h century. On the whole, the Japanese immigrants took any work they could find, mostly in the saw and pulp mills of BC. While the Japanese had little difficulty finding work, the Japanese were only marginally connected to the local society. In most cases, they clung together in communities that stood apart from the rest of the society. They tended to live in their own small enclaves. Cultural ties, housing costs, restrictive agreements, and racial prejudice all reinforced these residential boundaries. The immigrants also established their own community institutions in order to survive as a small minority isolated within an unsympathetic society. Newspapers, trade unions, educational societies, and religious associations exclusive to the Japanese were established within the immigrant community by the early 20th century. Essentially, the Japanese immigrant community remained a self-contained entity within the West Coast society.Although the Japanese were assimilated only to a small extent, they absorbed the language, customs, and values of western Canadian society far more quickly than other Asians. Still, whatever the extent of Japanese acculturation, the barriers of racism kept them from becoming an equal part of a white-dominated society.White society in BC was anti-Oriental. When the Japanese arrived in the province, they encountered a community already soaked in racism. Chinese immigrants had come two decades before them and in the years that followed, white society had already developed a strong dislike towards Asians in general. Thus the Japanese met hostility from the moment of their arrival. To the whites of the community, Asians appeared to be a threat to the cultural and economic prosperity of the whites. Due to this, the society was bursting with discriminate feelings. Around the late 1880s, there were many racist events in Vancouver. This was a difficult time for all Asians. They were no longer needed to provi...
