1. 21 Sep 2013The Vancouver SunSTEWART MUIR
In an urban landscape on edge, a thief with a gun shatters a Japanese- Canadian family’s world
Fears of an attack by Japan and a rising racism gripped the West Coast after the Dec. 7, 1941 bombing of
Pearl Harbor. In Vancouver, the Uno family went about the business of running their modest store, until
their son’s fatal encounter with a robber transformed many lives. This is the untold account of that night
and the extraordinary events that followed. On Friday, Jan. 16, 1942 at 8: 30 p. m., a tall, skinny man and
two friends approached the Uno family confectionary store on the northwest corner of 4th and Alberta.
War had made the nighttime city an eerie place. In this little pocket of Fairview some called Kawamuko,
windows of the worn clapboard houses and a nearby sawdust depot and fishing lure factory were
blacked out. Automobile headlights were masked to allow only a three- by- ¼ - inch slit of illumination.
Uno family photo
With more than 80 Japanese families in the surrounding neighbourhood, the Uno store at the northwest
corner of 4th and Alberta was a local hub of activity. This 1937 photo shows neighbourhood children
standing in front of the Uno store.
Air raid regulations, a precaution after Japan’s recent attack on Pearl Harbor, were in full force. The
whole west coast of North America was on edge. In the living room connected to the store by a
curtained doorway, the Uno family was listening to sentimental crooner Lanny Ross on his radio variety
show. Yoshiyuki ( Yoshi for short), at 27 the oldest child, sat on a couch between his youngest sister,
Yaeko, and brother Yuki and explained the latest worrying developments.
On a Friday evening, unmarried 20- somethings might have had other plans, but with all the trouble
lately the Uno children were staying closer to home — although the youngest, Bobby, was away that
evening.
As the door opened off the street into the store, a bell jangled and 51- year- old Oiyo Uno hurried out to
serve the customers as she did at least 100 times a day, leaving her children and husband Kosaburo in
the living room.
At the sight of the three men standing in her store, she recoiled in recognition.
“What do you want?” she said to the tall young man, who seemed intense and nervous. His two friends
were behind him. “Cigarettes,” he replied. The man had thick and wavy brown hair sweeping upward in
a spectacular wave and wore a white shirt and green sweater with a burgundy ascot that lent him a
sophisticated air. His dark green trousers were too short and patched on the right knee. He pulled out a
dark, long- barrelled revolver.
It was just the kind of crime that had been happening around the city lately — robberies targeting
Japanese- run businesses.

2. On Jan. 2, Japanese confectionary stores on East Cordova and Hawks Avenue were robbed within a few
minutes of each other by two grimy men armed with a knife, a spike and a file.
They got $ 10 in one and $ 25 in another, but in one case left behind a hat and coat when the clerk
fought back, locking himself inside his own store with one of the robbers. The intruder was only freed
when his accomplice broke the window.
Three days later, The Sun reported that windows were broken at two Japanese stores. The
confectionary store of E. Kariya at 595 Richards was vandalized by a “six- foot- tall woman” smashing a
window, and a slab of wood was thrown into the Jubilee Grocery at 3302 West Broadway.
A week before, The Sun reported that “natty bandits” armed with a “small automatic” robbed a
drugstore in the heart of Little Tokyo. The two welldressed men got away with $ 50.
The “jittery condition” of people on the coast had worsened a prevailing racism that Japanese Canadians
had always felt. Even for a minority used to being attacked, some said it was their worst beating since
the infamous 1907 riot.
By this time, social life among Japanese residents of Vancouver had “declined to a bare minimum,”
according to a Japanese newspaper report. People were staying home, wary of agitated whites. Business
was slowing down and Japanese were losing their jobs, increasingly turning to the Japanese Corps of the
Salvation Army for help.
It felt like suspended animation, said one writer.
Ominously, a delegation from B. C. was in Ottawa to demand that B. C.’ s Japanese population — even
the Canadianborn — be moved inland because of fears they would act as saboteurs if Imperial Japan
attacked the west coast as it had Hawaii.
Not everyone felt this way. The city’s newspapers engaged in a furious, polarized debate about the right
course of action.
The night of the robbery and over the weekend, Vancouver residents were rattled by the sound of
gunfire, mysterious blasts, human wailing and the screaming of sirens. Rumours spread through the city.
Vancouver was a city exposed in a nation at war, and the Uno family were among those jittery Japanese
whose lives were about to change forever.
Model of immigrant success
The Uno family was a model of immigrant success and a lot like other Japanese shopkeepers who had
been in the news. They were honest, stable, churchgoing strivers.
Kosaburo Uno was a native of the Lake Biwa area northeast of Osaka, in Shiga prefecture — a region
that provided many immigrants to B. C. They were unlike the coastal Japanese immigrants who went
into fishing. Uno was a farmer and his first Canadian job was on a dairy farm, but his real goal was to live

3. in the teeming, cosmopolitan boom town of Vancouver, where more than one tenth of the population
was Asian when he arrived in 1900.
Kosaburo was typical of many other immigrants of that time. He found work in the sawmills of False
Creek and became a Canadian citizen. By 1906, aged 28, it was time to start a family. Men like Kosaburo
chose so- called picture brides from Japan — young women they did not know whom they would
journey home to meet and marry before returning to Canada.
For the young women in such relationships, it was a way to do abroad what they could not do at home
— make money, help their parents, succeed.
Oiyo was 16 years old and three months pregnant with the first of six children when she arrived in
Vancouver with her husband aboard the KagaMaru in May 1907. Kosaburo could read and write but
Oiyo could not.
By that fall an anti- Japanese movement in the city was able to whip up racist mobs. They attacked Little
Tokyo. Family lore tells how Kosaburo grabbed whatever was at hand and took to the streets with other
Japanese men — many of them millworkers and no pushovers — to defend their neighbourhood, which
they did with great effectiveness.
Politicians caved to the protests, and while the Japanese who had already emigrated established
themselves, white resentment against their success in B. C. grew. Canada slammed the door on further
immigration from Japan.
The first Uno child, a girl, was born in a cabin at 5th and Alberta. Though the oldest fell ill and died in the
1920s, the marriage produced two more girls and three boys.
In the larger enclave of Little Tokyo, they had a name for this Fairview satellite — they called it
Kawamuko, which meant “across the river.” It was a reference to False Creek, not a river at all but a
busy industrial inlet lined with sawmills and teeming with ships.
Once settled in, the family occupied a number of different dwellings over the years, but never one more
than a couple of blocks away from the Japanese Methodist church at 6th and Columbia that they
attended.
Most of the local Japanese families lived in an area bounded on the east and west by Ontario and
Cambie streets and on the north and south by 3rd and 6th avenues. There was a similar enclave in
Kitsilano where the occupants of houses on 1st and 2nd avenues between Fir and Burrard were almost
all Japanese.
Late in life, Kosaburo would look back fondly on a “pleasant and enjoyable” life in raising a young family
and working up from a cabin to apartment to house.
Around them in the neighbourhood lived more than 80 other Japanese families. Given the large family
sizes of the day, this could easily have meant a population of 500.

4. Long gone today are the Methodist church and school at 6th and Columbia that were Kawamuko’s focal
point. Some of the shiplap-sided houses remain, but most have been replaced by small factories,
warehouses and various commercial activities.
By 1925, the family ran and lived in a grocery store at Columbia and 5th. Fourteen per cent of the city’s
confectionary stores were Japanese- run, a high proportion explained by racism that steered Japanese
into small businesses because they were blocked from professional fields.
Business was good enough that a few years later they bought a 16- unit apartment building and the
bungalow that fronted it, intending to open a store in the house.
With what the street directory called the “Jap School” right next door, it seemed like the perfect
location to sell candies and pop. But this proved to be a rare wrong move for the Unos. Despite having
purchased shop furnishings, they were refused a business licence.
So instead, in 1930 the Unos rented the corner shop at 305 West 4th and outfitted it as a confectionary
store serving mainly Japanese customers. It was not a good time for their trade. From 1928 to 1931, one
confectionary store in five closed across the city as the Great Depression began. But with Kosaburo’s
wages, other investments, and the fact that his wife could raise a family while running the store, they
made a go of it.
Oiyo Uno knew enough English to understand people, but felt less comfortable expressing her thoughts
in her adopted language.
Her store’s wares included bread, milk, pop, tobacco, penny candy, basic groceries, laundry soap,
produce and Japanese favourites like kamboko, a cured fish paste.
By 1942, Kosaburo and Oiyo had done well for themselves. They owned a car, the confectionary
business, an apartment building, and a share in the Japanese- owned furniture manufacturing business.
Yoshi worked as a polisher and his brother Yuki as a sander at the factory.
The Uno children dressed well and often went on excursions to local pleasure spots like Bowen Island,
Kitsilano Beach and Happyland at Hastings Park.
The family had the trappings of middleclass comfort for the era, including a radio and — from 1940 — a
telephone. Popular, sociable Yoshi even had a separate phone line by 1941.
Yoshi’s 24- year- old brother, Yuki, was first baseman for the legendary Asahi All- Stars, the
championship Japanese baseball squad that overwhelmed powerful white teams with a dazzling style of
play they called “brain ball.”
He was what every Japanese boy in Vancouver longed to be.
Japanese immigrants’ children saw themselves as loyal Canadians who could operate fluently in broad B.
C. society. By the 1930s, a fashionable young Japanese woman like Haruko Uno could step lively through
downtown.

5. The eldest Uno daughter, she lived at home and was happy with the independence and freedom that
came from her job at an all- Japanese cardboard box factory. She often shopped on Hastings or
Granville.
Nearly six per cent of the city’s prewar population was described as Oriental. Yet they also faced racism
and barriers every day. Even an honours degree from UBC was insufficient to qualify a Japanese person
for a good job.
Haruko’s brother Yoshi had dreamed of becoming an accountant but this was a non- starter because of
his race.
He settled instead for helping parttime with the bookkeeping at Advance Furniture Manufacturing, the
factory the Uno family owned a share of and where he also worked for nine years as a polisher.
By early 1941, even before Canada was at war with Japan, the Uno children who regularly ventured
outside the Kawamuko colony were feeling the rising hostility.
Two photos of Haruko, taken several years apart, probably by professional street photographers who
sold keepsake snapshots, evoke the changing mood.
One shows an attractive, confident young woman on Granville Street in 1938.
She is dressed to the nines and it’s as if the street belongs to her.
The other image, taken on West Hastings three years later in May 1941 — when Japan was bombing
cities in China, London was taking a battering in the Blitz and the Holocaust was well underway —
suggests a different mood.
It shows Haruko and her younger sister Yaeko on Hastings Street, walking toward Woodward’s
department store after shopping at The Bay.
If they seem tense and worried, they were well aware of the growing hostility toward them as JapaneseCanadians living in Vancouver.
On those downtown streets, wrapped up in much greater conflicts, a collision was brewing between
their world and that of a desperate and foolish group of young men.
“This is a holdup,” the gunman said, pointing the gun at Oiyo Uno. She opened the cash register and, as
his accomplices scooped out $ 2 in change, she retreated toward the door at the rear of the shop that
led to the Uno family’s living quarters.
“They came back,” she cried out in Japanese — the men who had been casing the joint.
It was the third time the store had been robbed, but the immigrant shopkeeper had never before faced
a weapon.

6. The tall man pushed her aside and went to the back of the store toward the living room doorway, which
was screened by two sliding half- doors between the store and the living room.
He fired his gun. The bullet travelled through the wood door toward the couch where Yoshi Uno sat
between his brother and sister. “Ouch!” he cried, grabbing his hand. He had been shot.
Peering through the curtain, the gunman fired again. This time the bullet entered Yoshi’s left elbow and
tore through the flesh all the way up to the shoulder.
The wounded man fell back, then got up and rushed out to the store with his brother behind him.
Within a minute, one man lay dying. An extraordinary tale had begun. As it unfolded over coming weeks,
months and years, it paralleled the transformation of a city, a nation and a people.