text: After three days of court, Thorson stated "I do not think anyone expects me to give judgment now". Three years later, after the war had ended and the Canadian government had begun to exile nearly 4,000 Japanese Canadians, Thorson released his judgment.  On August 29, 1947, it was announced that Nakashima, Wakabayashi, and Tanaka had lost. In his judgment, Thorson did not acknowledge any of MacLennan's arguments and mentioned very little about the lives of the litigants. Without addressing the larger harms of the dispossession of Japanese Canadians, stated that "the custodian could neither be characterized as the Crown nor its servant"; therefore, the case ended before it began since the litigants had sued the wrong entity. In addition to losing their homes, Thorson also charged Nakashima, Wakabayashi, and Tanaka for the legal costs of the government.
  Bird Commission
  In 1946 and 1947, pressure began to build for the federal government to address the forced sale of Japanese-Canadian property. In 1947, representatives from the Co-operative Committee on Japanese Canadians and the Japanese Canadian Citizens for Democracy (JCCD) which had formed in 1943 asked the federal government's Public Accounts Committee to launch a Royal Commission to look into the losses associated with the forced sales. In June 1947, the Public Accounts Committee recommended that a commission be struck to examine the claims of Japanese Canadians living in Canada for losses resulting from receiving less than the fair market value of their property.
  A Royal Commission was set up later that year, headed by Justice Henry Bird, with terms of reference that placed the onus on the Japanese-Canadian claimant to prove that the Custodian of Enemy Property was negligent in the handling of their property. The terms of reference soon expanded to also include the sale of the property below market value, but no cases were accepted that dealt with issues outside the control of the Custodian of Enemy Property.