Japanese diaspora

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The Japanese diaspora, and its individual members known as nikkei, are Japanese emigrants from Japan and their descendants. Emigration from Japan was recorded as early as the 12th century, but did not become a mass phenomenon until the Meiji Era, when Japanese began to go to North America, and later Latin America. There was also significant emigration to the territories of the Empire of Japan during the colonial period; however, most such emigrants repatriated to Japan after the end of World War II in Asia.[1]

According to the Association of Nikkei and Japanese Abroad, there are about 2.5 million nikkei living in their adopted countries. The largest of these foreign communities are in Brazil and the United States. Descendants of emigrants from the Meiji Era still hold recognizable communities in those countries, forming separate ethnic groups from Japanese peoples in Japan.[2]

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[edit] Terminology

Nikkei is derived from the term nikkeijin (日系人?) in Japanese,[3][4] used to refer to Japanese people who emigrated from Japan and their descendants.[5][4] Emigration refers to permanent settlers, excluding transient Japanese abroad. These groups were historically differentiated by the terms issei (first generation nikkeijin), nisei (second generation nikkeijin), and sansei (third generation nikkeijin).

Discover Nikkei, a project of the Japanese American National Museum, defined nikkei as follows:

We are talking about Nikkei people - Japanese emigrants and their descendants who have created communities throughout the world. The term nikkei has multiple and diverse meanings depending on situations, places, and environments. Nikkei also include people of mixed racial descent who identify themselves as Nikkei. Native Japanese also use the term nikkei for the emigrants and their descendants who return to Japan. Many of these nikkei live in close communities and retain identities separate from the native Japanese.[6]

The definition was derived from The International Nikkei Research Project, a three-year collaborative project involving more than 100 scholars from 10 countries and 14 participating institutions.[6]

[edit] Early history

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In the 1640s, the Tokugawa shogunate imposed maritime restrictions which forbade Japanese from leaving the country, and from returning if they were already abroad. This policy would not be lifted for over two hundred years.

[edit] Americas

People from Japan began migrating to the U.S. and Canada in significant numbers following the political, cultural, and social changes stemming from the 1868 Meiji Restoration. (See Japanese American, Japanese Canadian). Particularly after the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Japanese immigrants were sought by industrialists to replace the Chinese immigrants. In 1907, the "Gentlemen's Agreement" between the governments of Japan and the U.S. ended immigration of Japanese workers (i.e., men), but permitted the immigration of spouses of Japanese immigrants already in the U.S. The Immigration Act of 1924 banned the immigration of all but a token few Japanese, until the Immigration Act of 1965, there was very little further Japanese immigration. That which occurred was mostly in the form of war brides.

With the restrictions on entering the United States, the level of Japanese immigration to Latin America began to increase. Japanese immigrants (particularly from the Okinawa Prefecture) arrived in small numbers during the early 20th century. Japanese Brazilians are the largest ethnic Japanese community outside Japan (numbering about 1.5 million,[1] compared to about 800,000 in the United States), the city of São Paulo is the largest Japanese city outside Japan. The first Japanese immigrants (791 people - mostly farmers) came to Brazil in 1908 on the Kasato Maru from the Japanese port of Kobe, moving to Brazil in search of better living conditions. Many of them (along with Chinese immigrants) ended up as laborers on coffee farms. The first Japanese Argentine Nisei (second generation), Seicho Arakaki, was born in 1911. Today there are an estimated 32,000 people of Japanese descent in Argentina according to Association of Nikkei and Japanese Abroad. Japanese Peruvians form another notable ethnic Japanese community, and count among their members former Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori.

[edit] Europe

The Japanese in Britain form the largest Japanese community in Europe with well over 100,000 living all over the UK (the majority being in London),[citation needed], together with the community in Germany, particularly in and around Düsseldorf.[7] There are also small numbers of Japanese people in Russia; some Japanese communists settled in the Soviet Union, including Mutsuo Hakamada, the brother of former Japanese Communist Party chairman Satomi Hakamada.[8] The 2002 Russian census showed 835 people claiming Japanese ethnicity (nationality).[9]

[edit] Asia ex-Japan

Japanese emigration to the rest of Asia was noted as early as the 12th century; early Japanese settlements included those in Lingayen Gulf, Manila, the coasts of Ilocos Norte and in the Visayas. A larger wave came in the 1600s, when red seal ships traded in Southeast Asia, and Japanese Catholics fled from the religious persecution imposed by the shoguns, and settled in the Philippines, among other destinations. Many of them also intermarried with the local Filipina women (including those of pure or mixed Spanish descent), thus forming the new Japanese-Mestizo community. During the American colonial era, the number of Japanese laborers working in plantations rose so high that in the 1900s, Davao soon became dubbed as a Ko Nippon Koku (Little Japan in Japanese) with a Japanese school, a Shinto temple and a diplomatic mission from Japan. There is even a popular restaurant called "The Japanese Tunnel", which includes an actual tunnel made by the Japanese in time of the war.

There was also a significant level of emigration to the overseas territories of the Empire of Japan during the Japanese colonial period, including Korea, Taiwan, and Karafuto. Unlike emigrants to the Americas, Japanese going to the colonies occupied a higher rather than lower social niche upon their arrival. As a book for prospective migrants frankly said: "In Korea one can carry on an independent enterprise with oneself as master, freely able to employ Koreans at low wages and tell them what to do".[10] However, after World War II, most of these overseas Japanese repatriated to Japan. Only a few remained overseas, often involuntarily, as in the case of Japanese orphans in China or Japanese prisoners of war forced to work in Siberia.[11] During the 1950s and 1960s, an estimated 6,000 Japanese accompanied Zainichi Korean spouses repatriating to North Korea, while another 27,000 prisoners-of-war are estimated to have been sent there by the Soviet Union; see Japanese people in North Korea.[11][12]

In recent years, Japanese migration to Australia, largely consisting of females, has been on the rise.[13] There is also a community of Japanese people in Hong Kong largely consisting of expatriate businessmen.

[edit] Return migration to Japan

Main article: dekasegi

In the 1980s, with Japan's growing economy facing a shortage of workers willing to do so-called Three 'K' jobs (kitsui (difficult), kitanai (dirty), and kiken (dangerous)), Japan's Ministry of Labor began to grant visas to ethnic Japanese to return to Japan and work in factories. There are approximately 270,000 such people in Japan from Brazil alone. Most are bilingual in Japanese and Portuguese, Spanish, or English. The vast majority are Brazilians, but there is also a large population of Peruvians and smaller populations of Argentines and other Latin Americans.

[edit] References

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  1. ^ Azuma, Eiichiro (2005). Brief Historical Overview of Japanese Emigration. International Nikkei Research Project. Retrieved on February 2, 2007.
  2. ^ Shoji, Rafael (2005). Book Review. Journal of Global Buddhism 6. Retrieved on February 2, 2007.
  3. ^ International Nikkei Research Project (2007). International Nikkei Research Project. Japanese American National Museum. Retrieved on February 2, 2007.
  4. ^ a b Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1) (2007). nikkei. Random House, Inc.. Retrieved on February 2, 2007.
  5. ^ Komai, Hiroshi (2007). Japanese Policies and Realities. United Nations. Retrieved on February 2, 2007.
  6. ^ a b Discover Nikkei (2007). What is Nikkei?. Japanese American National Museum. Retrieved on January 19, 2007.
  7. ^ http://www.gfw-nrw.de/gfw/gfw.nsf/contentByKey/RENN-6D6RS3-EN-p
  8. ^ Mitrokhin, Vasili; Christopher, Andrew (2005). The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World. Tennessee, United States: Basic Books. ISBN 0-476-00311-7. 
  9. ^ (Russian) Владение языками (кроме русского) населением отдельных национальностей по республикам, автономной области и автономным округам Российской Федерации (Microsoft Excel). Федеральная служба государственной статистики. Retrieved on December 1, 2006.
  10. ^ Lankov, Andrei. "The Dawn of Modern Korea (360): Settling Down", The Korea Times, 2006-03-23. Retrieved on December 18, 2006.
  11. ^ a b "Russia Acknowledges Sending Japanese Prisoners of War to North Korea", Mosnews.com, 2005-04-01. Retrieved on February 23, 2007.
  12. ^ Morris-Suzuki, Tessa (2007-03-13). "The Forgotten Victims of the North Korean Crisis". Nautilus Institute. Retrieved on 2007-03-15.
  13. ^ Deborah McNamara and James E. Coughlan (1992). "Recent Trends in Japanese Migration to Australia and the Characteristics of Recent Japanese Immigrants Settling in Australia". Faculty of Arts, Education, and Social Sciences, James Cook University. Retrieved on 2006-12-21.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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