The majority of Ontario internees were men and women without families, who were sent to labour camps. Their work was as varied as:
- a nursery outside Mississauga, where they were paid 44 cents an hour (compared to white employees, who made 48) and were housed in a former manor house nearby
- worked for a variety of farms as day labourers while living in a central camp
- harvesting sugar beets near Glencoe
- camps for building roads in Northern Ontario
- 55 men living in a "roundhouse" in Chatham-Kent (where they built a Japanese bath and formed a baseball team) and picking apples, harvesting wheat, and clearing brush and landscaping in public parks
There are few stories of rebellion and resistance by Japanese workers, but here's one:
At one Niagara farm, Dick Ujiye, who had owned a dry cleaning business in Vancouver, was assigned to drive the fertilizer wagon. He decided that he was no farmer and talked with other Japanese Canadians about moving to the city. The conditions of the Japanese deportation from the B.C. coast, however, prohibited such a move. The RCMP sent an officer who spoke Japanese to check up on the Ujiye family because “they claimed that Dick was an agitator.” The policeman reported Ujiye to the farm owner and he was fired. Now he was in a position to move to Toronto.
