Japanese diaspora

Terminology

Nikkei is derived from the term nikkeijin (日系人) in Japanese, used to refer to Japanese people who emigrated from Japan and their descendants. Emigration refers to permanent settlers, excluding transient Japanese abroad. These groups were historically differentiated by the terms issei (first-generation nikkeijin), nisei (second-generation nikkeijin), sansei (third-generation nikkeijin), and yonsei (fourth-generation nikkeijin). The term Nikkeijin may or may not apply to those Japanese who still hold Japanese citizenship. Usages of the term may depend on perspective. For example, the Japanese government defines them according to (foreign) citizenship and the ability to provide proof of Japanese lineage up to the third generation - legally the fourth generation has no legal standing in Japan that is any different from another "foreigner." On the other hand, in the U.S. or other places where Nikkeijin have developed their own communities and identities, first-generation Japanese immigrants tend to be included; citizenship is less relevant and a commitment to the local community becomes more important.

Discover Nikkei, a project of the Japanese American National Museum, defined nikkei as follows:

We are talking about Nikkei people - Japanese emigrants and their descendants who have created communities throughout the world.

The term nikkei has multiple and diverse meanings depending on situations, places, and environments. Nikkei also include people of mixed racial descent who identify themselves as Nikkei. Native Japanese also use the term nikkei for the emigrants and their descendants who return to Japan. Many of these nikkei live in close communities and retain identities separate from the native Japanese.

The definition was derived from The International Nikkei Research Project, a three-year collaborative project involving more than 100 scholars from 10 countries and 14 participating institutions.

Early history

Overseas Japanese have existed since the 15th century.

After the Portuguese first made contact with Japan in 1543, a large scale of slave trade developed in which Portuguese purchased Japanese as slaves in Japan and sold them to various locations overseas, including Portugal itself, throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Many documents mention the large slave trade along with protests against the enslavement of Japanese. Japanese slaves are believed to be the first of their nation to end up in Europe, and the Portuguese purchased large amounts of Japanese slave girls to bring to Portugal for sexual purposes, as noted by the Church in 1555. King Sebastian feared that it was having a negative effect on Catholic proselytization since the slave trade in Japanese was growing to massive proportions, so he commanded that it be banned in 1571

Japanese slave women were even sold as concubines to black African crewmembers, along with their European counterparts serving on Portuguese ships trading in Japan, mentioned by Luis Cerqueira, a Portuguese Jesuit, in a 1598 document. Japanese slaves were brought by the Portuguese to Macau, where some of them not only ended up being enslaved to Portuguese, but as slaves to other slaves, with the Portuguese owning Malay and African slaves, who in turn owned Japanese slaves of their own.

Hideyoshi was so disgusted that his own Japanese people were being sold en masse into slavery on Kyushu, that he wrote a letter to Jesuit Vice-Provincial Gaspar Coelho on 24 July 1587 to demand the Portuguese, Siamese (Thai), and Cambodians stop purchasing and enslaving Japanese and return Japanese slaves who ended up as far as India. Hideyoshi blamed the Portuguese and Jesuits for this slave trade and banned Christian proselytizing as a result.

Some Korean slaves were bought by the Portuguese and brought back to Portugal from Japan, where they had been among the tens of thousands of Korean prisoners of war transported to Japan during the Japanese invasions of Korea (1592–98). Historians pointed out that at the same time Hideyoshi expressed his indignation and outrage at the Portuguese trade in Japanese slaves, he himself was engaging in a mass slave trade of Korean prisoners of war in Japan.

Fillippo Sassetti saw some Chinese and Japanese slaves in Lisbon among the large slave community in 1578, although most of the slaves were blacks.

The Portuguese "highly regarded" Asian slaves like Chinese and Japanese, much more "than slaves from sub-Saharan Africa". The Portuguese attributed qualities like intelligence and industriousness to Chinese and Japanese slaves which is why they favored them more.

In 1595 a law was passed by Portugal banning the selling and buying of Chinese and Japanese slaves.

From the 15th through the early 17th century, Japanese seafarers traveled to China and Southeast Asia countries, in some cases establishing early Japantowns. This activity ended in the 1640s, when the Tokugawa shogunate imposed maritime restrictions which forbade Japanese from leaving the country, and from returning if they were already abroad. This policy would not be lifted for over two hundred years. Travel restrictions were eased once Japan opened diplomatic relations with western nations. In 1867, the bakufu began issuing travel documents for overseas travel and emigration.

Before 1885, fewer and fewer Japanese people emigrated from Japan, in part because the Meiji government was reluctant to allow emigration, both because it lacked the political power to adequately protect Japanese emigrants, and because it believed that the presence of Japanese as unskilled laborers in foreign countries would hamper its ability to revise the unequal treaties. A notable exception to this trend was a group of 153 contract laborers who immigrated—without official passports—to Hawai'i and Guam in 1868. A portion of this group stayed on after the expiration of the initial labor contract, forming the nucleus of the nikkei community in Hawai'i. In 1885, the Meiji government began to turn to officially sponsored emigration programs to alleviate pressure from overpopulation and the effects of the Matsukata deflation in rural areas. For the next decade, the government was closely involved in the selection and pre-departure instruction of emigrants. The Japanese government was keen on keeping Japanese emigrants well-mannered while abroad in order to show the West that Japan was a dignified society, worthy of respect. By the mid-1890s, immigration companies (imin-kaisha 移民会社), not sponsored by the government, began to dominate the process of recruiting emigrants, but government-sanctioned ideology continued to influence emigration patterns.

To 1945

Japanese emigration to the rest of Asia was noted as early as the 12th century to the Philippines; early Japanese settlements included those in Lingayen Gulf, Manila, the coasts of Ilocos and in the Visayas when the Philippines was under the Srivijaya and Majapahit Empire. In the 16th century the Japanese settlement was established in Ayutthaya, Thailand., and in early 17th century Japanese settlers was first recorded to stay in Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). A larger wave came in the 17th century, when Red seal ships traded in Southeast Asia, and Japanese Catholics fled from the religious persecution imposed by the shoguns, and settled in the Philippines, among other destinations. Many of them also intermarried with the local Filipina women (including those of pure or mixed Chinese and Spanish descent), thus forming the new Japanese-Mestizo community. In the 16th and 17th centuries, thousands of traders from Japan also migrated to the Philippines and assimilated into the local population. pp. 52–3

In 1898 the Dutch East Indies colonial government statistics showed 614 Japanese in the Dutch East Indies (166 men, 448 women). During the American colonial era in the Philippines, the number of Japanese laborers working in plantations rose so high that in the 20th century, Davao City soon became dubbed as a Ko Nippon Koku ("Little Japan" in Japanese) with a Japanese school, a Shinto shrine and a diplomatic mission from Japan. There is even a popular restaurant called "The Japanese Tunnel", which includes an actual tunnel made by the Japanese in time of the war.

There was also a significant level of emigration to the overseas territories of the Empire of Japan during the Japanese colonial period, including Korea, Taiwan, Manchuria, and Karafuto. Unlike emigrants to the Americas, Japanese going to the colonies occupied a higher rather than lower social niche upon their arrival.

In 1938 about 309,000 Japanese lived in Taiwan. By the end of World War II, there were over 850,000 Japanese in Korea and more than 2 million in China, most of them farmers in Manchukuo (the Japanese had a plan to bring in 5 million Japanese settlers into Manchukuo).

In the census of December 1939, the total population of the South Pacific Mandate was 129,104, of which 77,257 were Japanese. By December 1941, Saipan had a population of more than 30,000 people, including 25,000 Japanese. Over 400,000 people lived on Karafuto (southern Sakhalin) when the Soviet offensive began in early August 1945. Most were of Japanese or Korean descent. When Japan lost the Kuril Islands, 17,000 Japanese were expelled, most from the southern islands.

After 1945

After and during the World War II, most of these overseas Japanese repatriated to Japan. Like the colonization of British, so of Japanese moved to the overseas countries during the World War II. The Allied powers repatriated over 6 million Japanese nationals from colonies and battlefields throughout Asia. Only a few remained overseas, often involuntarily, as in the case of orphans in China or prisoners of war captured by the Red Army and forced to work in Siberia. During the 1950s and 1960s, an estimated 6,000 Japanese accompanied Zainichi Korean spouses repatriating to North Korea, while another 27,000 prisoners-of-war are estimated to have been sent there by the Soviet Union; see Japanese people in North Korea.

There is a community of Japanese people in Hong Kong largely made up of expatriate businessmen. There are about 4,018 Japanese people living in India who are mostly expatriate engineers and company executives and they are based mainly in Haldia, Bangalore and Kolkata. Additionally, there are 903 Japanese expatriates in Pakistan based mostly in the cities of Islamabad and Karachi.

Americas

People from Japan began migrating to the U.S. and Canada in significant numbers following the political, cultural, and social changes stemming from the 1868 Meiji Restoration. (See Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians).

In Canada, small multi-generational communities of Japanese immigrants developed and adapted to life in outside Japan.

In the United States, particularly after the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Japanese immigrants were sought by industrialists to replace Chinese immigrants. In the early years of the 20th century, anxiety about the rapid growth of cheap Japanese labor in California came to a head when in 1906, when the School Board of San Francisco passed a resolution barring children of Japanese heritage from attending regular public schools. President Roosevelt intervened to rescind the resolution, but only on the understanding that steps would be taken to put a stop to further Japanese immigration. In 1907, in the face of Japanese government protests, the so called "Gentlemen's Agreement" between the governments of Japan and the U.S. ended immigration of Japanese workers (i.e., men), but permitted the immigration of spouses of Japanese immigrants already in the U.S. The Immigration Act of 1924 banned the immigration of all but a token few Japanese, until the Immigration Act of 1965, there was very little further Japanese immigration. That which occurred was mostly in the form of war brides. The majority of Japanese settled in Hawaii, where today a third of the state's population are of Japanese descent, and the rest in the West Coast (California, Washington and Oregon), but other significant communities are found in the Northeast and Midwest states.

The Japanese diaspora has been unique in the absence of new emigration flows in the second half of the 20th century. However, research reports that during the post-war many Japanese migrated individually to join existing communities abroad.

With the restrictions on entering the United States, the level of Japanese immigration to Latin America began to increase. Mexico was the first Latin American country to receive Japanese immigrants in 1897, when the first thirty five arrived in Chiapas to work on coffee farms. Japanese immigrants (particularly from the Okinawa Prefecture, including Okinawans) arrived in small numbers during the early 20th century. Japanese Brazilians are the largest ethnic Japanese community outside Japan (numbering about 1.5 million, compared to about 1.2 million in the United States), and São Paulo contains the largest concentration of Japanese outside Japan. The first Japanese immigrants (791 people, mostly farmers) came to Brazil in 1908 on the Kasato Maru from the Japanese port of Kobe, moving to Brazil in search of better living conditions. Many of them ended up as laborers on coffee farms. (see also Shindo Renmei)

Japanese Peruvians form another notable ethnic Japanese community with an estimated 6,000 Issei, and 100,000 Japanese descendants (Nisei,Sansei,Yonsei) with a former Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori as one of the most recognisable faces, also Japanese food known as Nikkei cuisine is part of the richness of Peruvian-Japanese culinary.

The first Japanese Argentine Nisei (second generation), Seicho Arakaki, was born in 1911.

See also Japanese Paraguayans.

There was a small amount of Japanese settlement in the Dominican Republic between 1956 and 1961, in a programme initiated by Dominican Republic leader Rafael Trujillo. Protests over the extreme hardships and broken government promises faced by the initial group of migrants set the stage for the end of state-supported labour emigration in Japan.

The Japanese Colombian colony migrated between 1929 and 1935 in three waves. Their community is unique in terms of their resistance against the internal conflict occurring in Colombia during the decade of the 1950s, a period known as La Violencia.

Europe

The Japanese in Britain form the largest Japanese community in Europe with well over 100,000 living all over the United Kingdom (the majority being in London). In recent years, many young Japanese have been migrating from Japan to Britain to engage in cultural production and to become successful artists in London. There are also small numbers of Japanese people in Russia some whose heritage date back to the times when both countries shared the territories of Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands; some Japanese communists settled in the Soviet Union, including Mutsuo Hakamada, the brother of former Japanese Communist Party chairman Satomi Hakamada whose daughter Irina Hakamada is a notable Russian political figure. The 2002 Russian census showed 835 people claiming Japanese ethnicity (nationality).

There is a sizable Japanese community in Düsseldorf, Germany of nearly 8,000.

Oceania

Early Japanese immigrants lived in Broome, Western Australia, and were involved in the pearl fishing business.

In recent years, Japanese migration to Australia, largely consisting of younger age females, has been on the rise.

There is also a small but growing Japanese community in New Zealand, primarily in Auckland and Wellington.

Return migration to Japan

In the 1980s, with Japan's growing economy facing a shortage of workers willing to do so-called three 'K' jobs (きつい kitsui [difficult], 汚い kitanai [dirty], and 危険 kiken [dangerous]), Japan's Ministry of Labor began to grant visas to ethnic Japanese from South America to come to Japan and work in factories. The vast majority — estimated at roughly 300,000 — were from Brazil, but there is also a large population from Peru and smaller populations from Argentina and other Latin American countries.

In response to the recession as of 2009, the Japanese government has offered ¥300,000 ($3,300) for unemployed Japanese from Latin America to return to their country of origin with the stated goal of alleviating the country's soaring unemployment. Another ¥200,000 ($2,200) is offered for each additional family member to leave. Emigrants who take this offer are not allowed to return to Japan with the same privileged visa with which they entered the country. Arudou Debito, columnist for The Japan Times, an English language newspaper in Japan, denounced the policy as "racist" as it only offered Japanese-blooded foreigners who possessed the special "person of Japanese ancestry" visa the option to receive money in return for repatriation to their home countries. Some commentators also accused it of being exploitative since most nikkei had been offered incentives to immigrate to Japan in 1990, were regularly reported to work 60+ hours per week, and were finally asked to return home when the Japanese became unemployed in large numbers.

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