Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2023. US$28.00, paper. ISBN 9780824893002.
English-language research on Japanese migration to the Americas has mainly focussed on migration to the US mainland or Hawaii, and a lesser extent, to Canada. However, there was also significant Japanese migration to Latin America and in the past few years, there have been more English-language works on this important alternate destination. Pedro Iacobelli and Sidney Xu Lu’s edited volume The Japanese Empire and Latin America brings together work from scholars based in Japan, the United States, and Latin America to provide a multi-faceted perspective on the Japanese presence in Latin America, its connection with Japanese migration elsewhere in the world, and to Japanese imperial policy in the first half of the twentieth century.
In their introduction, Iacobelli and Lu state that the intent of their work is to bridge the traditional division between a focus on the development of Japanese communities in Latin America based on an ethnic studies approach and wider studies of Japanese colonialism and imperial policy. This effort to locate Japanese migration to Latin America in a wider transpacific context leads to chapters focussed on connections between Japanese migration to Latin America and the Japanese government, cultural links between Japan and immigrant communities, the interconnectedness of Japanese migration to Latin America with other destinations in North America and the Asia-Pacific, and the tensions in identity formation in the new overseas Japanese communities.
The Japanese imperial state strongly encouraged emigration from Japan and exerted ongoing influence on Japanese communities in Latin America. Toake Endoh’s chapter demonstrates how the Japanese government encouraged emigration to expand Japanese political and economic power and rid itself of surplus rural populations and increasingly, socially or politically problematic people. Sidney Xu Lu and Andre Kobayashi Deckrow’s articles show the critical role of migration companies, which combined government, business, and local interests to encourage migration, acquire land in Latin America (in this case, Brazil), and encourage business ventures and settlements that would focus on exporting production of agricultural goods back to Japan. Ayumi Takenaka’s contribution also demonstrates the strong role of the Japanese state in organizing and influencing the Japanese community in Peru and how the empire attempted to use Japanese settlers to expand its political and economic influence.
This political and economic strategy meant that transporting people and goods was an important priority, as Elijah Greenstein’s chapter on Japanese shipping lines to Latin America shows. Greenstein indicates that Japan’s imperial expansion in Asia in the 1930s reduced the number of migrants to Latin America as the government started encouraging migration to Japan’s Asian imperial possessions. This, along with growing tensions arising from Japanese imperial wars, reduced the presence of Japanese shipping lines by the early 1940s.
These authors indicate that Japan’s imperial wars in Asia and growing nationalist hostility, particularly on the part of the Brazilian and Peruvian governments in the 1930s, led to a great reduction in Japanese migration to Latin America by the end of that decade. Even though the Japanese state did not directly administer Japanese settlements in Latin America, Japanese officials saw these new settlers as a way of expanding the empire’s political and economic power. This close association could often have unwanted consequences on the immigrants and their endeavours as Japan’s priorities shifted and host countries became more hostile to both Japanese settlers and Japan’s empire.
The Japanese government’s involvement in migration did not cease with the fall of the imperial regime in World War II. Hiromi Mizuno’s fascinating chapter on an abortive Japanese government experiment of settlement in the Dominican Republic in the 1950s shows the persistence of using migration to solve issues of surplus population and social welfare. This joint program with the dictatorial Dominican government of Rafael Trujillo suffered from issues of false advertising, hardship from unfamiliar terrain, domestic opposition, and lack of security. In the end, the migrants were repatriated in the early 1960s, but compensation suits against the Japanese government continued until the early 2000s.
Migration to Latin America had been motivated in part by growing hostility from North American governments to Japanese immigration. Eiichiro Azuma’s chapter on Japanese migrants in the US-Mexico borderlands shows that some saw new opportunities in Mexico and fled an increasingly hostile environment in the US. However, others saw migration to Mexico from Japan as a path to entering the US for economic opportunities. Facundo Garasino also indicates that the Japanese community in Argentina originated from Japanese settlers leaving Brazil and Peru for new opportunities. This shows that there was fluidity in movement within the Americas once migration occurred.
Cultural issues related to migration are also an important part of this volume. Seth Jacobowitz’s chapter discusses the importance of magazines and fiction in encouraging migration. Literature could also be a form of social memory as demonstrated by Ignacio Lopez-Calvo’s contribution concerning fiction produced by second-generation Japanese-Brazilians. Yoshitaka Hibi’s chapter demonstrates the importance of Japanese-language bookstores in maintaining links between Japan and migrant communities. Facundo Garasino’s research is a great example of intercultural communication by focussing on Shinyo Okada in Argentina and how he attempted to demonstrate that Japanese moral values and its success in empire building could mesh with Argentina’s nation-building project. These chapters demonstrate the importance that culture plays in issues of propaganda, social memory, and intercultural communication that arise from migration.
The book would have benefitted from a bit more discussion on the reactions of host societies to Japanese migration, as well as greater use of Latin American archival sources, but this is outweighed by the well-researched and innovative contributions in this volume. In all, this book’s multi-faceted exploration of the Japanese presence in Latin America, its connection to the Japanese state, and the formation of overseas communities and identities succeeds in providing greater depth on this important destination for Japanese settlement overseas.
Carl Young
Western University, London