Tomekichi Homma, Canadian

On October 19, 1900, Tomekichi Homma, a naturalized Canadian citizen, resident in this country for seventeen years, marched into Vancouver’s court house and demanded to register to vote. With a federal election just three weeks away, time was of the essence. 

Thomas Cunningham, the province’s “collector of votes” and administrator of the provincial voters list, brusquely refused. He would “go to jail,” he vowed, before he put an Asiatic name on the list.² 

Cunningham was not exaggerating. It was illegal under provincial law to register a Japanese or Chinese Canadian to vote, naturalized or not. The law provided for fines and even jail for collectors of votes who violated this prohibition. “No matter what happened,” the Vancouver Daily Province newspaper reported, “courts or no courts, orders or no orders, he will not add one name of a Chinaman or Japanese to the voters list, the preparation of which he now has in hand.” 

So began Tomekichi Homma’s battle to become a full Canadian, a fight that arguably made him Canada’s first civil rights activist. He took his stand when racism against Asian immigrants was in full flood, and he faced down critics and detractors in his own Japanese Canadian community. Homma persevered and won, for a time. His legal challenge to Cunningham’s ruling was upheld by the Chief Justice of BC at county court. Homma then won a resounding second victory when the full BC Supreme Court rejected the province’s appeal. He was finally defeated at the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London, then the highest court in the British Empire. Asian Canadian citizens would wait nearly fifty years to realize Homma’s dream, which for a few precious months had seemed within reach. 

The stakes could not have been higher for Homma and the community he represented. Winning the right to vote would not only have guaranteed Japanese Canadians the right to run for office and sit on a jury, but would also have opened the door to many professions and industries that denied access to anyone not on the voters list. 

That door remained closed. Denied the most fundamental rights of citizenship, Japanese Canadians saw their social and economic opportunities progressively reduced until their forced removal, dispersal and internment in the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Homma himself died in a West Kootenay Valley internment camp in October 1945, nearly half a century after his court challenge and four years before the BC Legislature finally granted Japanese Canadians the vote. 

Homma’s challenge is as relevant today as it was in 1900. The hundreds of thousands of immigrants now arriving in Canada annually have permanent residency, a status with all the rights and responsibilities of citizenship except the franchise, the all-important right to vote and stand for elected office. Homma sought the same legal rights and economic opportunities available to any adult white male. The Privy Council decision, fundamentally racist in its impact, imposed a huge cost on Canadians of Japanese, Chinese and South Asian ancestry and left an enduring stain on Canadian democracy. 

Although today’s permanent residents do not face perpetual exclusion based on race, recent dramatic increases in immigration mean Canada will perpetually be home to hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of voting-age residents with no right to vote and no ability to shape the political direction of Canada during a period of unprecedented social, economic and environmental crises. 

The road to Canadian citizenship traditionally ends in an emotional public ceremony, rich with meaning and celebration. A life-changing milestone for newcomers, it also is a source of power, conferring the right, however slight, to influence public policy and the direction of Canadian society. The current pathway from permanent residency to full citizenship for working-age permanent residents has been reduced to an administrative review, possibly an interview, and a simple online test. It may soon end with a self-administered online oath. It takes three years at a minimum, usually more. The contrast between today’s almost automated path to citizenship and Homma’s inspiring yet unsuccessful challenge could hardly be greater. 

The Privy Council’s decision, as historian Andrea Geiger has demonstrated, relied on an old American legal text to contrive an outcome that defied logic. It simultaneously denied the province’s right to regulate employment and exploitation of Asian workers while upholding the province’s right to deny them the vote. Homma’s civil rights counted little when held in the balance against the repercussions to employers and colonial powers across the Empire if British “subjects” were all entitled to vote. Britain sought to curry favour with Imperial Japan by purporting to treat its citizens with equality. As a result, Homma could claim citizenship through the process of naturalization, but he could not have the vote. Provincial law made sure of that. Similar discriminatory provincial laws applied to subjects of the British Empire, like residents of India, who moved to British Columbia, and to Chinese immigrants, who were residents of neither Britain’s Empire nor Japan’s. The judges did what they had to do to protect property rights and white privilege, even upending their own recent precedent in a previous case to stop Homma’s quest for the franchise.³ 

Although it would be another half century before the most racist aspects of provincial election laws were repealed, Homma’s demand to register was the first step in that process. His challenge reminds us that now is always the time to fight for the expansion of human rights, democracy and social justice. Homma refused to wait and so should we. This uniquely admirable man showed the way. 

Thomas Cunningham was well-qualified by birth and experience to defend the voting privileges of the white, male, colonial establishment. Born in Ulster, he had emigrated to Kingston, Ontario, as a young man and moved to British Columbia in 1859 in the wake of the Fraser River gold rush. A hardware merchant, coal mine operator and farmer, he had lived in New Westminster and Oregon and was now ending his career in Vancouver as returning officer and provincial horticulturalist. For eleven years he had served as member of the Legislature for New Westminster, a hotbed of anti-Asian sentiment.⁴ 

The man standing across from Cunningham in the office of the collector of votes was trim, businesslike and professional. At thirty-five, Homma was nearly thirty years Cunningham’s junior. A family portrait taken a few years later shows Homma in a well-tailored business suit and crisply knotted tie, with a full mustache but otherwise clean-shaven, gazing calmly past the camera. He was of medium height, but his contemporaries later remembered his air of quiet authority. Given the importance of the occasion and Homma’s status as a successful business person and community leader, it’s safe to assume he dressed just as formally to register to vote. 

Despite the broad community support he had earned, Homma was the only person who came forward to test the law. He had been anticipating this moment for years, ever since an 1895 legislative amendment had denied him and all other Japanese, now and in the future, the right to vote. “Heroes in Japanese books were always strong men,” writes Shigeharu Koyama, whose biography of Homma is based on a manuscript by Rintaro Hayashi, a revered community leader and historian. “They never lost in any match or battle. Nikkei people viewed Tomekichi Homma as one of those men.” To his compatriots, the court room became Homma’s solo stage. “He was hot blooded. He did not mind sacrificing his body for his belief. He was a warrior for justice.”⁵ 

Homma was born in 1865 in the village of Onigoe, in the heart of what is now Ichikawa, a suburb of Tokyo. The fourth son of Masatada Homma, a samurai who could trace his clan lineage back to the 1400s, Tomekichi was prepared from childhood to face a dramatically changing world. His mother, Chiyo, was an academic, skilled in the use of the naginata, a curved blade mounted on a long wooden staff, that was wielded by women warriors. Chiyo educated Homma from an early age, instilling in him the values of discipline, integrity, community service and leadership that were seen to be unique attributes of a samurai. He ultimately became fluent in Chinese and English as well as Japanese, speaking and writing all three languages. While his older brothers prepared for leadership roles in their community, Tomekichi Homma dreamed of wider horizons. He set his sights on Oxford. In 1883, just eighteen years old, he sailed for England. 

Homma grew up in Japan as long-established laws enforcing categories of status, class and caste—mibun in Japanese—were abolished in the face of the massive social and economic upheaval of Japan’s Meiji Restoration. These changes fell particularly heavily on groups like the samurai, whose economic and political status was destroyed, and on lower-caste and outcaste sectors, which achieved formal equality but still experienced systemic discrimination.6 As Japan relentlessly modernized and industrialized, hundreds of thousands of Japanese emigrated, searching for opportunity outside the continuing social and economic restrictions of Japanese society. Homma’s character was rooted in Japan’s history and culture, but his walk to the Vancouver courthouse that day in 1900 was equally driven by his refusal to accept any form of second-class status, a reflection of the levelling, more democratic impulse that was part of the transformation of Japanese society. 

A few weeks after leaving Japan, Homma and his lifelong friend Yuguro Sekine found themselves in Vancouver while their ship resupplied. The two men went ashore and never looked back.⁷ 

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.⁸ 

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.⁹ 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.10 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.¹¹ 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.¹² 

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.¹³ 

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.¹⁴ 

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.”¹⁵ 

“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.”¹⁶ 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.¹⁷ 

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.¹⁸  

When Homma stepped ashore in 1883, canned salmon was already the province’s second-largest export after lumber.19 From a halting start in 1867, salmon canning became an annual industry by 1871 with the export of three hundred cases from Annieville, on the south bank of the Fraser near New Westminster. Alexander Ewen, a salmon fisher and plant manager from Scotland, pioneered the use of gillnets on the river to increase harvests to the level necessary to make canning viable. In 1881 there were eight canneries on the river. By 1889 the number had grown to sixteen. In 1891, British investors funded Henry Bell-Irving to combine ownership of eleven canneries into Anglo-British Columbia Packing Co., the largest sockeye canning company in the world. The creation of ABC Packing triggered a round of consolidation that resulted in five companies controlling the Fraser’s annual pack of canned salmon.²⁰ 

Despite the industry’s staggering profits, experts who had witnessed the depletion of Atlantic salmon runs and runs on the Columbia River warned of similar results in BC without conservation. The steady increase in the number of canneries was matched by a similar increase in boats, reducing catch per boat and raising canners’ costs. In 1888, Ottawa’s Department of Marine and Fisheries decided to tackle both issues by limiting the number of fishing licences the next year to 450, later revised to 500. Of that number, more than 100 went to “independent” fishermen, all Caucasian, who fished a longer season by selling to both canners and local fish wholesalers, who shipped to eastern fresh fish markets opened by the CPR. Only ten licences went to Japanese fishers, all at English and Co.’s Steveston cannery. The remainder were fished by Indigenous fishers. 

No one was satisfied. In the political uproar that followed, white fishers were able to use their political leverage to remove the limit for their category of “bona fide fishermen, being British subjects and actual residents of the province.” A Royal Commission in 1892 recommended an increase in licences of all types, a reform partially implemented that year. The number of cannery licences rose to 417 from 350, and those for individual fishermen to 270 from 150. The largest increase in cannery licences went to the Japanese, who had been a negligible share of the fleet a few years earlier. The number of Japanese fishers on the Fraser was estimated at 50 in 1891, rose to 108 in 1892 and to 235 in 1893. There were as many Japanese as Indigenous fishers by 1895, and the number of Japanese gillnetters was equal to all Indigenous and white fishers combined by 1900.²¹ 

By 1892, if Japanese fishers like Homma wanted to escape the restrictions of a cannery boat, subject to the whims of canners and contractors, the only course was to seek naturalization as a British subject, which would make it possible to obtain an independent licence that promised a longer season and larger income. The first ten such licences were issued that year. (Homma obtained his licence the following spring.) This further inflamed white fishers, who saw the new-found independence of Japanese fishers as a threat, not an opportunity to co-operate. Many believed the naturalization certification papers of Japanese fishers were fraudulent.²² 

The increase in individual licences allowed the canners to create a new category of contract fishermen. These were men, both white and Japanese, who were guaranteed that their catch would be purchased, but at a fixed price per fish set by the canner. This arrangement outraged both independent white fishers, who saw the contract boats as a tool to depress prices, and Indigenous fishers, overwhelmingly fishing cannery boats, whose numbers were declining and incomes stagnating. To protect their incomes, fishermen needed to bargain a higher fixed price. 

The struggle over licensing was only one of the clouds hanging over the 1893 season—a “Big Year” on the Fraser’s four-year cycle of salmon returns, which produced a bonanza run every fourth year. Bell-Irving’s six Fraser River canneries accounted for 70 percent of the Fraser’s production. He immediately set to work to reduce his cost of fish. The larger runs and a bigger fleet would give canners a chance to cut prices, limit purchases or even refuse to take catches altogether from contract fishers if their processing capacity was overwhelmed. Suddenly aware of the threat of price cuts bearing down on them, the white fishers formed the Fraser River Fishermen’s Protective and Benevolent Association to bargain an increase in price, a reduction in cannery licences and an end to licensing Japanese. Elimination of the Japanese was the first and most emphatic demand. Early in July, a newly formed Canners’ Association set the price for sockeye at six cents a fish, a dramatic cut from the ten cents paid for several years. The same day, a mass meeting of fishermen, including white, Indian and Japanese representatives, agreed to refuse any contract below ten cents a fish. The stage was set for a strike that began July 14. Given almost no fish were running, it was more a protest than an act of economic warfare.²³ 

The canners immediately sought and obtained the support of the Japanese consul, who promised to “furnish 130 fishermen at short notice—three days—and 200 more if required.”²⁴ (It’s not known if this pledge was fulfilled.) Bell-Irving then offered a fifty-dollar reward to anyone providing information about acts of violence, intimidation or conspiracy by fishermen “in any combination or conspiracy to raise the rate of wages.” This was followed by an intensive campaign by Indian agents, cannery owners and even a priest to convince the more than 2,200 Indigenous fishers to set their nets and break the strike. Although newspaper reporters had no trouble finding strike supporters among Indigenous leaders, it was clear on Sunday night, July 23, when the gun fired to open the week’s fishery, that many Indigenous fishers had set their nets. The strike collapsed.  

The fishermen had been badly divided in the face of the canners’ solid front. On one hand, the white fisher’s association had not thought to seek a raise (to three dollars per day) for the Indigenous fishers on cannery boats until the strike was under way and the Indigenous fleet ready to break ranks. On the other hand, they had demanded that licences be denied to the Japanese, had denied union membership to the Japanese, refused to support the formation of a Japanese fishermen’s union and yet claimed the Japanese supported union price demands. Although most Indigenous fishers supported the strike, as did several hundred Japanese, the outcome was never in doubt.  

This was the chaotic and divided industry in which Homma began his career as an independent fisher. Although fishermen of all races drew lessons from the debacle, the racial divisions fanned by the canners would have profound consequences for both Homma and the Japanese Canadian community as a whole.²⁵ 

The 1893 season was an unqualified victory for the canners. The price they paid for fish rose steadily during the height of the summer, but crashed when the main run finally materialized on August 20. At that point the canners imposed boat limits and reduced prices, leaving fishermen with incomes equivalent to what they had earned in previous years despite the huge catches. So it went, year after year. In 1897, the next Big Year, Indigenous fishers refused to set their nets for less than twenty-five cents per fish. Japanese fishers also stopped work but said they would consider fifteen cents. White fishers, apparently unable to support any proposal by the Japanese, demanded fifteen cents as an opening price but admitted they would take a ten-cent minimum. The three groups met separately, then agreed collectively to seek a season-long price of fifteen cents. How this was communicated to the canners is unclear. The canners then offered ten cents, and the threatened strike collapsed before it began. When the big run arrived, prices were cut as low as two cents a fish, and the glutted canneries eventually refused fish altogether, resulting in what some estimated was the destruction of up to 100,000 fish a day as canneries refused to purchase surplus catches.²⁶ 

The 1897 salmon season proved a financial disaster for the Japanese fishermen. For Homma, it marked a personal and political turning point. A typhus epidemic had swept the Steveston area in 1896. Japanese Methodist missionaries in the community, who turned their building into a makeshift clinic, were quickly overwhelmed. This underlined the need for a hospital, and the missionaries turned to the fishermen for help. Homma became a driving force behind the response, believing that construction of a hospital open to all would bridge the racial divides in the industry. A meeting called in July 1897 to discuss the matter drew the Japanese consul, Tatsugoro Nosse; Goro Kaburagi, a Vancouver clergyman and newspaper editor; and about two hundred fishermen. Nosse told the meeting of the relentless attacks he was confronting from anti-Japanese interests determined to restrict immigration and naturalization. A hospital project would prove the value of the Japanese immigrants, he said, but the modest clinic launched by the missionaries was already $400 in debt. A new building was expected to cost $2,500 and annual operations would run as high as $1,500. Only the fishermen could generate the necessary funds. It was agreed the labour contractors would collect fifty cents per fisherman as a starting point.²⁷ 

Four days later, more than 500 Japanese fishermen gathered at the Steveston Opera House to discuss the impending salmon season. A price increase was now more critical than ever: “Fishing in the Fraser was poor in recent years; money for operation of the hospital was to be raised [and] this would be achieved only by putting up the fish price.” With 1,700 fishermen ready to go fishing, the Japanese made up one third of the total fleet. According to the history of the Japanese fishermen’s association, the fishers concluded that “Japanese must show some solidarity in this industry.” The meeting heard an appeal from a Tsy’msyen chief from Lax Kw’alaams, whose salmon fishers were always in the forefront of the fight for better prices—a telling example of one effort to reach across racial divisions that bedevilled the fishermen.²⁸ 

Then Homma took the floor. He presented a bargaining strategy that started with consultations with the white and Indigenous fishers. The meeting unanimously agreed to seek 12.5 cents a fish. The next day Homma was elected to a six-person Japanese Canadian bargaining committee, five members of which were labour bosses. Homma’s personal authority, however, was indisputable. “He was not like the other men at the cannery,” a contemporary recalled years later. “He stood out as being different, a quiet man who often kept to himself. But when he spoke, people listened.”²⁹ Once again, Indigenous and Japanese fishers met at the Opera House to seek a united position, but once again their efforts tumbled into confusion, division and rancour. In the face of a massive run, the triumphant canners ultimately cut the price to two cents a fish.³⁰ 

By 1900, the Fraser’s shoreline at Steveston was crowded with thirteen canneries, quiet during the off-season but roaring to life by late spring as the salmon runs began their annual build-up. Hundreds of gillnetters and dugout canoes lined the beaches and cannery floats. The town boasted the 900-seat Opera House, shops, gambling joints, bars and several churches along its wooden boardwalks. Each fall, cannery docks were lined with square-riggers waiting to take the canned pack to markets in England and Australia. The local newspaper grandly declared Steveston to be Salmonopolis. This summer boom town was the heart of the Japanese Canadian community in British Columbia.³¹ 

Despite the growing wealth of the industry, Tomekichi Homma and his fellow fishermen saw their economic clout withering even as the number of Japanese fishermen steadily increased. Most white fishermen were adamant they would never participate in a united fight with Japanese for better prices, nor for a fair licensing regime. Their goal was to control the fishery as a monopoly for white fishers through a licensing system that excluded Japanese, Chinese and Indigenous fishers, a goal they pursued by electing Members of Parliament committed to their demands. To Homma it was obvious that achieving the right to vote was vital to protect the Japanese foothold in the salmon industry. After the fiasco of 1897, it was also obvious they would need their own organization to have any chance of success. 

Working-class members of BC’s white minority had been fighting to limit the rights of Asian immigrants, particularly the Chinese, long before Homma’s arrival in Vancouver. Although Indigenous people participated in many aspects of the emerging colonial economy, particularly the fisheries, they did so on their own terms, maintaining their traditional activities in their territories while taking work in fishing, agriculture, logging or longshoring as they saw fit.³² For onerous physical labour like coal mining or salmon canning, BC’s mining barons and canners preferred contract labour, paying rock-bottom rates for Chinese workers laid off by the CPR or newly arrived from China. This system was quickly extended to Japanese workers in the fishing industry. White workers, particularly coal miners on Vancouver Island, who had been brought to BC from Scotland and England to open the coal mines, sought to use their political clout to eliminate Asian labour from the mines, blaming Chinese workers for depressing wages and unsafe practices. Mine owners freely admitted they preferred the lower-cost Chinese workers, and rubbed salt in the whites’ wounds by deploying Chinese workers as strike-breakers. In their first session in 1875, members of the BC legislature passed a law denying Chinese and Indigenous people the vote, ignoring the Japanese only because there were so few in the province. Countless efforts followed to eliminate or restrict Asian labour. 

In 1877, coal magnate Robert Dunsmuir used Chinese workers to break a strike at his Wellington mine. The new Miners’ Protective Association organized by Vancouver Island miners denied membership to Chinese workers, and provincial legislation soon followed that excluded Chinese from “positions of trust” underground. A second strike was raging in Vancouver Island mines in 1883, the year Homma arrived, and Chinese miners were again deployed by Dunsmuir to maintain production. Violent racial incidents were commonplace. In 1883, two Chinese workers died in a racist attack in Lytton. A mob attempted to burn Japanese sawmill workers out of their lodgings in New Westminster in the same period.³³ 

The legislative attacks were just as intense and frequent, targeting both Chinese voting power and access to work in various fields. Chinese workers resisted as well as they could, striking in Victoria in 1878 when provincial officials attempted to enforce one law that was later disallowed by the federal government as outside the province’s powers under the British North America Act.34 A new anti-Asian law passed in 1884 to deny Chinese the right to buy property was disallowed by Canada as unconstitutional, but a year later the federal government imposed a Chinese head tax of fifty dollars per immigrant in response to the demands of white workers.³⁵ Also in 1884, provincial premier G.A. Walkem brought in legislation to deny Chinese the vote, in part to distract voters from his role in a corruption scandal surrounding a Texada Island mine, but Canada disallowed that bill as well. By 1890, there was a clear record of repeated decisions by Canada to disallow provincial attempts to discriminate against Asian immigrants in ways that violated Canada’s jurisdiction over immigration under the British North America Act.36 That would change.³⁷  

Racial anxieties were further aroused in 1894 and 1895 when Japan routed Chinese forces to acquire Korea in the first Sino-Japanese war. Sneering references to “little brown men” in the press gave way to fears that a resurgent Japan would economically penetrate Canada through immigration, using the well-known work ethic and community solidarity of Japanese migrants to displace white workers. The very qualities that should have made Japanese welcome in Canada were thus turned against them. This racist perspective was combined with a view that Japanese Canadians were incapable of assimilation.³⁸ 

In 1895, provincial legislators cast a wider net, this time including Japanese in their attack. The white legislators were responding to the discovery of a handful of Japanese names on municipal voters lists, as well as Japan’s decision to lift emigration limits. The new legislation denied voter registration to “any person of the Japanese race, naturalized or not,” a dramatic expansion of the prohibition to people of Japanese ancestry born in the province. In this law, Japanese was defined as “a person who was born in Japan or a person who does not have British parents. Regardless of one’s naturalization status, it means a person of Japanese race.” 

The legislation must have seemed like a direct insult to Homma, who had lived in the province for thirteen years and had been naturalized in April 1894. Under this bill, neither he nor any of his descendants would have the right to vote. He must have been aware of Great Britain’s recent decision to end its discriminatory trade treatment of Japan to gain the sympathy of Asia’s emerging superpower. Yet in Canada, the prospect of full citizenship was being snatched away, not just for him but for all people of Japanese ancestry and their children, even if born in Canada. In 1896, white fishermen in Steveston went further, petitioning to deny fishing licences to anyone not on the voters list, an existential threat to the economic survival of the Japanese community.³⁸ 

Despite the huge salmon runs of 1897, the price of salmon had fallen and the hospital debt remained. Creditors were pressing for payment. The only cash on hand was a $200 donation from His Highness Prince Arisugawa-No-Miya, a visiting member of the Japanese Emperor’s family. It was an apologetic contribution made only after he failed to show up to review the Japanese gillnet fleet, Japanese flags fluttering, which had gathered for hours at the mouth of the Fraser in stormy weather. (The prince’s steamer had returned to Vancouver when a number of passengers became violently seasick off Point Grey.)³⁹ The fishermen agreed to use the windfall to tackle part of the debt and organized intensive fundraising to raise the remainder.  

With the need for a permanent organization more clear than ever, they formed Gyosha Dantai (the Fraser River Fishermen’s Benevolent Association) on November 30, 1897, and elected Homma interim president. This proved to be a pivotal event in the history of the Japanese community, laying the groundwork for all that came later. The new organization would be more than a union, the fishermen decided. Focusing on the Japanese community’s needs in the broad sense, it would build a permanent hospital, open to all, and build a school for the small but growing number of Japanese Canadian children. Homma was the driving force behind all these initiatives, dedicated above all to the goal of full citizenship. He understood, as historian Andrea Geiger has emphasized, “that the ability to vote would give Japanese immigrants a voice in shaping legislation that affected them.” The province’s white majority had raised the barriers to that goal very high.⁴⁰ 

Now only thirty-five, Homma was one of the community’s senior members. In the years since his arrival, he had become a man of some means. In 1897 he moved to Vancouver, opening a restaurant in the city’s Chinatown, a community newspaper and a boarding house. He became well-known for the support and lodging he offered to Japanese newcomers, connecting them to jobs on the railroad or in the salmon industry. His language skills made him in demand in both the Japanese and Chinese communities, providing translations and interpretation, even in court. “The penniless, unemployed, and new immigrants were told to go to [Homma’s] establishment because it was widely known that they would get free lodging and food,” says Tenney Homma, Homma’s granddaughter. “As a rooming house proprietor and an employment agent for the railway company, Homma helped Japanese Canadian men with the basic needs of accommodation and employment. My grandfather understood the hardships faced by immigrants trying to establish themselves in a new country. He was sympathetic to their difficult plight and put forth the effort to help those less fortunate; a lesson he learned from a young age through his parents.”⁴¹ 

The presidency of Dantai was no simple task. An expansion of Japanese emigration and the diversion of thousands of migrants from Hawaii, where bubonic plague had broken out, generated a huge surge of new arrivals. Scores of men were arriving weekly, virtually penniless, with no place to live or work. With few skills and no ability to speak English, they quickly gravitated to Steveston. Their arrival placed a tremendous strain on the community and further fanned the flames of racism as they moved into the salmon industry. Worse, a legal dispute had drained the resources of the hospital, and contributions were declining in the face of poor fish prices and community controversies. The deficit had recurred. A permanent building seemed nowhere in sight. Homma acknowledged that his strategy of opening a hospital to encourage co-operation with white and Indigenous fishers had come “to a very disappointing point.” He submitted his resignation as president on May 29, 1899.⁴² 

Despite this apparent setback, Homma was on the brink of even more important changes. After his move to Vancouver in 1897, friends told him of a young woman they thought suitable for marriage. Matsu Tanikawa, a farmer’s daughter from Fukuoka, was “a headstrong unattached young woman who came to Canada against her parents’ wishes.” Meetings were arranged. A perfect match, they would marry February 28, 1900. It was, his children later realized, a marriage a man of his background could never have made in status-conscious Japan. On his marriage certificate, he declared his profession to be “fisherman.”⁴³ 

During the same period, in response to the discrimination apparent in the 1895 legislation denying the vote to the Japanese, Homma had helped found an organization in Vancouver that was dedicated to “upholding and defending the rights of Japanese living in Canada.” In July 1899, Homma and his supporters heard dramatic news. On July 28, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, the highest court in the British Empire, had struck down as unconstitutional a BC provincial law limiting the right of Chinese workers to work underground in Robert Dunsmuir’s Vancouver Island mines. The verdict in Union Colliery v. Bryden was unequivocal: regulation of the political and property rights of naturalized citizens was outside provincial jurisdiction. Surely this applied equally to the prohibition on registration of Asian voters. The road to the vote and full citizenship suddenly seemed wide open.⁴⁴ 

The Dunsmuir battle was the latest in a long legal war by BC exclusionists to deny Chinese workers the right to work and the right the vote. Federal legislation passed in 1885, when construction of the CPR was finished, imposed a fifty-dollar head tax on Chinese immigrants and denied the vote to Chinese persons, whether born in Canada or naturalized. (The legislation did not apply to Japanese. That discriminatory provision only came a decade later in provincial law.) Prime Minister John A. Macdonald explained that the Chinese intended to return to China and, in any case, had “no British instincts, British feelings or aspirations and therefore ought not to vote.” BC provincial legislation added to the discrimination against Chinese citizens: at least eighteen laws were passed between 1884 and 1889 to restrict access by Asians—variously Japanese, Chinese and/or immigrants from India—to many workplaces and professions. Nowhere was this truer than in the coal industry. 

Driven by anti-Asian sentiment among white miners—who, not coincidentally, were also voters—provincial politicians tried every means possible to force Asian workers out of the mines, often citing alleged safety concerns. Safety was a real issue in Vancouver Island’s explosion- and fire-prone mines, but white miners and their unions exaggerated language barriers and Chinese workers’ lack of skills. The real grievance was mine owners’ use of the Chinese workers to break strikes and depress wages. After 1888, Robert Dunsmuir was the only Vancouver Island mine owner to use Asian labour, most notably in the Union Colliery he opened in 1890. After Robert Dunsmuir’s death in 1889, his son James maintained the same policy. As he had explained to a Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration in 1885, the Chinese were “hardy and industrious,” and if it “were not for Chinese labor, the business I am engaged in specially, coal mining, would be seriously retarded and curtailed.” Much of the conflict, he believed, could be solved if Chinese were given the vote. Not surprisingly, this idea fell on deaf ears. It was not hard to see why the Dunsmuirs favoured Chinese labour. Chinese workers were paid $1.25 a day compared to the two to three dollars customarily paid to whites.⁴⁵ 

In 1890, the BC Legislature moved against the Dunsmuirs, amending the Coal Mines Regulation Act to prohibit the employment of Chinese underground. Years of legal skirmishing followed, with provincial authorities reluctant to enforce the provision against such a powerful employer. In 1898, James Dunsmuir decided, after countless political and legal battles, to resolve the issue once and for all. He directed John Bryden, a member of the Legislature and shareholder in Dunsmuir’s Union Colliery mine, to file suit demanding that the exclusion of Chinese workers be enforced. Dunsmuir, of course, desired the opposite: his goal was to have the provincial limitations on the use of Chinese labour declared ultra vires, or beyond the province’s constitutional power. Bryden was colluding with Dunsmuir to create a test case. To complicate matters further, Dunsmuir made no secret of his intention to employ Japanese underground as well. In 1899, the Privy Council found in his favour.⁴⁶  

The Privy Council’s decision in the Union Colliery case was significant not just because it clarified the division of powers in the British North America Act (BNA Act) and upheld Ottawa’s supremacy in issues related to “naturalization and aliens.” It also opened up, for the first time, a human rights dimension to the law by affirming the right of Chinese to work underground. 

No doubt Homma and his colleagues were elated to read the Privy Council declaration that “the subject of ‘naturalization’ seems prima facie to include the power of enacting what shall be the consequences of naturalization, or, in other words, what shall be the rights and privileges pertaining to residents in Canada, after they have been naturalized.” Contrary to the provincial view, the Privy Council saw “no reason to doubt that, by virtue of Section 91 (25) [of the BNA Act] the Legislature of the Dominion is invested with exclusive authority in all matters which directly concern the rights, privileges and disabilities of the class of Chinamen who are resident in the provinces of Canada.” The whole point of the Coal Mines Regulation Act, they continued, “consists in establishing a statutory prohibition which affects aliens or naturalized subjects, and therefore trench upon the exclusive authority of the Parliament of Canada.” It could not stand.⁴⁷ 

A clear defeat for Vancouver Island’s white union miners, the Union Colliery decision also seemed to spell an end to provincial interference in the voting rights of immigrants. This was the precedent, Homma believed, that would strike down the voting prohibition and win Japanese Canadians the right to vote.⁴⁸ 

Homma’s resignation as president of Dantai, combined with the need to prepare for price bargaining in the run-up to 1901’s Big Year salmon runs, precipitated a complete reorganization of the fishermen’s association, now renamed Fureza Gawa Ryoshi Dantai or Fraser River Japanese Fishermen’s Benevolent Association. In addition to overseeing price bargaining, hospital construction and plans for a school, the leaders of Dantai now also agreed to challenge the denial of their right to vote. They overhauled the constitution and recruited Yasushi Yamazaki, a flamboyant and two-fisted rabble-rouser to the presidency. An immigrant from a samurai family with wide experience in the salmon fishery, Yamazaki had worked in the fur seal fishery, as a newspaperman and even as a sailor in the American Navy. Yamazaki, as well as Iwakichi Shimamura and Hisakichi Oura would become Homma’s “supporting shield,” a dedicated and loyal group of supporters. Yamazaki, who became a close friend and advisor to Homma, organized the fishermen while Homma prepared his legal case.⁴⁹ 

During the first hectic months of 1900, Yamazaki and the Dantai leadership focused almost exclusively on salmon negotiations. The white fishermen’s union locals, now under the banner of the B.C. Fishermen’s Union and socialist leadership, made direct overtures for unity with both Japanese and Indigenous fishers. Frank Rogers, a charismatic longshoreman and socialist activist, personally contacted Yamazaki and Indigenous leaders to forge real unity. For the first time a fragile united front emerged that put the Fraser Rivers Canners’ Association on the defensive. First Nations leaders from the Skeena and the Nass were included in the negotiations, and union supporters in Vancouver organized food and supplies for Japanese strikers in Steveston. For a time it appeared the fishermen had finally overcome their divisions.⁵⁰ 

After several weeks of the strike—during which Japanese fishers working under the labour boss system had no income whatsoever—Dantai decided to accept twenty cents a fish for the first six hundred fish caught in a week and fifteen cents a fish thereafter. They prepared to begin fishing. The canners did everything in their power to widen this breach, as they had when Indigenous fishers were ready to settle in 1893. Desperate to ensure union pickets were unable to interfere with the Japanese fleet as it set its nets, the canners obtained a declaration of martial law from a local justice of the peace to trigger the despatch of armed militiamen from Vancouver. The strike unfolded against the backdrop of a provincial election on June 9, which saw the discredited administration of Premier Joseph Martin replaced by a new alliance led by James Dunsmuir. The political vacuum in Victoria made it possible for the canners to call out the militia without reference to elected officials above the rank of magistrate, a critical factor in ending the strike. The Legislature did not reconvene until July 19. The troops of the Duke of Connaught’s Own Regiment, mocked by fishermen as the “Sockeye Fusiliers,” camped for several days on a sunbaked field behind the Gulf of Georgia cannery. The arrival of the Sockeye Fusiliers, with bayonets mounted and orders to “shoot to kill,” combined with the arrest and brief imprisonment of Rogers, marked the end of the strike. The Japanese fleet began fishing, forcing white and Indigenous fishers to settle for a flat price of 19 cents per fish.⁵¹ 

After the Sockeye Fusiliers folded their tents and returned to Vancouver, Dantai leaders in Steveston concluded, “Our decision to start fishing for twenty cents resulted in our victory and the development of Steveston as the residence of our people.”⁵² They saw their drive to achieve the vote as part of that work, and now they were free, at last, to turn their attention to the legal front. As the salmon season ended, Homma readied his challenge.⁵³ 

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.⁵⁴ 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.”⁵⁵ 

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, 1900.⁵⁶  

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.”⁵⁷  

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.”⁵⁸ 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.⁵⁹ 

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.⁶⁰ 

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.”⁶¹ 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.⁶² 

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.⁶³ 

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.⁶⁴ 

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.”  

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.⁶⁵ 

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, 1900.⁶⁶ 

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.”⁶⁷ 

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.⁶⁸ 

BC Attorney General David Eberts faced none of Homma’s obstacles. White public opinion was unanimously in his corner, and he had the provincial treasury at his disposal to retain Canada’s top legal minds. Cunningham had been appalled at McColl’s ruling and urged Eberts to hire William Bowser, a rising young Conservative lawyer in Vancouver, for the appeal to the BC Supreme Court. But Eberts, understanding the stakes, had loftier ambitions. He used senior legal counsel in Vancouver for the first appeal and then Canada’s top constitutional lawyers for the final round in London.  

Born and trained as a lawyer in Ontario, Eberts had been a member of the BC bar since 1882 and Attorney General from 1895 to 1898, when he lost his cabinet post in one of the regular political upheavals of the era. Now he was Attorney General once again, this time in the cabinet of Premier James Dunsmuir. Eberts was the co-ordinator of the government’s anti-Asian campaign in both the Legislature and the court. 

The provincial government did not rely on voting prohibitions alone to respond to anti-Asian sentiment. Asiatic immigration had been the first topic on the agenda in January 1901, when Dunsmuir and Eberts travelled to Ottawa for a series of meetings with Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier and other senior federal officials. It seemed likely Canada was “about to limit or prohibit the immigration of Japanese,” Dunsmuir reported on his return. BC’s fundamental objection to Asiatic immigration had been set out in a letter to Laurier on October 9, 1900, just ten days before Homma sought to register.  

Notwithstanding the friendly treaty relations between Japan and Great Britain, Dunsmuir had written, BC needed relief from “Mongolian” immigrants. “If the people against whom we desire a measure of protection were, in their standard of living, on a par with our own, the competition of Japanese and Chinese would be a legitimate one,” Dunsmuir wrote, “but I need not point out to you what has been contended so often and with so much force against an indiscriminate and unrestricted immigration of Mongolians, that, without lowering the general standard of living necessary to meet the decrease in wages it is not possible for white labour to exist in the face of a system that has grown up under conditions entirely foreign to Anglo-Saxon communities, wholly inapplicable in this country and out of harmony with our institutions.” Canada and Japan were working hard behind the scenes to find a solution that saved face for both global empires. Ultimately it was Japan that conceded, “volunteering” to limit emigration to Canada. By 1901, the number of arriving Japanese was already plummeting.⁶⁹ 

To win the Homma case, Eberts had to neutralize the Union Colliery precedent won by James Dunsmuir at the Privy Council in 1899. (Despite his legal victory, Dunsmuir had demonstrated political pragmatism by laying off the Chinese workers at Union Colliery to help win his seat in the 1900 election.) The man Eberts selected for the task was Toronto lawyer Christopher Robinson, a seasoned constitutional expert and veteran of a number of high-profile criminal and international cases, including the trial of Louis Riel.⁷⁰ By May 1902, Eberts and Robinson were in steady communication. They underpinned their work with a further legal opinion from A.F. Lefroy, another eminent Toronto law professor, whose highly regarded textbooks emphasized the need for legal judgments to adhere closely to precedent. Robinson, in particular, seemed confident the decision in Union Colliery could be overcome. He was certain that Canada had no power to interfere in the provincial constitution, of which voting rights were a critical element. The impact of Union Colliery, he claimed, was on aliens only, not naturalized citizens, whose rights could be provincially regulated.⁷¹ 

Eberts’ initial direction to Robinson laid bare the racist assumptions underlying the province’s policy. Japanese immigrants like Homma, he wrote “become British subjects in name only. They are largely of the coolie class and come here to work for a few years. As soon as they have accumulated a small sum of money, they return to their native land, and others take their place. To confer the franchise upon such men would be an act of extreme folly. Having no real interest in the country, and no knowledge of its political institutions, their votes would become an article of merchandise.”⁷² 

Eberts further declared, “The offence of personation would flourish unchecked, as it is about as difficult for a Canadian to distinguish one Jap or Chinaman from another as it is to distinguish one pea from another. Even if they exercised the franchise properly, it is intolerable that these foreign races, which can never be assimilated with our population, should in many constituencies determine who shall represent the people in the legislature.” 

Citing an obscure American legal text, Eberts argued that the US Constitution made it clear that “political rights, such as the franchise, the right to hold office, etc., are never an unconditional result of citizenship. This is evident from the fact they are always withheld from minors, and almost without exception from women.” How the US Constitution entered into the case was never clear, but Eberts’ suggestion would have far-reaching effects. Had British Columbians realized that Canada would control voting by immigrants, he said, they “never would have consented to enter into Confederation.” 

Eberts and Robinson had plenty of time to hone their arguments. Word soon arrived from London that Homma’s case would not be heard until mid-1902. By the summer of that year, Robinson was settled into his London hotel and in close contact with legal firms familiar with the workings of the Privy Council. He asked Eberts for a full set of background documents, including the Elections Act and information on recent voting patterns. A key consideration for all elected officials was the fear that a bloc vote by newly enfranchised Japanese Canadian voters could swing an election. This fear was justified: Eberts had prevailed in his own Victoria South constituency in the 1900 election by only 259 votes to 208. Dunsmuir had been elected in Nanaimo with only 249 votes, just 24 more than his Labour opponent. In Vancouver, where four candidates were elected from a field of twelve, only seven votes separated the fourth successful candidate from the first runner-up in an election in which more than 15,300 voters cast ballots. Clearly, Japanese Canadian voters casting their ballots in a bloc could make their presence felt even when they were a small share of the electorate. 

Homma’s case was heard in London on July 4, 1902, with Robinson representing the province. The argument, turning on countless obscure points of constitutional law, lasted the better part of the day. By the end, Robinson told Eberts, he was “feeling very hopeful.” His notes make no reference to Homma’s legal submissions or even his name. Due to the nature of the case—a battle of precedent and legal principles—Homma was never called to testify. In this final legal contest, however, it was as if he didn’t exist, even though his name was in the title of the case. Nor was the court interested in the issue of discrimination. Indeed, declared Lord Halsbury, who wrote the Privy Council decision, the rights or wrongs of a policy “which excludes a particular race from the franchise is not a topic which their Lordships are entitled to consider.”⁷³ 

On December 17, 1901, the Privy Council ruled to reverse the BC courts’ decisions, shutting the door on the franchise for Japanese Canadians and other Asian Canadians. Cunningham’s refusal to register Homma was upheld. To buttress their decision, a 180-degree reversal of Union Colliery, the Privy Council judges reached into American constitutional law, apparently endorsing Eberts’ arguments. As Andrea Geiger demonstrates in her research into the case, the Privy Council relied on Lawrence’s Wheaton, an American legal treatise published in 1863. To reverse Union Colliery, the Privy Council had to first find grounds to let provincial law override the federal responsibility for immigration and naturalization. Lawrence’s Wheaton offered that precedent in American law, which logically should not have entered into the Privy Council’s deliberations at all. (The court also did not refer to the US Constitution’s Fifteenth Amendment, adopted in 1870, which states that “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”) 

Having found grounds, however shaky, to uphold provincial jurisdiction, the court then had to dispose of the Union Colliery precedent. Union Colliery related to an entirely different issue, the judges declared, because the province’s coal-mining regulations had the effect of denying Chinese, naturalized or not, the right to work in the province, one of the “ordinary rights of the inhabitants of British Columbia.” It should be “obvious that such a decision can have no relation to the question whether any naturalised person has an inherent right to the suffrage within the Province in which he resides.” In fact, this was not obvious to anyone, including Robinson. The BNA Act “is construed as we have always contended for and thought to be obviously right,” he told Eberts, admitting that “it is difficult to reconcile what is said in Union Colliery and what is said here.” There were other strange aspects of the decision, he added, but concluded that “this need not trouble us.” The right team had won.⁷⁴ The Attorney General’s staff quickly paid Homma’s costs of $1,785 as directed by the Privy Council.⁷⁵ 

The Privy Council decision has been declared “one of the most interesting constitutional somersaults in Canadian history,” a direct repudiation of the Union Colliery precedent that had produced complete victory for Homma in the two lower courts.76 The two decisions, just two years apart, seem headed in different directions, but the thread that links them is the class interest of people like Dunsmuir. In the various tests of Union Colliery attempted by the labour movement and anti-Asian politicians in the next few years, the Union Colliery decision prevailed, and provincial laws regulating Asian miners were struck down. (Provincial laws requiring registration on the voters list as a requirement to work in many professions remained.) As historian Ross Lambertson concludes, “Considerations of justice took a back seat to considerations of jurisdiction,” with the courts allocating jurisdiction as required to uphold the entitlements and privileges of the white population.⁷⁷ 

By 1900, the courts tended to strike down legislation opposed by employers, particularly if the laws concerned affected aliens exclusively, something the courts viewed as a clear intrusion on federal jurisdiction over immigration. Judges were also reluctant to interfere with discrimination against naturalized Canadians that arose from the Elections Act, which was clearly in provincial jurisdiction. Thus the Privy Council supported the needs of Dunsmuir as the employer in its Union Colliery decision and upheld his objectives as Dunsmuir, the anti-Asian premier, in Homma. “The two cases are impossible to reconcile,” conclude two experts on Canadian immigration policy, unless we concede that “the judiciary were as sensitive to business concerns as were the politicians.”⁷⁸ 

It is impossible to rule out a further consideration on the part of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. It was wielding supreme legal authority over a global British Empire counting 400 million subjects, any one of whom might seek the franchise in some new home. Was it not prudent to leave matters like voting to local authorities rather than impose a global standard that simultaneously applied in jurisdictions as disparate as Australia, South Africa, India and Canada? Confronted with such a reality, it is no surprise the court favoured a “decentralized” approach to such matters.⁷⁹ 

Anti-Asian exclusionists maintained relentless pressure against Chinese and Japanese immigration in the years that followed. Between 1906 and 1910, immigration from Asia virtually ceased, partly as a result of voluntary measures on Japan’s part and partly due to the Canadian government’s counter-measures against Chinese immigration. Nonetheless, the Japanese Canadian population in BC rose 30 percent between 1900 and 1911 and trebled in Vancouver. Without the franchise, these Canadians faced continually expanding prohibitions against their participation in larger and larger parts of the BC economy, as well as discrimination in every sphere of life. Homma’s first two victories had been followed by a shattering defeat, a defeat with repercussions for Chinese Canadians and South Asian immigrants as well. A Chinese Canadian initiative to pursue the franchise soon faltered and died in the wake of the Homma ruling. 

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.⁸⁰ 

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.81 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.⁸² 

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. ⁸³ 

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 1922.⁸⁴ 

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.”⁸⁵  

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.⁸⁶ 

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?