The Jack Long propaganda photographs were commissioned by the Government of Canada to create the false impression that some 20,000 Japanese Canadians, whom it had forcibly interned in 1942, were being especially well treated and enjoying their lives in internment camps. Their purpose was to secure fair treatment for Canadian soldiers held in Japanese Prisoner of War camps. Bureaucrats employed the discriminatory logic that there was an equivalence between Canadians of Japanese ethnic origin - 75% of whom were Canadian by birth or naturalization - and ethnic Japanese in Imperial Japan.
It should be noted that the photograph titles are the original captions. These captions reflect the objective of the propaganda photographs and were a product of 1940s thinking. Internees are not referred to as Canadians. They are all "Japanese" or in one offensive case, "Japs." The names added to the captions are for non-Japanese persons.
Descriptions are used such as "cheerful", "modern", "a fine place", "well-equipped", "well-stocked", "clean" and "as perfect as possible." Euphemisms are employed such as "space-saving and "snug" for cramped, "evacuees" for internees, "repatriation" for deportation, "cottages" for internment shacks, and "settlements" and "housing centres" for the actual camps. There are "orderly rows of houses" and "tidy valleys." The point is often made that the internees are being treated the same as other Canadians.
One bureaucrat in the Department of External Affairs who saw Long's images wrote: "These are excellent photographs." But the annotation of another bureaucrat, Arthur Redpath Menzies, just below his colleague's comment are a reminder of the reality of the situation not revealed by the photographs themselves: "Understand from some who have been there that this spot is actually pretty grim - very cold - no work except sawing wood . . . in fact not a very pleasant spot - for Canadian citizens where only offence is their colour." [From the File Pocket of RG 25 A-3-b, Vol. No. 3006, File No. 3464-AN-40C.]
