Japanese American Migration and the Making of Model Women for Japanese Expansion in Brazil and Manchuria, 1871-1945

This article examines how the experience of Japanese American migration shaped the ways in which women were instrumentalized by the Japanese empire for its expansion in South America and Northeast Asia. The anti-Japanese sentiment and campaigns in the United States from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century greatly impacted the Japanese government's approach to managing women's role in Japan's migration-driven expansion in Brazil and Manchuria during the following decades.

The history of Japanese overseas migration was a story of men as much as of women. Women were among the earliest Japanese who set their feet on foreign lands in modern era. They were indispensable components of Japanese overseas communities since the beginning of their formation, as students, laborers, farmers, housemaids, waitresses, prostitutes, etc.¹ Thus women, like men, were targets of migration promotion of the Japanese expansionists and were considered crucial for Japan's migrationdriven expansion. What role women should play in Japanese overseas communities was a constant topic of discussion among the Japanese expansionists throughout the history of the Japanese empire. This article examines how the experience of Japanese American migration shaped the ways in which women were instrumentalized by the Japanese empire for its expansion in South America and Northeast Asia between the 1880s and the end of the World War II.

In the world dominated by modern imperialism the status of women became a measurement of a nation's civilization.² The perceived inferiority of women in both social status and moral standard in Asian societies served as the evidence of backwardness of the Orient.³ Like other non-Western countries, Japan itself had been a target of the global project of rescuing oriental women conducted jointly by social activists and governments of Western empires. The formation of Japan's branch of Women's Christian Temperance Union (JWCTU) for example, was a product of this rescuing mission of the imperial West.⁴

A latecomer in the nineteenth century imperial world, Japan's rise as a civilized nation and empire was a careful imitation of Western empires. Faithful learners of the imperial West, Japanese policymakers and social leaders considered women a crucial resource to uplift the empire in the global hierarchy of nation and race. Women were called upon to upgrade the empire's international profile in the very beginning of the Meiji era by serving as dedicated mothers and wives to facilitate Japanese expansion in Hokkaido, the empire's first colony.

In the imagination of Japanese expansionists, Japanese migration to America was a shortcut for Japan to gain membership in the exclusive club of modern empires. However, as the following pages explain, such designs were in part impeded by the uneducated rural Japanese women who began to arrive on American shores in large numbers as prostitutes and picture brides at the turn of the twentieth century. In the eyes of Japanese expansionists, these low-class women exposed the backwardness of the Japanese race to the American public and caused much of the anti-Japanese sentiment in the U.S. Japanese educators, many of them were women, in Tokyo and California launched trans-Pacific campaigns to abolish Japanese prostitution in North America and to educate the female migrants by correcting their social manners, dress style, and hygiene habits.

This article also joins recent studies to illustrate that women were called into service in settler colonial expansion of modern empires as the anchor of migrant communities. Anna Davin and Anne McClintock have explained how the British Empire incorporated motherhood and childrearing in national policymaking in order to secure racial purity and population power of the next generation for colonial expansion.⁵ Ann Stoler also demonstrates that Dutch women, as wives and mothers, were considered crucial to forestall miscegenation and to maintain moral superiority of Dutch settler communities in Indonesia.⁶ In a similar way, the Japanese female immigrants in the United States were seen crucial for Japanese community building on the U.S. West Coast. To combat white racism and appease the anti-Japanese sentiment, Japanese educators in the trans-Pacific campaigns aimed to turn all the immigrant women into "good wives and wise mothers" according to the moral value of white bourgeois families in the United States.

The said campaigns failed to avert the eventual exclusion of Japanese immigrants from the United States. However, it did pave the way for the Japanese government's involvement in recruiting and training female migrants for Japanese expansion in Brazil and Manchuria during the following decades. The Japanese government arrived at the conclusion that the lack of quality women in Japanese American communities was a major cause of Japanese exclusion from the United States, therefore it began to take an increasingly active role in the promotion and management of women's overseas migration. In the 1920s and 1930s, it paid for female migrants' trans-Oceanic passages, expecting them to put down permanent roots for the Japanese empire in South America by becoming wives and mothers in Japanese Brazilian communities. The imperial state's instrumentalization of women culminated in the 1936 government project of mass migration to Manchuria. As a critical component of the project, the Japanese government trained and resettled tens of thousands of women in Manchuria. These women were charged with the task of showcasing the Japanese race's superior feminine morals to other Asian women; furthermore, they were expected to maintain Japanese racial purity by giving birth to the next generation of pureblood Japanese empire builders in Asia.

The voices of the individual Japanese women who left the archipelago and settled across seas are absolutely important and deserve thorough analyses. An oral history study of these female migrants, for example, sheds light on different reasons why they pursued a life path abroad. Some chose to migrate to the United States in order to escape patriarchal suppression in their families and the Japanese society in general. They had little interest in following the teachings of the imperial government and educators to become pawns of the Japanese empire.⁷

This article, however, is a study of the migration promoters, educators, and policy makers, not the personal voices and stories of female migrants themselves. The subject of my analysis are the ideas and activities of Japanese thinkers and doers, both in and outside of the imperial government, who viewed migration as an essential tool of Japanese expansion. This approach allows me to examine the meaning of Japanese women's migration beyond boundaries of geography and national sovereignty. The continuity in the ideas and activities of Japanese expansionists and the migration institutions in the Japanese empire in different waves of Japanese overseas migration demonstrate profound connections of Japanese migration on both sides of the Pacific Ocean. Though the North and South America had never been actual part of the Japanese empire, this article elaborates the unexpected ways in which the experience of Japanese migration in the United States and Brazil formed the role of women in Japan's process of nation building and empire making.

From Hokkaido to America: Preparing Women for Expansion

The conception of women's role in modern Japan was connected with colonial expansion from the very beginning of the Japanese empire, when the Meiji government turned its attention to women's education in order to fulfill its quest of colonial expansion in Hokkaido. The example of the United States as an expanding nation that kept on "opening up new land and pushing back the frontier" had attracted great interest from the Meiji leaders since the formative years of the empire.⁸ In the mind of Kuroda Kiyotaka, the man in charge of the empire's colonization of Hokkaido between 1871 and 1882, Japanese expansion in Hokkaido should carefully emulate the recent American westward expansion. Kuroda appointed Horace Capron, a former Commissioner in the Department of Agriculture of the United States, as the principal advisor of the Hokkaido Development Agency, Tokyo's proxy in Hokkaido. In addition, the Agency also hired more than forty American experts who specialized in fields such as agriculture, geology, mining, railway building, and mechanical engineering in order to guide its project of developing Hokkaido by taking advantages of its natural resources.⁹

Tsuda Sen, the editor of the Hokkaido Development Journal, the official mouthpiece of the Hokkaido Development Agency, compared Japan's expansion in Hokkaido with the colonization of California by the white settlers. In Tsuda's imagination, California had been no more than an empty stretch of land until it became a part of the United States. Within two decades of American settlement, with the discovery of gold and improvements in agricultural technology, California became a civilized land with abundant material wealth. Hokkaido, Tsuda reminded his readers, not only had similar latitudes to California but also boasted equal amounts of natural resources. With the influx of settlers from Japan proper making progress in land exploration, "the Ezo land of yesterday" would surely become Japan's California of tomorrow.¹⁰

As it was for American westward expansion, the migration of people constituted the core of Kuroda's plan for Hokkaido. The success of the Hokkaido project, Kuroda believed, ultimately depended on whether or not the empire had enough capable people for this mission. Before the state could prepare the next generation of empire builders for Hokkaido, it was necessary to establish women's schools to train the mothers of these empire builders first.¹¹ During an observation trip to the United States, Kuroda was particularly impressed by the influence of women wielded in American society. In his report to Tokyo, he proposed a specific plan of sponsoring a selected group of young Japanese women to study in the United States in order to prepare them to become exemplary mothers in Japan's first colony.¹²

Following Kuroda's proposal, five girls from elite families were chosen to go to the United States to study along with the Iwakura Mission.¹³ Among these five girls was the six-year-old Tsuda Umeko, the second daughter of Tsuda Sen. Tsuda Umeko arrived in San Francisco in 1871 and stayed in the United States until 1882. Unsatisfied with the job opportunities she had in Japan, she later studied at Bryn Mawr College in Philadelphia between 1889 and 1892. Through her successful effort in fundraising, Tsuda Umeko established a scholarship in 1893 to help other Japanese women to follow in her footsteps and study in the United States.¹⁴ Seven years later, she founded Women's Institute for English Studies (Joshi Eigaku Juku), later known as Tsuda College, one of the leading institutions in Japan for women's higher education during the twentieth century.

Tsuda Umeko remained single and childless throughout her life. In a narrow sense, one might say that she failed to fulfill her obligation to the empire as a mother and disappointed Kuroda. However, as one of the earliest promoters of women's education in modern Japan, her life-long career demonstrated that women's education was developed in hand in hand with the quest of colonial expansion since the very beginning of modern Japan. In addition to establishing Tsuda College, Tsuda Umeko also became the founding director of the Japanese Young Women's Christian Association (JYWCA) in 1905, a central driving force behind women's education movement in modern Japan. One of the recipients of the scholarship she established was Kawai Michi, who later emerged as a central leader of the JYWCA and an influential figure in women's education movement who spearheaded the campaign of educating Japanese female migrants on the American West Coast.

The idea of motherhood in service of the empire was also cited by Fukuzawa Yukichi, another supporter of Hokkaido migration, in his promotion of women's freedom and rights. In response to the challenge by the West, Fukuzawa believed that the Japanese racial stock should be physically improved to match that of the Westerners. The first step, he argued, was to change the social condition of women. Under the backward Tokugawa customs, women lacked both responsibility and satisfaction in their daily life, thus they were physically stunted and so were children they gave birth to. He reasoned that as a result of centuries-long social oppression of women, the average Meiji subject was physically weak and small. The nation would not have strong and healthy offspring unless Japanese women's mental and physical conditions were improved.¹⁵

An insightful observer of his time, Fukuzawa also pointed out that the freedom and rights of women should be understood in the context of modern imperialism and the global racial hierarchy it created. Women's position in a society, as he saw it, symbolized the degree of progress and civilization achieved by the nation. Fukuzawa called for more opportunities of women in education and employment as well as equal rights to men in matters such as marriage, and property ownership.¹⁶ For him, women's position not only functioned as a barometer for Japan's progress in Westernization but also enabled Japan to establish its own imperial hierarchy that elevated it above its Asian neighbors. Although Japan fell behind the Western powers in terms of women's rights, Fukuzawa contended, Japanese women enjoyed a much higher degree of freedom and happiness than their counterparts in Joseon Korea and Qing China.¹⁷ Written in the same year, his famous essay "De-Asianization" further urge the nascent empire to embrace Western civilization and launch its own colonial expansion in East Asia.¹⁸

Following the abolishment of the Hokkaido Development Agency in 1881 and the imperial government's huge budget cut that decimated its previous subsidies on colonial migration in Hokkaido, the empire's northern frontier was no longer considered as the most ideal destination for Japanese migration.¹⁹ Instead, the Meiji expansionists casted their colonial gaze overseas. Somewhat ironically, Japan's previous imitation of American westward expansion in Hokkaido turned the American West itself into one of the earliest destinations of Japanese overseas expansion. Fukuzawa Yukichi was the central figure in the promotion of Japanese American migration in the 1880s. In a speech in 1884, he recognized the decline of interests in migration to Hokkaido, following it with a call for migrants to venture out of the archipelago: "If Hokkaido is really bad, why don't our young men change their direction and go to foreign countries? … America is the most suitable country for anyone to emigrate to."²⁰ For Fukuzawa, the United States, like Hokkaido, was a land of abundant wealth awaiting Japanese exploration. He described in The Review of Nations in the World (Seikai kuni zukushi):

[The U.S.] is equal to the Great Britain in every kind of manufacturing and business; and it is superior to France in literature, arts, and education. Their land produces grains, animals, cotton, tobacco, grapes, fruit, sweet potatoes, gold, silver, copper, lead, iron, coal; indeed nothing necessary in daily life is wanting. People who want to get clothes and food naturally come to the place where it is easy to make a living, so people gather from all over the world every day and every month.²¹

In Fukuzawa's view, in addition to its material prosperity, the United States was also an immigrant nation that had a vibrant spirit of progress and stood at the center of modern civilization. He thus believed that the United States was the place where ambitious Japanese men could study and grow as Japanese subjects.²² Moreover, the United States was also an expanding nation that kept on opening up new lands through frontier conquest and migration. Fukuzawa encouraged his countrymen to follow the examples of European settlers and participate in America's westward expansion. One day, he envisioned, the offspring of Japanese immigrants would gain political rights in the United States and sway American politics. Japanese American migration, as Fukuzawa further imagined, was only the first step of Japanese settler colonial expansion overseas, the eventual goal of which was to establish ten or twenty "new Japans" around the world.²³

For Fukuzawa, the ideal subjects of migration were "men of noble goals (shishi)."²⁴ However, he also recognized the importance of women in his blue print for Japanese expansion. Ever the pragmatist, he found reasons to celebrate the emigration of a growing number of Japanese prostitutes around the Pacific Rim starting in the late nineteenth century.²⁵ He called these expatriate prostitutes a "necessary evil (hitsuyō aku)" and argued that they would benefit the Japanese empire in two ways: They would facilitate migration-driven expansion by satisfying the sexual needs of Japanese male emigrants,²⁶ and their remittances back to the archipelago would be a boon for Japan's nascent capitalist economic system, which was still at the stage of primitive accumulation.²⁷

Eliminating Japanese Prostitution in the American West

Fukuzawa promoted Japanese American migration not only by pen but also in action. From 1884 to 1888, a number of graduates of Fukuzawa's Keio School arrived in California separately. In May 1888, the Alumni Association of Keiō School was established in San Francisco with 35 members.²⁸ In 1887 Fukuzawa proposed to establish a "Japanese nation in America."²⁹ To realize this goal, he collaborated with Inoue Kakugorō, a student of his, to plan on purchasing land in California in order to build an agricultural colony for Japanese settlers.³⁰ This plan came to an abrupt end, however, due to Inoue's sudden arrest during his stay in Japan.³¹ The failure of this colonial project marked the end of Fukuzawa's promotion of the United States as a migration destination.

While Japanese migration to the United States continued, Fukuzawa's enthusiasm for Japanese expansion in North America faded out from the public media. The ambitious Meiji expansionists who set their feet on the American West Coast witnessed flagrant white racism in the form of anti-Chinese campaigns. They grew worried that the Japanese, immigrants from a "civilized" nation and empire, might meet the same fate of exclusion as the inferior Chinese.

Furthermore, while Japanese prostitutes began to arrive on the American West Coast in growing numbers since the late 1880s, Japanese government officials, social reformers and religious leaders did not share Fukuzawa's view on the issue of overseas prostitution. They saw Japanese prostitution in the American West as a main cause for the rise of anti-Japanese sentiments in the United States. In order to maintain Japan's image as a civilized empire in the eyes of the white Americans, expansionists in both Tokyo and San Francisco launched a series of campaigns to eliminate Japanese prostitution in the United States. In fact, the issue of women in overseas Japanese communities served as a constant driving force of women-related social campaigns in domestic Japan. As the following paragraphs will illustrate, it was through the campaigns of eliminating overseas prostitution that Japanese abolitionists were able to launch their attack on licensed domestic prostitution.

Although white racism later shaped the nature of Japanese antiprostitution campaigns on both sides of the Pacific, it was the same institutionalized racism against Chinese immigrants in the United States that attracted Japanese prostitutes to the West Coast of North America in the first place. After the signing of the Burlingame Treaty in 1868 that allowed Chinese male laborers entry into the U.S. mainland in order to meet the demand for labor in the American West, Chinese migrant laborers began to arrive on the West Coast. The extremely unbalanced gender ratio in Chinese American communities presented a lucrative opportunity for the prostitution trade, but the growth of these immigrant communities fanned anti-Chinese sentiment in the American West. In response, the American federal government passed the Page Act of 1875 that prohibited the entry of "oriental prostitutes" and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. By effectively banning Chinese prostitutes from entering the country, these two pieces of legislation turned Chinese American communities, primarily composed of young bachelors, into a demanding market for Japanese prostitution. The Japanese were not subject to the Chinese Exclusion Act and Japanese procurers could easily circumvent the Page Act by presenting the prostitutes as their wives to American customs officers.³²

The Chinese Exclusion Act also created a vacuum of cheap labor, one that was filled by hundreds of thousands of Japanese male laborers, further enlarging the market for Japanese prostitution in the United States. Such a lucrative market attracted both Japanese prostitutes whose families were impoverished by Japan's costly projects of nation- and empirebuilding and their procurers who recruited and brought them there, sometimes through coercion and deception.³³

Starting in the end of the 1880s, Japanese consuls on the American West Coast began to send sensational reports to Tokyo regarding the growing issue of Japanese prostitution, some including concrete numbers of prostitutes and locations of brothels in specific cities and states. Japanese immigrant associations such as the Gospel Society in San Francisco and the Society of Concerned Japanese (Nihonjin Dōshikai) in Seattle also filed petitions, urging Tokyo to ban the migration of Japanese prostitutes in order to purify Japanese American communities.³⁴ Japanese Foreign Ministry responded by putting a stop to the emigration of prostitutes: In 1893, it banned women from leaving the archipelago without legitimate reasons; in the next year, it issued the Regulations of Emigration Protection that allowed the government to suspend any migration agent whose business would harm "public peace or morality." However, these restrictions proved ineffective, and procurers still managed to take prostitutes overseas under the disguise of married couples.³⁵

Prostitution abolition in domestic Japan also began to gain momentum in the 1880s. The formation of the JWCTU in 1886, Japan's first nationwide women's organization, turned local abolition campaigns into a national movement. As early as 1890, its official journal, Tokyo Fujin Kyōfu Zasshi,³⁶ published an article penned by a Japanese immigrant in the United States, warning that Japanese prostitutes in the United States were about to be deported due to their immoral profession. "What a shame it is," the article lamented, "that some of our countrywomen in the U.S. are treated and excluded just like the Chinese."³⁷ In the same year, another Japanese abolitionist journal named Haishō also published an article that condemned Japanese prostitutes for inviting American criticism and disgracing the Japanese nation.³⁸

Fully aware of their government's anxiety about how prostitutes in the United States were damaging the images of the Japanese empire and race, Japanese prostitution abolitionists exploited the issue of overseas prostitution to propagate their own versions of public morality.³⁹ While the JWTCU was not oblivious to the perils of domestic licensed prostitution,⁴⁰ in the beginning its main focus was on overseas prostitution. The newly formed Union initiated two major petition projects, one of which was a lobbying campaign to abolish overseas prostitution—but not its domestic counterpart.⁴¹ Starting with its inaugural issue in 1888, Tokyo Fujin Kyōfu Zasshi, reported on various attempts by Japanese consuls in Hawaii, Shanghai, Manchuria, and California to eliminate prostitution by Japanese female emigrants.⁴² From its establishment in 1886, the JWCTU submitted petitions to the government annually until 1927, when the state signed the League of Nation's convention to end the trafficking of women and children.⁴³ From the beginning, overseas prostitution was not only a major concern of the abolitionists but also an easier issue to tackle compared to domestic prostitution in terms of persuading the state to take action.⁴⁴

The abolitionists also spared no efforts to link the issue of overseas prostitution with that of domestic prostitution, in order to legitimize and mobilize support and resources for their campaigns to abolish licensed prostitution in Japan. A 1915 Fujin Shinpō article called on Japanese women to end the "inhuman licensed prostitution system" in the archipelago in order to stop the overseas prostitutes from shaming the empire.⁴⁵ In a petition delivered to the Home Minister in 1911, the JWCTU's president Yajima Kajiko asserted that domestic licensed prostitution was the source of overseas prostitution, which she defined as the natural development of an evil domestic system, thereby arguing that the elimination of licensed prostitution at home was necessary to prevent prostitutes from sabotaging the empire's civilized image abroad.⁴⁶ In this way, campaigns for the abolition of overseas prostitution came to justify and empower campaigns against licensed prostitution back at home.

While the campaign to abolish domestic licensed prostitution was linked to the efforts to eliminate Japanese prostitution in America, they had markedly different results: The prostitution abolition movement in Japan failed to mount significant challenge to licensed prostitution within Japan, and this system continued to function under imperial sanction until the end of World War II.⁴⁷ On the other hand, since the end of the first decades of the twentieth century, the visibility of Japanese prostitution in the American West steadily declined, though some women continued to engage in the same profession by either disguising themselves as waitresses in restaurants and bars that mushroomed in Japanese immigrant communities or re-migrating to inland America.⁴⁸

There were two reasons for this apparent end of Japanese prostitution in the American West, and both were direct or indirect results of the growth of anti-Japanese sentiment in the United States. First, white racism became institutionalized through a series of laws and regulations that made it increasingly difficult for Japanese prostitutes to gain entry to the United States. Through the Gentlemen's Agreement of 1908, the United States forced Tokyo to stop issuing new passports to those who planned to migrate to the United States as laborers. Based on the Gentlemen's Agreement, the Japanese government enacted a nearcomplete ban on migration from Japan to the U.S. mainland. This regulation prevented new Japanese procurers from entering the United States with prostitutes disguised as their wives. In 1910, the revision of the Immigration Act and the passage of the White Slave Traffic Act (or the Mann Act) in the United States gave the federal government the right to deport alien prostitutes and also allowed it to punish anyone for transporting prostitutes from one state to another.⁴⁹

Second, the growth of anti-Japanese sentiment in the United States pushed Japanese American elites to the fore to combat prostitution in their own communities. Regurgitating the rhetoric of white exclusionists, they attributed the cause of these anti-Japanese sentiments not to white racism but to the immorality of Japanese immigrants themselves. They believed that if only these moral failings could be rectified, the Japanese migrants would be welcomed by the white Americans as one of their own. Leaders of Japanese communities thus voluntarily collaborated with Americans to search and deport prostitutes in their own communities. The Human Society (Jindō Kyōkai), formed in 1906 in Seattle, was an example of such collaboration. It was established by Christian leaders of Japanese immigrants and a local American Methodist minister with the goal of ending Japanese prostitution in the city.⁵⁰ Controlled by community elites, Japanese immigrant newspapers also served as diligent watchdogs on moral failings in their own communities, sparing no efforts to discover and expose Japanese brothels and prostitutes. Thus with both assistance from the vernacular media and the cooperation of Japanese American community leaders, the federal government was able to punish Japanese procurers and deport Japanese prostitutes according to the new laws.⁵¹

As the door of the United States was shut to Japanese prostitutes, the center of Japanese overseas prostitution shifted to Asia. In particular, along with Japanese imperial expansion in northeast Asia, the Japanese government transplanted the licensed prostitution system from the archipelago to its colonial territories first in the Korean Peninsula and then southern Manchuria.⁵² This licensed prostitution system in the Japanese empire eventually led to the tragedy of comfort women in Japanese military during the Asia-Pacific War.⁵³

On the other side of the Pacific, the decline of Japanese prostitution did nothing to pacify anti-Japanese sentiment in the United States. Institutionalized racism deprived not only Japanese immigrants of naturalization rights, but also that of owning land and the freedom of marriage. In 1905, for example, California outlawed inter-racial marriages between Asian immigrants and Caucasians.⁵⁴

Representing a Civilized Race: Japanese Women's Education across the Pacific

In the imagination of social leaders in Japan and Japanese American communities, aside from female prostitution, the moral corruption of Japanese male immigrants was also a primary cause of anti-Japanese sentiments in the United States. Their involvement in gambling and prostitution was believed to be a result of the lack of "good natured (zenryō naru)" Japanese women who would form families with them. Prominent Japanese politician and social reformer Abe Isoo, for example, asserted in 1905 that in order to "strengthen the foundation of Japanese American communities," it was imperative to encourage Japanese women to migrate to the United States so that they could rescue young Japanese men from "a insipid life" and "degradation." Exporting women to the United States, Abe continued, would also "inspire our women's great spirit of overseas expansion." To this end, Abe suggested that the imperial government should promote the migration of women with "good education and morality" to the United States. He also expected Japanese social leaders and organizations in both the United States and Japan to assist in the settlement of these women in Japanese American communities.⁵⁵

The migration of Japanese women to the United States was indeed underway, but not in the form as Abe expected. While the Gentlemen's Agreement forced Tokyo to stop the labor migration to the United States, it left a door open to family members of immigrants already in the country. In order to get married, many immigrants asked their relatives in Japan to choose partners for them, as they could not afford to go back to Japan themselves. After the two sides exchanged photos by mail and agreed on marriage, the husband would mail a steam ship ticket to his bride so that she could come to the United States to meet him and live with him. This type of marriage, which became increasingly popular among Japanese immigrants in the United States after the Gentlemen's Agreement, was called "picture marriage," and the women who migrated to the United States through this method were known as "picture brides."⁵⁶

Thus by the end of the 1900s, the decline of the Japanese prostitution was accompanied by an increasing number of young women who came to the United States as wives of male Japanese immigrants. Like the prostitutes before them, however, these picture brides, mostly from poor families in rural Japan, soon became targets of local anti-Japanese campaigns. Their "inappropriate" styles of dressing and make-up, "outdated" sense of cleanness, and "uncivilized" social manners were all interpreted by white exclusionists as evidence of Japanese inferiority and used to legitimize their calls for Japanese exclusion.

As a whole, social leaders in Japan and Japanese American communities not only paid careful attention to the white exclusionists'comments but also unquestioningly accepted their logic. In the minds of educated Japanese on both sides of the Pacific, the picture brides' "uneducated" behaviors, like the expatriate prostitutes before them, brought shame upon the Japanese empire and prevented Japanese immigrants from being accepted to the white man's world. In response, these leaders launched a series of campaigns to educate and discipline the picture brides so that they could represent the empire in a more desirable way. Kawai Michi, the national secretary of JYWCA, was a central figure in the education campaigns of picture brides. Having studied in the United States with the support of the scholarship established by Tsuda Umeko, Kawai firmly believed that the image of a nation was judged by the education level of its women. For Japan to be universally recognized as a civilized nation and empire, she asserted, it was crucial to improve the quality of all Japanese women.⁵⁷

Figure 1.

Members of an American Congressional committee were investigating the Japanese picture brides at the immigration station of Angel Island. This photograph was taken on July 25, 1920. Courtesy of Getty Images, "Bettmann Archive Pictures and Images."

Under Kawai's leadership, the JYWCA and its main branch in California launched education programs to educate picture brides so that they could better represent Japan.⁵⁸ With support from local government and politicians, the JYWCA established an emigrant women's school in Yokohama, teaching picture brides about housework, English, childrearing, American society, Western lifestyle, and trave lknow-hows before they left for the United States.⁵⁹ Pamphlets with similar guidance tips were disseminated among emigrant women. The JYWCA's California branch also offered accommodation and similar training to picture brides after their arrival.⁶⁰ Through these efforts, the campaign leaders hoped to showcase the civilized Japanese womanhood to the white Americans.

These behavior correction campaigns went as far as regulating the picture brides' marriages. Owing to a common lack of communication and understanding between the two sides before marriage, not all picture marriages could be successful. In order to find a desirable partner, some male immigrants engaged in deception by sending fake photos or lying about their financial situations. As a result, many picture brides felt disappointed or even cheated upon arrival. Some brides opted for divorce. Since there were far fewer women than men in Japanese communities in California, it was relatively easy for them to remarry. Kawai attributed these wife-initiated divorces to "the weakness of Japanese females" and the "degradation" of their morality. These "degraded women" were blamed for giving the Japanese Americans a bad name, and female immigrants were urged to remain loyal to their husbands and fulfill their duty to raise children. Members of the JYWCA branch in California sometimes even intervened and managed to prevent such divorces.⁶¹

Due to widespread financial difficulties, most Japanese immigrant women living in rural areas had no choice but to work in the fields with their husbands.⁶² American exclusionists accused them of transgressing the gender boundaries established by white bourgeois families, according to which only men could be the family's breadwinners. They described Japanese women in the field as the slaves of their husbands, and attributed such "transgression" to racial inferiority and primitive traditions.⁶³ Replicating this claim, Kawai argued that if women went out to work, their housework and childrearing duties would be neglected. She maintained that Japanese female immigrants' farm work was driven by their greed for money, and assumed that it was a cause of American anti-Japanese sentiment.⁶⁴

In these efforts the JYWCA was joined by Imin Kyōkai (the Emigration Association) an organization founded by a group of Japanese politicians and social elites aiming to mollify anti-Japanese sentiment in the United States and to explore alternative destinations for Japanese overseas migration. The Emigration Association established an emigration training center in Yokohama in 1916, offering classes on social manners, hygiene, foreign languages, childrearing, and housework directly to emigrants. Within two months of its opening, over 400 migrants—two fifths of whom were women—had attended classes there. The center was jointly funded by the Japanese Foreign Ministry and donations from business elites. Nagata Shigeshi, the president of Japanese Striving Society (Nippon Rikkōkai), a leading Japanese migration organization of the day, served as its first director.⁶⁵ Aside from providing pre-departure training for female migrants, the Striving Society also functioned as a matchmaking agency for picture marriages.

However, none of these efforts could forestall the eventual exclusion of Japanese immigrants from the United States. With the enactment of the Immigration Act of 1924, the female migrants education campaign failed in achieving their fundamental aim. Nevertheless, like the previous campaign of eliminating overseas prostitution, it did serve to stimulate women's education movement within Japan.

In the context of both campaigns, the female migrants were portrayed as not only staining the empire's honor but also sabotaging Japanese overseas expansion. Insidious as it was, this image problem did serve as a powerful motivator for leaders of both campaigns to expand women's education in Japan. As Kawai Michi plainly pointed out, promoting women's education at home was the ultimate solution to Japan's image problem aboard.⁶⁶

Three members of JWCTU conducted an investigative trip to Siberia and northern Manchuria in 1919, returning with the conclusion that the Amakusa and Shimabara areas in Kyushu were the origin of Japanese overseas prostitution.⁶⁷ The JWCTU attributed the prevalence of overseas prostitutes to "uncivilized" customs and low levels of female education in those two areas.⁶⁸ Reports following these missions concluded that Japan's licensed prostitution system should be abolished, and that it was imperative to establish programs to provide moral education for the women of Shimabara and Amakusa about the dangers and immorality of prostitution. The investigation report noted in particular that, in order to launch education campaigns, greater cooperation between the government and social groups was needed. Public speeches by JWCTU members, it argued, were far from sufficient, and the government needed to take responsibility for these women's moral education by revising textbooks and providing social campaigns with financial and political support.⁶⁹

At its annual meeting in 1919, the JWCTU decided to launch special education campaigns in Shimabara and Amakusa.⁷⁰ JWCTU's leaders subsequently embarked on a school speaking tour in Kyushu,⁷¹ and its Kyushu branch sponsored an essay contest on the issue of overseas prostitution for all the students in the island.⁷² By 1921, the JWCTU had successfully organized a series of well-attended gatherings in Kyushu and formed close alliances with local authorities and social groups to support women's education campaigns.⁷³ These public gatherings and JWCTU meetings were supported and attended by local government officials, social educators, and journalists.⁷⁴ Through these campaigns, the JWCTU strengthened its local branches and furthered its cooperation with local government and other local women's social groups.⁷⁵ In particular, the JWCTU cooperated with the Virgin Society (Shojo Kai) a state-run women's organization, to conduct its women's education campaigns in rural areas from the end of the 1910s.⁷⁶ The Society planned to incorporate "facilitating Japanese women's overseas emigration" into its mission as early as 1918.⁷⁷

Similarly, the JYWCA's emigrant women training school in Yokohama collaborated with other women's schools and involved itself in local affairs, even participating in poverty relief activities.⁷⁸ Through a series of public lectures in Kyushu and western Japan, Kawai Michi addressed the problem of Japanese women in California and promoted collaboration between the JYWCA, local authorities, and other women's schools. Her speaking tour was particularly successful in Nagasaki, Kumamoto, and Hiroshima, the places in western Japan that sent the largest annual numbers of women abroad. Meeting with local governors, mayors, and directors of police departments, Kawai successfully argued for the necessity of establishing local JYWCA branches and advancing women's education.⁷⁹

From the United States to Brazil: The Rise of Family Migration

The immigration ban in the United States further fueled the Japanese's overpopulation anxiety. Ever since the beginning of the Meiji era, different generations of Japanese expansionists had embraced the Malthusian anxiety as a justification for the migration-driven expansion of the empire.⁸⁰ They pointed to overpopulation as the root of whatever Japan's social problem was at the time, including unemployment, land disputes, and political tensions. Yet at the same time, they also celebrated Japan's population growth as the crucial means to increase the strength of the empire. Thus the only solution, they reasoned, was to export the surplus people overseas, thereby both relieving the population pressure at home and turning the surplus people into trailblazers for the empire's expansion abroad.

Three years after the passage of the Immigration Act, Yanaihara Tadao, a leading thinker of Japanese colonialism of the day, noticed that the issue of overpopulation was spreading like a "wildfire" in public discourse. Not only did media and opinion leaders engage in nationwide debates on how to deal with overpopulation, in 1927 the Japanese government also established the Commission for the Investigation of the Issues of Population and Food (Jinkō Shokuryō Mondai Chōsa Iinkai) directly under the cabinet in order to solve this issue.⁸¹

The increasing visibility of the issue of overpopulation legitimized Japanese expansionists' search for alternative destinations for Japanese migration. Brazil, imagined as a land as resourceful and spacious as that of the United States yet free of white racism, became a major alternative destination of Japanese migrants. Between 1908 and 1924, the number of Japanese immigrants in Brazil grew steadily; by the time the Immigration Act of 1924 passed, it had reached 35,000.⁸² In the same year, an unprecedented number of migrants from rural Japan, fully subsidized by Tokyo, also began to arrive on the shores of the State of São Paulo. From then on until 1936, Brazil remained the single country that received the biggest number of Japanese migrants outside Asia.⁸³

The exclusion of Japanese immigration in the United States paved the way for further recruitment of Japanese female migrants to Brazil. The expansionists in Tokyo concluded the emigrants' failure in permanent settlement was the cause of their exclusion: Most of them had no interest in acquiring land or forming families in the United States because they planned on eventually returning to Japan. A lack of participation in local politics also led to their failure in forestalling the exclusion through political means. Having internalized this logic, the expansionists put a great deal of efforts into fostering permanent immigrant settlement in Brazil. To this end, male migrants were encouraged to become farmers inside of laborers, while female migrants were expected to provide them with families and give birth to the next generation in Japanese Brazilian communities.

Figure 2.

This is a poster of KKKK around the mid-1920s to recruit Japanese for Brazilian migration. It clearly illustrates two expectations of the migrants: (1) they were supposed to migrate as a family unit; (2) with the hoe in hand, the central figure in the poster was described as a farmer. This indicates that the migration should be agriculture-centered. Courtesy of Museu Histórico da Imigração Japonesa no Brasil, São Paulo.

The migration programs of Overseas Development Company (known as the KKKK: Kaigai Kōgyō Kabushiki Gaisha), the imperial government's main proxy in the promotion and management of Brazilbound migration, is a telling example of the importance of women in Japanese Brazilian migration. Formed in 1917, it was the chief institution for promoting Japanese migration and settlement in Brazil throughout the 1920s and 1930s. The company recruited migrants in family units instead of individually; to be qualified to sign a migration contract with the KKKK, each migrant family needed to have at least three adults (defined as age twelve or older).⁸⁴

Figure 3.

This is a Magic Lantern slide that the Japanese Striving Society's president Nagata Shigeshi used during his speeches around Nagano Prefecture in late 1910s to promote Japanese migration to Brazil. It was a picture of the family of Nakamura Sadao, a schoolteacher from Kamiminochi County in Nagano Prefecture, who migrated to Registro, Brazil together in 1918. Family migration had begun to become the norm of Japanese migration in Brazil around that time. Courtesy of the Japanese Striving Society.

To be sure, the KKKK's policy of only recruiting whole families of migrants did not necessarily guarantee the migration of women. Recognizing the importance of women as wives and mothers in Japanese settler communities in South America, Japanese expansionists paid particular attention to the promotion of women's migration to Brazil. Telling examples of their efforts could be found in Burajiru, the official journal of the Japanese Brazilian Association (Nichibu Kyōkai)—aKobe-based organization to facilitate Japanese migration and economic expansion in Brazil formed in 1926. In 1932, the journal published a special issue on women's migration, including several articles emphasizing the importance of women for Japanese community-building in Brazil.

This special issue contained an article that was penned by Nakashima Sei'ichirō, the former Japanese consul of São Paulo. Nakashima argued that the prosperity of the British settler colonies around the world should be attributed to efforts of the British women, who migrated overseas to accompany British male settlers. They not only solidified British colonial communities by making homes and families, but also helping to maintain racial purity by forestalling miscegenation. In comparison, the expansion of Latin empires was much less successful due to lack of female migrants. Most of the Latin colonists were single men who ended up with inter-racial marriages with local women, thus failing to maintain strong colonial communities. The Japanese's ancestors, though they had sailed to Southeast Asia in the distant past, were not able to leave any traces due to the same dilution of their racial stock. Nakashima also happily noted the increase of women among the Japanese migrants to Brazil and believed that the more active participation of women would lead Japanese overseas expansion to a great success.⁸⁵

Another Contributor, the president of Ōtsuma High School for Women (Ōtsuma Kōdō Gakkō) Ōtsuma Kotaka, further reminded the readers that the quality of female migrants was also important. He complained that the majority of the Japanese women who sailed abroad in the past were prostitutes. Like the low-class Japanese laborers, they only brought shame to the empire and agitated anti-Japanese sentiment abroad. As Japan was expanding in Brazil, what the empire truly needed was the kind of women who would sail across seas, hand in hand with men, and share their mission of building a new home for the Japanese in South America.⁸⁶

To encourage women's migration, aside from providing subsidies to those who migrated in family units, the Japanese government also established the Overseas Women's Association (Kaigai Fujin Kyōkai) in 1927. This institution was aimed at providing pre-departure training for Japanese women as well as serving as a matchmaking agency between Japanese male settlers abroad and women back in Japan. The mission of the Association was clearly spelled out in its founding manifesto: With a rapidly growing Japanese population confined in the small and poorly endowed archipelago, the Japanese society would soon be plagued by "resource shortage and dangerous thoughts." The remedy was to settle Japanese people overseas so that they could explore the resources in "untouched and empty" land elsewhere. However, male settlers could not complete this task alone. They had to be accompanied by women who would assist them in building homes and communities abroad. Furthermore, Japanese women should help to foster mutual understandings between the Japanese and people in host societies to forestall anti-Japanese sentiment in the future. Accordingly, the mission of the Association, as the manifesto announced, included promoting interests in overseas migration among ordinary women, building training centers to prepare female migrants with skills, establishing and managing public facilities like hospitals, schools, and libraries in overseas Japanese communities, and arrange marriages for single Japanese men abroad.⁸⁷

From its establishment to the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Association's primary target was to facilitate migration to Brazil. The first achievement the Association made was to obtain a grant from the Japanese government to establish a Japanese hospital in the city of São Paulo. From 1932 to as late as 1939, the Association settled several groups of Japanese women in Brazil as prospective wives of Japanese male settlers. It also held numerous public lectures and workshops to promote overseas migration among ordinary women in the archipelago.⁸⁸

The history of the Overseas Women's Association also demonstrates that the campaigns to abolish Japanese overseas prostitution and to educate Japanese female migrants on the U.S. West Coast were closely connected with the migration of Japanese women to Brazil. Kubushiro Ochimi, a prominent leader of the JWCTU and women's education movement in the 1920s and 1930s, served as one of the association'sdirectors.⁸⁹ Similarly, after establishing the emigrant center in Yokohama that provided trainings to the U.S.-bound "picture brides," the Striving Society's president Nagata Shigeshi established the Department for Cultivating Women (fujin shūyōbu) under the Society's mantle in 1925. The department was dedicated to promoting women's migration to Brazil and providing them with appropriate trainings. Like the Overseas Women's Association, the Institute also facilitated marriages between domestic women and Japanese men in Brazil.⁹⁰

From Brazil to Manchuria: The Birth of the "Continental Brides"

Japan's military expansion in Manchuria in 1931 and the formation of Manchukuo as the empire's puppet state inspired Japanese expansionists to reconsider northeast Asia as an optimal migration destination. Migration promoters, old and new, not only debated about strategies and plans but also conducted a number of experimental migration campaigns under military sponsorship. However, by the mid-1930s, all of these experiments had failed due to violent local resistance and the more competitive living cost of local residents in Manchuria.⁹¹ On the other hand, the annual number of Japanese immigrants in Brazil kept growing. Due to a continuous decline of immigration from Italy and Portugal to Brazil, in 1932 the Japanese accounted for 37 percent of the immigrants who entered Brazil that year, becoming the largest group of immigrants in terms of annual number. The inflow of Japanese migrants reached its peak in 1933 and 1934. In both years, about 23,000 Japanese arrived on Brazilian shores,⁹² accounting for more than half of the overall annual number of immigrants to Brazil.⁹³

The early 1930s was also marked by the further growth of Japanese communities in Brazil. To retaliate against the commonwealth nations' boycott against Japanese textile in 1932, Tokyo turned from India to Brazil as Japan's primary raw cotton supplier.⁹⁴ In order to stimulate cotton cultivation, technical assistance from Tokyo and financial subsidies from Japan's major textile companies began to pour into Japanese Brazilian communities. This development contributed to the prosperity of Japanese agriculture in Brazil in general and the success of cotton production in particular throughout the 1930s. By 1939, Japanese communities in São Paulo alone contributed 20.4 percent of state's annual agricultural output in general. In terms of cotton, the output of Japanese communities accounted for as much as 43.3 percent.⁹⁵

However, two political changes in the mid-1930s reversed this situation. Japanese military expansion in Manchuria brought about a resurgence of "the yellow peril" rhetoric in Brazil. The rhetoric of protecting the nation from Japanese invasion joined the old race-based anti-Japanese sentiment that first emerged in Brazil in the first two decades of the twentieth century.⁹⁶ The Miguel Couto Amendment, passed by the Constituent Assembly in 1933, imposed constitutional restriction on Japanese immigration to 2,849 persons per year, 2 percent of the existing Japanese population in Brazil.⁹⁷ Though not immediately imposed, the Japanese immigration dropped sharply in the following years as a result, from more than 23,000 in 1933 to less than 2,000 in 1941.⁹⁸

Japan's migration-driven expansion eventually took another major direction change in 1936, shifting from South America to Manchuria. As the military dramatically increased its influence in Japanese politics following the February 26 Incident, the Hiroda Kōki cabinet successfully turned the Kwangtung Army's agenda of mass migration to Manchuria into a national policy. The imperial government began to orchestrate the project to relocate 5 million farmers in 1 million households from Japan to Manchuria within the next two decades.⁹⁹ The heyday of Manchurian migration thus began.

Recruiting and relocating female migrants was a vital part of the government's migration policy.¹⁰⁰ In addition to promoting the migration of entire households, the government also encouraged young, single women in Japan to migrate to Manchuria. Referred to as "continental brides" (tairiku no hanayome), these women were expected to foster Japanese community building in the Asian continent by marrying Japanese male settlers there. Like in the campaigns of migration to the United States and to Brazil, the Japanese expansionists emphasized the necessity to train these women before their migration.

According to a government's handbook distributed to the statefounded female emigrant training schools throughout Japan, the goal of the training programs was to make sure emigrant women would serve the empire at three levels: First, as an instrument of Japanese colonial policy, they would maintain the Yamato race's racial purity and transplant the superior Japanese female morality to the Asian continent. Second, as members of Japanese settler communities, they would maintain the stability of their communities by supplying food, clothing, and shelter. Last, as housewives in individual settler families, they would assist their husband in farming, providing comforts at home, and giving birth to the next generation of empire-builders and taking care of them.¹⁰¹

The state-centered migration of women to Manchuria in the 1930s marked as a watershed in the history of Japanese female migration overseas. Both in terms of depth and width, the imperial government was actively involved in migration management and female migrants trainings on an unprecedented scale. However, the state migration machine was not conjured out of thin air; rather, it was closely connected with Japanese migration campaigns to the United States and Brazil during the recent past. The human and institutional connections can be illustrated by a few examples.

In 1929, after resigning from her position in the JYWCA, Kawai Michi established a private women's college, the Keisen School for Young Women (Keisen Jogakuen). Aside from general education, this Tokyo institution also aimed to provide training in horticulture and farming skills to young Japanese women who planned to migrate to Japan's colonies.¹⁰² The Overseas Women's Association that played an important role to train Japanese female migrants and relocate them to Brazil moved its focus from South America to Asia in the 1930s. Beginning in 1935, it settled Japanese women to Manchuria and China proper, through either marriage with local Japanese male migrants or employment opportunities.¹⁰³ Responding to the government's mass migration policy in the late 1930s, it vowed to contribute the construction of the new order in East Asia¹⁰⁴ and became a key institution in training continent brides for the empire.¹⁰⁵ Nagata

Shigeshi began to involve himself in Manchurian migration in 1932, serving as a member in the government planning committee that drafted the blueprint for the ambitious five-million migration project.¹⁰⁶ Under his leadership, the Japanese Striving Society launched a series of campaigns to export Japanese men and women to Manchuria—and later, to Java and the Philippines. Wherever the empire expanded to during the Asia-Pacific War, the migration machine would soon follow.¹⁰⁷ The mobilization of women to support Japan's imperial expansion continued until the end of the Asia Pacific War in August 1945.

Conclusion

Through the case of Japan, this study deepens our understanding on how women were instrumentalized by imperialism and colonialism in modern era. Conventional wisdom has described the Japanese government's policy of exporting women from Japan to Manchuria in late 1930s as a particular product of Japanese imperialism during the era of total war. Like that of the comfort women, the story of the continental brides has been used to illustrate the convergence of gender suppression with racial subjugation at the peak of Japanese militarism and war mobilization.¹⁰⁸ However, as this article has demonstrated, such imperial instrumentalization of women was hardly an anomaly in the history of the Japanese empire or a unique product of the total war. Instead, the idea of using women to facilitate imperial expansion and the idea to train them so that they could better fulfill such obligation had been well practiced in different waves of Japanese migration-driven expansion since the very beginning of the empire.

This article has examined the instrumentalization of women in Japanese expansion by moving beyond the conventional boundaries of the Japanese colonial empire and relocating it in a trans-national space between the local, the national, and the global. It has highlighted the inseparability between the experience of Japanese migration in the United States and Japanese migration in Asia and South America. Japan's imitation of American westward migration in its own colonial expansion in Hokkaido in the beginning of Meiji era allowed the Meiji leaders to re-understand the value of women as both mothers of future empire-builders and symbols of national progress. The colonial migration in Hokkaido also planted the intellectual roots for Japanese migration in the United States.

The anti-Japanese campaigns in the United States in the early twentieth century also substantially changed how Japanese womanhood was defined and how Japanese women were called into serve for the empire's expansion. To appease the anti-Japanese sentiment Japanese political leaders and social reformers sought to eliminate Japanese prostitution from the U.S. West Coast. Japanese expansionists also launched campaigns to educate Japanese female immigrants in the United States so that they could showcase the civilized image of the Japanese empire to the white Americans, with the hope that the Japanese immigrants would be accepted by the white American society as equal members. The racial exclusion of the Japanese immigration in the United States in 1924 further ushered the Japanese government's direct involvement in promoting women's migration and providing trainings to female migrants in Japan's migration-driven expansion in Brazil and Manchuria in the following decades.

From the perspective of migration, this study thus joins some other articles in this issue in the discussion of the interplay between racism and sexism in the history of modern empires. In particularly, the American exclusion of the Japanese immigration, as this article has explained, set the Japanese government's agenda to mobilize and train women for Japanese migration-driven expansion in Asia and South America. This study thus highlights the trans-Pacific consequences of white racism in the United States by explaining how it contributed to the instrumentalization of women during the course of the Japanese empire's expansion. It challenges the conventionally nation-based, territory-bound approaches in gender history by bridging our understanding of gender relations in Japanese history and race relations in the history of the United States and Brazil.