Tomekichi Homma, Canadian: 6
When Homma walked to the court house from his home in Chinatown, he made a point of walking through the front door to register to vote.
The political climate for the challenge could hardly have been worse. Opposition to any concessions to Asian workers was at fever pitch. The debacle of the 1897 salmon season negotiations, during the previous Big Year, had ended with white, Indigenous and Japanese fishers at each other’s throats. Tempers had not improved during the 1900 negotiations, despite the efforts of union organizers like Frank Rogers. Resentment of the Japanese Canadian fishermen was skyrocketing as the number of arriving immigrants doubled and tripled. Homma’s team was well aware of the forces arrayed against them but believed the Union Colliery decision offered a firm precedent to level the playing field.[1]
Many years later, community leader George Tanaka, who knew Homma, wrote that, “like a cautious fighter, he bided his time. Homma as an interpreter proved he understood, read and wrote English. He was familiar with the voting process. As a boarding-house operator, he became a bona fide resident of Vancouver. Now he was ready. He was surely the foremost advocate and activist of Nikkei civil rights, and without peer.”[2]
Homma needed funds to hire a lawyer. Dantai board members were divided into teams and sent to every corner of BC and as far as the Skeena River to collect donations. “It was extremely hard work,” community leader Rintaro Hayashi wrote many years later. Ultimately, Homma’s supporters raised $1,500 over a two- to three-year period, “a reflection of how Japanese Canadians felt about the voting issue.” To save money and time, the fishermen decided to launch a single challenge in Vancouver with Homma as their representative.
The court house was just a few blocks from Homma’s home at 37 Dupont Street—later renamed Pender Street—in the heart of Vancouver’s growing Chinatown. He made a point of walking through the front door of the court house when he went to the office of the collector of votes on October 19, 1900.[3]
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Cunningham had been expecting him. Plans to launch the court challenge had been revealed a few days earlier in the Vancouver Weekly, one of the city’s earliest Japanese-language newspapers. The paper, published by Rev. Goro Kaburagi, reported that a meeting of Japanese Canadians had concluded “that legislation debarring Japanese from voting at dominion or provincial elections is unconstitutional.”[4]
News of Homma’s confrontation with Cunningham spread quickly. “The question which has for a long time been anticipated has at last come forward,” wrote the Vancouver Daily World. “A Japanese applied to be placed on the voters’ list and was refused.”[5] Reporters were quick to interview Cunningham, giving wide coverage to his chest-thumping vow to face jail before he allowed Homma to register.
The Province implied others had attempted to register as well, but only Homma’s name was on the application for judicial review filed a few days later. Not one English-language paper—Vancouver had the Vancouver Daily Province, the Daily News Advertiser and the Vancouver World; Victoria had the Daily Colonist —interviewed Homma on that day or any other occasion in the months to come.
Cunningham’s stormy rhetoric was both theatrical and pragmatic. As a former member of the Legislature from New Westminster, a racist stronghold, he was demonstrating his unwavering commitment to the “anti-Oriental” consensus in the province. Legally, he had no choice: provincial law required him to deny registration to anyone except white men on pain of a fifty-dollar fine or a month in jail.[6]
Homma was as ready to hear Cunningham’s rejection as Cunningham was to issue it. Within a week, R.W. Harris, Homma’s lawyer, applied for a judicial review. The application was signed “Tomey Homma, boarding housekeeper and employment agent.” As Homma and Cunningham were both aware, the outcome would turn on the court’s interpretation of Union Colliery. The hearing took place four weeks later, before Justice Angus McColl. This was too late to allow Homma to vote in the November 7 federal election—Cunningham ruled he would use the existing list with Japanese names prohibited. But the decision on November 30, 1900, was a complete victory for Homma and his supporters.[7]
McColl, chief justice of the BC Supreme Court, upheld Homma’s right to vote and ordered his name be added to the voters list. Basing his ruling squarely on Union Colliery, McColl declared the provincial law unconstitutional. He then made a comment that went to the heart of Homma’s case, the only time during the entire legal battle when any of the many judges involved acknowledged the real stakes of the battle.
“Whatever may be thought of the existing Naturalization Act in so far as it relates to British Columbia,” he wrote, “the residence within the Province of large numbers of persons, British subjects in name, but doomed to perpetual exclusion from any part in the passage of legislation affecting their property and civil rights would surely not be to the advantage of Canada and might even become a source of national danger.” This warning would play out in catastrophic fashion for the Nikkei in the wake of Pearl Harbor.
McColl was not naïve about the immediate political implications of his ruling. If not for Union Colliery, he said, “I would have considered that the authority of the Dominion Parliament becomes exhausted with the naturalization and that the person naturalized passes under the jurisdiction of the provincial legislature . . . but this view did not prevail with the Privy Council in the case mentioned, the effect of which, as I understand it, is that the Provincial Legislature has no power [to] pass any legislation whatever which does not, in terms at least, apply alike to born and naturalized subjects of Her Majesty.”[8] Homma’s legal bullet had hit the target.
Just four months later, on March 8, 1901, Cunningham’s appeal of McColl’s decision was heard by the BC Supreme Court, which needed only twenty-four hours to issue both a majority ruling upholding McColl’s decision and a dissenting opinion. The majority opinion, written by Justice Montague Drake, confirmed McColl’s reasoning. The Union Colliery ruling made it clear that Canada had jurisdiction over naturalization, Drake said, a jurisdiction set out in the Naturalization Act. No decision of the provincial Legislature could override that reality. A minority verdict delivered by Mr. Justice George A. Walkem, a former premier of the province and vocal exclusionist, focused on the division of powers between the federal government and the provinces in the British North America Act.
It was true, Walkem conceded, that Canada’s Naturalization Act made it clear that any naturalized citizen “shall, within Canada, be entitled to all political and other rights, powers and privileges, and subject to all obligations to which a natural-born British subject is entitled or subject within Canada.” The term “political rights,” Walkem said, “is a very wide expression,” which could be modified by local circumstances. In fact, the vote was denied to judges of the Supreme and County Courts, senior government officials and members of the armed forces on full pay, the vast majority of whom were British subjects.
If Canada could do this at the national level, surely a province could deny the vote to Chinese and Japanese naturalized aliens if it considered “that these two particular classes of Canadians . . . ought not, on grounds of public policy, to be entrusted with the franchise.”
But Walkem explored these issues, he said, merely with a view “of showing that none of the points I have mentioned have been overlooked.” He had no choice, he concluded, but to disallow Cunningham’s appeal because of Union Colliery. Homma had again hit the mark.[9]
The province’s political elite, urged on by indignant editorials, began a crisis response. “Naturalized Mongolians are legal voters,” raged the News Advertiser, adding “the blow has fallen.” Determined to reverse Homma’s achievement, BC Attorney General D.M. Eberts sought immediate leave from the Supreme Court to appeal once more to the Privy Council in London. The court speedily agreed. The Privy Council would have to clean up the mess it had made with Union Colliery. Both Homma and Eberts rushed to prepare for what would be the final contest.[10]
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Homma’s success was as unexpected and astonishing to many in the Japanese community as it was to political leaders and legal experts in Victoria. Some Japanese Canadians had never considered seeking the vote; others saw Homma’s crusade as an unnecessary provocation to the province’s legions of racists. “Many Nikkei people did not have any firm opinion,” Rintaro Hayashi recalled years later. “Some always wanted to oppose whatever initiative others were working on, and some thought [that] as long as it did not affect their home, it was more of an entertainment. The larger the fire the more fun it was, if it was burning on the opposite side of the river.”
This fire was burning close to home, however, and Homma had to renew his fundraising to pay for the appeal to the Privy Council. Now the naysayers came forward, warning “there was no way of beating a government.” It would be best just to go along, they cried, because “it is silly to spend money on what Homma, an arrogant schemer, is trying to do.” Those voices, however loud, were in the minority. With slogans like “Help Homma” and “Don’t kill Homma!” the money began to flow in.[11]
Homma’s double victory did serve to further arouse Vancouver’s racists. There were hundreds of people, claimed the Province, who “freely state that they will not allow the Japanese to vote if it comes to a matter of force.”[AM5]
At the same time, Homma’s supporters in Dantai were facing tremendous challenges on other fronts. Indigenous fishers had made Japanese exclusion from the salmon fishery a key demand in 1900. They renewed that call in 1901 as the fleet prepared for bargaining on the Big Year prices.
The demand for exclusion of the Nikkei dominated hearings of a Royal Commission into “oriental labour” that took place in Vancouver that spring. In June, the Fraser River Canners Association, aware of the financial pressures imposed by the hospital and Homma’s court case, secretly offered Nikkei labour bosses a payment of three dollars per fisherman for the hospital provided Dantai accepted FRCA price demands.[12]
Homma bit his tongue in the face of criticism and carried on. An appeal to Japanese consul Seizaburo Shimizu for funds was rebuffed. As the sole voice of the Japanese community in the eyes of the press, Shimizu was a tireless opponent of any form of discrimination against Japanese nationals, frequently contrasting the “highly civilized” Japanese with the allegedly less desirable Chinese. Now, with his eyes on the fragile new friendship with Great Britain, he professed himself disinterested in the problems of naturalized Japanese Canadians, who had evidently ceased to be nationals of Japan.
The Japanese embassy in London took the same position when Homma’s lawyers sought assistance to prepare for their Privy Council submissions. “How can a Japanese ambassador help those inconvenient people who dared to naturalize in a foreign country?” the ambassador asked. In fact, fearful of a humiliating move by Canada to limit or prevent Japanese immigration, Japan had already cut off emigration to Canada on August 7, 1900.[13]
Homma and his colleagues received a similar response when they travelled to Seattle in May 1901 to seek aid from the much larger Nikkei community there. Their appeal was hampered by recriminations over a recent Japanese immigration case that Seattle community leaders believed had been bungled in Canada. In spite of “offensive remarks made under the influence of alcohol consumption” by members of the audience, Homma spoke of the “tumultuous effort to obtain voting rights. He made his earnest plea for united effort toward the victory and support toward the legal fee of $1,500.”
After a tough debate, the Seattle leadership agreed to provide aid. “Cases such as this movement are a critical issue for all Japanese,” wrote the reporter who covered the meeting for Nihonjin, a Japanese newspaper in Seattle. “I hope we are all able to put our personal emotions aside, and more simply put, we should not put our personal relationships over our public missions and should support our fellow citizens from our homeland [living] in Canada and fight the battle as a united force.”[14]
Nihonjin later termed Homma “a loyal figure with a keen sense of justice. During his long residence of more than ten years in America, he has put others before himself and helped people to achieve their success. That personality is what makes Homma who he is and should be highly valued.” Like many leaders, Homma often believed more in the capabilities of the people he represented than they may have believed in themselves. It was a quality that produced resentment when he challenged them to do more, but admiration and respect when they reflected on what he achieved on their behalf. Bit by bit, Homma got his money.[15]
Next in Tomekichi Homma, Canadian: the province’s white elite mobilize to stop Homma’s string of court victories.
[1] Geiger, Subverting Exclusion, 23.
[2] From a draft of Toyo Takata, Nikkei Legacy: The Story of Japanese Canadians from Settlement to Today (Victoria: NC Press, 1995), included in Homma papers, Box TD 103, Nikkei National Museum and Cultural Centre.
[3] Homma and Isaksson, Tomekichi Homma, 26.
[4] “Will the Law Hold? Vancouver’s Japanese Newspaper Holds that the Law Debarring Naturalized Asiatics from Voting Will Not Hold Good in the Courts,” Vancouver Daily Province, October 23, 1900, p. 5. The Province reporter who broke the story to English-speaking readers marvelled that the Weekly was “essentially an up-to-date newspaper” with the latest news on wars in South Africa and China, as well as “advertisements of some of Vancouver’s most prominent merchants.”
[5] “Shall the Jap Vote?” Vancouver Daily World, October 27, 1900, 1.
[6] “Japanese Will Fight in the Canadian Courts for Registration as Voters,” Vancouver Daily Province, October 26, 1900, 10.
[7] Harris to Cunningham, October 25, 1900, BC Attorney General, Correspondence Inward 1901, GR-0429, Box 07, File 02, BC Archives. In Re the Provincial Elections Act and In re Tomey Homma, a Japanese, [1900] B.C.J. 1957 B.C.R. 368.
[8] The Collector of Votes for the Electoral District of Vancouver City and the Attorney General for the Province of British Columbia v Tomey Homma and the Attorney General for the Dominions of Canada (British Columbia) [1902].
[9] The arguments are well summarized in Keita Szemok-Uto’s paper “Conflicting Decisions.”
[10] 1901 Carswell BC 36 British Columbia Supreme Court [Full Court At Vancouver] Reference Re Provincial Elections Act and Reference Re Tomey Homma, A Japanese 1901 Carswell 36, 8 B.C.R. 76 In Re The Provincial Elections Act and In Re Tomey Homma, A Japanese Walkem, Drake and Martin, JJ. Judgment: March 9, 1901; “Naturalized Mongolians Are Legal Voters,” Daily News Advertiser, December 1, 1900, p. 4. BC Attorney General, Correspondence Inward 1901, GR-0429, Box 07, File 02, BC Archives. Leave was granted March 25, 1901.
[11] Koyama, Tomekichi Homma: An Honourable Life, 56–72.
[12] Meggs, Strange New Country, 146–150.
[13] Koyama, Tomekichi Homma: An Honourable Life, 66–72.
[14] Dongyu, “Report from Steveston: Activist Visitors from Vancouver,” Nihonjin, May 18, 1901, 8. The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Naoko Tanabe, of Densho, the Japanese American Legacy Project, in identifying and translating this and related articles.
[15] “Brief Description of Vancouver People,” Nihonjin, July 27, 1901, 7.