He earned a Military Medal for Canada. Then Canada put him behind barbed wire.
October 7, 1887: Masumi Mitsui, a Japanese Canadian war hero, was born in Japan.
Masumi Mitsui was born on October 7, 1887, into a military family in Japan. He immigrated to Canada in 1908, reportedly after being refused entry to a military academy. In British Columbia, he worked on a farm in Richmond and then as a waiter at Victoria’s Union Club, where he became fluent in English and developed the leadership skills that would later matter far more than anyone expected.
He was Issei, part of the first generation of Japanese immigrants. Like other Japanese Canadians of his era, he was denied rights that other Canadians took for granted, including the vote.
When World War I began, Mitsui wanted to serve. A Japanese Canadian newspaper publisher in Vancouver, Yasushi Yamazaki, helped organize military training for 171 volunteers in early 1916, and Mitsui was one of them.
Getting Rejected, Then Becoming a Leader
But enlistment stations in British Columbia put up barriers. The volunteers learned that battalions in Alberta would take them, and more than 160 made the trip. Mitsui joined the 192nd Overseas Battalion in Calgary on September 1, 1916. He later said he went because he believed it would benefit both Canada and Japan, which was then a British ally.
Mitsui reached the Western Front in early March 1917 with the 10th Battalion. The battalion’s lieutenant-colonel was concerned about the English skills of its Japanese Canadian recruits, so he put all of them under Private Mitsui’s leadership.
He fought at Vimy Ridge and was wounded at Arleux on April 28, 1917, but he returned to the front. That August, he led 35 Japanese Canadians into the bloody Battle of Hill 70, near Lens, France. Only a handful survived. For his leadership, his bravery, and for aiding wounded soldiers, he was promoted to sergeant and awarded the Military Medal.
Winning the Vote
After his discharge in April 1919, he married, started a poultry farm in Port Coquitlam, and raised four children.
British Columbia had barred Japanese residents from voting since 1895, and the federal vote followed the provincial one. The veterans’ early appeals failed. In 1925, they formed their own Canadian Legion branch, BC Branch No. 9, with Mitsui as president.
In 1931, he led a delegation to Victoria to lobby the legislature. By a single vote, it agreed to give Japanese Canadian veterans the provincial vote. They became the first Canadians of Asian heritage to win it in British Columbia. Other Japanese Canadians would wait another 18 years.
What Canada Took
In 1939, Mitsui and the veterans helped welcome King George VI and Queen Elizabeth to Vancouver, a public show of loyalty. Then Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and Hong Kong, and suspicion hardened into demands to remove Japanese Canadians from the coast.
In 1942, Mitsui was escorted to Hastings Park in Vancouver, a fairground ringed by a fence topped with barbed wire, to be registered as an “enemy alien.” According to the Canadian Encyclopedia, an official greeted him by his old rank, and Mitsui reportedly pulled out his medals, threw them on the table, and asked, “What are the good of my medals?”
The government seized the family’s 17-acre poultry farm in Port Coquitlam and sold it without their consent. By one estimate, the family received only about a third of its value. Mitsui and his wife were forced to relocate to Greenwood, British Columbia, where he was put in charge of local security.
Relighting The Lantern
When the war ended, the family was not allowed to return to the coast. They moved to southern Ontario and eventually settled in Hamilton. Mitsui was one of about 22,000 Japanese Canadians who were displaced, detained, and dispossessed. Most were Canadian citizens.
In August 1985, Mitsui was invited back to Vancouver as the honored guest at a ceremony to relight the lantern at the Japanese Canadian War Memorial in Stanley Park. It had been extinguished in 1942.
He died in Hamilton on April 22, 1987, a few months before his 100th birthday. The next year, Canada signed a redress agreement with the Japanese Canadian community that included a formal apology and financial compensation.