Collective Experience of Political Violence as Identity: Conversion, Citizenship, and Religious Identities among Second Generation Japanese Canadians

At the beginning of the Second World War, the Canadian government forcibly removed Canadians of Japanese ancestry from their homes in British Columbia. During and immediately following their internment, many Japanese Canadians converted to Christianity. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork among aging Japanese Canadians, this article contextualizes the wartime conversion to Christianity in the wider sociocultural milieu of the 1940s. Discussing contemporary participation of Japanese Canadians in both Buddhist and Christian services in a long-term care facility, this paper suggests that the radical segregation and racialization of this group during wartime gave rise to a collective identity of Japanese Canadians irrespective of their religious affiliation.