was part of an imperialist expansion that included Taiwan, Karafuto, Korea, and Manchuria. Taiwan was the first imperialist conquest as a result of the war between Japan and China. Besides being a colony for Japanese capital investment, Taiwan was a point of departure for future economic and political control of continental Asia and Oceania. As a result of the Russian-Japanese War, Japan conquered Korea in 1910. The Korean labor force was used to industrialize Manchuria. Korea became a source of raw materials, a destination for Japanese capital investment, and a market for Japanese consumer products (Vieira 1973: 30–32).
Karafuto, located in the south of Sakhalin Island, was conquered by Japan in 1905 in the Japanese-Russian war, and the Japanese state colonized it by subsidizing its earlier emigrants. From 1905 to 1931, Japan made its way through Manchuria, creating the puppet state of Manchukuo to develop its agricultural resources and industries (Vieira 1973: 32).
After World War I, the League of Nations transferred some South Pacific islands to the Japanese state, which then subsidized a colonization company to exploit its tropical resources. The company enjoyed a monopoly and did not pay taxes. On the other hand, it provided shelter, medical assistance, and accident insurance to its workers. The workers received half of the wages paid in Tokyo and had to pay for their own transportation (Vieira 1973: 32–33).
Migration outside the Japanese empire reached the following countries: the Philippines, Hawaii, Canada, the United States, Peru, and Brazil. Japanese migration started in the 1880s, when migrant families moved to Hawaii and North America. By 1940, immigrants comprised a total of 439,316 people, among them 226,847 who settled in Latin America (193,156 in Brazil) and 206,871 in Canada, the United States, and Hawaii. Most emigrants had a low socioeconomic background and came from less-developed agricultural regions. Migration to Brazil was planned and subsidized by the government under the supervision of private companies and, from 1920 on, was more politically driven. Emigration companies sent immigrants bound by agricultural agreements and motivated by active propaganda. Almost all of them considered emigration to be temporary and this impacted their adjustment into Brazilian society (Vieira 1973: 33–34).
Japanese imperialism conquered China’s market and others in Asia and Africa. The Japanese government reformulated its emigration and colonization policy and unified the emigration companies. Kaigai Kogyo Kabushiki Kaisha (KKKK) or Overseas Company of Enterprises S.A. was founded in 1917 through the reorganization of Tõyõ Imin Kaisha with the financial support of the Foreign Relations Department. KKKK incorporated all the earlier companies and in 1920 enjoyed a monopoly on emigration and colonization. Brasil Takushoku Kabushi Kaisha, which had already established a Japanese colony in Registro, São Paulo State, was incorporated into KKKK in 1919. The total number of Japanese immigrants who arrived in Brazil from 1908 to 1940 was about 180,000 (Mita 1999: 41–42).
The founding of KKKK was also related to an economic crisis and postwar unemployment, which provoked worker protests. Those who left Japan did so in order to survive a severe crisis and did so with the help of the Japanese government (Tsuda 2003: 55–56). The Japanese government also sent emigrants to Peru, Paraguay, Argentina, Bolivia, Dominican Republic, and Mexico between the end of the nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth century.
The official reasons for the policy promoting migration to Latin America from the 1920s to 1960s were overpopulation and poverty. In fact people who were disadvantaged and marginalized due to the state’s modernization and capitalist development radicalized their resistance, and the Japanese state decided to get rid of those who questioned its policies by sending them to Latin America. Besides increasing its internal social control, the nation-state spanned borders in an imperialist way through its migration-colonization program (Endoh 2009).
People throughout North and South America distrusted Japanese immigrants due to their different phenotype and their preservation of a nationalistic feeling, which connected them to their homeland. Peruvians shared analogous feelings. Referring to Japanese immigration to Peru, Mário C. Vázquez (1970: 91) said, “The Japanese established associations of people from the same ‘home town.’” This attitude prevented them from marrying Peruvian women. Thus, they lived in “isolation.” When their contracts expired, some went back to Japan and others went to the cities to find work. Their stated claim to return to Japan also annoyed the nationalistic Peruvian elite as well as authors such as Vázquez, who wrote from an assimilation perspective. It did not occur to them and to the population of the American continents that Japanese immigrants faced harsh living conditions due to discrimination and had created associations to protect themselves and keep their culture alive.
Another problem is that the population in general saw Japanese immigrants as strangers who could threaten their “achievements, possessions and social standing” (Bauman 2016: 15). Bauman was referring to European, especially French attitudes toward refugees and asylum seekers in 2015 and 2016. He was analyzing the attitudes of “the emergent ‘precariat’” sector of society, whose social position has been endangered by socioeconomic and political transformations. However, it could also be applied to the nineteenth-century/early twentieth-century working and middle classes in the Americas and to government policies in relation to Japanese immigrants. This was especially true in Canada and in the United States, where there was strong competition between the established population and Japanese immigrants. This fear of strangers seeing them as a threat to people’s social positions and to their nationalist feeling has lasted for more than a century, and currently shows an upward trend.
Japanese Immigration to Hawaii and the United States
Japanese emigrants went to work on plantations in Hawaii as temporary migrant workers, and from there they migrated to the United States. Among the 200,000 Japanese who immigrated to Hawaii, 180,000 later went to the United States. Most of them were young educated men due to the Japanese law that required eight years of schooling. Compared to the European immigrants who settled in the United States, the percentage of people who could not read and write was low among Japanese immigrants. Most Japanese immigrants came from rural areas and were not severely poor. They arrived in the United States with more money than the average immigrants from Europe (Takaki 1994: 22).
The first Japanese emigrant flow went to Hawaii in 1868, when Hawaii was an independent kingdom. They also immigrated to the west coast of the United States. Those who arrived first were rural young single men. They came from the Provinces of Hiroshima, Wakayama, Kumamoto, and Yamaguchi. Some of them later returned to Japan; others sent for their wives. The American government denied citizenship to those who were born in Japan, although their American-born children had citizenship automatically. Considered foreigners, Japanese immigrants could not buy land for agriculture (Kitano 1980: 185).
The Japanese government controlled who emigrated. Moved by an increasing nationalism, the government considered Japanese emigrants as representatives of their homeland: “Anyone who wanted to go to Hawaii or the United States had to apply for permission. Review boards screened the applicants to make sure that they were healthy and educated, and that they would uphold ‘national honor’ abroad” (Takaki 1994: 22–23).
In 1908, the United States called for a Gentlemen’s Agreement with Japan, in which the latter country agreed to prevent the emigration of Japanese laborers. However, there was a loophole: close relatives of workers already in America would be allowed to emigrate. At this time, Hawaii was a territory of the United States, so it followed the same policy (Takaki 1994: 24). Most Japanese immigrants settled in California, where they became shopkeepers and small farmers. Others worked for railroad owners and landowners. Another Japanese community was founded in Seattle in the 1890s. Much like the other west coast communities, these immigrants came primarily from prefectures in the south and west of Japan. Initially, the community was predominantly young, single men. In contrast, emigrants to Brazil were required to be part of family units (Yanagisako 1985: 3).
Immigrants to the mainland faced intense racial prejudice and discrimination. In 1920s, California Nisei, or second-generation Japanese Americans, represented only 2 percent of the
