From War Hero To Internee- Masumi Mitsui MM

A sad tale of how quickly fortunes can change. Won the MM in the first war, locked up in the second.
"Masumi Mitsui, MM, farmer, soldier, Canadian Legion official (born 7 October 1887 in Tokyo, Japan; died 22 April 1987 in Hamilton, ON). Masumi Mitsui immigrated to Canada in 1908 and served with distinction in the First World War. In 1931, he and his comrades persuaded the BC government to grant Japanese Canadian veterans the the right to vote, a breakthrough for Japanese and other disenfranchised Canadians. Nevertheless, Matsui and more than 22,000 Japanese Canadians were displaced, detained and dispossessed by the federal government during the Second World War ".
www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/masumi-mitsui

 

Good site and story, course it would be better if they had buried something, but I guess you can't have everything.

 

Interesting comparison with a British experience. A Japanese journalist named Ohara joined the Indian Army in 1914, later transferred to the British, fought, wounded and decorated at the Somme, transferred to the RFC and ended the war as a Sgt Pilot in the RAF. He married a British girl and settled in Britain and made a living as an artist decorating trays in the Japanese style (one is in the Royal collection). He retained his Japanese citizenship. In WW2 he was not interned but allowed to go on living much as he had before the war.

 

Basically all countries did that (especially during the ww1), i.e., interned some people believed to be a threat.
Actually, if you had the chance to choose you should have chosen the American/Canadian way, all the others were worse.
And the Soviets would kill them all.