Launching a Paper in the 1920s

Reminiscences of Ryuichi Yoshida:

During that time [early 1920s] anti-Japanese discrimination was becoming very intense. I travelled all over B.C. to gather material and write about the conditions of Japanese workers. The Labour Union supporters were controlling the Japanese Association and it provided me with seventy-five dollars a month wage to do that research. I did that for nine months.

I discovered that the Furuya company, a large labour contractor, was charging thirty percent commissions on food and merchandise to Japanese railway workers. Those men came to me and requested that the Labour Union take some action, although they weren’t members. I reported this and the findings of other such things in the Labour Weekly. I was also able to have the editor of the Continental Times, Mr. Osada, publish part of that report.

The general manager of the Furuya Company came to Vancouver from Seattle to complain to Yamazaki, the owner of the Continental Times. The Japanese Board of Trade in Vancouver also complained and demanded that any further articles like that be cancelled. Yamazaki said, ‘You will not publish them in my paper’. We used the press of the Continental Times to publish the Labour Weekly. They refused to print the Labour Weekly anymore. Then the Labour Weekly was printed by a job printer on Powell street. The main customers of that printer were members of the Japanese Board of Trade and they told him that they would not give him jobs if he continued to print the Labour Weekly. So he stopped printing our paper; for a while there was no Labour Weekly.

We discussed the possibility of operating our own press but we could not survive as only a weekly newspaper. Then we thought of publishing a daily newspaper. We estimated that we needed about $10,000 to start with. We had to get about 1,500 subscriptions and some advertisements. That was a huge sum of money at the time. We were very optimistic because at that time the Labour Union had only one hundred and fifty dollars in its account.

At a general meeting of the Labour Union it was agreed to publish the paper on the condition that someone be responsible for it on a full-time basis. I became the manager for the first two years. We started to collect contributions for the new newspaper and were quite successful. We bought a secondhand press and ordered type from Japan and started publishing in May 1924. During that time I was travelling all over B.C. to get contributions and subscribers. I was hardly home at all.

The name of our paper was The Daily People (Minshu) and it belonged to and was directed by the Labour Union. It was a daily and took the form of a regular newspaper into which the views of a union paper were woven. The main objects of The Daily People were to combat anti-Japanese discrimination and to make Japanese workers more aware of the principles of the Labour Union. We put in articles against Japanese bosses who exploited workers and merchants who charged high food commissions.

There were three Japanese newspapers in Vancouver then – The Daily People, the Continental Times, and the Canada Shimpo. Canada Shimpo was very conservative. It was established by Kagetsu, that big sawmill owner. It had the support of most of the merchants because the Continental Times didn’t defend them strongly enough. The Continental Times was fairly progressive for an ordinary newspaper, depending on the topic.

When Suzuki left the Continental Times to write for the Daily People a lot of their subscribers came over to us. Those three papers were very different. On some incidents, such as a murder for instance, they wrote similar articles. But if the topic was concerning work the three papers wrote completely different accounts. If there was a strike the Canada Shimpo would not mention it or it wrote only criticism: ‘Delinquent workers strike and make trouble for their employers’ etcetera. The subscribers were merchants and people of very conservative ideas, including workers. There were a lot of workers opposed to the ideas of The Daily People. The Continental Times usually gave some plain information without too much comment. It was bought by a man who made it into a ‘popular’ paper; it published a lot of trivial stories but it became the biggest newspaper. The Daily People was a union paper and could not become soft. On strikes and labour problems The People was the only one that gave thorough coverage.

The Daily People issue of October 29, 1925.