Toake Endoh Exporting Japan Politics of Emigration To Latin America
Toake Endoh Exporting Japan Politics of Emigration to Latin America
Exporting Japan examines the domestic origins of the Japanese government's policies to promote the emigration of approximately three hundred thousand native Japanese citizens to Latin America between the 1890s and the 1960s. This imperialist policy, spanning two world wars and encompassing both the pre-World War II authoritarian government and the postwar conservative regime, reveals strategic efforts by the Japanese state to control its populace while building an expansive nation beyond its territorial borders. Toake Endoh compellingly argues that Japan's emigration policy embodied the state's anxieties over domestic political stability and its intention to remove marginalized and radicalized social groups by relocating them abroad. Documenting the disproportionate focus of the southwest region of Japan as a source of emigrants, Endoh considers the state's motivations in formulating emigration policies that selected certain elements of the Japanese population for ''export.'' She also recounts the situations migrants encountered once they reached Latin America, where they were often met with distrust and violence in the ''yellow scare'' of the pre-World War II period.
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Print length
280 pages
Product description
Review
''Skillfully unravels Japan's intricate domestic politics of emigration to Latin America before and after WW II.''--''Enterprise & Society''
About the Author
Toake Endoh teaches political science in the liberal arts department at Hawaii Tokai International College.
Product details
Publisher : University of Illinois Press; 1st edition (15 March 2009)
Language : English
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Pacific Affairs, VOLUME 84 – NO. 3
EXPORTING JAPAN: Politics of Emigration to Latin America | By Toake Endoh
Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009. 267 pp. (Tables, figures, maps.) US$50.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-252-03402-2.
Toake Endoh’s Exporting Japan is an important contribution to the growing field of Asian Diaspora Studies. In this book, he provides his reader with a detailed analysis of Japanese emigration policy to Latin America. In particular, he writes against the scholarship of international economy, structuralism and transnational networks in order to examine domestic political aspects of emigration, adopting a state-centric paradigm that focuses on the intentions, ideology, perceptions and actions of the Japanese state in regard to Latin American emigration. Endoh explores three specific paradoxes: the unorthodox patterns of migration and settlement, governmental policy for overseas migration, and the southwest origin of the majority of immigrants. This Japan-focused study of emigration offers scholars insight into the policy behind the largest Japanese diasporic populations, although it does not introduce any new theoretical literatures to the field of Asian Diaspora Studies.
The strength in Endoh’s study lies in his ability to access Japanese-language sources that describe the Japanese government’s policies in respect to overpopulation, post-World War II emigration, and how the state retained links to its expatriate communities. Looking at the policies regarding overpopulation, Endoh introduces a hybrid approach that synthesizes migration, social control and state expansion, and considers the Japanese government’s Latin American emigration policies in the context of Asian colonization through its broader encouragement of emigration to Hokkaido, Taiwan, Korea and Manchuria. He analyzes the geographic and social origins of the emigrants and illustrates the ways in which the Japanese government recruited citizens from poorer communities as a means of combating overpopulation and poverty, looking specifically at policies directed toward the populations of the southwest of Japan (Hiroshima, Yamaguchi, Fukuoka, Saga, Nagasaki, Kagoshima, Kumamoto and Okinawa), the burakumin, and ex-miners (such as those from Mitsui Mining). In his consideration of post-World War II emigration, Endoh offers his readers an analysis of the Dominican Republic, Bolivia and Paraguay, stressing that the Japanese government believed that emigration ensured “a smoother and quicker postwar reconstruction” despite the fact that the General Headquarters (GHQ) and Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (SCAP) frowned on it during the Occupation (81). Finally, in his examination of state expansion through emigration, Endoh highlights Japan’s interest in Brazilian agricultural products, such as cotton and soybeans, as well as the nationalistic pride of the diasporic communities, whose members sent monetary contributions to Japan and encouraged loyalty to Japan. The detail-oriented analyses of these policies expand scholarship on the history and politics of modern Japan.
The greatest strength of Endoh’s book, its access to Japanese-language sources, is also its greatest weakness. Endoh heavily relies on Japanese- and English-language sources, including few in Spanish and none in Portuguese. While his summary of the history of the two waves of migration to Latin America, Peru and Brazil in the first wave (1898-1941) and Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Bolivia and Paraguay in the second wave (1950s and 1960s), is a welcome addition to studies of Japanese emigration to Latin America, his analysis of Japanese immigration to these countries ignores some of the major scholarship, including Jeffrey Lesser’s seminal studies of Japanese immigration in Brazil. Instead, Endoh claims that Latin American emigration policies were an extension of the imperialist designs of the Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. This problematic conflation of emigration policies with colonial policies insists on nation-building by way of transnational expansion when, in fact, Japan never colonized Latin America. Though it is true that some immigrants showed nationalistic pride in being Japanese, Endoh overemphasizes the significance of the defeat of Japan during World War II, citing emperor worship in Latin America and highlighting the conflict between the kachigumi (those who believed that Japan had won the war) and the makegumi (those who believed that Japan had lost the war). While this conflict did cause a rift in the expatriate communities in Brazil, Peru and other Latin American countries, the violence was particularly constrained to the Japanese community in São Paulo and was largely ignored by the Brazilian government until members of the Shindô Renmei (The League of the Emperor’s Subjects), a kachigumi organization, killed a non-Japanese Brazilian man in 1946. Endoh does not examine information that points to the Brazilian government’s role in the maintenance of Japanese nationalism. His reliance on Japanese-language sources leads him to overemphasize the importance of these conflicts within the Japanese expatriate community in support of his claim that Japanese nationalism abroad contributed to furthering immigration to Latin America from Japan post-World War II.
Nevertheless, I highly recommend the book to scholars of Asian Diaspora Studies as well as students of modern Japan interested in policies regarding Japanese colonialism and the GHQ/SCAP Occupation of Japan, because Endoh offers his readers insight into how the Japanese government used Latin American emigration as a political decompressor to restore order in Japan.
Zelideth María Rivas
Colorado College, Colorado Springs, USA
p. 569
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Toake Endoh. Exporting Japan: Politics of Emigration toward Latin America. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 2009. Pp. 267. $50.00.
José C. Moya
The American Historical Review, Volume 116, Issue 5, December 2011, Pages 1451–1452, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.116.5.1451
Published: 01 December 2011
Extract
Japanese transpacific migration headed primarily to Hawaii and, to a lesser extent, the west coast of the United States and Canada during the late 1800s. During the twentieth century, however, the flow shifted southward with the share going to Latin America reaching one-fourth during the first two decades of the century, four-fifths in the in the 1920s and 1930s, and half during the postwar revival of Japanese emigration in the 1950s and early 1960s. Altogether, about 325,000 Japanese migrated to Latin America during the entire period.
Toake Endoh divides this stream into two phases. Up to the mid 1920s, most people migrated through private arrangements and to more favorable destinations, while those arriving later migrated mainly under the patronage of the Japanese government to less desirable destinations. This pattern raises three questions for the author. Why would “individual rational actors” move to destinations that were poorer and less developed than...
Article
Toake Endoh. Exporting Japan: Politics of Emigration to Latin America
August 2010Enterprise and Society 11(3):664-667
DOI:10.1093/es/khq006
Authors:
Keiko Yamanaka
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Abstract
Japan sent two waves of state-sponsored immigrants to Latin America before and after its entanglement in wars in China and the Pacific. During the two decades from 1921 to 1941, 183,000 Japanese departed for Brazil, Peru, Mexico, Argentina, Paraguay, and Bolivia. This accounts for 75 percent of the total number of Japanese immigrants to Latin America before 1937, the year Japan struck war with China. In 1952, after seven years' military occupation by the United States, Japan returned to the international world. Wasting no time, the Japanese government resumed its project to send immigrants to Latin America. Between 1953 and 1970, a total of 56,000 Japanese left for Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia, Dominican Republic, and Argentina. Half of these immigrants to Latin America during both periods originated from Japan's southwestern region, including the prefectures of Hiroshima, Kumamoto, Fukuoka, and Okinawa. In Exporting Japan political scientist Toake Endoh addresses two major issues regarding Japan's state-officiated programs for emigration to Latin America in both pre- and post-WWII periods. The first one concerns the social identity of the Japanese emigrants, together with the sociopolitical context in which their emigration occurred in each period. The second one concerns the perceptions, goals, and ideologies of the sending state and its agencies that orchestrated and executed the national emigration policy (including local governments, immigration organizations, immigrants' associations, and private corporations). Endoh observes that for both periods these state-backed programs were full of contradictions. Specifically, for both periods, she examines how and why the state so eagerly promoted, and tenaciously clung to, emigration programs that sent its people to isolated, often dangerous, hinterlands of developing Latin American countries. Consequently, a large proportion of Japanese emigrants suffered devastating circumstances, while many defected from their projects. Despite these alarming results, the government continued its program until post-WWII economic development made it irrelevant for all parties. Endoh contends that something else, beyond the demographic pressures and socioeconomic insufficiencies that have usually been cited as the main causes of the emigration, has been responsible for the state's enduring commitment to Japanese emigration to Latin America. These are the focus of Exporting Japan. The book comprises three parts. Part 1 describes history, statistics, and other facts of Japanese emigration to Latin America during the pre-WWII period (Chapter 1) and the postwar period (Chapter 2). Part 2 discusses the political contexts in which emigration emerged among influential Japanese politicians, officials, and corporations as a national strategy to cope with increasing population and impoverishment among socioeconomic lower classes. It also addresses how the state developed its ideas and policies of emigration, while organizing institutional machineries to recruit emigrants during the pre- and post-WWII periods (Chapters 3 and 4, respectively). Part 3 identifies the social origins of emigrants (Chapter 5), and investigates the social, economic, and political contexts within which these emigrants chose to participate in the emigration program in the midst of Japan's national crisis before and after WWII (Chapter 6). Chapter 7 discusses the political ideologies behind the state's forceful promotion of emigration policy and unspoken goals of constructing a Japanese diaspora in Latin America before and after the war. The heart of this book rests in Chapter 6 in which Endoh analyzes Latin American emigration policies as state responses to rising social unrest during both periods. Forty years after the Meiji Restoration, by the early 1910s a breakdown of national cohesion, that underlay the rapid modernization and militarization, became evident to state leaders. This was especially conspicuous among working classes of the southwestern region where distribution of land was highly skewed and large industrial complexes, including coalmines and shipyards, were heavily concentrated. Among them, the author identifies four groups as being the most oppressed and impoverished: peasants, industrial workers, coalminers, and Burakumin (the outcaste population, a legacy of feudalism). Although specific contexts and causes of impoverishment differed, each group became increasingly agitated and radicalized, resulting in riots, protests, rallies, and strikes. In the wake of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the Japanese elite recognized a serious threat to Japan's capitalism and colonialism in the increasingly popular international socialist movement among the impoverished, thereby requiring an immediate and effective measure...
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