Exporting Japan: Politics of Emigration to Latin America

3. Building the Emigration Machinery

3. Building the Emigration Machinery The great earthquake that devastated the Tokyo metropolitan area in September 1923 was a watershed for the beginning of the government of Japan’s intervention into Japanese Latin American emigration. The Yamamoto Gonbei cabinet (September 1923–January 1924) created a relief program for some of the quake victims who had lost homes, families, and jobs, to assist them in migrating to Brazil. The program subsidized 200 yen in travel expenses for each of the 110 applicants to the program.1 Though a relatively small-scale and temporary measure, it was the first government-appropriated budget for overseas migration in eight years.2 More importantly, the government became engaged in migration from that point forward, positioning it as national policy (kokusaku) and laying the institutional foundations for the program. Chapter 1 provided a historical overview of the shaping of prewar Japanese emigration to Latin America by socioeconomic and political factors in the host countries. These immigration-side narratives—stories of Japanese immigrants’ struggle to survive under restrictive and adverse conditions in Latin America—highlighted one of the major conundrums of the migration history: that is, why the Japanese emigrants went from higher to lower economies. In addition, there is another unsolved question as to why Japanese migration to Latin America saw a remarkable surge in the total number of emigrants from the early 1920s until the mid-1930s, when anti-Japanese sentiment became rife in many Latin American host countries. As a first step in answering these questions, this chapter will examine the flip side of the migration story and look at the domestic conditions in Japan from which emigration sprang. At the center of this analysis is the endogenous “push” factor, that is, the Japanese state’s ideas, decisions, and actions that elevated migration to Japan’s national imperative. 60 latin american emigration as a national strategy Early Public Discourse With the demise of feudalism in 1868, the imperial Meiji government aspired to quickly modernize the nation-state. The state builders looked to western Europe and the United States for effective political, legal, and administrative structures, economic and industrial systems, military technologies, and “high culture.” They also realized the importance of international human exchanges in acquiring material and intellectual resources for modernity, and enthusiastically supported migration of the best and brightest students and scholars, often from the former samurai class. One hundred seventy-four civil servants and private students who went to the United States in 1869 were among that government selected and sponsored elite. In contrast, the early Meiji government did not embrace or encourage emigration by people from the lower classes. A European venture to transport 153 Japanese workers to Hawaii without the authorization of the government of Japan (the gannenmono incident of 1868) hardened its attitude against labor emigration. After hearing of the quasi-slave treatment of its citizens on sugar plantations in Hawaii, the government was convinced that overseas migration was a dangerous undertaking for its people.3 Furthermore, the Japanese government, seeking revisions in the unequal treaties that had been imposed upon it by the Western nations, worried that Japanese emigration would worsen the chances of those revisions since uneducated dekasegi (labor migrants) would “reinforce the western image of Japan as an uncivilized nation.”4 After the gannenmono incident, no organized Japanese emigration took place for seventeen years. The early Meiji government felt that commoners should instead migrate within the nation, engaging in development of Hokkaido, Japan’s large northernmost and underpopulated island. With the establishment of the Office of Development in 1869, the government began developing this vast yet almost virgin territory. It administratively defined the realm of the indigenous Ainu people as “Hokkaido,” erected a modern legal structure of property rights in agriculture and fisheries, and deployed farmers and tondenhei, meaning armed farmers, from the mainland to the territory, which was only sparsely populated by the Ainu “barbarians.” 5 By Japanizing the land, cultivating natural resources, and raising industry, the government of Japan attempted to substantiate its claim over the territory and its unassailable sovereignty over it, especially against potential aggressors such as Russia. A detailed and thorough account of Japan’s colonization of Hokkaido is beyond the scope of this study,6 but it is noteworthy that the Hokkaido colonization was a pioneering initiative to build the nation via migration. This colonialist model Building the Emigration Machinery 61 would later be deployed in Taiwan, Korea...