“After All Our Efforts at Good Citizenship”: Propriety, Property, and Belonging in the Dispossession of Japanese Canadians, 1940s

Abstract

This article argues that in the early twentieth-century evolution of citizenship in Canada, property persisted as a site wherein national belonging could be claimed and performed. It contextualizes a Japanese Canadian family’s performances of property and protests at their wartime dispossession within the ideals that Canadian urban reformers, planners, and property theorists set out in the 1920s and 1930s. In doing so, this article reveals the unequal access to citizenship that property ownership afforded and thus introduces a complex portrait of hierarchies of membership and belonging in Canada at this time.