Labor, Japanese Migration, and National Crises in the Chilean Nitrate North

This paper asks the following question: how did Japanese migrant labor impact debates in Chile over economic crises, social relations, and the national racial identity in the early twentieth century? Beginning in the 1890s, various Chilean nation-builders advocated for Chile to reorient its principal industry in sodium nitrate fertilizer (saltpeter) towards Japan. They believed that if they could pry open massive untapped nitrogen markets in Japan and potentially contract Japanese workers to mitigate the nitrate region’s precarious labor supply, they could reverse the fortunes of a formerly booming but currently fading nitrate export industry. In the end, xenophobia, discord over defining the national racial community, and opposition from a highly militant labor movement converged to ultimately preclude the arrival of Japanese laborers, but not before the topic sparked an explosive national debate.

This paper tells this story through both the high politics of labor migration and the local/daily conflicts between Japanese migrants and Chilean authorities in northern nitrate port

cities. Specifically, I will begin by examining the correspondence of Chilean diplomats in Tokyo who energetically endorsed Japanese labor to ameliorate supposed nitrate labor shortages in the 1910s. I will then analyze the local Chilean laborers and port authorities who opposed the racial threat of Japanese migration and argued that labor instability in the nitrate zones was not about a shortage, but rather a labor surplus as a volatile saltpeter industry reduced employment opportunities. The explosive and widespread debates over introducing Japanese labor reveals how Japanese migration shaped Chile’s social question as Chile and Japan developed commercial ties in the Pacific World.