Transforming Nikkeijin Identity and Citizenship: Untold Life Histories of Japanese Migrants and Their Descendants in the Philippines, 1903–2013 by Shun Ohno (review)

Shun Ohno’s involvement with the Nikkeijin—overseas Japanese migrants and their descendants—in the Philippines spans about three decades now, beginning with his work as the Manila correspondent for a Japanese newspaper in the eighties. Ohno’s stories about the Philippine Nikkeijin, published in the national daily Mainichi Shimbun in 1987, argued that Japan had a responsibility toward these people who suffered and continued to suffer from Japan’s invasion of the Philippines during the Second World War. A series of such articles led to greater public and political interest in their plight and eventually to the recognition that the Japanese government had to provide them assistance and opportunities. Ohno’s book, therefore, is the culmination of a very long engagement not only with the matter of Nikkeijin citizenship, but also with the men and women who have had to grapple with and negotiate their identities as well as the complicated legal processes involved in claiming their Japanese citizenship.

Ohno argues that identity and citizenship are flexibly constructed by both individuals and interested states (the Philippines and Japan) within a changing sociopolitical and economic landscape, as seen in the unfolding of citizenship issues across three generations of Nikkeijin based in various cities in the Philippines and, for some of them, in their move to Japan. By focusing on the development of identity and citizenship issues across three generations, using data collected for over a decade (from the late 1980s to the mid-2000s) from a large set of life histories and quantitative surveys, Ohno makes a unique contribution to the literature on Japanese migration to the Philippines, which hitherto has focused on the prewar period and relied on official documents and diplomatic records.

The book starts by locating its place within the large body of studies on the Nikkeijin in the Philippines and elsewhere. The main body is structured chronologically, with each chapter focusing on a specific historical period, beginning with the exploration of job and business opportunities in the Philippines during the early 1900s by first-generation Japanese migrants, or Issei, to their marriage to local women; the establishment of Japanese schools for the education of Nisei, the second generation of overseas Japanese migrants, up to the early 1940s; the turbulence of wartime occupation and postwar recovery; and the struggle for recognition and recompense up to the present. For each period Ohno provides a richly detailed account of the lives of the Nikkeijin based on his interviews, documentary evidence, and official statistics. The accounts speak of the diversity of the group—Ohno is careful not to generalize or homogenize the Nikkeijin, whose identities are complicated by their ethnic background (e.g., as Japanese mainlander, Japanese Okinawan, lowland Filipino, indigenous Filipino), religious background, and social class or occupation. The accounts also highlight the divisions that exist in Filipino society—between lowland Christianized Filipinos and indigenous Filipinos, between the poor working class and rich landed class, between the political and economic center of power (i.e., Manila) and those in the peripheries. These conditions, together with economic and political upheavals in and between Japan and the Philippines, provide the complex backdrop against which the Nikkeijin alternately performed, disowned, and reclaimed their identities and citizenship as Japanese. Ohno also pays close attention to the enormous role that pillars of civil society played. He describes how educational institutions, religious groups, Japanese and Philippine media, and nongovernment organizations or associations actively participated in shaping the discourse on Nikkeijin identity and citizenship and reconfiguring the relationships of obligation and responsibility between the Japanese state and individual Nikkeijin. The book also brings into the analysis the many changes in the context in which identity and citizenship are negotiated—the shift in Japanese state consciousness from militarization to globalization, the view of migration as voluntary or forced (depending on the political and economic situation), and the...