Tomekichi Homma, Canadian: 2
Homma became a salmon gillnetter in Steveston, then a summer boom town where Indigenous fishers and workers from every part of the world harvested the massive salmon runs
Vancouver presented a dramatic contrast to Homma’s home village. The settlement emerging around what is now Gastown in downtown Vancouver was flanked to the east by a major sawmill. Arriving steamships docked within sight of a smouldering sea of stumps spreading south and west as labourers cleared the land for the explosive development expected when the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) line arrived from the east. The last spike was driven at Craigellachie in 1885, and the first train arrived in Vancouver in 1887, making the city a key link in emerging North Pacific trade routes from eastern Canada to China and Japan.
Despite the ravages of smallpox, Indigenous people were still a majority of the region’s residents, with Musqueam, Squamish, Tsleil-Watuth and many other First Nations communities around the inlet and on the Fraser River delta to the south. Sometime after his arrival, Homma moved to Steveston, a tiny hamlet on the north side of the Fraser River’s main stem, where he became a salmon fisherman.[1]
What prompted Homma to give up his ambitious and long-planned journey to Oxford to become a common labourer and fisherman, well below his station in Japanese society? “He saw Canada as a country with boundless opportunities, a place of life and freedom,” says Tenney Homma, his granddaughter.[2] Given his education, it’s possible he knew something about British Columbia before he arrived and harboured private ambitions to make a complete break with his upbringing. Many others made such life-altering decisions.[3]
Japanese seafarers were no strangers to BC’s waters. As Japan opened up to the world, Japanese mariners became active in the North Pacific fur trade, especially hunting fur seals that migrated across the Pacific to rookeries on the Pribilof Islands in the Aleutians.[4] News of the scope and drama of the changes reshaping the Pacific coast from California to Alaska—the gold rushes, the railway construction, the explosion of city-building—would certainly have circulated among educated Japanese, who had a growing daily press to feed an insatiable interest in foreign affairs.
Unlike many other Japanese who settled in BC, however, Homma had no background in fishing or the sea, nor did he disclose his samurai status in his new community. Homma’s own family only learned of their ancestry after his death, although his strong academic and language skills were evident. His commitment to fishing, an “unclean” or outcaste occupation in some parts of Japan, was a profound rejection of the caste system, a rejection he repeated when he later married a woman far below his standing in Japan.
Homma seems to have left Japan both physically and emotionally, focusing all his energies on building a new community in Canada. Despite turning his back on the social conventions of his birthplace, Homma remained proudly Japanese. Driven by what he believed to be the core values and responsibilities of a samurai, he sought to recreate himself in conditions of full equality in this new home.[5]
The few Japanese who preceded Homma to Steveston were often from poverty-stricken maritime prefectures of Japan like Wakayama, where salmon and herring fishing were common occupations. On the Fraser River delta they were surrounded by abundance, despite many hardships. Great flocks of migratory birds passed through in spring and fall; the river’s tidal flats and shallows were rich in clams, oysters and crabs; and the Fraser’s salmon runs were the largest in the world, drawing Indigenous harvesters from around the Salish Sea each fall. European settlers in Steveston quickly started farming in addition to salmon fishing. By 1879, the demand for dikes to protect their fields from Fraser flood waters triggered the creation of the municipality of Richmond to levy the necessary taxes.[6]
The arriving Japanese found seasonal work in the growing number of salmon canneries along the Fraser. Manzo Nagano, the first Japanese immigrant to settle on the Fraser, not only prospered as a fisherman but also returned to Japan several times to establish an export market for his salmon saltery near New Westminster. Even with active recruiting in Wakayama by immigrants like Gihei Kuno, only about 400 Japanese lived in the Steveston area by the late 1890s. Then their numbers began to rise sharply. Some newcomers were veterans of the Victoria-based sealing fleet, which departed every spring to harry the migrating pelagic seals to their rookeries in the Aleutians, delivering their pelts to Yokohama or Canton before returning to Victoria. Others, like Homma, were emigrants who stopped in British Columbia on their way elsewhere and never left. Most lived a subsistence existence, working when they could. Very few enjoyed Nagano’s financial success.[7]
Homma needed strength and resilience to succeed as a fisherman. Most Japanese worked primarily during the salmon season as contract labourers, pulling the heavy linen gillnets by hand into the flatbottomed Columbia River–style boats that dominated the fishery in the early years. Although equipped with a small gaff-rigged sail, the boats were manoeuvred for the most part by a “boat puller” with long oars while another fisherman handled the net. Fishermen lived exposed to the elements for days during the fishery, fighting wind and tide. When ashore, most lived in dormitory-style housing provided by the contractors, who sold their labour to canners on a piece rate for each case of salmon packed, deducting liberally to cover food, lodging and equipment. Since they were working on cannery boats, licensed to the cannery owner and hired through a contractor, the Japanese fishermen lived a precarious existence, wholly dependent on the contractor for the necessities of life. In the words of Ken Adachi, a pre-eminent historian of the Japanese Canadian community, “the immigrant was a chattel.”[8]
“The boss controlled 20 or 30 boats,” Asamatsu Murakami, a veteran of the system, recalled decades later. “A Japanese boss talked to the cannery about lending or buying nets and gear for the fishermen. The boss was responsible, very responsible for them. If a fisherman got into debt, the boss had to pay it off. So he had to be careful to eliminate bad habits like drinking, otherwise he lost money. None of the men had wives then, they were all single. And as there were no women, they’d get wild. Just a few drinks and they’d start a fight. I saw a lot of fights. Some men killed each other, some were put in jail.”[9] During the off-season, Japanese fishermen often suffered disease and chronic illness from their meagre diet and contaminated water. They gambled and drank when they could afford to, building gillnetters or splitting cedar into shakes to make some extra income. The nearest community, New Westminster, was more than twenty-five kilometres upstream, and Vancouver was a full day’s journey away by stagecoach on a rutted, muddy wagon road.[10]
Given their huge financial exposure, the Japanese bosses played a critical role in the strikes that periodically paralyzed the fishery, siding more often with the canners than with the fishers when production stopped. For the Japanese fishermen, the only ticket out of this bondage was naturalization, possible after three years’ residency. Once naturalized, a Japanese fisherman could obtain his own licence and contract directly with a cannery. Salmon fishers were paid a daily wage rate during the early years, but were later forced to accept a price per fish as the industry expanded, a tactic used by the canners to transfer more of their risk to the harvesters.
Indigenous fishers were dependent on the canners for licences, boats and gear, but unlike the Japanese they could pick up and go home whenever they wished—and sometimes did. Indigenous fishers also had additional leverage because Indigenous women were a vital source of cannery labour. White fishers were the most independent of all, the only sector of the fleet with access to licences, the ability to withdraw their labour and, perhaps most critical, the power of the vote to force more favourable regulations. They exercised this power relentlessly to exclude the Japanese.
As the industry grew, the size of the salmon fleet grew with it. The share of the fleet operated by Japanese grew fastest of all during the 1890s. There was continuing tension among fishermen to achieve some security. They could either reduce competition on the fishing grounds by limiting access by others, or they could seek to increase the price paid for fish by bargaining with the canners. The fight to achieve a fair share of the value of the catch would be a formative force in Homma’s career.
The Fraser could be beautiful in the summer, with Mount Baker rising in a great white cone to the south, terrifying in a southeast autumn gale and frozen bank to bank in wintertime. When the salmon were running, as spring turned to summer, the beginning of the weekly opening would be announced by a Sunday cannon shot from Steveston’s Garry Point, at the mouth of the river, where a single Douglas fir stood alone on the beach. The nets of hundreds of gillnetters, crewed by white, Indigenous and Japanese fishers, would cover the river all the way to New Westminster. These were the boundaries of Homma’s life in his new homeland. Compared to Oxford or Onigoe, it was the far side of the moon.[11]
Next in Tomekichi Homma, Canadian: Homma emerges as a key leader among the Japanese Canadians struggling to make a living in the Fraser River’s salmon fishery.
[1] The 1881 population was 25,661 Indigenous, 1,548 Chinese and 9,038 others, including whites. Keith Ralston, “The 1900 Strike of the Fraser River Sockeye Fishermen (master’s thesis, University of British Columbia, 1965), 10.
[2] Tenney Homma, “Notes for Vancouver Historical Society presentation, January 2004,” Nikkei Museum and Cultural Centre, Box TD201.
[3] Andrea Geiger, Converging Empires: Citizens and Subjects in the North Pacific Borderlands (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2022), 5–6. Japan was initially a market for sea otter and fur seal pelts, but Japanese mariners quickly asserted interest in these industries as producers when Japan opened up. By 1900, Japanese were active in all aspects of fur seal harvesting and marketing. See also James R. Gibson, Otter Skins, Boston Ships, and China Goods: The Maritime Fur Trade of the Northwest Coast, 1785–1841 (Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992), 142–143.
[4] Geiger, Converging Empires, 75–87.
[5] Geiger explores these issues in Subverting Exclusion, 138–150.
[6] Geoff Meggs, Salmon: The Decline of the Pacific Fishery (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1991), 27.
[7] In 1891, only fifty-three Japanese, including two women, were listed in the permanent population of five hundred in Steveston, of which about half were Caucasians. The rest were Chinese. By 1900, the permanent Japanese population was four hundred, of which forty-six were women and twenty-three were children. Mitsuo Yesaki, Sutebusuton: A Japanese Village on the British Columbia Coast (Vancouver: Peninsular Publishing, 2003), 9–13.
[8] Ken Adachi, The Enemy That Never Was (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1979), 32.
[9] Daphne Marlatt, Steveston Recollected: A Japanese Canadian History (Victoria: Provincial Archives of B.C., 1975), cited in Meggs, Salmon, 49.
[10] Meggs, Salmon, 49.
[11] Geoff Meggs, Strange New Country: The Fraser River Salmon Strikes of 1900–1901 and the Birth of Modern British Columbia (Madeira Park, BC: Harbour Publishing, 2018), 75–85; Meggs, Salmon, 48–59; Masako Fukawa, Stanley Fukawa and the Nikkei Fishermen’s History Book Committee, Spirit of the Nikkei Fleet: BC’s Japanese Canadian Fishermen (Madeira Park, BC: Harbour Publishing, 2009).