 26 men arrived in Sidney. No steamer awaited them, but the police did.
After Suian Maru had dropped off most of the men, it was spotted by authorities “hovering about Beecher Bay in a suspicious manner.” Trapped by light winds, the schooner was still there when the quarantine officer reached the area later that day. We’ve been fishing, the captain told the authorities and pointed to the fishing lines on deck as evidence of their activities, but the lines were clearly new and had never been used. The captain said that the weather had been so bad at their fishing destination in Bering Strait that they had run south and east, heading to New Westminster to buy salt salmon instead. Challenged again, the captain admitted they had landed a number of Japanese illegals on the shore. But perhaps there was a way out of this small difficulty. “Without attracting attention he slipped a little packet of gold coins into the pocket of [the quarantine officer]. The doctor felt the jingling store of gold, and put it aside as an exhibit in the case.” The captain, however, was confident that his attempted bribe had been successful.
The mate, too, tried to put over the false story. “The mate was suave,” reported the newspaper. “He held to his tale until the evidence began to accumulate. Finally, he looked over to the captain and he said, ‘Skigaiaganai,’ which means, in effect, ‘It can’t be helped.’” The mate and captain then admitted the ship had sailed across the Pacific with the sole purpose of landing the illegals on British Columbia soil.
The newspaper was somewhat perplexed by the whole attempt. At that time, Canada placed no restrictions on Japanese immigration. In order to leave Japan, an emigrant needed a passport and permission to leave; in order to enter Canada, he needed to pass a medical examination. The reporter conjectured that those on board the schooner had failed to get exit permission or feared they would not pass the health examination.
Escorted into Victoria, the captain was very unhappy. According to the Colonist:
[He] is a very serious man. He is not only worrying with the fear of prospective imprisonment for his share in the expedition, though it is generally stated by the Japanese that he started from Oginohawa with the belief that he commanded a fishing expedition, but he is worrying too for fear that he will lose his expected decoration for service on Japanese transport during the recent war. Imprisonment will mean the cancellation of any award made on this account.
Eventually, all the passengers were captured. The captain and the ship were charged with landing the group at a place other than a port of entry and without passenger lists or permission. Fines were levied against both. The story disappears from the newspapers, though the reporter predicted the fines would be paid; if they weren’t, the ship would be confiscated and the captain imprisoned. The captain presumably returned to Japan, his hope of wartime decorations still alive.
All of the passengers were permitted to stay in Canada. They still owed Oikawa for their passage and went to work for him on two islands at the mouth of the Fraser. Though Oikawa—for whom one of the islands is named—returned to Japan in 1917, most of the immigrants stayed in Canada, and some of them and their children were sent to internment camps in 1942. A plaque in Richmond commemorates their voyage.
It was not Oikawa’s first attempt to bring Japanese into the country to work for him. He had brought in Japanese immigrants legally but paid them so poorly that they rebelled and refused to continue working. A second attempt, this time to bring in Japanese illegally, was stopped by Japanese authorities. Oikawa was sentenced to jail, although the sentence was subsequently reversed. The voyage of Suian Maru was his third attempt, a voyage so celebrated that it became the subject of a novel written in Japan.
One of the men who helped negotiate to keep the Suian Maru immigrants in Canada was Fred Yoshy, a clerk at the Japanese consulate in Vancouver. Writer James D. Cameron notes that this was just the beginning for Yoshy, who went on to help smuggle many more Japanese into the country. When the Canadian government, faced with climbing immigration from China and Japan and frightened by an anti-Asian riot, imposed controls on Japanese immigration in 1907, Yoshy saw not limitation but opportunity.
By this time, Yoshy was the interpreter for the immigration branch in Vancouver, and he had much scope for illegal activities. From the end of the First World War through to the 1930s, he took advantage of his post by convincing his superiors he should examine would-be immigrants by himself. He then allowed various illegal immigrants to stay in the country—for a price. Though suspicions repeatedly gathered over his head, his superiors, either in on the plot or happily ignorant and somewhat lazy, continued to deny that there was anything wrong going on.
In 1928, an informer told the RCMP:
Yoshy and his partner . . . are trafficking in smuggling some innocent Japanese into this country by way of using naturalization certificates. The partner in Japan trains Japanese applicants to some extent to fit them to be examined at a Port of Entry in Canada for precaution’s sake, but it is so arranged that this Fred Yoshy is always to meet these immigrants at Vancouver, because this Yoshy is allowed to examine these Japanese immigrates by himself alone.
By 1931, it was impossible to ignore Yoshy’s involvement in human smuggling. The RCMP collected fraudulent birth certificates, naturalization certificates and statements about Yoshy’s activities. He was arrested, but witnesses in the case disappeared, possibly fearing that they would be deported, or worse, if they told the truth. The charges became a cause célèbre, reports ricocheting through newspapers across the country. Later that year, Yoshy was finally convicted of conspiracy and of unlawfully receiving a gift while employed by the government and was sentenced to two years and six months at hard labour in the BC Penitentiary. It is thought that he returned in Japan in disgrace after he served his jail term.