“From Citizens to Refugees”: Japanese Canadians and the Search for Wartime Sanctuary
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Beginning in 1942, almost 22,000 Japanese Canadians were removed from their homes on the West Coast of British Columbia. While some citizens privately understood their situation as akin to other histories of displacement, they never discussed their situation publicly using the language of refugeehood or exile. By contrast, the Cooperative Committee on Japanese Canadians, which protested the federal government’s deportation of Japanese Canadians in 1946, cloaked the wartime experience of Japanese Canadians using these very terms. To understand these variations in approaches, this article focuses on the question of what is signified when the term refugee is used in public debates about citizenship and state responsibilities. It begins by framing the stakes of this question by highlighting the debate over the term refugee in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. It then explores the experiences of journalist Muriel Kitagawa and her family as they sought refuge in Toronto and the activism of religious leaders who advocated on behalf of Japanese Canadian internees (with reference to a parallel history in the United States). The article concludes by considering the ways in which histories of internment have been memorialized in relation to other accounts of mass displacement. In doing so, the article advances the concept of “refugee distancing” as a way of understanding the reaction of citizens to the idea that they might become refugees. In the context of the Second World War, supporters’ use of the term refugee was a calculated political strategy meant to evoke the promises of citizenship, but it was also one that inadvertently highlighted the vulnerabilities at the core of racialized citizenship experiences, to the detriment of the very citizens the language was meant to assist.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.069 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".