Japanese Diasporas: Unsung Pasts, Conflicting Presents, and Uncertain Futures (review)

This volume, edited by Nobuko Adachi of Illinois State University, takes up a range of phenomena that have hitherto not appeared together in a single collection: the variety of past and present Japanese diasporas around the world. It represents an important addition to our understanding of historical and contemporary Japan, to an analysis of the movement of Japanese abroad (as immigrants, emigrants, or business people on temporary secondment), and to the very nature and dynamics of what it means to be Japanese. While scholars have dealt with individual cases—immigrants to South America, interned refugees in North America, and businessmen and their families in Asia, for example—this volume brings their varied experiences together in a manner that displays both the variety of contexts in which Japanese diasporas appear and the differences between them. Although the scholarly level of the individual contributions varies (as in any edited volume), as editor, Adachi has on the whole managed to maintain a high standard throughout the book. The volume should appeal to scholars interested in Japan and Japanese diasporas, and many of the individual chapters are appropriate for teaching purposes.

Let me trace out the volume's 15 contributions. In her introduction, Adachi contends that in contrast to other diasporas, groups of Japanese descent outside the country have received relatively little scholarly attention (compared, for example, to the Jewish or Chinese diaspora). She then goes on to suggest different forms of diaspora—for instance, incipient, displaced, or positive minority diasporas—and how they characterize diverse groups of Japanese descent. This chapter, as I will later elaborate, is the most sophisticated from a theoretical point of view.

In his chapter, Roger Daniels provides a straightforward depiction of the Japanese diaspora in the Caribbean, the United States, and Canada. Much of this contribution still reads like a paper presented at a conference rather than a piece within an edited volume. James Stanlaw devotes his contribution to a description of Japanese emigration and immigration from the Meiji era on. In providing solid statistical data to his analysis, Stanlaw makes an argument that appears throughout the text: the specific geographical origin of immigrants leaving Japan (the different prefectures or Okinawa) had repercussions for the social structure of Japanese groups in their host societies. The third contribution, by Jonathan Dresner, offers a perspective on how the Japanese government encouraged and pressured emigrants to move to other countries but to properly "represent" the country abroad. He offers an interesting analysis of government documents published for the consumption of these immigrants.

Greg Guelcher's contribution tells the story of the agricultural colonists in Manchukuo. Using various historical sources, he depicts the gap that the colonists encountered between an overly optimistic set of expectations and the reality of their lives abroad. Shun Ohno offers a very good analysis of the kin ties initiated by Japanese moving abroad through an analysis of the patterns of intermarriage of first- and second-generation Japanese in the Philippines. He demonstrates how complex their experiences were before, during, and after World War II. The sixth chapter is authored by Nobuko Adachi who provides a fascinating study of the multiplex identities of Japanese Brazilians as they are cross-cut by the urban-rural divide and generational dynamics. Adachi makes a strong case for the internal heterogeneity of immigrant groups. Keibo Oiwa offers a nuanced portrayal of the experience of transnational migrants to Canada through a diary of one such woman and the contexts of her text and the observations it contains. Of special note is the harsh reality of being an interned person during World War II.

In a very good chapter, Daniel Masterson traces out the experience of the Japanese in Peru and their experiences as return migrants to Japan. This dual move—out of and then back into the country—sets the tone for many of the analyses that follow. The next piece by Lane Ryo Hirabayashi and Akemi Kikumura-Yano analyzes...