Addition by Subtraction: State-Led Japanese Brazilian Migration in the Service of Japanese Empire

Between 1920 and 1941, some 200,000 Japanese migrated to Brazil as part of a Japanese government-led migration program. Recruited, trained, and sponsored by state-run migration companies, these immigrants worked as agricultural laborers and settled rural lands primarily in Brazil’s Southeast. Once in Brazil, the majority lived in isolated immigrant communities, where, through these migration companies, they continued to rely on Japanese, and not Brazilian, state institutions for survival. The unique circumstances of state-led Japanese Brazilian migration only reinforced the idea that emigrants remained subjects of the Japanese empire. Immigrants, for example, continued to consume news in Japanese, often with greater emphasis on developments in East Asia, and their grievances with the Brazilian government were usually communicated through Japanese diplomatic intermediaries. Consequently, the experiences of Japanese immigrants in Brazil challenge the pervasive belief that immigrants aimed to assimilate.

My paper examines how Japanese policymakers and migration company officials imagined the state-led migration program as a tool of Japanese empire when implemented in the early-1920s. Contemporaneous government reports and agricultural journals reveal that these leaders believed that large-scale migration was mutually beneficial for emigrant and Japan alike. Based on Western understandings of agricultural economics, they believed that not only would clearing Japanese land of excess tenant farmers save agriculture at home, but also that Japan would gain economically from the import of products grown by Japanese farms abroad

I also examine the migration companies' imperial rhetoric. While much of the emphasis in the guidebooks and pamphlets used to recruit agricultural emigrants concerned the economic opportunities that awaited them in Brazil, ironically, these sources also rationalized emigration as a patriotic act. Ultimately my paper argues that at both the levels of government policy and popular opinion, state-directed Japanese Brazilian migration was conceived as an imperial endeavor that benefited Japan.