Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Exporting Japan

University of Illinois Press

Contents

Notes on the Translation and Usage of Japanese Names and Words...................................................viiIntroduction.....................................................................................................11. The First Wave of Japanese Migration to Latin America.........................................................172. The Second Wave: Post–World War II Period...............................................................353. Building the Emigration Machinery.............................................................................594. Post–World War II Resurgence of State-Led Migration to Latin America....................................805. Social Origins of Japanese Emigration Policy..................................................................1016. Latin American Emigration as Political Decompressor...........................................................1387. State Expansion through Emigration............................................................................170Conclusion.......................................................................................................197Notes............................................................................................................205Bibliography.....................................................................................................239Index............................................................................................................253

Chapter One

In the history of Japan—an island nation surrounded by oceans on all sides—overseas migration was a natural undertaking. From ancient times, Japan sent its people overseas to obtain exotic goods, or to learn of different cultures and ideas. The modern state that emerged in the late nineteenth century also used the international circulation of people to acquire foreign resources, assess potential opportunities, and enrich the nation-state. Outward-looking Japanese people of various classes and origins, freed from the feudal seclusion of the Tokugawa shogunate (1603–1867), avidly exploited new life chances abroad, mostly in the United States and Europe. Early Japanese emigrants during the Meiji period (1868–1912) included government-sponsored elite students from the privileged classes, less affluent, self-financed students, and ordinary laborers who wished to get rich in a foreign land. This last contingent was the most numerous. They were generally poor and eager to take even cheap, dirty, or dangerous jobs. The billowing wave of these job seekers headed eastward, mostly to Hawaii, the Pacific Coast of the United States, and Canada, as table 1.1 shows. America was seen as a land of opportunity, where ordinary yet industrious individuals could "get rich quick."

Japanese migration to the Iberian Americas, which is the central focus of this book, started relatively late, initially ran parallel to the mainstream of preceding migrations, and then took an unorthodox development path. Latin America-bound migration began about a decade later than migration to Hawaii and on a more humble scale. A group of 790 contract workers who entered Peru were the first organized example. After them, the flow of Japanese emigration continued in parallel with the larger flows to Hawaii and the continental United States. One of the factors that made Latin American emigration less popular in its early period was the relatively underdeveloped economic level of the receiving countries. The Latin American economy, whose degree of development varied, of course, from country to country, was generally agrarian, less industrial, and poverty-stricken by the standards of the western hemisphere. Therefore, wages and job opportunities available to Asian immigrants were limited. The early Japanese immigrants, who were profit-seeking dekasegi (migrant workers), believed that no other place in the Americas could match the U.S. labor market. Latin America was their second or third choice. Secondly, the Japanese dekasegi workers preferred migration to Hawaii, where although working conditions for the immigrant plantation workers were no less favorable, the islands were physically closer to Japan, already had a growing Japanese population, and provided the chance of subsequent migration to the mainland United States. In fact, many of those who first settled in Hawaii quickly left the miserable plantation work in the islands, once having paid off their original debts, for more and better opportunities, re-migrating to the mainland. Third, some of the early Japanese immigrants also understood Latin America, like Hawaii, as only a transit point for their eventual entry into the United States. In particular, Mexico, America's neighbor, assumed such a springboard role. Likewise, some of those who went to Peru and Brazil also made similar decisions, moving northward by way of Mexico or Puerto Rico.

The proportions of Japanese influx to North and South America reversed in the 1920s, as tables 1.1 and 1.2 demonstrate. Migration to Hawaii, the United States, and Canada plummeted, while that to Latin America, including Mexico, showed strong growth. Among the 160,000 Japanese who migrated overseas in the 1920s, 53.2 percent headed to Brazil, Peru, Mexico, Argentina, or other Latin American countries, while North America's share, including Hawaii, fell to 23.2 percent. This was in stark contrast to the previous two decades when North American emigration accounted for as much as 70 percent of the total while Latin America's share was less than 13 percent. From the 1920s until the mid-1930s, Latin America was the most favored destination for Japanese emigrants. All in all, from 1899 till the eve of the Pacific War in 1941, Japan sent as many as a quarter million citizens to Latin America.

Japanese migration to Latin America followed an unorthodox trajectory in its evolution: those Japanese emigrants flowed from a developing economy (i.e., prewar Japan) to less developed economies, such as Peru, Brazil, Mexico, Bolivia, and Paraguay (Argentina was a relatively more prosperous exception), as opposed to the dekasegi emigrants who went to the richer North America. These waves of downward migration never ceased, and even intensified through both liberal (until the 1910s) and state-controlled (from the 1920s to the 1930s) periods. Despite the fermenting anti-Japanese climate in the host societies, growth in the number of immigrants continued to be strong, owing much to large-scale immigration to Brazil. Furthermore, the government of Japan grew heavily involved with, and influential on, Latin American emigration, which reached its apex in the 1920s and 1930s. And it was under that period of state-patronized migration that anomalous destinations for Japanese immigration—such as the Peruvian and Brazilian interiors, and to a lesser extent, Bolivia and Paraguay—emerged.

With these distinct traits of Latin American emigration in mind, this chapter will provide a historical overview of how the prewar Japanese migration to Latin America began and how it was shaped by adversarial socio-economic and political conditions in the host societies. The destinations of prewar Japanese migration ranged from Cuba and the northern part of Mexico to the southern...