The Colonial Migration to Hokkaido and the Origin of Japanese Trans-Pacific Diaspora in America, 1870s–80s

This article argues that the Meiji government’s programs of colonial migration to Hokkaido in the 1870s established the intellectual basis for the earliest wave of Japanese trans-Pacific migration to the US in the 1880s. At the center of the nexus between Japanese colonialism in Hokkaido and trans-Pacific migration to America lies the agenda of turning undesirable subjects of the nation into desirable ones through outward migration.  

The political reforms of the Meiji government deprived the samurai class of their hereditary privileges and livelihood. Government officials and public intellectuals identified these declassed samurai as a threat to the new nation and proposed to relocate them to Hokkaido, the northern frontier of the nascent empire. The migration of declassed samurai was promoted in two related agendas. First, migration to Hokkaido was justified as an opportunity for declassed samurai to regain their livelihood and honor by transforming themselves into trailblazers of national expansion. Second, the government defined the population distribution in the archipelago as imbalanced, with Japan proper having a surplus population and with Hokkaido being empty. The migration of the samurai became imperative for the balancing of the population distribution of the archipelago. 

The first wave of Japanese American migration rose in the mid 1880s after the Meiji government lifted the ban on overseas migration. As with the Hokkaido initiatives, this migration campaign had the immediate goal of providing relief to declassed samurai by turning them into model Japanese subjects in the empire’s new frontier:  the American west. The campaign was further legitimized by the urgency of migrating people from the overcrowded archipelago to the less populated American continent. Fukuzawa Yukichi, who advocated Hokkaido migration in the 1870s, also became the central initiator of the first wave of Japanese American migration in the 1880s.