Book Talk

Challenging Exile: Japanese Canadians and the Wartime Constitution

February 18, 2026 at 7:00pm

Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre – 6 Sakura Way, Toronto

Expect a dynamic discussion and then a lively Q&A with audience members.

This is a free event reserve your spot here.

For more information, visit the JCCC website

In September 1945, Canada proposed exiling Japanese Canadians to Japan, a country devastated by war. Thousands who had experienced internment and dispossession were now at risk of banishment.

In Challenging Exile, Jordan Stanger-Ross and co-author Eric M. Adams detail the circumstances and personalities behind the exile. They follow the lives of families facing government orders that uprooted them from their homes, stripped them of their livelihoods and possessions, and proposed to exile them from Canada. And they analyze the court case in which lawyers and judges grappled with the meaning of citizenship, race, and rights in times of war and its aftermath.

“Essential reading for anyone who cares about our country’s past”

-The Globe and Mail

Read the full review here.

The Speakers

Eric M. Adams is a professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Alberta and has written widely on constitutional law, legal history, employment law, human rights, and legal education. He lives in Edmonton.

Jordan Stanger-Ross is a professor of history at the University of Victoria and is the author of numerous works on the history of migration and race in North America. He lives in Victoria.

Moderator, Masumi Izumi, is a Professor at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan. A leading scholar of Japanese American and Japanese Canadian history, she is the author of Nikkei Kanada-jin no Idou to Undou: Shirarezaru Nihon-jin no Ekkyou Seikatsu Shi [The Japanese Canadian Movement: The Little-Known Trans-Pacific History of Japanese Migration and Activism] (Takanashi Shobo, 2020, in Japanese), which is a comprehensive history of Japanese Canadians.