Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009. 267 pp. (Tables, figures, maps.) US$50.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-252-03402-2.
Toake Endoh’s Exporting Japan is an important contribution to the growing field of Asian Diaspora Studies. In this book, he provides his reader with a detailed analysis of Japanese emigration policy to Latin America. In particular, he writes against the scholarship of international economy, structuralism and transnational networks in order to examine domestic political aspects of emigration, adopting a state-centric paradigm that focuses on the intentions, ideology, perceptions and actions of the Japanese state in regard to Latin American emigration. Endoh explores three specific paradoxes: the unorthodox patterns of migration and settlement, governmental policy for overseas migration, and the southwest origin of the majority of immigrants. This Japan-focused study of emigration offers scholars insight into the policy behind the largest Japanese diasporic populations, although it does not introduce any new theoretical literatures to the field of Asian Diaspora Studies.
The strength in Endoh’s study lies in his ability to access Japanese-language sources that describe the Japanese government’s policies in respect to overpopulation, post-World War II emigration, and how the state retained links to its expatriate communities. Looking at the policies regarding overpopulation, Endoh introduces a hybrid approach that synthesizes migration, social control and state expansion, and considers the Japanese government’s Latin American emigration policies in the context of Asian colonization through its broader encouragement of emigration to Hokkaido, Taiwan, Korea and Manchuria. He analyzes the geographic and social origins of the emigrants and illustrates the ways in which the Japanese government recruited citizens from poorer communities as a means of combating overpopulation and poverty, looking specifically at policies directed toward the populations of the southwest of Japan (Hiroshima, Yamaguchi, Fukuoka, Saga, Nagasaki, Kagoshima, Kumamoto and Okinawa), the burakumin, and ex-miners (such as those from Mitsui Mining). In his consideration of post-World War II emigration, Endoh offers his readers an analysis of the Dominican Republic, Bolivia and Paraguay, stressing that the Japanese government believed that emigration ensured “a smoother and quicker postwar reconstruction” despite the fact that the General Headquarters (GHQ) and Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (SCAP) frowned on it during the Occupation (81). Finally, in his examination of state expansion through emigration, Endoh highlights Japan’s interest in Brazilian agricultural products, such as cotton and soybeans, as well as the nationalistic pride of the diasporic communities, whose members sent monetary contributions to Japan and encouraged loyalty to Japan. The detail-oriented analyses of these policies expand scholarship on the history and politics of modern Japan.
The greatest strength of Endoh’s book, its access to Japanese-language sources, is also its greatest weakness. Endoh heavily relies on Japanese- and English-language sources, including few in Spanish and none in Portuguese. While his summary of the history of the two waves of migration to Latin America, Peru and Brazil in the first wave (1898-1941) and Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Bolivia and Paraguay in the second wave (1950s and 1960s), is a welcome addition to studies of Japanese emigration to Latin America, his analysis of Japanese immigration to these countries ignores some of the major scholarship, including Jeffrey Lesser’s seminal studies of Japanese immigration in Brazil. Instead, Endoh claims that Latin American emigration policies were an extension of the imperialist designs of the Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. This problematic conflation of emigration policies with colonial policies insists on nation-building by way of transnational expansion when, in fact, Japan never colonized Latin America. Though it is true that some immigrants showed nationalistic pride in being Japanese, Endoh overemphasizes the significance of the defeat of Japan during World War II, citing emperor worship in Latin America and highlighting the conflict between the kachigumi (those who believed that Japan had won the war) and the makegumi (those who believed that Japan had lost the war). While this conflict did cause a rift in the expatriate communities in Brazil, Peru and other Latin American countries, the violence was particularly constrained to the Japanese community in São Paulo and was largely ignored by the Brazilian government until members of the Shindô Renmei (The League of the Emperor’s Subjects), a kachigumi organization, killed a non-Japanese Brazilian man in 1946. Endoh does not examine information that points to the Brazilian government’s role in the maintenance of Japanese nationalism. His reliance on Japanese-language sources leads him to overemphasize the importance of these conflicts within the Japanese expatriate community in support of his claim that Japanese nationalism abroad contributed to furthering immigration to Latin America from Japan post-World War II.
Nevertheless, I highly recommend the book to scholars of Asian Diaspora Studies as well as students of modern Japan interested in policies regarding Japanese colonialism and the GHQ/SCAP Occupation of Japan, because Endoh offers his readers insight into how the Japanese government used Latin American emigration as a political decompressor to restore order in Japan.
Zelideth María Rivas
Colorado College, Colorado Springs, USA
p. 569