Tomekichi Homma, Canadian, Part 8: Aftermath
Devastated by his legal defeat, Homma largely withdrew from public life, living and working at Great Northern Cannery on the north shore of Burrard Inlet
The white community’s reaction was one of quiet satisfaction. A Province editorial analyzed the legal aspects of the case in detail for the first time, concluding with heavy irony that the BC Supreme Court would have done better had they “followed their own opinions, but they went wrong in attempting to follow the opinion of Their Lordships of the Privy Council [in Union Colliery].”
It all went to show, the Province concluded, that it was time for Canada to consider its own Supreme Court.
Reaction to the decision by some in the Japanese Canadian community was swift and harsh. Homma’s detractors were quick to condemn his challenge, declaring, “They cannot follow in such a conceited speculator’s footsteps. One has to be very foolish to pour money into such a venture.”
The Japanese consulate, always careful to distance itself from Homma’s case, now found itself humiliated by the denial of the franchise, which condemned Japanese immigrants to a second-class status in law. In future, Japan would not permit emigration to a country that did not guarantee the franchise to naturalized Japanese.[1]
Homma was devastated by the outcome. Unlike many Japanese Canadians, who naturalized initially to get access to fishing licences, Homma believed the right to vote was fundamental to citizenship. He valued “its more cardinal substance,” a community leader wrote many years later, including the right to run for office or to serve on a jury.[2] The relegation to second-class status explicit in the ruling offended him to his core.
In the two years since undertaking the court case, Homma had lived the experiences of an entire lifetime, launching the Japanese civil rights association, opening a restaurant and a hotel, launching a tofu business and operating a rooming house. He was undoubtedly involved in the turmoil of salmon price bargaining, with its violent clashes, food deliveries to striking fishermen and even martial law.
As if these pressures weren’t enough, he and his wife, Matsu, were also confronting personal tragedy. Matsu had delivered their first child, a girl they named Shizue, on December 18, 1902, just days after news of the Privy Council decision reached Vancouver. Shizue fell sick with fever and died February 6, 1903.
Many in the community were aware how hard Homma had fought for them and never forgot his sacrifice. While Homma prepared his Privy Council submissions in 1901, Yamazaki had led the Japanese fishermen through a second chaotic round of bargaining to maintain a minimum price for fish during the 1901 Big Year salmon run, which proved to be the largest in the Fraser’s history.
Once again, the Japanese fleet settled while the BC Fishermen’s Union, representing the white fishermen, remained on strike. The result was violent clashes on the fishing grounds, with Yamazaki providing armed protection to Japanese fishers who faced assault and kidnapping by union pickets. At the end of the season, Yamazaki moved to Seattle where he could live and work in safety.
Homma now largely withdrew from public life, although he emerged briefly a few years later to mediate a squabble between factions in the Japanese community over arrangements to welcome yet another royal visitor from Japan. His broad business interests still demanded his time, but there could be no escape from the racist tensions of Vancouver. His boarding house was at the epicentre of the Vancouver anti-Asian riots of September 1907, when mobs devastated Chinatown and then attempted to overrun the emerging Japanese Canadian community on Powell Street.[3]
In 1909, in part to provide a healthier climate for their oldest son, Joseph, the Hommas moved to Frank Millerd’s Great Northern Cannery on the north shore of Burrard Inlet, where Tomekichi Homma became the night watchman. Frank Millerd, an Irishman who fought in the Boer War before immigrating to Canada, was a rare independent canner who valued his relationship with his employees, particularly the Japanese Canadians.
The high walls of the cannery compound, where Indigenous, Chinese, Japanese and white workers lived in unusual harmony, with their own general store and mess hall, was a quiet refuge from the business pressures, political battles and prejudices of the city. The North Vancouver ferries linking the north shore of the inlet to the city could only be reached by a narrow gravel path that hugged the beach, sometimes forcing travellers to wade through freezing waves at high tide. Homma often carried a pistol as a precaution against cougars and bears or human hazards he might encounter on the day-long return trip. .[4]
The Hommas suffered another terrible blow in 1913, when their second son, Junkichi, was lost overboard on the Fraser River. Homma, who had been operating the boat, never fished again. The next year, according to family recollections, he helped organize food deliveries to the passengers on the Komagata Maru, which sat anchored in Burrard Inlet for two months as Canadian authorities manoeuvred to deny the 378 immigrants on board the right to enter Canada.
At Great Northern, Homma focused on his watchman duties and worked tirelessly on two books recounting the history of the Japanese Canadian community. Over a period of seven years, Homma travelled the province interviewing early Japanese immigrants. The result was two books, Canada no Hoko (Treasures of Canada) and Canada Doho Hatten Taikan Furoku (An Appendix to the Directory of the Development of Japanese Canadians), published in 1922.[5]
In 1929, fire destroyed Homma’s personal papers, including diaries dating back to his earliest days in Canada. A stroke during the same period made it difficult for him to speak. Nonetheless, he remained a revered community elder, consulted on a host of issues by people who made the trip to Great Northern to seek his advice. He read four papers a day, two in English and two in Japanese. In 1942, when Japanese Canadians were forcibly displaced and relocated, Canadian officials acknowledged Homma’s prestige by offering him a private railway car to internment. Homma refused, insisting he and his wife, Matsu, travel with community members in the regular train that took them to Popoff internment camp in the Slocan Valley, where he died on October 18, 1945.
Despite the defeat at the Privy Council, Homma’s reputation grew over time. “You have consistently sacrificed yourself for the public good,” wrote Junshiro Nakagama in a 1922 tribute. “Canada’s Homma is the object of reverence by the Japanese communities overseas.”[6]
The fight for the franchise eventually resumed. After his return to Vancouver in 1909, Yasushi Yamazaki took over management of Tairiku Nippo, the Japanese community’s main newspaper. When the First World War broke out, Yamazaki sought to organize a Japanese Canadian volunteer battalion, certain that such a show of loyalty would compel Canadian authorities to grant the franchise. The would-be volunteers, repeatedly rebuffed, finally had to pay their own way to Calgary to sign up in Alberta. Many of those who served in France died. The survivors did get the vote, but not until 1931.
By 1920, the year the Japanese Canadian community in Vancouver raised its war memorial in Stanley Park, Yamazaki was spending most of his time pursuing business interests in occupied Manchuria, where he died some years later. Only in 1947 did the BC Legislature finally grant Japanese Canadians the vote, thanks to the tireless efforts of George Tanaka, national secretary of the Japanese Canadian Citizens Association, and Seiji Homma, Tomekichi’s son, who was president of the provincial branch and watched from the Legislature’s public gallery.[7]
The spark Tomekichi Homma ignited in Cunningham’s office was never extinguished. Homma’s example stands today as an inspiration and a reminder of how deeply racism and privilege can penetrate in a democratic society. Homma advanced his challenge, in the face of overwhelming opposition from the wider public and even from some in his own community, because the denial of the vote, not just to him but to his children and their children, was simply wrong.
We can only judge Homma by his actions, because his voice has been silenced. In the entire written record, at least in English, there isn’t a single direct quote from Tomekichi Homma. No reporter ever interviewed him. He never testified in court. The only surviving photographs are from his family’s collection. His speeches to the members of Dantai have not survived, even in a second-hand account. Only a single volume of his many diaries remains, from a year long after his court battle.
The only way we can remember Tomekichi Homma is by recalling his courageous, urgent and insistent demand to be fully Canadian. Had he not started fighting on that day, how long would it have taken for justice to be done?
[1] Geiger, Subverting Exclusion, 149–150.
[2] Toyo Takata, Nikkei Legacy notes in TD103, Homma Papers, Nikkei Museum and Archives.
[3] Unsigned notes in Homma fonds at Nikkei Museum and Cultural Centre, probably by Toyo Takata.
[4] Millerd’s biographical details from https://rbscarchives.library.ubc.ca/francis-millerd. See also Meggs, Salmon, 120–131, for the post-war struggles of the Nikkei fishermen in the 1920s and 1930s; also Chris Harvey, “Fish Canneries Reference,” recovered at https://macfuj.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Oct-7-2004_FishCanneriesReference.pdf. Details of Great Northern from Tenney Homma in “Recollections.”
[5] Homma and Isaksson, Tomeikichi Homma, 45.
[6] Junshiro Nakagama, Kanada Do Haltan Taikan, Chronicle of Japanese Community Development in Canada (1922).
[7] Patricia Roy, “Citizens Without Votes: East Asians in British Columbia, 1872–1947,” in Jorgen Dahlie and Tessa Fernando, Ethnicity Power and Politics in Canada, (Toronto: Methuen, 1981), 154–155; also Meggs, Strange New Country 192–193.
Author’s Note and Acknowledgements
I first learned about Tomekichi Homma’s failed challenge to win the vote some thirty years ago as I researched the early history of the salmon fishery in British Columbia. The history of Gyosha Dantai, the Japanese Fishermen’s Protective and Benevolent Association, took a dramatic turn in 1899 when Homma resigned the presidency of the organization he had helped found just three years before.
Yasushi Yamazaki, selected in his place, was a hard-bitten, two-fisted and charismatic leader, the kind of man fishermen believed they needed as they faced what they expected would be a turbulent salmon season full of confrontation and violence. The quieter and more cerebral Homma seemed to fade from view, conducting his longshot court challenge while strikes shook the salmon industry.
The Homma family did much to restore his reputation with the publication in 1995 of Tomekichi Homma: The Story of a Canadian. This slim volume by K.T. Homma and C.G. Isaksson drew a definitive portrait of Homma and what was known about his remarkable life from the family’s perspective.
It was not until the 2009 publication of Spirit of the Nikkei Fleet, written by Masako Fukawa, Stanley Fukawa and the Nikkei Fishermen’s History Book Committee, with their access to Japanese-language resources, that a fuller picture emerged of Homma’s role as a pathbreaking civil rights leader and his roots in the fishing industry. This brief account of the salmon price negotiations in 1900 and 1901, which included a brief declaration of martial law in Steveston and frequent violent clashes on the fishing grounds, showed how the Dantai leadership sought to fight on two fronts—in price bargaining and in the courts—to consolidate their place in BC.
My book Strange New Country, published in 2018, dug deeper into the price negotiations, led by Yamazaki for Dantai, socialist Frank Rogers for the BC Fishermen’s Union and Chief George Kelly, later named Lige’ex by the Tsy’msyen, for the Indigenous fishers. The Japanese fishermen believed their achievements during those tumultuous years built the foundation for the community’s later success, but Homma’s failed court challenge seemed to me to raise important questions.
Why did Homma and his colleagues go forward when they did, as racism in BC was in full and violent flood? What legal arguments did they advance? And how, after decisive early victories, was Homma’s initiative defeated?
Many of those questions were answered by Andrea Geiger, first in her contribution to Louis Fiset and Gail Nomura’s Nikkei in the Pacific Northwest and later in her own Subverting Exclusion: Transpacific Encounters with Race, Caste, and Borders, 1885–1928, published by Yale University Press in 2011. Ross Lambertson and Alan Grove also analyzed the legal issues in two important academic papers.
This article is an attempt to weave all these groundbreaking works together to produce a clearer picture of Homma and his remarkable fight for the right to vote.
During the research, I had the honour of meeting Tenney Homma, Homma’s granddaughter and co-author of his biography, who willingly shared family recollections of Tomekichi Homma, many of which are incorporated in this paper. They often shed new light on circumstances in which Homma took on the fight for citizenship.
Linda Reid and Daien Ide, of the Nikkei Museum and Archives, provided tremendous assistance in reviewing the Homma materials in the archive. They also connected me with Fumiko Miyahara, who translated much of the Japanese-language biography of Homma by Shigeharu Koyama, who based his work on a manuscript by Rintaro Hayashi. Further material was identified by Naoko Tanabe, Densho, the Japanese American Legacy Project, in Seattle. My thanks to them as well.
Finally, my appreciation to the staff of the Royal BC Museum and Archives for assistance in tracking down the available correspondence in government files about the Homma case.
I have been unable to find a single direct quote from Homma in English or in Japanese translation in all the material I have reviewed. It is one of the many tragedies of Homma’s life that his personal papers and diaries were destroyed by fire in 1927. Who knows what riches were lost that day? It is a tribute to Homma’s work, however, that even this catastrophe failed to erase his efforts, still evident through his actions in those long-ago courtroom battles.