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For many Japanese people, the 49th parallel was only a line on a map, yet there were differences for the Japanese residents in the United States and Canada. The two nations had different concepts of citizenship and constitutions but, in what has been called “hemispheric orientalism,” prejudice knew no border. Both countries severely restricted immigration from Japan. In the United States, immigrants, the Issei, were aliens ineligible for citizenship. Thus, states could deny their access to commercial fishing and the right to own or lease land. Because the American constitution bestows full citizenship on the native-born, their American-born children, the Nisei, could vote and acquire land, but experienced discrimination especially in employment. On paper, the Canadian Issei had more civil rights since they could become naturalized but this provided few advantages apart from the rights to own land and to fish commercially. The Canadian Nisei had no more rights than their parents. In British Columbia, where 95 percent of the Japanese lived, they could not vote and provincial laws and customs denied their access to many occupations. During the Second World War, both nations required all the Nikkei to leave the Pacific Coast, incarcerated some, severely restricted the mobility of others, and proposed to “repatriate” many of them to Japan. Drawing mainly on the previous scholarship which has examined specific themes, time periods, or comparisons, this article offers an overview of how between the 1890s and the 1940s the effects of prejudice varied more in detail and timing than in principle even though formal consultation between the two nations was sporadic. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 1946 a group of Western New York and Southern Ontario business leaders proposed locating United Nations headquarters on Navy Island, Canadian territory in the Niagara River. One of the most visionary proposals ever to come from the region, it was a genuinely binational project, grounded in the symbolism of the peaceful relationship along the Niagara after the War of 1812. The proposal revealed a high level of cross-border economic and cultural integration in the Niagara region that had been strengthened by the shared experience of World War II. However, the region was increasingly marginalized from its national and state/provincial cores as it struggled to integrate itself into an ever more globalized economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]