An Ethnography of the Lives of Japanese and Japanese Brazilian Migrants. Ethel V. Kosminsky
the urban protests in the 1890s, and even more so after the Russo-Japanese War. They promoted agricultural production and rural industry and established several private and government-backed village youth associations and agricultural cooperatives. They also supported local branches of the Patriotic Women’s Society, an organization that aimed to solidify the links between villages and the armed services by assisting soldiers, sailors, and their families. The government used its ties to local leaders throughout the country to control agrarian unrest (Totman 2005: 345–47).
When Japan signed Trade Agreements in 1858 and 1866, it started to engage in international trade but resisted any external economic influence and refused international loans. The politicians of the Meiji Era began pushing for rapid industrialization, since the transition from an agrarian economy to an industrial one was the only guarantee against imperialist intervention from Western nations. Japanese capitalism developed with the state as the principal entrepreneur due to the lack of commercial capital. At the beginning of the Meiji Era, rich trading families focused on traditional activities, such as trade and loans. Thus, the state raised the necessary capital through internal loans and heavy taxes on the agriculture sector (Vieira 1973: 26–27).
Japanese capitalism presented peculiarities, as the state was both entrepreneur and economic control agent. Besides this, Japan applied an unequal distribution of taxes that exploited peasants in order to modernize the non-agrarian sector of the economy. Modernization depended on the heavy new land tax. This tax worsened the gap between poor peasants and urban inhabitants and spurred the rural to urban migration for factory work (Vieira 1973: 27–28).
The government played the role of principal industrial entrepreneur until 1880, financing and controlling the nation’s transportation and communication system, mining, heavy industry, and textile industry. The Japanese state attracted private capital to invest in industry through low interest loans and generous subsidies. Governmental control of economic life was more significant than in other countries at that time. However, in 1880, the state sold all the industries except for railroad companies, telegraph, shipyards in Yokosuka, and armament factories. Thus, the state and the new capitalist class created an alliance that concentrated capital among a small group of people. At the same time, the government founded a new education system, used Western medicine, sent and financially supported students in Western countries, opened consulates, and expanded the military and marine forces based primarily on the new land taxes and on internal loans (Vieira 1973: 28–29).
In 1873, taxes upon land changed from payment in produce, which varied annually, to a fixed currency payment. Peasants found it impossible to pay this tax; they often had to sell their land, or saw their land confiscated and then rented. Several peasant revolts erupted. Compounding the problem, the peasants’ manufactured goods could not compete with the cheapest imported products. Peasants also had to deal with the loss of communal land, which was a source of wood and soil fertilizers. This struck the agrarian sector hard and compelled further migration to the cities (Vieira 1973: 29–30). Thus, similar to the British accumulation of capital (Marx 1975: 891–954), rural–urban migration was both a product and precondition of the industrial development of Japan. Peasants became the labor force of the factories.
The Expansion of the Japanese Empire
As Japan’s population increased, it spread beyond the three principal Japanese islands (Honshu, Kyushu, and Shikoku) into new areas, occupying Hokkaido in the north and Okinawa in the south. The colonization of Hokkaido started in 1872. Eventually in 1920 and 1930, it became a source of emigration to other industrialized locations and to other countries (Vieira 1973: 30).
The Ryukyu Islands (which include Okinawa) were incorporated into the Japanese empire in 1879. Once an independent kingdom with its own culture, it became a Japanese province, which exported sugar and coal to Japan. Eventually, the Japanese government promoted the emigration of Okinawans to the Japanese Pacific colonies, to Hawaii, the United States, Canada, and South America. Around 1930, more than 54,000 Okinawans were living in other countries. In 1962, there were 19,100 Okinawans in Brazil according to the General Census of the Japanese Colony. Discriminated against in Japan because they were not considered Nihonjin, Okinawans suffered discrimination in Brazil as well for several decades after the Japanese colonization. Okinawans in Brazil have had their own associations, and formed a predominantly endogenous group (Vieira 1973: 30–31).
Starting with the Chinese-Japanese War (1894–1895), Japanese migration was part of an imperialist expansion that included Taiwan, Karafuto, Korea, and Manchuria. Taiwan was the first imperialist conquest as a result of the war between Japan and China. Besides being a colony for Japanese capital investment, Taiwan was a point of departure for future economic and political control of continental Asia and Oceania. As a result of the Russian-Japanese War, Japan conquered Korea in 1910. The Korean labor force was used to industrialize Manchuria. Korea became a source of raw materials, a destination for Japanese capital investment, and a market for Japanese consumer products (Vieira 1973: 30–32).
Karafuto, located in the south of Sakhalin Island, was conquered by Japan in 1905 in the Japanese-Russian war, and the Japanese state colonized it by subsidizing its earlier emigrants. From 1905 to 1931, Japan made its way through Manchuria, creating the puppet state of Manchukuo to develop its agricultural resources and industries (Vieira 1973: 32).
After World War I, the League of Nations transferred some South Pacific islands to the Japanese state, which then subsidized a colonization company to exploit its tropical resources. The company enjoyed a monopoly and did not pay taxes. On the other hand, it provided shelter, medical assistance, and accident insurance to its workers. The workers received half of the wages paid in Tokyo and had to pay for their own transportation (Vieira 1973: 32–33).
Migration outside the Japanese empire reached the following countries: the Philippines, Hawaii, Canada, the United States, Peru, and Brazil. Japanese migration started in the 1880s, when migrant families moved to Hawaii and North America. By 1940, immigrants comprised a total of 439,316 people, among them 226,847 who settled in Latin America (193,156 in Brazil) and 206,871 in Canada, the United States, and Hawaii. Most emigrants had a low socioeconomic background and came from less-developed agricultural regions. Migration to Brazil was planned and subsidized by the government under the supervision of private companies and, from 1920 on, was more politically driven. Emigration companies sent immigrants bound by agricultural agreements and motivated by active propaganda. Almost all of them considered emigration to be temporary and this impacted their adjustment into Brazilian society (Vieira 1973: 33–34).
Japanese imperialism conquered China’s market and others in Asia and Africa. The Japanese government reformulated its emigration and colonization policy and unified the emigration companies. Kaigai Kogyo Kabushiki Kaisha (KKKK) or Overseas Company of Enterprises S.A. was founded in 1917 through the reorganization of Tõyõ Imin Kaisha with the financial support of the Foreign Relations Department. KKKK incorporated all the earlier companies and in 1920 enjoyed a monopoly on emigration and colonization. Brasil Takushoku Kabushi Kaisha, which had already established a Japanese colony in Registro, São Paulo State, was incorporated into KKKK in 1919. The total number of Japanese immigrants who arrived in Brazil from 1908 to 1940 was about 180,000 (Mita 1999: 41–42).
The founding of KKKK was also related to an economic crisis and postwar unemployment, which provoked worker protests. Those who left Japan did so in order to survive a severe crisis and did so with the help of the Japanese government (Tsuda 2003: 55–56). The Japanese government also sent emigrants to Peru, Paraguay, Argentina, Bolivia, Dominican Republic, and Mexico between the end of the nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth century.
The official reasons for the policy promoting migration to Latin America from the 1920s to 1960s were overpopulation and poverty. In fact people who were disadvantaged and marginalized due to the state’s modernization and capitalist development radicalized their resistance, and the Japanese state decided to get rid of those who questioned its policies by sending them to Latin America. Besides increasing its internal social control, the nation-state spanned borders in an imperialist way through its migration-colonization program (Endoh 2009).
People throughout North and South America distrusted Japanese immigrants due to their different