Japanese diaspora

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Japanese people 日本人
Shōtoku, Ieyasu, R. Hiratsuka, Akihito and Michiko, Samurai during Boshin War, Japanese family of today
Total population
About 130 million
Regions with significant populations
Japan      127 million
Significant Nikkei populations in:  Brazil 1,400,000 [2]  United States 1,200,000 [3]  Philippines 150,000  PRC 99,000 [4]  Canada 85,000 [5]  Peru 81,000 [6]  United Kingdom 51,000 [7]  Germany 35,000 [8]  Argentina 30,000 [9]  Australia 27,000 [10]  Singapore 23,000 [11]  Mexico 20,000 [12]  Taiwan 16,000 [13]  South Korea 15,000 [14]
Languages
Japanese, Ryukyuan, Ainu
Religion
Cultural/Secular Shinto - Buddhism view • talk • edit

The Japanese diaspora, and its individual members known as nikkei (日系, nikkei^?), are Japanese emigrants from Japan and their descendants to other parts of the world. Emigration from Japan first happened and was recorded as early as the 12th century to the Philippines, 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, Peru 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]

Contents 1 Terminology 2 Early history 3 Americas 4 Europe 5 Asia ex-Japan 6 Return migration to Japan 7 References 8 External links

[edit] Terminology

Nikkei is derived from the term nikkeijin (日系人, nikkeijin^?) 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). The term Nikkeijin may or may not apply to those Japanese who still hold Japanese nationality. An inclusive definition would see Japanese emigrants who have significantly acculturated to their new surroundings as "Nikkeijin," while an exclusive definition would only include their children, born and raised outside of Japan (who may or may not be dual citizens). Usages of the term may depend on perspective. For example, the Japanese government defines them according to (foreign) citizenship and the ability to provide proof of Japanese lineage up to the third generation - legally the fourth generation has no legal standing in Japan that is any different from another "foreigner." On the other hand, in the U.S. or other places where Nikkeijin have developed their own communities and identities, Japanese emigrants tend to be included; citizenship is less relevant and a commitment to the local community becomes more important.

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

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. Travel restrictions were eased once Japan opened diplomatic relations with western nations. In 1867, the bakufu began issuing travel documents for overseas travel and emigration.^[7]

Before 1885, relatively few people emigrated from Japan, in part because the Meiji government was reluctant to allow emigration, both because it lacked the political power to adequately protect Japanese emigrants, and because it believed that the presence of Japanese as unskilled laborers in foreign countries would hamper its ability to revise the unequal treaties. A notable exception to this trend was a group of 153 contract laborers who immigrated--without official passports--to Hawai'i in 1868. ^[8]. A portion of this group stayed on after the expiration of the initial labor contract, forming the nucleus of the nikkei community in Hawai'i. 1885, the Meiji government began to turn to officially sponsored emigration programs to alleviate pressure from overpopulation and the effects of the Matsukata deflation in rural areas. For the next decade, the government was closely involved in the selection and pre-departure instruction of emigrants. The Japanese Government was keen on keeping Japanese emigrants well-mannered while abroad in order to show the West that Japan was a dignified society, worthy of respect. By the mid-1890s,immigration companies, not sponsored by the government,(imin-kaisha 移民会社) began to dominate the process of recruiting emigrants, but government-sanctioned ideology continued to influence emigration patterns.^[9]

[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 and 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. The majority of Japanese settled in Hawaii where today a third of the state's population are of Japanese descent, and the rest in the west coast (California, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon and Washington state), but other significant communities are found in the Northeast and Midwest states.

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,[15] compared to about 1.2 million in the United States), and São Paulo contains the largest concentration of Japanese 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.

The Odyssey of Japanese Colonists in the Dominican Republic

Between 1930 and 1961, life in the Dominican Republic was controlled by the dictator Rafael L. Trujillo, he's intentions where to bring more immigrants from the outside modern world. In his plans he let migrate thousands of Japanese people.In an agreement formalized with the Japanese government in 1956, Generalissimo Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina of the Dominican Republic extended an offer of refuge for Japanese immigrants seeking to improve their fortunes in the late 19505 by taking up residence in Trujillo's vaunted "Paradise of the Caribbean." The provision of sites ultimately unfavorable for colonization, lack of infrastructure, failure of the Japanese government to address the complaints of the colonists, and political instability within the Dominican Republic led to the abandonment of five of the eight colonies. By 1962 only 276 of the 1,319 original colonists remained; the rest had either ...

[edit] Europe

The Japanese in Britain form the largest Japanese community in Europe with well over 100,000 living all over the United Kingdom (the majority being in London)^{[citation needed]}, together with the community in Germany, particularly in and around Düsseldorf.^[10] 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.^[11] The 2002 Russian census showed 835 people claiming Japanese ethnicity (nationality).^[12]

Please help improve this section by expanding it. Further information might be found on the talk page or at requests for expansion.

[edit] Asia ex-Japan

The first Japanese emigration to the rest of Asia was noted as early as the 12th century to the Philippines; early Japanese settlements included those in Lingayen Gulf, Manila, the coasts of Ilocos Norte and in the Visayas when the Philippines was under the Luzon Empire and the Chola Empire, Srivijaya, and the Majapahit Empire. 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, Manchuria, and Karafuto. Unlike emigrants to the Americas, Japanese going to the colonies occupied a higher rather than lower social niche upon their arrival. ^[13] 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 orphans in China or prisoners of war captured by the Red Army and forced to work in Siberia.^[14] 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.^[14][15]

In recent years, Japanese migration to Australia, largely consisting of younger age females, has been on the rise.^[16] There is also a community of Japanese people in Hong Kong largely made up 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. The vast majority - estimated at roughly 300,000 - are Brazilians, but there is also a large population of Peruvians and smaller populations of Argentines and other Latin Americans. As native speakers of Portuguese and Spanish, some also speak Japanese and/or English, but many do not.

It is now disputed that those Nikkeijin born in Japan from two full blooded Nikkeijin parents should be given Japanese nationality. This would mean that lex soli would apply to children of Nikkeijin parents. This seems to be a rare occurrence in the past, but with the Nikkei Brazilians this instance is not too uncommon. Being born in Japan, and being both ethnically and culturally Japanese, many Japanese argue that these children should be granted Japanese nationality by birth.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Discover Nikkei, A site co-ordinated with the Japanese American National Museum and affiliated with academic, community programs, and scholars.
• APJ, A non-profit organization representing Japanese Citizens living in Peru and their descendants.

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