West Meets East

Many Canadians, if asked to think about our country’s relationship with Japan, will recall the internment of Japanese Canadians as enemy aliens during World War Two, even though it was subsequently demonstrated that they posed no security threat whatsoever. Although an apology, compensation and other forms of redress took place starting in 1988, the internment remains one of Canada’s darkest chapters.

But there was a long history of Japanese-Canadian contact before World War Two, and Anne Shannon’s Finding Japan: Early Canadian Encounters with Asia pulls together a disparate collection of characters—“adventurers, military and technical advisers, missionary educators and social workers, businessmen and art collectors, politicians, diplomats and soldiers, as well as the occasional misfit”—whose stories indicate that the relationship is much more colourful and complex than we realize. For me, a second-generation Canadian missionary kid born in Japan and a...