The Rise of Heimin

Starting in the late 1880s, domestic political tensions surrounding the shizoku issue became diluted by the fever of overseas expansion and the materialization of promised political reforms such as the formation of the Imperial Diet and the enact of the Meiji Constitution. The decline of the former samurai class as a political force was accompanied by the rise of the commoners (heimin) as a voice in the political debate. The term heimin, as a political concept, carries different meanings and connotations in different contexts, but here it is used to specifically indicate the class of common youth who belonged to the generations born after the Tokugawa-Meiji transition. Most members of the heimin class had no inherited power or honor like the shizoku and possessed a distinct political consciousness.

The shift from shizoku to heimin as the center of Japanese political discourse mirrored the transition of Japanese social identity from one based on inheritance into one shaped by social and economic status. These changes reflected the horizontalization of Japanese society pushed by the forces of modernity. Although shizoku identity continued to be memorized as a symbol of honor and many continued to use their shizoku backgrounds for self-promotion, the title of shizoku no longer possessed the same political power as before. Some central heimin activists, though holding shizoku backgrounds themselves, embraced the idea of heimin as the idealized democratic subject position.Footnote ⁶

The early heimin activists believed that Japan’s existing political and social structures, still monopolized by inherited privilege and traditional value, had betrayed the spirits of egalitarianism and progress promised by the modern society. They argued that the nation should move forward by giving political and economic opportunities to individuals born without privilege. Tokutomi Sōhō, a prominent spokesperson for heimin, had grown up in a family of gōshi, wealthy peasants who obtained certain shizoku privileges by serving the Tokugawa Bakufu. Tokutomi strongly resented the full-fledged samurai who had looked down upon him since childhood because of his inferior social background.Footnote ⁷

In 1886, Tokutomi published his heimin-centered blueprint for Japan’s nation-building, The Future Japan (Shōrai no Nihon). He observed that the nineteenth-century world was an arena of international competition where only the fittest could survive.Footnote ⁸ Hidden behind the wars and arms race was the true rivalry of national wealth. In other words, nations ultimately competed with each other in terms of economic productivity and trade.Footnote ⁹ In the past the samurai had enjoyed political and economic privileges due to their status as military aristocrats without engaging in any form of economic production. But, argued Tokutomi, the samurai could no longer lead such a parasitic life in the new society now. The heimin, as the main body of economic production, were now replacing aristocracy and emerging at the center of national and global politics – a trend that was proven by both the French Revolution and the American Revolution.Footnote ¹⁰ In order to survive and gain the upper hand in international competition, Japan had to follow this global trend by allowing its common people to take up the mantle of leadership.Footnote ¹¹

In the next year, Tokutomi established the Association of the People’s Friend (Minyū Sha) to disseminate ideas of commonerism (heiminshugi), calling to form a nation and empire led by commoners. The association’s official journal, Friend of the Nation (Kokumin no Tomo), began its circulation the same year. Tokutomi’s promotion of heimin-centered nationalism and the increasing popularity of his works among the general reading public revealed the society’s lack of upward mobility. This predicament of common youth was well captured by two contemporary works of fiction. Mori Ōgai’s The Dancing Girl (Maihime), first serialized on Friend of the Nation upon Tokutomi’s request, described a tragic romance between an ambitious but unprivileged Japanese man and a German dancing girl. Under a plethora of social pressures, the protagonist eventually had to discard his true love in order to gain his dream job—an elite position within the government bureaucracy. Futabatei Shimei’s The Drifting Cloud (Ukigumo), on the other hand, told the story of a well-educated and hardworking young man from an aristocratic family in the Tokugawa era who failed in both his career and love because he refused to be a sycophantic social climber in Meiji society.Footnote ¹² The protagonists in both stories were young men of promise who either graduated from a hyperselective university or were born into an established family. Most common Japanese youth had no access to the privileges enjoyed by either of them. Nevertheless, the protagonists’ struggles against the social barriers that belied the premise of modernization were shared by all the commoners in Meiji Japan. Even those who were wealthy enough to study at the bourgeoning private colleges faced serious discriminations compared with their counterparts from imperial universities on an already oversaturated job market. A journal, The Youth of Japan (Nihon no Shōnen), claimed in 1891 that private college graduates in the fields of politics and economics had only a 50 percent employment rate.Footnote ¹³ These jobless graduates were joined by a much larger number of rural and urban youth who could not afford higher education but still held high expectations for their own future inspired by the spirit of egalitarianism.

Tokutomi blamed this lack of opportunities for the commoners on the aristocrats who would not let go of their stranglehold on the country’s politics and economy. In his essay “Youth of the New Japan” (“Shin Nihon no Seinen”), Tokutomi called those with inherited privileges “old men of Tenpō” who clung to traditional values and made no contribution to the nation’s advancement.Footnote ¹⁴ In his view, these aristocrats should yield to the flow of history and make way for the commoners, who were the young and progressive harbingers of the future.

How, then, did Tokutomi envisage a society of commoners? It was not only an egalitarian society that gave political rights to the common people through electoral democracy, but also one that provided a fair platform where ordinary men could achieve economic success by their own efforts. In order to realize this goal, he argued, society needed to operate according to the principles of self-independence and self-responsibility. Unlike the old shizoku and kazoku aristocracies who lived as social parasites, everyone in the nation of heimin should earn their own living. “Their brows are wet with honest sweat … and they do not owe to any man.”Footnote ¹⁵ Tokutomi deemed the desire for a career (shokugyō no kannen) so important in the formation of independent subjects of the nation that he went as far as calling it the “new religion of Japan.”Footnote ¹⁶

The ideal image of the heimin, therefore, was the working class that emerged from Japan’s fledgling capitalist society in the late nineteenth century. Friend of the Nation described them as “workers” (rōdōsha). Accordingly, the publication was sensitive to class-based exploitation and sympathetic to the working class’s poverty. An 1891 article, for example, argued that the working class was of a noble character and should receive fair payments for their labor. In order to transform itself into a nation of heimin, Japan should emulate the model of the Western countries where, according to the article, the workers were treated well and allowed to have a share of the profits.Footnote ¹⁷

Tokutomi’s promotion of the rights of the commoners was closely associated with his vision for Japan’s empire building. The economic independence of the commoners and their rise to power as a sociopolitical force in domestic Japan mirrored the Japanese empire’s claim of its own rights of expansion on a global stage that was previously dominated by the Western imperial powers. The development of a heimin nation, Tokutomi argued, would better prepare Japan to survive and prosper in a social Darwinist world. In the book On the Expansion of the Great Japan, he reasoned that the expansion of an empire was dependent upon the expansion of its individual subjects. He encouraged Japan’s commoners to follow the examples of the British, the Chinese, and the Russians to migrate to every corner of the world as the pioneers of Japanese expansion.

The First Sino-Japanese War and the Heimin Expansion

Prior to the First Sino-Japanese War, support for the heimin discourse was limited to Minyū Sha members and their intellectual followers who had few interactions with the working class. After Japan’s victory over Qing China, however, the heimin discourse became closely associated with Japan’s burgeoning labor movement. This movement arose amid the boom of Japanese industrial development triggered by the Sino-Japanese War. Tokutomi Sōhō’s proto-socialist ideas of nation building were picked up, though in revised forms, by the socialist thinkers and activists in their campaigns calling for political and economic rights of the workers. The heimin-centered discourse of Japanese expansion was eventually materialized in the Christian Socialists’ campaigns for moving working-class youth to the United States.

A year after the end of the First Sino-Japanese War, Tokutomi lamented the loss of Japan’s “national energy”: the Japanese policymakers ended the war without capturing the Qing Empire’s capital of Peking (now Beijing), a decision that destroyed the Japanese populace’s wartime passion for expansion and progress. Deluded by the illusion of peace, he observed, young people gave up their noble goals of studying politics, religion, science, and philosophy and turned to moneymaking.Footnote ¹⁸ In fact, Japanese nationalism and expansionism did not come to an end after the conclusion of the First Sino-Japanese War – it simply manifested itself in a different form. However, Tokutomi was correct to notice that the heimin discourse had taken a decidedly materialistic turn.

The common Japanese economic optimism and thirst for monetary gains, stimulated by war’s end, was demonstrated by the sudden popularity of business schools. While they had a hard time filling their seats before the war, these business schools began to enjoy full registration, and some were even able to admit students selectively right after the war.Footnote ¹⁹ The decade following the war also witnessed a boom in writings on personal economic success in print media. Business Japan (Jitsugyō no Nihon), a journal aimed at selling business courses to students without a formal education, was founded in 1897.Footnote ²⁰ Magazines of different ideological stances and backgrounds, such as the Sun (Taiyō) and the Central Review (Chūō Kōron), introduced special columns that published rags-to-riches stories and tips on moneymaking ventures. The most widely circulated journal representative of this era was Seikō (Success), founded by Murakami Shūnzō in 1902. Its circulation reached fifteen thousand within three years.Footnote ²¹

The discourse of success embodied by Seikō and other magazines of the day was directly derived from the idea of commonerism promoted by Tokutomi Sōhō. Like Tokutomi, Murakami characterized the heimin as a young and progressive group that should replace the “conservative” old men and lead the nation to a better future.Footnote ²² Like the Hokkaido expansionists decades ago, Murakami was promoting a story of personal achievement. However, this time the protagonist was no longer the declassed shizoku who would regain their previous honor and dignity: now the common youth, who were born without any privileges, would lift themselves up through hard work.

The flood of literature on material success was in direct contrast to the stark economic reality. The First Sino-Japanese War did stimulate military and civil industry expansions, marked by a rapid increase in the numbers of factories and wage laborers. Yet it was soon followed by a severe depression that resulted in a far-reaching wave of bankruptcy and unemployment. Income declines and deteriorating working conditions led to the rise of the labor movement. The backbone of this movement, the young working class, was also the main audience of the discourse of materialistic success. As its celebration of moneymaking spoke to the wage laborers’ hope for financial advancement, its call for more employment opportunities for the common youth also matched the working class’s resentment of class exploitation and economic inequality.

While Tokutomi expressed sympathy toward the laborers, this materialistic version of commonerism was associated more closely with the working class and converged with Japanese socialist thoughts at the turn of the twentieth century. Unlike the later wave of socialist movements that directly challenged the existing political structure after the Russo-Japanese War, this early version of socialism, while critical about the political status quo, did not seek to upend it. Influenced by Protestant Christianity,Footnote ²³ Japanese Socialists of the day considered self-help as the ultimate solution to working-class poverty. They sought to bridge the social gap through interclass reconciliation as well as religious and moral suasion on the poor. Leading socialists such as Katayama Sen and Sakai Toshihiko were key supporters of the idea of self-help and published articles in Seikō to promote materialistic success. Rōdō Sekai (Labor World) – the mouthpiece of the labor movement of the day – and Seikō also carried advertisements for each other.Footnote ²⁴

In the heimin thinkers’ agenda of nation building at the turn of the twentieth century, the ideal subjects of the empire were no longer the shizoku but the common working-class youth epitomized by work-study students (kugakusei), poor boys who worked their own way through school.Footnote ²⁵ Like the shizoku expansionists in earlier decades, some heimin ideologues also embraced overseas migration as the foundation of Japan’s nation making and empire building. The idea of Malthusian expansionism, lamenting the overcrowdedness of the archipelago on the one hand and emphasizing the importance of migration in producing desirable subjects on the other, continued to guide their various agendas for expansion. Attributing the lack of opportunities for common youth to the nation’s growing size of surplus population, heimin expansionists believed that overseas migration would allow ambitious young men to achieve economic independence. Convinced that the future of the Japanese empire lay in frontier conquest and territorial expansion, they expected that these common youths would rise to positions of leadership in the empire by building settler colonies abroad.

Resurgence of Japanese Migration to the United States

Japan’s victory over Qing China in the First Sino-Japanese War relieved Japan’s racial anxiety caused by the Chinese Exclusion Act in the United States, which previously had led the shizoku expansionists to explore alternative migration destinations. The war, as Tokutomi observed, cemented the Japanese hierarchical superiority over the Chinese in the racial imaginations of Japanese expansionism.Footnote ²⁶ Tokutomi emphasized that the war opened the doors for Japan’s further expansion not only in Asia but also globally.Footnote ²⁷ In other words, the war was fought for Japan’s global expansion and for its confidence to do so.Footnote ²⁸

Tokutomi’s intellectual friend Takekoshi Yosaburō penned an article in Friend of the Nation at the end of the war, inviting his countrymen to consider, without regional and racial bias, Japan’s position in the world.Footnote ²⁹ A graduate from the Keiō School,Footnote ³⁰ Takekoshi inherited the school founder Fukuzawa Yukichi’s faith in de-Asianization. He believed that the Japanese should abandon the labels of Asia and the yellow race and “stand at the top of the world” by absorbing the essence of both East and West.Footnote ³¹ In 1896, a year after the war’s end, Takekoshi founded the journal Japan of the World (Sekai no Nihon), repositioning Japan in the hierarchy of world politics as a force on equal footing with the Western powers. For this venture he received financial support from two politicians who were involved in Japan’s diplomatic mission to revise its unequal treaties with the Western powers, Saionji Kinmochi and Mutsu Munemitsu.Footnote ³²

This reembrace of the West was accompanied by a fundamental challenge to the Seikyō Sha thinkers’ discourse of racial conflict. While Seikyō Sha intellectuals believed in a destined rivalry between the yellow races and the white races, between East (Asia) and West. Takekoshi, on the other hand, criticized the definition of Asia as a culturally or biologically homogenous racial entity:

Takekoshi’s deconstruction of Asia’s racial homogeneity went hand in hand with his emphasis of the uniqueness of the Japanese race in relation to the rest of Asia. “Japan,” he explained, “is geographically separated from the Asian continent and is close to the heart of the Pacific Ocean. Its civilization is not that of the Mongolians but an independent one synthesizing the essence of different cultures in the world.”

This revision of Japan’s racial identity, made possible by victory over Qing China, served to conceptually delink Japan from Asia in general and China in particular. It allowed Japanese expansionists to draw a distinction between Japanese migration to the United States and the tragedy of Chinese exclusion therefrom. They believed that the Japanese were people of a master race like Westerners; as such, they would be welcomed by the white Americans in the United States, just as Japan would be accepted as an equal member in the club of civilized empires.Footnote ³⁴ Fukuzawa Yukichi, for example, resumed his promotion of overseas migration in 1896. In an article urging his countrymen to build “new homes overseas,” he confirmed that the war had altered Japan’s racial identity: “The single fact that Japan has defeated the ancient and great country of China has changed the minds of the conservative, diffident Japanese people.” Fukuzawa further proudly announced that “in capability and in vigor, [the Japanese] are not inferior to any race in the world.”Footnote ³⁵

Figure 3.1 This is the cover of an issue of a popular magazine, Shōnen Sekai (The World of the Youth), published in 1895. The cover celebrates Japan’s victory in the Sino-Japanese War. With the world map at the center, this picture also illustrates how this victory ushered in passion among Japanese intellectuals for the empire’s global expansion.

Thus, the rise of heimin as a sociopolitical force and the reimagining of the Japanese racial identity after the First Sino-Japanese War made the United States once more a favorable migration destination. Japan’s imperial-minded socialists connected their domestic sociopolitical campaigns to the mission of empire building. They believed that relocating the common youth to the United States would bridge the domestic social gap while contributing to their agenda of building Japan as a heimin-led egalitarian empire. The rest of this chapter analyzes three most representative and influential migration promoters of the day: Katayama Sen, Abe Isoo, and Shimanuki Hyōdayū. By examining the convergence and divergence of their migration-related ideas and activities, the following pages shed light on the different ways in which this wave of American migration was connected with the process of Japanese nation building and imperial expansion in Asia.

Divergence and Convergence in the Discourses of Heimin Expansion to the United States

The mid-1890s witnessed a proliferation of private migration companies in Japan. The increase in the number of trans-Pacific sea routes after the Sino-Japanese War allowed many of these companies to include the United States on their commercial maps.Footnote ³⁶ These for-profit companies targeted the rural masses, individuals who usually had to take a huge risk by selling their properties in order to pay for their passage. Equally profit-minded, these rural migrants simply hoped to find temporary work as laborers abroad in order to lift themselves – as well as their families back in Japan – out of destitution.Footnote ³⁷

In response to a series of anti-Japanese campaigns on the American West Coast targeting the migrant laborers since the early 1890s, the Japanese government enacted the Emigrant Protection Law in 1896. It was aimed at preventing “undesirable” migrants from entering the United States so that they would not bring “shame” upon the empire. It imposed financial requirements on both migration companies and the migrants themselves, hoping this would remove the uneducated and purely money-seeking laborers from the migrant pool. Within a few years, however, the imperial government realized that this law was all too easily circumvented, thus in 1900 it began to limit the number of passports issued for those who wished to travel to the United States.Footnote ³⁸

The discourse of commoner migration to the United States emerged at this moment. The heimin expansionists were critical of the government’s restriction on overseas migration, considering it to be a shortsighted policy that dampened the common youth’s expansionist spirit or, worse, a malicious strategy of the bourgeois state designed to confine the working class to perpetual domestic exploitation. However, they shared the government’s view that the most desirable migrants were not the rural masses living in absolute poverty. While encouraging the migrants to accept laborer jobs, they believed that migration to the United States should not be solely for economic survival. These migrants should have long-term goals of self-improvement such as seeking higher education or business success; furthermore, they needed to connect their lives with the well-being of Japan. They also agreed with the government in that the for-profit migration companies should be blamed for indiscriminately sending “undesirable” subjects abroad, thereby stirring up anti-Japanese sentiments on the other side of the Pacific. Their own heimin migration campaigns, in contrast, would help the truly promising youth in Japan to circumvent government restriction and rescue them from the exploitative migration companies.

The thinkers and promoters of heimin migration were nearly unanimous in their Malthusian interpretation of Japan’s demographic trends. Like the shizoku expansionists in the previous decades, they appreciated Japan’s rapid population growth as a sign of swelling national strength. At the same time, the archipelago’s incapacity to accommodate this growing population made overseas migration both necessary and unavoidable. The heimin expansionists also integrated the logic of Malthusian expansionism into specific criticisms against Japan’s existing political and social order. Either sympathizers of the labor movement or outright socialists, they were also influenced by Protestant Christianity. They did not seek to fundamentally alter the structural foundations of the nation but strove for reconciliation and reformation, avoiding serious conflict rather than promoting it. Migration to the United States became a key component in their respective blueprints for transforming Japan into a commoner-centered nation and empire.

Different agendas of nation/empire building and different practical approaches shaped the heimin promoters’ interpretation of Japanese demography and the meaning of migration to America in divergent ways. The following paragraphs offer an analysis of the thoughts of three leading promoters – Katayama Sen, Abe Isoo, and Shimanuki Hyōdayū. During this wave of migration movement, each of them championed a specific vision about how migration would transform Japan into a heimin nation and empire.

Katayama Sen, a renowned leader of Japan’s socialist movement in the early twentieth century, followed the classic path of a struggling student in his own youth. He migrated to the United States in 1884 and worked to pay for his education. Having joined the socialist cause while in America, he returned to Japan right after the First Sino-Japanese War. He was a vanguard of the fledgling labor movement, working to organize labor unions and demanding improved working conditions and better pay for workers. From 1901 to 1907, he published a number of books and numerous articles in the mouthpiece of labor movement in Japan, Labor World (Rōdō Sekai), and beyond. In these writings he urged the common youth to migrate to the United States, offering them guidance through every step of the migration process, from how to circumvent governmental restriction to exploring job options and educational opportunities in America. To put his ideas into practice, he also established the Association for Migration to the United States (Tobei Kyōkai) and provided firsthand assistance to the migrants.

The existing scholarship has generally treated Katayama Sen’s promotion of migration and his socialist career as separate from each other, but his initiative in American migration was crucial to understanding his approach to the socialist movement in Japan at the turn of the twentieth century. Katayama believed that overpopulation within the archipelago had partially enabled class-based exploitation. The rapid growth of population caused domestic inflation, an increase in landless peasants, and rising unemployment.Footnote ³⁹ The shortage of food and jobs forced the struggling working class to accept jobs with extremely low payment. Katayama argued that the government’s restriction on migration served only the interests of the rich: it was aimed to confine the working-class young men within the country, where opportunities for education and employment were scarce, so that the rich could better take advantage of this condition to exploit them.Footnote ⁴⁰

Katayama had little trust in the state, and his eventual goal for the labor movement was not to build a socialist society centered around the governmental power.Footnote ⁴¹ However, he did share his contemporary Japanese socialists’ conservative stance, seeking to bridge the social gap not through revolution but by promoting ways for the working class to help themselves. While the formation of labor unions would strengthen the working class in general and put laborers in a better position vis-à-vis their employers, migrating to the United States, Katayama believed, would help them to escape capitalist exploitation in Japan altogether.

For Katayama and other migration promoters of the day, everything in the United States stood in glaring contrast to the miserable sociopolitical conditions in Japan. What’s more, with what he described as the vast, empty, and unexplored land on its West Coast, the United States could easily accommodate hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Japan.Footnote ⁴² Katayama further idealized the United States as the model of a socialist nation, a place where the role of labor was highly respected and the laborers were well paid. American labor unions were strong and their interests were protected by politicians and intellectuals. As a result, the United States was a nation where common people could make their own way by honest labor and succeed with a spirit of self-help. Japanese mass media of the day also portrayed rich American businessmen as sympathetic figures – unlike the selfish and bloodsucking entrepreneurs in Japan, American businessmen treated their employees well. They celebrated rags-to-riches success stories of Andrew Carnegie and Cornelius Vanderbilt as examples of not only self-made men but also those of kind philanthropists.Footnote ⁴³

While Katayama saw assisting heimin youth to migrate to the United States as a way to fight the state’s oppression of the working class, the prominent social reformer and politician Abe Isoo, on the other hand, believed that the Japanese government should take the lead in guiding migration to the United States. In contrast to Katayama, who distrusted the government, Abe believed that the welfare state was key to the formation of a socialist nation. Abe agreed with Katayama that overpopulation worsened class exploitation and exacerbated Japan’s social problems; however, he argued that the condition of overpopulation meant there was a pressing need for state-centered socialist reforms.Footnote ⁴⁴ He urged the government to take up the responsibility to improve the livelihood of common people. Migration was an effective way to provide employment and educational opportunities to members in a society plagued by overpopulation and inflation, thus the government should lift its restriction on migration and encourage the commoners to migrate overseas by providing both guidance and subsidization.Footnote ⁴⁵

While Katayama and Abe represented two divergent perspectives on the role of the Japanese government in their socialist visions of nation building, Shimanuki Hyōdayū emphasized the importance of Christianity in his blueprint for Japan’s future. A Protestant priest and an enthusiast supporter of the Salvation Army’s socialist approach to evangelicalism, Shimanuki saw social philanthropy and Christianity-based moral reform as two sides of the same coin.Footnote ⁴⁶ While sharing other socialists’ concerns about social inequality and poverty in Japan, he sought to combine materialistic solution with spiritual salvation. He established the Tokyo Labor Society (Tokyo Rōdō Kai) in 1897, later renamed as the Japanese Striving Society (Nippon Rikkō Kai). This organization was aimed at providing both financial aid and moral suasion to struggling students, whom he saw as the future of the nation.Footnote ⁴⁷

Returning from a trip to the United States in 1901, Shimanuki was convinced that migration abroad, especially to the United States, was an effective way to realize his goal of national salvation.Footnote ⁴⁸ Describing Korea as a hopeless and dying country, he warned that Japan was on the verge of a similar crisis. Overpopulation in Japan not only had enlarged the social gap and caused poverty but also would lead to a decline of the national spirit. Japan would follow the way of Korea if its young men refused to seek solutions abroad.Footnote ⁴⁹ The United States was a country with vast, empty lands as well as many job opportunities. What’s more, it was the center of both Western civilization and Christianity. A move to the United States would both lift the Japanese youth out of poverty and save their soul by converting them to Christianity. Shimanuki referred to this process as “spiritual and physical salvation” (reiniku kyūsai), a phrase that became the Striving Society’s enduring motto. This dual salvation of the common youth, he believed, would lead to the eventual salvation of the nation.Footnote ⁵⁰

Figure 3.2 This is a symbol of the Striving Society that appeared in 1905. It connected the words of American migration (tobei), work-study (kugaku), success (seikō), and aspiration (risshi) together around the concept of striving (rikkō) at the center. Rikkō (Striving) 3, no. 1 (January 1, 1905): 1.

Differing understanding of the predicament of the heimin class shaped the agendas of these three migration promoters in divergent ways. However, as all three were converts to Protestant Christianity and at times spoke together at public events in support of labor movement in Japan, their ideas had definite points of convergence. On their global map of Japanese expansion, the United States was no doubt the most desirable destination. In their minds, Taiwan, the Korean Peninsula, and Manchuria, areas controlled by or under the influence of Japan’s expanding empire, were already densely occupied by their native peoples. The local labor costs were generally low; thus it only made sense for entrepreneurs to move to these territories. The United States, on the other hand, was the ideal destination for the common youth because its labor market was favorable to the Japanese.

Yet like their shizoku counterparts in earlier decades, these heimin migration advocates did not see migration merely as a form of poverty relief. They believed that their project would mold migrants into model imperial subjects and trailblazers of expansion.Footnote ⁵¹ It only made sense, then, that migration should be a selective process. Though these advocates professed to be speaking for the working class, they nevertheless opposed temporary labor migration (dekasegi). Japanese temporary laborers usually made their way to the United States through migration companies or labor contractors; as most of them came from an impoverished rural background, they aimed only to make some quick money within a short period before returning to Japan. In the eyes of heimin expansionists, these temporary laborers had a dangerous resemblance to the “uncivilized” Chinese immigrants because they lacked in everything from education and social manners to long-term commitment.Footnote ⁵² They blamed these temporary laborers for sabotaging Japan’s national image aboard and causing anti-Japanese sentiment in the United States, leading the Japanese race down an ignominious path that might end in racial exclusion as the Chinese had suffered.

Those who did qualify for the migration project were the common youth, endowed with a certain amount of financial resources and education and who had a strong will for personal success and ambition for national expansion. The expansionists urged working, as laboring would be only their first step to starting their life in the United States, one that would allow them to achieve financial independence. Their personal growth, moreover, would not end there: Katayama expected these youth to replicate his own experience by pursuing higher education,Footnote ⁵³ Shimanuki wanted their materialistic achievement to lead them to Christianity,Footnote ⁵⁴ and Abe believed that life in the United States would positively influence these Japanese subjects due to their physical proximity to Western civilization.Footnote ⁵⁵

While temporary laborers were considered undesirable and were likened to the excluded Chinese immigrants, the desirable candidates were expected to be colonial migrants (shokumin) with a commitment to long-term settlement. Heimin expansionists wanted them to build permanent communities in the United States as a part of Japan’s global expansion in the mode of British settler colonialism. They hoped that Japanese immigrants would be able to establish themselves as equal members of American society, thereby gaining political rights and economic benefits.

In the heimin expansionists’ blueprint for Japanese community building in the United States, the role of women was as important as that of men. Since the end of the 1880s, Japanese prostitutes had begun to arrive on the American West Coast, driven by their own poverty at home and the demand for commercial sex by the predominately male Japanese immigrant population across the Pacific. The expansionists condemned these prostitutes for bringing shame to the Japanese empire just like the low-class temporary Japanese laborers.Footnote ⁵⁶ Katayama believed that prostitution was a result of the lack of education. To represent the civilized image of the empire abroad, Katayama urged that instead of prostitutes, more well-educated Japanese women should migrate to the United States. For Katayama, the arrival of educated women was also crucial for Japanese American community building, because he believed that the immoral behaviors committed by Japanese men in the United States, such as gambling and frequenting brothels, were due to the lack of women. These women of good nature and culture would thus improve the ethics of Japanese American communities in general by regulating the mind and behavior of Japanese men.Footnote ⁵⁷ From a similar perspective, Abe Isoo called for a governmental ban on the migration of prostitutes to the United States and the formation of special organizations to facilitate Japanese women’s trans-Pacific migration and their adjustment to the new life in the United States.Footnote ⁵⁸

The migrants’ success in the United States, in the minds of the expansionists, would both increase Japan’s political influence and stimulate the Japanese economy by enhancing bilateral trade. In addition to bringing economic benefits to Japan, heimin migration to the United States also provided ideological justification for the empire’s expansion in Asia. Abe Isoo, for example, described Japan as “the broker of civilization,” buying it from the United States and then selling it to China and Korea; it was thus natural for the Japanese to hold a base at the Western end of the North American continent.Footnote ⁵⁹ While the United States had a mission of bringing the blessing of civilization to Japan, Abe argued, Japan had a similar obligation to spread the same blessing to the Asian continent.Footnote ⁶⁰ Shimanuki Hyōdayū also believed that the migrants would be made into better Japanese subjects once they moved to the United States and converted to Christianity; thus migration was the first step in the empire’s mission to transplant progress to East Asia.Footnote ⁶¹ To Shimanuki, who began his religious career as a missionary in Korea, the philanthropic assistance he provided to the struggling students was a way to achieve his ultimate goal of evangelizing Asia.Footnote ⁶² The prosperity of the Japanese communities in the United States, in terms of both economic success and spiritual salvation, was crucial in justifying Japan’s acceptance of the global hierarchy arranged according to the degree of Westernization and legitimizing the empire’s colonial expansion in Asia.

The Decline of Japanese Labor Migration to the United States

The heimin migration discourse peaked around the time of the Russo-Japanese War. In the minds of the Japanese expansionists, a victory over the Russians would give Japan yet another bargaining chip during its negotiation with the Western powers for global expansion. Foreseeing Japan’s victory, an article on Striving (Rikkō), one of the official journals of the Japanese Striving Society, predicted that the war would bring a great opportunity to boost Japanese migration to the United States. The author argued that Japan’s victory would end anti-Japanese discrimination in the United States because the Americans would finally recognize Japan as a strong power and treat the Japanese immigrants with respect.Footnote ⁶³ A few days after the war ended, Abe published his most important work for the promotion of America-bound migration, urging Japan’s government and social leaders to work together in order to build a “new Japan in North America” (hokubei no shin nihon). He assured his readers that the US government, fearful of a powerful Japan’s reprisal, would not dare to exclude Japanese immigrants. Moreover, as Japan had now achieved effective hegemony in East Asia, the empire could claim its own version of the Monroe Doctrine and exclude the interests of the United States from Manchuria and the Korean Peninsula.Footnote ⁶⁴ Such optimism led to a sharp increase in the number of Japanese migrants to the United States after the Russo-Japanese War: the numbers of Japanese who migrated to the US mainland from Japan and Hawaiʻi in 1906 and 1907 more than doubled from their prewar levels.Footnote ⁶⁵

The eventual fate of Japanese migration to the United States, however, did not bear out such optimism. Contrary to Japanese expectations, the Russo-Japanese War triggered an unprecedented wave of Japanese exclusion campaigns in the United States. Japan’s defeat of Russia ironically served as fresh ammo for the racial exclusionists who called for keeping the uncivilized and aggressive Japanese out of the white men’s world. The decision by the municipal government of San Francisco in 1906 to exclude Japanese children from public schools demonstrated that anti-Japanese sentiment had gained support from the policymakers in the Golden State. In September 1907, a long article appeared in the New York Times titled “Japan’s Invasion of the White Man’s World,” describing the Japanese as inassimilable intruders into American society. The Malthusian interpretation of Japanese demography, cited by the Japanese expansionists to justify their migration agendas, was used by the article as a reason to exclude the Japanese. It argued that having failed to export migrants to Hokkaido, Taiwan, Korea, and Manchuria, Japan was now sending its surplus population to America, the white men’s domain. The Russo-Japanese War, the article warned, showed that Japan was a dangerous threat. If given the opportunity, it might invade America by force. The Japanese immigrants who refused to assimilate into US society would serve as Japan’s vanguards in such an invasion.Footnote ⁶⁶

This lengthy report showed that anti-Japanese sentiment had spread beyond the American West Coast and gained a nationwide audience. Its political influence resulted in the Gentlemen’s Agreement between Japan and the United States that came into effect in 1908, in accordance with which the Japanese government voluntarily stopped issuing new passports to those who planned to migrate to the United States as laborers. In exchange, the Roosevelt administration promised to not impose official restrictions on Japanese immigration and also managed to remove the ban on Japanese immigrant children from attending public schools in San Francisco through a negotiation with local officials.

Based on the Gentlemen’s Agreement, the Japanese government enacted a near-complete ban on migration from Japan to the US mainland.Footnote ⁶⁷ There were only a few exceptions to this ban, including remigrants, family members of migrants already in the United States, as well as government-approved agricultural settlers. As a result, the main body of trans-Pacific migration became the so-called picture brides, young women who entered the United States as the wives of Japanese immigrants already in the United States. They were urged to project a civilized image of the empire and foster Japanese community building in American society. The male-centered commonerist discourse of previous years, however, had died out due to this drastic policy change.

The Gentlemen’s Agreement thus brought the decade-long wave of heimin migration to the United States to a sudden end. Hoping this unexpected roadblock would be quickly removed via diplomatic renegotiations, migration promoters continued to mobilize their countrymen with rosy images of the United States. However, the demises of Amerika (the successor of Tobei Zasshi) and Tobei Shinpō in 1909, respectively the mouthpieces of Katayama and Shimanuki’s migration campaigns,Footnote ⁶⁸ marked the total collapse of such an illusion.

The end of labor migration to the United States mirrored the decline of heimin expansionism in the late 1900s. The Gentlemen’s Agreement forced Katayama and Abe to give up their plans of turning Japan into a heimin-centered nation and empire through migration. The powerful Hibiya Park rallies and riots between 1905 and 1908 also convinced them that making structural changes in domestic Japan was actually possible, though they disagreed completely as to how to bring these changes about – or indeed what these changes were.

Katayama began to follow a path similar to his radical comrade Kōtoku Shūsui. In 1909 he began to criticize the Christian churches in Japan for being dominated by the rich and thus lacking the initiative to solve the country’s social and economic issues.Footnote ⁶⁹ He abandoned his Christian faith and turned to materialist Marxism as the ultimate solution, seeking a more radical method to achieve his goals. He was arrested for leading a labor strike in Tokyo in 1911, the same year that Kōtoku Shūsui was executed for a failed plot to assassinate the Meiji Emperor. After being released, Katayama went to the United States again and took part in the labor movement in Japanese American communities. Inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, he became a Leninist. He participated in the international communist movement and was eventually buried in the Kremlin.

Abe Isoo, on the other hand, continued to regard overpopulation as the central issue that blocked Japan’s path to a better future. With the doors to the United States now shut, he turned to promoting contraception and played a key role in Japan’s birth control and eugenic movement during the 1920s and 1930s. While the exclusionists in the United States taught the Japanese expansionists that migration to the white men’s domain was impossible, it was another American, Margaret Sanger, who provided the Japanese with the “correct” solution to their “problem” of overpopulation. While the idea of birth control was introduced to the Japanese much earlier, it never gained nationwide support until Sanger visited Japan in 1922. Celebrated as the “Black Ship of Taishō,”Footnote ⁷⁰ Sanger’s speaking tour in Japan vested the advocates of birth control and eugenics in Japan with a degree of much-wanted legitimacy: progress and science.Footnote ⁷¹ In the year of Sanger’s visit, Abe published the book On Birth Control (Sanji Seigen Ron) in which he turned away from his earlier criticism of capitalism and class-based exploitation. He now argued that overpopulation was the fundamental cause of social issues such as labor disputes, rural poverty, and gender inequality in Japan as well as the world at large. Contraception, accordingly, was the ultimate solution.Footnote ⁷²

However, Abe’s agenda of population control was not simply aimed at reducing the birth rate. Abe, who subscribed to Sanger’s idea of “more children from the fit, less from the unfit,”Footnote ⁷³ had a clear eugenic teleology. He believed that the American exclusion of Japanese immigrants was caused by the migrants’ undesirability,Footnote ⁷⁴ and he called for improving the quality of the Japanese race by preventing the reproduction of the “unfit” who either had genetic flaws or did not possess enough resources. It was not uncontrolled population growth but the selective reproduction, coupled with quality control, that would lead Japan to success on the world stage.Footnote ⁷⁵

In the same year, Abe put his ideas into practice as the director of the Japanese Birth Control Study Society (Nihon Sanji Chōsetsu Kenkyūkai). Labor union leader Suzuki Bunji, whose moderate stance represented that of the labor movement in the 1920s and 1930s in general, became Abe’s loyal supporter. Under what was insightfully defined by Andrew Gordon as “imperial democracy,” Japan’s labor unions at the time did not wish to pose radical challenges to the status quo. The labor movement sought to strengthen its political power by forming alliances with bourgeois parties; it celebrated imperial wars and expansion.Footnote ⁷⁶ These moderate socialists and labor activists were soon joined by leading feminists and prominent physicians. Though they disagreed with each other on a multitude of issues, all of them considered eugenic-oriented contraception as an effective way to realize their social agendas. Together they constituted the main force of the birth control movement in Japan between the 1920s and 1930s.Footnote ⁷⁷

Conclusion

“Fighting with the Qing was fighting with the world.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Tokutomi’s contemporary observation insightfully captured the fundamental changes the First Sino-Japanese War brought to Japanese expansionism: it ushered in the resurgence of Japanese migration to the United States and the rise of heimin expansionist discourse. This chapter has argued that the emergence of heimin as a sociopolitical force in Japan, stimulated by the First Sino-Japanese War, shifted the focus of migration-driven expansion from the declassed shizoku to working-class youth. The outcome of this war also convinced the Japanese of their racial superiority over the Chinese, creating an illusion among the expansionists that the Japanese, members of a civilized empire and a master race in their own right, could be treated by the Westerners as their equals. Buoyed by such optimism, they once again turned their gaze to the United States as the ideal destination for Japanese migration.

In 1907, Kōtoku Shūsui, a leader of Japan’s socialist and anarchist movement, published the book Commonerism (Heiminshugi), outlining his political agenda for turning Japan into a nation of commoners. A pioneering critic of imperialism and a strong opponent of war and expansion, Kōtoku was on the very opposite end of the ideological spectrum from his contemporary Tokutomi Sōhō. Nevertheless, Kōtoku’s vision of a heimin nation resembled Tokutomi’s own in terms of calling for the heimin to have political rights, adopting a sympathetic approach to the issue of working-class poverty, and celebrating historical progress.

As this chapter has shown, the leaders of Japan’s socialist movement at the turn of the twentieth century became the loyal heirs of Tokutomi’s heimin-centered nationalism and expansionism. They connected the pursuit of political rights for commoners with improving the economic conditions of the working class. The majority of the socialist leaders of the day did not adopt Kōtoku’s revolutionary stance; they sought moderate ways to achieve their goals, ready to work with the political establishment and lending their support to imperial expansion.

In the first decade of the twentieth century, migration to the United States served as a way for socialists of different viewpoints to realize their particular blueprints of Japanese nation/empire building. As adherents of Malthusian expansionism, Katayama Sen, Abe Isoo, and Shimanuki Hyōdayū all blamed overpopulation for widening the social gap and causing poverty in Japan. Seeing the United States as a land of boundless wealth, a heaven of laborers, and the center of world civilization, they hoped migration to the United States would save Japan’s working class from exploitation and poverty. Moreover, they envisioned that these migrants would be turned into model subjects who could fulfill the Japanese empire’s own Manifest Destiny.

Racism on the other side of the Pacific led to the decline of Japanese labor migration to the United States at the end of the 1900s. While they subsequently followed divergent paths due to their different approaches to socialism, both Katayama Sen and Abe Isoo ceased their promotion of migration to the United States.Footnote ⁷⁹ Shimanuki, however, continued to help young men to move to the United States via smuggling. Starting in the mid-1900s, reports on the Japanese Striving Society’s members’ expeditions to Korea, China, and Latin America began to appear in the society’s official journals such as Rikkō and Kyūsei. While maintaining that the United States was the most ideal destination, Shimanuki began to encourage his followers to explore other parts of the world for migration purposes.Footnote ⁸⁰

The first decade of the twentieth century also witnessed a short-lived campaign of Japanese farmer migration in Texas. Like the labor migration to the US West Coast, the farmer migration was another campaign in the wave of heimin expansion. But different from the labor migration that was centered on the urban working class, the backbone of this campaign of migration was Japanese farmers, the nonprivileged but politically conscious rural commoners. This campaign was also a joint product of the anti-Japanese sentiment in the American West and the rise of the Japanese agrarianism at the turn of the twentieth century. Chapter 4 examines the Texas migration campaign and explains the significance of this short-lived campaign in the history of Japanese migration-driven expansion.

Figure 3.3 This is a symbol of the Striving Society that appeared in 1909. Compared to the one from 1905, “colonial migration” (shokumin) has replaced “American migration” (tobei). This demonstrates that after the enactment of the Gentlemen’s Agreement the Striving Society no longer considered the United States as the only ideal destination for migration and began to explore the possibility of migration to other parts of the world. Kyūsei 5, no. 81 (November 1909): 1.

The Debate on the Role of Agriculture

Both laborers and farmers were key components of heimin, the class of commoners with no inherited privilege in Meiji Japan. The growth of their presence in the public discourse heralded the decline of shizoku’s political influence. In the eyes of heimin activists, there was a substantial overlap between the categories of farmers and laborers, as migrants from the countryside constituted the main body of the burgeoning working class in the cities. The majority of migrants who made their way overseas by following the teaching of heimin expansionists like Tokutomi Sōhō, Katayama Sen, and Shimanuki Hyōdayū were young men who had grown up in the countryside.

However, the respective rise of laborers and farmers as political forces revealed different social changes within the Japanese society. The calls for labor migration reflected the growth of the Japanese urban working class at the end of the nineteenth century. The emergence of farmers in the discourse of Japanese expansionism, on the other hand, was a result of agriculture’s shrinking importance in an increasingly industrialized empire.

In the minds of Meiji empire builders, the agriculture sector was an essential contributor to Japan’s quest of modernization but not a direct beneficiary. The passage of the Land Tax Reform Law of 1873 legalized land ownership, allowing lands to be freely bought and sold. The government’s land survey that came with the law registered a substantial amount of new land to be taxed, and the government’s land tax income increased by 48 percent.Footnote ³ For most of the Meiji period, the agricultural sector remained the biggest source of the state’s income, which in turn was used to finance industrial development. The privatization and marketization of land resulted in a concentration of landownership. The Matsukata Deflation in 1881 accelerated this process by causing a sharp drop in the prices of rice and silk. As a result, between 1884 and 1886, 70 to 80 percent of farming households in the Japanese countryside were in debt.Footnote ⁴ Many owner-farmers had no choice but to sell their land in order to pay off debts. After losing their land, they either stayed in the countryside as tenant farmers or migrated to urban areas to seek employment as wage laborers. Japan in the last two decades of the nineteenth century thus experienced both a rapid shrinkage of the owner-farmer population and an increase in landlord-tenant disputes.

The outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War dealt yet another blow to Japanese agriculture. The war boosted industrial development and lured even more people away from the countryside. The growing urban population and the rising standard of living turned Japan from a rice exporter into a rice importer. From the late 1890s, rice from Taiwan and later the Korean Peninsula began to flow into the Japanese market.Footnote ⁵ Shrinkage of the owner-farmer population and growing insufficiency in rice production received immediate attention from Japanese thinkers. Figures from both inside and outside of the policymaking circle warned the nation about the importance of farming and sought to improve the position of agriculture in the national economy.

Two schools of thought emerged at this moment. Both of them emphasized the centrality of agriculture, but each had a different blueprint for Japan’s national destiny in relation to the West. One school of thought was represented by Yokoi Tokiyoshi, a professor of agronomy at Tokyo Imperial University. In an 1897 essay titled “Agricultural Centralism” (“Nōhonshugi”), Yokoi launched a radical attack on the early Meiji principle of national development centering on industrialization and Westernization. The Western model of development was destined to fail, he argued, because its one-sided industrial development would inevitably widen the social gap. With increasingly flagrant disparity between the different segments of society, Western societies would eventually head down a path of revolution and chaos. Due to its blind imitation of the Western model, Yokoi believed, Japan’s industrialization was also being built on the sacrifice of the agricultural population. Attached to the soil, farmers were naturally the most patriotic subjects and most qualified soldiers of the empire. Yet as urbanization drained both human and material resources from the countryside, these farmers were losing their land and becoming mired in poverty. To avert potential chaos, Yokoi argued, the government should make the development of agriculture – instead of industry – its top priority.Footnote ⁶

The other school of thought was represented by Nitobe Inazō, the founder of the School of Japanese Colonial Policy Studies. In 1898, a year after Yokoi published his essay, Nitobe authored On the Foundation of Agriculture (Nōgyō Honron).Footnote ⁷ This book-length study was not as widely known as some of his other works, but it profoundly influenced the evolutionary course of Japanese colonialism and expansionism in the following decades. The book, like Yokoi’s essay, emphasized agriculture’s role as the very foundation of the empire. While sharing some of Yokoi’s criticisms about the government’s neglect of domestic agriculture, Nitobe firmly believed that Japan was destined to follow the path of the West and become an industrialized empire. Unlike Yokoi, Nitobe drew the conclusion that agriculture was not to replace industry as the top policy priority. Instead, Nitobe called for more attention to the development of agriculture in order to secure Japan’s progress in industrialization.

Nitobe criticized the Western European powers such as the United Kingdom and France for achieving rapid industrialization at the price of sacrificing their agricultural sectors. As a result, he argued, the European empires eventually lost their agricultural self-sufficiency; they had no choice but to meet their domestic need for agricultural products through importation from their overseas colonies. Nitobe urged Japan to avoid falling into the same trap, as agriculture was the empire’s very foundation on which all other achievements – such as cultural progress, urbanization, and the improvement of public health – could be built. It was thus imperative for the Empire of Japan to maintain its agricultural self-sufficiency.

Nitobe’s interest in agriculture, stemming from his study at Sapporo Agricultural College in Hokkaido and his personal connection with Tsuda Sen’s Association of Studying Agriculture (Gakunō Sha), was infused with both Malthusian expansionism and colonial ambition. He believed that rapid population growth was essential for Japan’s development as a civilized and expanding empire, and a flourishing agricultural sector was the key to keeping the population growing because it guaranteed sufficient food supply.Footnote ⁸ The protagonists in Nitobe’s blueprint for Japanese empire building were no longer the shizoku of yesterday or the bourgeoning urban working class, but the owner-farmers (jisakunō) from the countryside. Working in the field on a daily basis, Nitobe argued, the owner-farmers were healthier and physically stronger than the urban dwellers and would make better soldiers for the empire. Moreover, they also enjoyed a higher fertility rate and longer life expectancy than the urban residents.Footnote ⁹ As both the primary food supplier for the nation and the biggest source of manpower for the imperial army, they should be protected from falling into poverty and performing excessive labor.Footnote ¹⁰

Nitobe’s agenda was better received than Yokoi’s because most national leaders both within and outside of the government still saw Western-style industrial imperialism as the example to emulate for Japan. Within ten years after its original publication, On the Foundation of Agriculture was reprinted five times. Nitobe’s idea of emphasizing the fundamental role of agriculture in Japan’s development into an industrial empire also won him many supporters and converts among the thinkers and doers of Japanese expansion. On Japanese Agricultural Centralism (Nihon Nōhon Ron), authored by agronomist Hiraoka Hikotarō four years after the publication of Nitobe’s book, for example, wholeheartedly accepted Nitobe’s notion of agriculture as the foundation of Japan’s national progress. It further offered several ways to reverse the agricultural sector’s decline, including lowering the land tax, imposing protective tariff on imported agricultural products, as well as modernizing farming management techniques and equipment.Footnote ¹¹ More importantly, Hiraoka also proposed the migration of Japanese farmers overseas. The migration and resettlement of a certain amount of rural population overseas, he argued, would speed up Japan’s agricultural mechanization process and increase agricultural productivity. The growth of overseas Japanese communities would also increase the export of Japanese agricultural products abroad.Footnote ¹² As a leading thinker and professor of colonial studies, Nitobe also trained and influenced a group of colonial thinkers. Among his protégés were Tōgō Minoru and Ōkawadaira Takamitsu, whose works demonstrated the impacts of both the Russo-Japanese War and the rise of anti-Japanese sentiment in the United States. As the following pages demonstrate, their writings marked the beginning of farmer-centered Japanese expansionism.

Japanese Exclusion in the United States and the Emergence of Farmer Migration

At the turn of the twentieth century, while Japanese intellectuals were trying to grapple with the empire’s agricultural issues, anti-Japanese sentiment in the United States also began to swell. Japanese laborers, who constituted the majority of the overall Japanese immigrant population of the day, became the primary targets of anti-Japanese campaigns in America. These laborers were seen in the same light as the Chinese immigrants who were already excluded; they were labeled as lacking in social manners and education, and they were accused of being reluctant to contribute to the local community due to a lack of commitment to the new life.

Anti-Japanese sentiment on the American West Coast grew even stronger after Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War, when the exclusionists began to link the threat of the racially inferior Japanese immigrants to the American labor market with the threat that the Empire of Japan potentially posed to American national security. Japanese mass media paid close attention to the anti-Japanese campaigns on the American West Coast and expressed indignation toward the United States after the agreement was sealed. In June 1907, a popular journal of satire cartoons named Tokyo Puck published a special issue titled “The Issue of Anger toward the United States” (“Taibei Haffun Gō”), criticizing Americans’ hypocrisy by juxtaposing their self-professed principles of humanism, justice, and freedom with the reality of American immigration restrictions, racism, and corrupted politics. Novels imagining a war between Japan and the United States, ending with total victory for Japan, also began to appear in 1907,Footnote ¹³ allowing the Japanese public to take a measure of fictional revenge against the hypocritical Americans.

While anger and vengefulness were the mass media’s general response to American anti-Japanese sentiment, Japanese intellectuals, particularly those who were trained in Western colonial theories, sought to reconcile Japanese exclusion in the United States with the image of the United States as a righteous leader of the West that Japan sought to follow. They faithfully accepted the logic of the white exclusionists and saw temporary labor migration as an undesirable model of Japanese expansion in the United States. The rise of agricultural centralism and growing landlord-tenant disputes in Japan naturally drew their attention to agricultural migration as an alternative.

Malthusian expansionism provided an easy solution to Japanese thinkers who lamented the agricultural sector’s decline while maintaining the necessity for industrial and commercial primacy. They attributed the fundamental cause of rural depression to overpopulation in the Japanese countryside, which in turn had led to an overall decline in agricultural productivity. The fact that Japan lost its main staple food self-sufficiency was seen as damning evidence of this overpopulation crisis.Footnote ¹⁴ Based on this assumption, they argued that the Japanese agricultural sector could be revived by relocating the surplus rural population overseas with no major changes to the existing economic structure of the country.

Two studies on colonialism that appeared right after the Russo-Japanese War marked the beginning of this shift in intellectual thought.Footnote ¹⁵ Both Nihon Imin Ron (On Japanese Emigration) and Nihon Shokumin Ron (On Japanese Colonial Migration) were written under the auspices of Nitobe Inazō. Authored respectively by Ōkawadaira Takamitsu in 1905 and Tōgō Minoru in 1906, these works were among the earliest original studies of colonialism by Japanese scholars, who previously had relied heavily on the existing colonial studies done by Western scholars. Produced during the formative years of the colonial policy studies in Japan (Shokumin Seisaku Kenkyū), these two works laid the foundation for the discourse of expansionism both in and beyond Japanese academic circles in the decades to come.

For both Ōkawadaira and Tōgō, the anti-Japanese campaigns in the United States served as lessons for Japan’s further expansion. They believed that in order to avoid being excluded again in the future, Japanese emigrants should do away with their sojourning mentality (dekasegi konsei) and aim to settle abroad permanently. Under the sojourning mentality, the previous Japanese migrants to the United States planned to stay overseas only temporarily; after they saved a certain amount of wealth, they would return home. As a result, the authors asserted, they were unwilling to assimilate into American culture or make any contribution to their host country. Their self-isolation from the mainstream society became a major cause of anti-Japanese sentiment. The solution to this problem, Ōkawadaira and Tōgō argued, was for Japanese emigrants to prepare to resettle their lives abroad permanently; they should consider the host country their home and actively contribute to its development. Only in this way could they be accepted as equal members in the host country and secure new citizenship, thereby gaining voting rights and the ability to forestall any anti-Japanese policy in the future. Taking it a step further, they would also be able to make long-term contributions to Japan by swaying the politics of the host country and facilitating bilateral trade relations between the two states.Footnote ¹⁶

Aside from dictating the appropriate mind-set for migrant overseas settlement, Ōkawadaira and Tōgō also contended that the model of Japan’s migration-based expansion should be agrarian. Unlike other types of expansion that could achieve only temporary results, agriculture-centered expansion, they believed, would bring permanent benefits to the empire. Tōgō quoted the words of German historian Theodor Momsen in the beginning of his book: “That which is gained by war may be wrested from the grasp by war again, but it is not so with conquests made by the plough.”Footnote ¹⁷

The ideal candidates for migration were farmers in the countryside who were victims of continuous rural depression.Footnote ¹⁸ The deterioration of the farmers’ quality of life was accompanied by Japan’s loss of self-sufficiency in rice supply beginning at the end of the nineteenth century, leading to increasing concerns among Japanese policymakers and intellectuals about food shortages. It was in this context that Malthusian expansionism, an ideology that had already for decades served as the logical foundation for Japanese expansion, was offered up as the easiest explanation: rural depression and food shortage were the natural result of overpopulation in the Japanese countryside, and the only remedy was for the empire to expand further by relocating the surplus farmers abroad. Useless in Japan, they would acquire more land outside of the archipelago and work them to the empire’s benefit.Footnote ¹⁹

Tōgō shared classic Malthusianism’s belief that a given size of earth had a certain limit on the food it could produce. If the population size exceeded what the earth could support, the earth would begin to lose its fertility, leading to economic crisis and subsequently moral crisis. At the same time, like most intellectuals of his day, Tōgō maintained that population growth was absolutely necessary because it was a critical indicator of national strength. Japan’s high fertility rate proved the nation’s racial superiority, making them comparable to the Caucasians.Footnote ²⁰ He believed that there was an intrinsic relationship between the increase of food production and that of population.Footnote ²¹ In order to sustain the current speed of demographic increase, Tōgō argued, Japan had to increase its agricultural productivity. At the same time, the current low productivity in agriculture was due to its excessive farming population: there were too many farmers and not enough arable land. Relocating these surplus peasants overseas to acquire and farm new lands would not only increase the efficiency of agriculture at home but also provide more food supplies from abroad.Footnote ²²

Tōgō further categorized expansion into two types: nonproductive and productive. Unlike nonproductive expansions such as military conquest, agricultural migration was a type of productive expansion because it aimed for long-term benefits and permanent settlement. While it could not provide a quick payoff due to the very nature of agriculture, it could steadily develop and consistently yield profits for a long time. Spanish expansion into South America had failed because their nearsighted colonists were satisfied with temporary profits, paying attention only to mining precious minerals; in contrast, the British had successfully expanded into North America due to their long-term investment into land settlement: having voyaged cross the Atlantic Ocean with plows and pruning hooks, they started their new lives by cultivating the land first.Footnote ²³ Since agriculture was the foundation for population growth and the development of both industry and commerce, promotion of agricultural migration should be a top priority for the Japanese government in terms of its overseas expansion policies.Footnote ²⁴

Like Tōgō, Ōkawadaira also believed that Japan’s rural depression was a result of overpopulation in the countryside. As there were too many farmers and not enough arable land in Japan, he argued, the rural economy suffered from unhealthy competition among the farmers and an overall decline in agricultural productivity.Footnote ²⁵ The already oversaturated labor market in rural Japan took another blow when more than half a million veterans returned from the battlefields of the Russo-Japanese War. Ōkawadaira agreed with Tōgō in that relocating the “extra” farmers overseas was the best solution to Japan’s rural depression.Footnote ²⁶

Both Tōgō and Ōkawadaira imposed certain standards for prospective migrants, stipulating that the candidates should be carefully selected and trained. For example, tenant farmers who had little land or money were not qualified because the trip itself and land acquisition abroad required a certain amount of capital. Only owner-farmers could meet the financial requirement. Land ownership also correlated with a certain degree of education, therefore the owner-farmers were more politically conscious as imperial subjects; they were more likely to be prepared to present Japan as a civilized empire to the foreigners.

As adherents of Malthusian expansionism, Tōgō and Ōkawadaira maintained that in order for agriculture-based migration to be successful, the migrants’ destinations must have vast amounts of fertile land. Tōgō believed that Hokkaido and Taiwan, the two existing destinations, were no longer fertile enough to house Japan’s rapidly growing peasant population. Though they were not opposed to migration to the United States, Tōgō and Ōkawadaira believed that the empire had to find alternative destinations beyond the reach of the Anglo-Saxons. Tōgō considered the Korean Peninsula and Manchuria, two territories that came under Japan’s sphere of influence after the Russo-Japanese War, as the ideal targets for agricultural expansion.Footnote ²⁷ Ōkawadaira, on the other hand, believed that Asia was already too densely populated, therefore South America was a better choice.Footnote ²⁸

As Tōgō and Ōkawadaira’s plans demonstrated, the Japanese expansionists were operating on a global scale in their searches for settlement locations. Eventually, the state of Texas in the United States became the first test site for the idea of Japanese farmer migration, an experiment that was carried out with cooperation between the imperial government and a number of social groups. The campaign for Texas migration attracted nationwide attention in Japan and paved the way for Japanese agricultural migration to Asia and South America from 1908 onward.

From Laborers to Farmers

Japanese Texas migration constituted the initial step in the transformation of Japanese migration-driven expansion. Not only did it put the idea of farmer migration into practice, it also paved the way for Japanese farmer migration to Latin America. Texas came under the radar of Japanese expansionists due to the efforts of Japanese diplomats. In response to the anti-Japanese sentiment on the American West Coast, the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs began to tighten its control on emigration in order to avoid further provoking anti-Japanese sentiment in the United States.Footnote ²⁹ At the same time, however, Japanese diplomats were also looking for ways to continue Japanese migration to the United States. In 1902, Uchida Sadatsuchi, the Japanese consul in New York, made a pitch to Tokyo about relocating Japanese farmers to Texas for rice cultivation. Reprinted in mass media, Uchida’s report triggered a boom in Texas migration from Japan that lasted from 1902 to 1908.Footnote ³⁰

As a result of Uchida’s report, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs showed a strong interest in the prospect of Japanese migration to Texas and began to publish relevant reports in its official journals.Footnote ³¹ The imperial government’s interest in the idea was echoed by public enthusiasm in mass media. By 1908, countless reports and stories of Japanese rice farming (beisaku) in Texas had appeared in different types of journals and newspapers at both national and local levels. Among these media outlets were leading migration journals such as Amerika, Tobei Zasshi, and Shokumin Sekai, mainstream media such as Chūō Kōron and Tōyō Keizai Shinpō, as well as those targeting specific or professional audiences such as Kyōiku Jiron (Education Times) and Nōgyō Sekai (Agricultural World).Footnote ³² Influenced by passionate rhetoric from both the government and mass media, hundreds of Japanese sailed across the Pacific and landed in southern Texas to pursue a career in rice farming.Footnote ³³ Among these trans-Pacific rice farmers were some prolific writers who broadcasted their success, in rather exaggerated styles, to their countrymen back in Japan, further fueling the fever for Texas.

One of the most vocal proponents for agricultural migration was Yoshimura Daijirō, a Malthusian expansionist who had been enthusiastically encouraging Japanese youth to achieve personal success by leaving overpopulated Japan for United States to seek work-study opportunities.Footnote ³⁴ He formed the Society of Friends of Overseas Enterprises (Kaigai Kigyō Dōshi Kai) in Osaka in 1903, aiming to assist Japanese farmers for migration to Texas.Footnote ³⁵ Together with other society members, Yoshimura purchased 160 acres of land in League City, Texas, and established a rice farm there in 1904.Footnote ³⁶ Though the farm was bankrupted the same year, this experience allowed Yoshimura to pen three guidebooks on American migration for Japanese readers between 1903 and 1905 that highlighted the promising future for rice farming in Texas. These guidebooks provide a valuable prism for us to analyze this phase of transition for the Japanese expansion discourse in the mid-1900s, when the empire moved away from labor migration and promoted agricultural migration in its stead. They also reveal that Malthusian expansionism continued to serve as the fundamental driving force in this new stage of Japan’s migration-based expansion in the decades to come, with the agricultural sector at its front and center.

Texas as Japanese Frontier: Rice, Race, and History

How did Texas become an ideal target for Japanese agricultural expansion? There are a number of reasons for this phenomenon, all of them embedded in the historical contexts of both countries. First, the Lone Star State was an alternative to the American West Coast, which up to this point had been the most attractive destination for Japanese labor migrants. In response to the rise of anti-Japanese sentiment on the West Coast, migration promoters in Japan began to cast their eyes eastward to inland America. Yoshimura, for example, saw American exclusionism as a natural result of the arrival of a huge number of immigrants “who raided the coastal areas like locusts.” He believed that Japanese immigrants would be welcomed if they moved to inland states such as Colorado, Texas, and Louisiana, places that had not yet received many Asian immigrants. In addition, these inland states’ vast and rich lands were currently occupied by only very few residents.Footnote ³⁷

The attention shift of Japanese expansionists from the West Coast to inland America also matched the rise of the discourse of farmer migration in Japan that began to replace the discourse of labor migration. In his report to Tokyo, Uchida Sadatsuchi described the migration of Japanese farmers to Texas as a better alternative to labor migration to the West Coast. Unlike the unenlightened and low-class laborers who would only provoke the white residents’ wrath, Uchida emphasized, the key to Japanese success in the United States was to export owner-farmers who had both a fair amount of wealth to purchase land and the resolution to settle in the United States permanently.Footnote ³⁸ Texas, situated far away from the centers of anti-Japanese sentiment in the West Coast, looked particularly promising to Japanese expansionists. According to Yoshimura, the state of Texas was roughly twice as big as Japan but was occupied by only a small number of settlers.Footnote ³⁹ Blessed with a pleasant climate, it was a cornucopia waiting for Japanese farmers to explore and develop.Footnote ⁴⁰

Figure 4.1 This map of Texas was included in Yoshimura’s book Hokubei Tekisasushū no Beisaku: Nihonjin no Shin Fugen. It highlights the ideal areas for rice farming in Texas as well as railway routes that connected the areas with other parts of the United States.

Second, Texas was singled out as the most promising destination for Japanese migrants because it was beginning to take part in American agricultural capitalism’s trans-continental expansion. Even though livestock husbandry remained Texas’s economic engine when it became the twenty-sixth state in 1845, Texas quickly became a primary cotton supplier in the country by the turn of the twentieth century, and it had begun to supply cotton to the fledgling Japanese textile industry by the end of Sino-Japanese War.Footnote ⁴¹ After its neighbor Louisiana became the top producer of rice in the United States in 1889 by attracting rice farmers to work the coastal lands along the Gulf of Mexico, the Texan government sought to do the same in the southern part of the state, an area that shared the coastline with Louisiana. The completion of the Southern Pacific Railroad, connecting New Orleans with Los Angeles and running straight through Texas, also expedited agricultural settlement and the transportation of farm products. The Southern Pacific Railroad Company had obtained a large amount of Texan land along the railway lines. Motivated by profit, it spared no effort to attract agricultural settlers to the Lone Star State who would purchase its land for rice farming.Footnote ⁴² Originally tasked with investigating the conditions for cotton cultivation in the American South, Uchida was approached by leaders of agriculture in Texas. These Americans expressed an interest in attracting Japanese farmers to the state in order to jumpstart its own rice cultivation industry.

The opportunity of rice farming in Texas coincided with the rising calls for “rescuing” agriculture in Japan. For Japanese expansionists, relocating farmers from the overcrowded archipelago to Texas to grow rice was a masterful move that would kill two birds with one stone. The emigration of surplus population would help to balance Japan’s domestic farmer-land ratio and improve its agricultural productivity. Moreover, Japanese success in rice farming in Texas would reaffirm the centrality of agriculture to the Japanese national identity, something that was endangered by Japan’s loss of self-sufficiency in rice.

Yoshimura Daijirō argued that in the preceding decades, the demand for food had grown rapidly in the United States as the country’s population skyrocketed. Out of many types of staple foods, rice was a particularly popular choice in the United States because its advantages had been amply demonstrated by Japanese robustness and productivity. “The courage of Japanese soldiers, the vigor of Japanese rickshaws, and the physical strength of Japanese women,” Yoshimura proudly claimed, were all results of rice eating (beishoku).Footnote ⁴³ He also believed that rice farming in Texas would further prove that the Japanese were the world champion in agriculture. While the demand for rice kept growing, Yoshimura pointed out, the white settlers preferred commerce and industry to agriculture. For this reason, the Japanese would be welcomed in Texas because they were the nature-anointed kings of rice farming.Footnote ⁴⁴

Third, Texas was seen as the new frontier of Japanese expansion because of its own colonial history. In Yoshimura’s imagination, the past and present of Texas were not only relevant but also closely connected to Japanese expansion at its moment of paradigm change. The history of Texas, he argued, was a tale of colonial competition and racial struggle. The land of Texas had changed hands from the Native Indians to Latin Europe colonists, the Mexicans, and eventually the Anglo-Saxons. The American expansion experience in Texas was particularly instructive to the Japanese because it was a testament to the merits of long-term settler expansion. The old colonial expansion, exemplified by the Spanish Empire, was conducted through military conquest and invasion.Footnote ⁴⁵ Yet the era of military invasion had ended, announced Yoshimura, and the civilized powers now wrestled through peaceful means as migration became the primary method of expansion in this new era. For Japanese expansionists, Texas’s recent history demonstrated the power of migration and settlement: The American migrants first arrived in this part of Mexico without any support from their national government. Through diligence and perseverance, they were able to entrench themselves in this foreign land and make it their own. Operating under the natural principle of survival of the fittest, they were eventually enthroned as the owners of Texas.Footnote ⁴⁶ The colonization of Texas, Yoshimura contended, represented the overall model of American settler expansion that the Japanese should emulate. The key to such a successful venture was replacing temporary laborers with farmers who were prepared for long-term settlement in foreign lands.

If the colonial history of Texas offered a lesson for Japanese expansionists, the campaign for Japanese farmer migration to Texas was an indispensable part in their blueprints of the empire’s expansion. It was expected that success in rice farming in Texas would allow the Japanese to claim a primary role in rice production, a field that would be of vital importance to the US economy in the future.Footnote ⁴⁷ The victory of the Japanese farmers over white settlers in Texas would herald the success of Japanese expansion in the following decades in East Asia, Southeast Asia, and South America, new arenas of global colonial competition in the dawning century.Footnote ⁴⁸

Based in Osaka, the Society of Friends of Overseas Enterprises was established by Yoshimura and his peers to ensure the success of this new model of Japanese expansion in Texas. Yoshimura believed that like the American settlers who colonized Mexican Texas, the new Japanese migrants should have to resolve to make American Texas into a permanent home of the Japanese. The society’s goal was to provide guidance to these empire builders to make long-term plans of settlement and help them to overcome temporary hardships while abroad.Footnote ⁴⁹ Not only did the society have plans to build several branches in the United States, it also aimed to branch into Asia.Footnote ⁵⁰ Even though this organization quickly collapsed, its vision for Japanese empire building demonstrated that under this new direction of agricultural expansion, Japanese migration to the United States was still intrinsically tied to Japanese expansion into the other parts of the Pacific Rim.

The involvement of Katayama Sen, a central leader of Japanese labor migration to the United States, in the movement of rice planting in Texas testified that Japanese migration-based expansion had become irreversibly centered on agriculture. In 1904, after investigating the existing Japanese farms in Texas, Katayama penned four consecutive articles in the Oriental Economist (Tōyō Keizai Shinpō) that passionately promoted agricultural migration to Texas.Footnote ⁵¹ At the same time, with the rise of anti-Japanese sentiment on the American West Coast in mind, Katayama offered his readers some words of caution. He pointed out that while Texas was a superior alternative to the West Coast because the Japanese were welcomed there and the procedure for them to purchase land was simple, not every Japanese could succeed. Temporary laborers were not qualified for rice farming in Texas because they did not have the specialized knowledge needed to choose the land, prepare farm facilities, and manage a farm. Farmers with limited means were also unsuitable, as they did not have enough money to purchase lands in Texas. The most desirable migrants for this project were thus those who owned sizeable land themselves in Japan with both the expertise in crops cultivation and the means to secure sufficient startup capital.Footnote ⁵²

Katayama soon put his rhetoric into practice. Between 1905 and 1907, he made several attempts at establishing rice farms in Texas and recruiting farmers from Japan, none of which succeeded. Ironically, his failure stemmed from his own inability to meet the two preconditions that he had laid out in his analysis: he had neither agricultural expertise nor stable financial support. When his long-term donor Iwasaki Kiyoshichi withdrew his money, Katayama had no choice but to end his Texas campaign once and for all.Footnote ⁵³

Subverting Racism through Farming

In order to raise money for their projects, Katayama Sen relied on big donors while Yoshimura Daijirō used collective funding. In contrast, many other Japanese farm owners in Texas were wealthy enough to establish their businesses in Texas with their own money. The most successful and influential Japanese farm in Texas was established and managed by Saibara Seitō and his family.

Saibara Seitō’s life path illustrated the multidimensional connections between Japanese trans-Pacific migration and Japan’s colonial expansion in Asia. An activist in the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement, he was elected as a member of the Imperial Diet in 1898 and became the president of Doshisha University in the next year. A Malthusian expansionist, he began his career as a colonist in 1896 by funding a migrant farm in Hokkaido named the Society of Northern Light (Hokkō Sha).Footnote ⁵⁴ Disappointed by the domestic political climate and stimulated by the fever of migration to America, Saibara resigned his positions in Japan and moved to the United States for a new start in 1902. Inspired by Uchida’s report on Japanese rice farming in Texas and established his own farm on three hundred acres of land in Webster, Texas, at the end of 1903.

Saibara was well educated in specialized knowledge and in possession of substantial wealth. Though born to a shizoku family, he was an ideal candidate for success in this wave of heimin-centered agricultural migration and indeed became one of the most eminent Japanese settlers in Texas. From 1904 to 1907, his farm almost tripled in size and its output quadrupled. Due to Saibara’s effort in seed refinement and the exploration of alternative crops, his farm was able to enhance its rice productivity and survive several natural disasters as well as unexpected drops in the price of rice, even while some other Japanese farms went bankrupt.Footnote ⁵⁵

Self-styled as a torchbearer of the Japanese agricultural expansion in the United States, Saibara became a spokesperson for Texas rice farming in Japan. Traveling back and forth between Texas and Japan, he persuaded his family members to join his cause and recruited farmers (mainly from Kōchi, his native prefecture) to work on his farm. He further participated in Texas migration promotion in Japan by advertising his success to the Japanese public: he made public speeches and wrote articles for various domestic journals to share tips with his countrymen who planned to follow his footsteps. Widely reported on and celebrated in migration circles, Saibara became the symbol of Japanese agricultural migration to Texas. His farm became an exhibition site of Japanese nationalism and expansionism that attracted visits from Japanese intellectuals, entrepreneurs, and politicians when they visited the United States for the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition in 1904.Footnote ⁵⁶ Students in Japanese agricultural colleges saw Saibara as an idol, as one of their popular songs described their ideal postgraduation career path based on his story:Footnote ⁵⁷

Aside from the success of his farm, other factors also contributed to the ascension of Saibara Seitō as the face of Japanese agricultural expansion. Aware of the rise of anti-Japanese sentiment on the West Coast, he understood that obtaining American citizenship and the associated political rights was crucial to the migration endeavor in the long run, thus he immediately applied for naturalization after the land purchase in Texas. However, as the Naturalization Act of 1870 permitted the naturalization of only Caucasian and African immigrants, the immigration authority in the state of Texas received Saibara’s application without giving him a clear answer.Footnote ⁵⁹ The ambivalent attitude of Texas authority led the Japanese expansionists to believe that there was a possible pathway to naturalization for them. In their imaginations, Saibara’s success in developing rice farming in Texas and his resolution of permanent settlement would eventually earn him citizenship in the most civilized country of the world.

To the Japanese expansionists, the development of rice farming and the existing race relations in Texas made the state a perfect place for the Japanese to subvert white racism. After an investigation of Saibara’s farm, politician Matsudaira Masanao observed that unlike the West Coast, Texas did not have a lot of Chinese or black people due to racial animosity; in contrast, the Japanese migrants were welcomed by the white settlers. Armed with their world-famous expertise in rice farming, the Japanese were treated even better than Caucasians from Italy and Spain.

While the lower-class Japanese laborers were targeted by white exclusionists on the West Coast, Matsudaira believed that capable and educated Japanese migrants like Saibara could easily gain American citizenship in Texas. As Japanese success in Texas would prove their assimilability into the white men’s world, it would win for Japanese the right of naturalization in the entire country. Such a development would allow the Japanese settlers to participate in American politics in order to consolidate Japanese frontiers in the United States.Footnote ⁶⁰

Seeing rice farming in Texas as a promising model that could bring about a better future for Japanese migrants in the United States, Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs also provided political support to the movement. At the turn of the twentieth century, in order to avoid provoking further anti-Japanese sentiment on the American West Coast, the ministry had reduced Japanese labor migration to the United States. However, it gave a green light to those who intended to migrate to Texas as farmers, including both wealthy men like Saibara who would become big farm owners and small owner-farmers who would like to collectively manage a farm by pooling together their funds and labor. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs categorized the latter as collective farmers (kumiai nōfu) and managed to negotiate for their rights to migrate under the Gentlemen’s Agreement.Footnote ⁶¹ As a result, the doors of Texas remained open to Japanese agricultural migration, at least in theory, until the passage of Immigration Act of 1924.

The End of the Texas Migration Campaign

To the severe disappointment of most Japanese expansionists of the day, the wave of Texas migration quickly ebbed and faded out from Japanese public discourse before the first decade of the twentieth century came to an end. While natural disasters and drops in rice prices due to overproduction had dealt substantial setbacks to Japanese farms in Texas,Footnote ⁶² it was the shortage of labor that fundamentally doomed these ventures. Matsuhara Ichio, the Japanese consul in Chicago, observed in a report to Tokyo in 1908 that after migrating to the United States, many Japanese farmhands quickly abandoned their posts. Most of them left for California, where they picked up better-paying labor jobs.Footnote ⁶³ The lack of leisure facilities in rural Texas was another reason why Japanese migrants were eager to quit the farm life and move elsewhere.Footnote ⁶⁴

These migrants had high mobility because of the particular way in which they were recruited. Since it was difficult to persuade those who had either fortune or land to abandon their properties in Japan, Japanese farm owners in Texas did not require their employees to make any financial commitment to the farm. As a result, contrary to the expectation of the Japanese agricultural expansionists, Japanese farms in Texas ended up recruiting laborers, not shareholding farmers, from Japan. In order to circumvent the government restrictions on labor migrants, these farm laborers applied for their passports as collective farmers and presented themselves as small shareholders of Japanese farms in Texas. However, with little actual commitment to the farms, it was easy for these farm laborers to quit and move on.Footnote ⁶⁵

Most Japanese farm owners preferred migrants from Japan to the local white, black, or Mexican farmers for two reasons. First, they trusted the farming skills of their compatriots because most of these migrants were previously farmers in Japan. Second, there was a language barrier between the Japanese farm owners and the locals.Footnote ⁶⁶ The migrants from Japan thus constituted the primary labor source for Japanese farms in Texas, and their remigration to California and urban Texas left the farms mired in crisis.

Japanese farm owners responded to this crisis by working together to form the Texan Japanese Association (Tekisasu Nihonjin Kyōkai) in 1908. Immediately after its establishment, the association submitted an appeal to Japan’s minister of foreign affairs, Komura Jutarō, urging the imperial government to stop the remigration of the Japanese farm laborers from Texas through diplomatic means. However, this effort was doomed from the start because there were no legal ways for Tokyo to control the mobility of its subjects outside of the imperial territory.

The failure of the Texan Japanese Association’s appeal announced the end of Japanese agricultural migration in Texas. Faced with both a labor shortage and a drop in the price of rice, most Japanese farms went bankrupt before the end of the 1910s; their employees and owners either returned to Japan or remigrated to California.Footnote ⁶⁷ Only a handful of them, including the farm owned by Saibara Seitō, were able to survive by reducing size and cultivating alternative crops.

A New Beginning: Farmer Migration and Brazil

Although the Texas campaign was short-lived, it marked a turning point in the evolution of Japanese Malthusian expansionism. It opened up a new chapter in the history of Japan’s migration-driven expansion marked by farmer migration. In response to anti-Japanese campaigns in North America and the deterioration of Japan’s rural economy during the first decades of the twentieth century, Japan’s migration-driven expansion underwent a major paradigm shift from labor migration to agrarian settlement.

Due to their diverse social and political backgrounds, during the previous decades Malthusian expansionists had imagined very different futures for Japan’s migrants—from businessmen to company employees, from plantation owners to farm laborers. The failure of the Texas campaign, however, convinced a growing number of Malthusian expansionists that becoming land-owning farmers was the only viable career path for Japanese migrants. This paradigm change was further cemented by the failed Japanese American enlightenment campaign in the 1910s and 1920s, a subject that will be examined in the next chapter.

The failure in Texas also forced Japanese expansionists to explore alternative destinations, leading them to cast their gaze on the “empty and rich lands” of Latin America. The initial architect of Texas campaign Uchida Sadatsuchi became the Japanese consul in the state of São Paulo, Brazil, in 1907. He immediately found Brazil to be a more suitable place for Japanese migration than the United States due to a perceived absence of racism. He did not hesitate to support migration leader Mizuno Ryū through diplomatic means, enabling him to bring the first official group of Japanese migrants to Brazil on the ship Kasato-maru in 1908.Footnote ⁶⁸ The growing Japanese communities in Brazil also attracted the attention of Saibara Seitō. Disappointed by the rejection of his citizenship application in the United States, Saibara entrusted his Texan farm to his son and joined Japanese expansion in Brazil by starting a farm in the state of São Paulo in 1918. While his farming career in São Paulo was not as successful as expected, he moved north to the state of Pará in 1928 as an employee of Japan’s South America Colonization Company (Nanbei Takushoku Kabushiki Gaisha) to experiment with Japanese farming at the mouth of the Amazon River.Footnote ⁶⁹

Conclusion

At the end of the 1906 novel The Broken Commandment, protagonist Segawa Ushimatsu decides to sail to Texas and start his new life there as a rice farmer. Though a work of fiction, this book was an example of the Japanese general public’s awareness of the opportunity of taking up rice farming in Texas. The rise of Japanese farmer migration to Texas, while similar to the wave of labor migration to the US West Coast in terms of its heimin-centered base, represented a turning point in the evolution of Japanese migration-based expansion. It marked the beginning of farmer-centered expansion with the goal of long-term agricultural settlement.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Japan lost its self-sufficiency in rice. As a result, it had to import its main staple food from Taiwan and the Korean Peninsula. The decline of the agricultural sector triggered a debate on agriculture’s importance to the nation. Representing two opposing sides of the debate, Yokoi Toshiyoki and Nitobe Inazō held contrasting views on the nation’s best course of development, but they both believed that agriculture had a fundamental role to play in Japan’s overall economic growth, arguing for agriculture’s centrality in both Japan’s national identity and cultural tradition.

Malthusian expansionism provided a convenient solution for Japanese thinkers who sought to reverse the decline of agriculture while maintaining that the development of industry and commerce was vital to the empire’s success. They attributed the fundamental cause of rural depression to overpopulation in the countryside, which in turn led to the overall decline of agricultural productivity. Based on this assumption, they argued that the revival of agriculture could be achieved by relocating the surplus population overseas without major changes in the existing economic structure in society. Moreover, these surplus farmers in Japanese countryside, through migration and farming, would become powerful vanguards of the empire’s expansion project.

Aside from the calls for “rescuing” Japanese agriculture, the promotion of farmer migration to Texas was also a response to rising anti-Japanese sentiment on the American West Coast that primarily targeted Japanese labor migrants. In this context, rice farming in Texas was deemed as the best alternative because Japanese farmers, the expansionists believed, would find a warmer welcome in the United States than would laborers. Moreover, they were better equipped to put down permanent roots, thereby establishing the Japanese as an expansionist race in the American frontier. They expected that the success of Japanese rice farmers in Texas would reassert the racial superiority of the Japanese in the world through their achievements in agriculture.

However, a structural labor shortage quickly led to the decline of Japanese rice farming in Texas. The failure of this project and the enactment of the Gentlemen’s Agreement forced the Japanese expansionists to revise their blueprint of agricultural migration. The Gentlemen’s Agreement had shut America’s doors to Japanese migrant laborers, but it was still possible for Japanese to migrate to America through familial relations. It thus ushered in the era of picture brides, when hundreds of thousands of Japanese women moved to the US West Coast. Japanese migration leaders strived to appease the anti-Japanese sentiment by encouraging Japanese Americans, through education and moral suasion, to assimilate into the mainstream – in other words, Caucasian – society. At the same time, thinkers and doers of Japanese expansion began to explore alternative migration destinations in Northeast Asia, Latin America, and the South Seas to carry out their versions of farmer-centered expansion.

In response to the ongoing Japanese exclusion campaigns in the United States represented by the promulgation of Alien Land Laws in a few states in the American West, Japanese policymakers, intellectuals, and migration movement leaders conducted heated debates that redefined the meaning, pattern, and direction of the empire’s future expansion. Yoshimura Daijirō’s failure to sustain his Texan farm and the enactment of the Gentlemen’s Agreement did not hamper his zeal for embracing Western civilization. He participated in the activities of the Great Japan Civilization Association (Dai Nihon Bunmei Kyōkai), an organization founded by leading politician Ōkuma Shigenobu with the goal of winning Japan membership in the white men’s world.Footnote ⁷⁰ The mission of the Great Japan Civilization Association was similar to that of another organization formed in 1914, the Japanese Emigration Association (Nihon Imin Kyōkai), in which Ōkuma also played a central role. As the next chapter discusses at length, the Emigration Association became a headquarters for campaigns launched by Japanese expansionists to facilitate Japanese American assimilation into white American society. The next chapter also discusses how the model of farmer migration evolved in the years between the enactment of the Gentlemen’s Agreement and the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924, when the American doors were completely shut to Japanese immigration. It explains in detail why, among the different campaigns in various areas around the Pacific Rim, it was in Brazil that the Japanese farmer migration turned out to be the most successful.

The Beginning of Japanese Farmer Migration in Northeast Asia

After the Russo-Japanese War cemented Japan’s political ascendancy in Northeast Asia, the Korean Peninsula and Manchuria became convenient alternatives to North America following the demise of the Texas campaign and the enactment of the Gentlemen’s Agreement. The most famous proponent for Japan’s expansion into Northeast Asia was Komura Jutarō, the minister of foreign affairs in the second Katsura Cabinet, who proposed the strategy of “concentrating on Manchuria and Korea” (Man Kan Shūchū) in a speech to the Imperial Diet in 1909. The formation of the Oriental Development Company (Tōyō Takushoku Kabushiki Gaisha) in 1908, under the political and financial support of the Prime Minister Katsura Tarō, brought the proposal of Northeast Asian expansion into action. The company acquired farmland on the Korean Peninsula, recruited Japanese farmers, and settled them there.Footnote ²

Japan’s migration-based expansion in Northeast Asia, both in ideology and in practice, was a replica of the failed Texas migration campaign, in terms of both the discourse of Malthusian expansionism and the idea of farm migration. Komura, for example, reasoned that the spacious land in the Korean Peninsula and Manchuria would be more than enough to accommodate Japan’s surplus population. He further argued that migration would also help to stimulate Japanese population growth by an extra thirty million.Footnote ³

The idea of farmer migration to the Korean Peninsula was further articulated by Kanbe Masao, a professor of law at Kyoto Imperial University. He published On Agricultural Migration to Korea (Chōsen Nōgyō Imin Ron) in 1910, on the eve of Japan’s formal annexation of Korea. Like Komura, Kanbe believed that instead of Hawaiʻi, the US mainland, or Latin America, the Korean Peninsula should be the premier destination for Japanese migrants. For Kanbe, agricultural migration from Japan to Korea was not merely a solution to the issue of overpopulation but also a mission of spreading civilization because the unenlightened and incompetent Koreans had to be guided by the Japanese in order to cultivate their own land.Footnote ⁴

In addition, the proposal of expansion into Northeast Asia was also a strategic response to anti-Japanese sentiment in the United States. It was in line with Komura’s acceptance of the Western imperialist world order and his efforts to gain Japan entry to the club of civilized powers. A longtime diplomat, Komura played a key role in forming the Anglo-Japanese Alliance in 1902 and in renewing it in 1911. In 1907, while serving as Japan’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, he contributed to Japan’s diplomatic efforts to placate the anti-Japanese sentiments in Canada.Footnote ⁵ Taking the cabinet post of minister of foreign affairs soon after the Gentlemen’s Agreement was reached, Komura fulfilled the government’s promise to ban Japanese labor migration to the United States. Adopting a pro-Anglo-American stance, he proved instrumental in negotiating the Root-Takahira Treaty with the United States in 1908. The treaty clarified the two countries’ colonial privileges in the Asia-Pacific region in order to avoid possible conflicts between these two Pacific powers.Footnote ⁶ For its part, the policy of Man Kan Shūchū was in line with Katsura Cabinet’s efforts to find a way for Japan to expand without rousing American suspicion and hostility.Footnote ⁷

As will be discussed in the following paragraphs, Komura’s notion of achieving conciliation with the United States in exchange for Japan’s membership in the club of civilization was shared by contemporary advocates for Japan’s southward expansion (nanshin) in the South Seas. These campaigns for exploring alternative routes of expansion were intertwined with Tokyo’s efforts in facilitating Japanese American assimilation. During the interactions between the course of exploring alternative routes of expansion and that of fostering Japanese assimilation into the American society, farmer migration with the goal of permanent settlement was further solidified as the most desirable mode of Japanese expansion in the following decades.

White Racism and Malthusian Expansionism: The Formation of the Emigration Association

In the history of Japan’s migration-driven expansion, if the campaign of Texas migration marked the beginning of the paradigm shift from labor to agriculture, the enactment of the Alien Land Law in California in 1913 was another critical event. Aimed at excluding Japanese farmers from the domestic agricultural sector and creating a social climate that was pointedly inhospitable for immigrants, the California Alien Land Law of 1913 denied issei Japanese Americans the right to land ownership and restricted their legal tenancy to three years. It not only damaged the agricultural development of Japanese American communities but also gave a bitter lesson to the Japanese Malthusian expansionists about the importance of land ownership. It thus further cemented the centrality of land-acquisition-based farmer migration in the history of Japanese migration-driven expansion in the following decades.

In response to the Alien Land Law, Japanese politicians and social groups redoubled their efforts to placate anti-Japanese sentiment in the United States. Entrusted by business tycoon Shibusawa Ei’ichi, the first president of Industrial Bank of Japan (Nihon Kōgyō Ginkō), Soeda Jū’ichi and Kamiya Tadao, an employee of the Brazil Colonization Company, went to the United States to investigate the issue.Footnote ⁸ Soeda and Kamiya concluded that a moral reform was needed to “civilize” Japanese immigrants because their backward behaviors and lifestyle had been fueling anti-Japanese sentiment. Based on this conclusion, Shibusawa, Soeda, and Nakano Takenaka – the director of the Tokyo Chamber of Commerce – jointly submitted two proposals to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The first proposal contained their plans to smooth over anti-Japanese sentiment in the United States, including promoting mutual understanding between the two nations and turning Japanese Americans in the United States into better civilized subjects. The second proposal, however, called for looking to the South Seas and Latin America as alternative destinations for Japanese migration in the following decades.

These two proposals found supporters within the imperial government. In 1914, the government and social groups collaborated to form the Japanese Emigration Association to facilitate Japanese overseas migration and expansion by giving public lectures, conducting workshops, and publishing journals/books on the subject. Its members included top government officials, Imperial Diet members, business elites, intellectuals, and migration agents.

The inaugural meeting of the Emigration Association was held in the hall of Tokyo Geographical Association,Footnote ⁹ the founding site of the Colonial Association (Shokumin Kyōkai), and there were indeed parallels between these two organizations. Like the Colonial Association, the Emigration Association was formed in response to Asian exclusion campaigns in the United States, and both membership rosters included Japanese politicians, social elites, and intellectuals. Members of the Emigration Association supported migration for different purposes: policymakers saw migration as essential for expansion, business tycoons expected it to boost international trade, while intellectuals believed it would make Japan rise through the global racial hierarchy. Yet as a whole they were, like the Colonial Association members before them, adherents to Malthusian expansionism who lamented the issue of overpopulation in Japan but simultaneously avowed the necessity of further population growth.

As the manifesto of the Emigration Association claimed, among the nations of the world, the Japanese nation had an outstanding population growth rate as well as impressive population density. The goal of the association was to facilitate overseas migration so that the nation would not be mired in poverty and revolutions. Emigration, however, was not simply aimed at offloading of the surplus population. As the founders of the association also emphasized in the manifesto, “Western scholars often use the terms of colonial nation (shokumin koku) and non-colonial nation (hi shokumin koku) to differentiate successful nations from the unsuccessful ones.” As a few European empires continued to strive as colonial nations, “Japan and the U.S. also began to take part in this imperial competition.” The association’s mission, then, was to serve Japan’s national interests by facilitating migration-based expansion and cementing Japan’s status as a member of the colonial nations’ club.Footnote ¹⁰

While the Colonial Association aimed to promote shizoku expansion in order to prepare for racial competition with the West, the Emigration Association was founded when anti-Japanese sentiment in the United States was at its peak. Yet instead of adopting a combative stance toward the West, the association hoped to keep the general avenues of Japanese overseas migration open by reconciling with Anglo-American colonial hegemony. Members of the association believed that widening the channel for Japanese immigration into the United States was not only crucial for Japan’s future expansion but also feasible in practice. As Soeda Jū’ichi articulated, they were optimistic for two reasons. First, they denied the existence of racism against Japanese among white Americans and argued that Japanese immigrants themselves should be blamed for anti-Japanese sentiment because of their lack of social manners and backward lifestyle. As they saw it, at the heart of the problem was the insular national character of the Japanese, a product of the long-term isolationist (sakoku) policy of the backward Tokugawa regime. If this trait could be altered, then the anti-Japanese sentiment would disappear.Footnote ¹¹ Second, they perceived World War I as a turning point that would lift the migration restriction in the United States: as the European battlefields demanded manpower, the flow of European migration to the United States would dry up after the war began, and Japanese immigrants would thus again be welcomed to fill the labor vacuum. In addition, Japanese Canadians who voluntarily joined the Canadian military to fight in the war would also improve Japan’s international image.Footnote ¹²

In the Emigration Association’s blueprint for Japanese global expansion, the removal of migration restrictions in the United States was of paramount importance. This was not only because the United States still had spacious, fertile, and sparsely populated land, but also because the acceptance of Japanese immigrants by Americans would provide irrefutable evidence for Japan’s status as a civilized nation equal to the Westerners. It would legitimize Japan’s expansion in the future by opening the doors of other countries, both “civilized” and “uncivilized” alike, to Japanese migration. As the director of the Emigration Association Ōkuma Shigenobu envisioned, American acceptance of Japanese immigration would prove that Japan was capable of synthesizing the essences of the East and West. Standing on the top of the hierarchy of civilizations, Japan’s expansion was destined to bring enlightenment to the entire world.Footnote ¹³

The Enlightenment Campaign for Japanese American Assimilation and Women’s Education

Members of the Emigration Association such as Shibusawa Eiichi and Soeda Jū’ichi played leading roles in the enlightenment campaign (keihatsu undō), a collaborative initiative launched by government officials and social leaders in Japan as well as Japanese Americans community leaders. It employed a two-pronged approach to achieve its goal of Japan-US conciliation that included both “external enlightenment” (gai teki keihatsu) and “internal enlightenment” (nai teki keihatsu). The former sought to improve the image of Japan and Japanese among the white Americans by increasing commercial, religious, and cultural exchanges between Japan and the United States. The latter, on the other hand, was targeted at the Japanese immigrants in the United States. If the Japanese immigrants’ “problems” could be corrected, the campaign leaders believed, the anti-Japanese sentiment in the United States would naturally give way to acceptance. To this end, they identified a variety of problems common to Japanese Americans. These issues included ignorance of American customs, inadequate English proficiency, insufficient interaction with white Americans, engagement in gambling and prostitution, as well as reluctance to make social investment in the United States.Footnote ¹⁴

In the campaign leaders’ blueprint of civilizing the Japanese American communities, women played a critical role. Though Shimanuki Hyōdayū, the first president of the Japanese Striving Society, died as early as 1913 and was not an official participant in the enlightenment campaign, his ideas on how women could contribute to the Japanese American assimilation actually set the agenda for the enlightenment campaign. Between the late 1900s and early 1920s, Japanese women began to migrate to the United States as marriage partners of the Japanese male immigrants in a growing number. This was because the Gentlemen’s Agreement shut the American doors to Japanese migrant laborers but left them open to family members of the existing immigrants. Responding quickly to this situation, Shimanuki started raising fund for the establishment of women’s school (Rikkō Jogakkō) inside the Striving Society in 1909, which became true at the end of that year.Footnote ¹⁵ Referring to their racial struggles in the United States, Shimanuki argued, the Japanese American immigrants were fighting a peaceful war, one as significant as the Russo-Japanese War. To support their battle to win the Japanese race deserved recognition from the white Americans, the society was dedicated to facilitating the migration of Japanese women to the United States so that they could become marriage partners and domestic assistants to male immigrants.Footnote ¹⁶

The migration of Japanese women, Shimanuki reasoned, would placate anti-Japanese sentiment in the United States in two ways. First, the most important reason for the overall success in the worldwide colonial expansion of the European powers was that the male settlers migrated overseas with their wives. Just like the wives of the European colonial settlers, the Japanese women could give their husbands in the United States physical assistance and emotional comfort to overcome the material difficulties and loneliness in the foreign land. This family life would not only help the Japanese male immigrants to restrain themselves from indulgence in immorality and crimes but also solidify their resolution of permanent settlement in the United States. The improvement of Japanese immigrants’ lifestyle would change the white Americans’ attitude toward Japanese immigration. Second, women could also give birth to the next generation of the Japanese in the United States, who enjoyed the birthright citizenship and political rights attached to it. Because most of the first generation of Japanese immigrants had no access to US citizenship, the more children they had, the stronger the Japanese American communities would become politically. The growth of Japanese population with citizenship would prevent anti-Japanese campaigns from having political consequences.Footnote ¹⁷ However, for Shimanuki, not all Japanese women were qualified to take on this mission. Only those who were physically and mentally ready were qualified. The goal of the Women’s School of the Japanese Striving Society was to prepare these women to become good wives and mothers in the frontiers of Japanese expansion before their migration.Footnote ¹⁸

In the minds of the leaders of the enlightenment campaign, the female migrants were far from ready to take on this glorious mission. Most of the Japanese women who reached the American shore between late 1900s and early 1920s were picture brides (shashin hanayome) from poor families in rural Japan.Footnote ¹⁹ Japanese educators criticized them for bringing shame on the Japanese race and nation because of their “inappropriate” manners and “outdated” makeup and dress. Kawai Michi, national secretary of Japanese Young Women’s Christian Association (JYWCA) and a central figure in the enlightenment campaign, attributed American anti-Japanese sentiment in part to the “uneducated” behavior of these women. Having studied in the United States under the support of the scholarship established by Tsuda Umeko, Kawai firmly believed that the image of a nation was judged by the education level of its women. Under her leadership, the JYWCA and its main branch in California initiated education campaigns to discipline picture brides so that they could represent Japan in more desirable ways.Footnote ²⁰ With support from the local government and politicians, the JYWCA established an emigrant women’s school in Yokohama, providing classes on housework, English, child rearing, American society, Western lifestyles, and travel tips for the picture brides before they left for the United States.Footnote ²¹ Besides training, the JYWCA disseminated pamphlets with similar guidance among emigrant women. The JYWCA’s California branch also offered accommodation and similar training to picture brides after their arrival.Footnote ²² Through these efforts, the campaign leaders expected to showcase civilized Japanese womanhood to the white Americans.

In addition, the female migrants were also expected to solidify families and give birth to children for Japanese American communities. For this reason, the mission of disciplining rural women’s wrongdoings did not stop at correcting their manners in daily life but went as far as regulating their marriage and occupation. Owing to limitations of communication and understanding between the two sides before marriage, not all marriages of Japanese immigrants ended happily. In order to find a good partner, some Japanese male immigrants used fake pictures to appear younger and more handsome than they really were. Others lied about their financial situation, claiming that they were successful businessmen or rich landowners, while in reality they were merely agricultural laborers.Footnote ²³ As a result, many picture brides felt either disappointed or cheated when they faced reality. Since there were far fewer women than men in Japanese communities in California, it was relatively easy for a single female to find a job and live by herself. Some disappointed brides thus chose divorce.Footnote ²⁴ Leaders of the enlightenment campaign attributed these wife-initiated divorces to “the weakness of Japanese females” and “degradation of female morality.”Footnote ²⁵ They warned that these “degraded women” were the cause of American anti-Japanese sentiment, and urged all Japanese immigrant women to remain loyal to their husbands and fulfill their duty to raise children.Footnote ²⁶ Local Japanese Christian women’s homes sometimes even intervened and managed to prevent such divorces.Footnote ²⁷

Figure 5.1 Members of an American congressional committee investigating the Japanese picture brides at the Angel Island immigration station.

This photograph was taken on July 25, 1920. Courtesy of Getty Images, Bettmann Archive Pictures and Images.

Responding to financial difficulties and the hardship of agricultural life, most Japanese immigrant women living in rural areas had no choice but to work in the fields with their husbands.Footnote ²⁸ White exclusionists accused them of transgressing gender boundaries, in which a man should be the only breadwinner while a woman should stay at home taking care of the family. They described the Japanese women in the field as the slaves of their husbands and attributed such “transgression” to the racial inferiority and uncivilized tradition of Japanese immigrants.Footnote ²⁹ Replicating claims of the exclusionists, Kawai argued that if women went out to work, their housework and child-rearing duties would be neglected. She maintained that Japanese female immigrants’ farm work was driven by their greed for money and assumed that it was a cause of American anti-Japanese sentiment.Footnote ³⁰

Permanent Settlement and the Intellectual Shift from “Increasing People” to “Planting People”

This campaign of educating Japanese picture brides in the United States was also part of the ideological transition of Japanese expansionism in response to the rise of anti-Japanese sentiment in North America. The threat of racial exclusion in the United States reminded the expansionists in Tokyo the importance of permanent settlement of the Japanese migrants abroad. Unlike Ōkawadaira Takamitsu and Tōgō Minoru who called for Japanese expansion elsewhere in the late 1900s, the enlightenment campaign’s goal was to remove the restrictions on Japanese migration to the United States. Yet the enlightenment campaign was also an offspring of the intellectual debates since the late 1900s that attempted to make sense of the rise of anti-Japanese sentiment in the United States. Replicating the ideas of Ōkawadaira and Tōgō, the campaign leaders identified the immigrants’ sojourner mentality (dekasegi konsei) as the root of all evil, thus they believed that the ultimate solution was for the immigrants to commit to permanent settlement. As rural peasants came to constitute the majority of the migrant population and the domestic rice riots continued, agricultural settlement was naturally favored by the campaign leaders as the most desirable model of migration. In their minds, the enactment of the California Alien Land Law of 1913 reinforced the central importance of land ownership in order for Japanese immigrants to succeed in permanent settlement.Footnote ³¹

To prepare migrants for the long-term commitment, the campaign leaders stressed the importance of training the migrants before they left Japan. To this end, the Emigration Association held regular lectures in Tokyo and Yokohama, published journals and books that disseminated migration-related information, and organized annual workshops from 1916 to 1919. These workshops were attended by teachers from high schools and professional schools throughout the archipelago.Footnote ³² The association also established an emigration training center in Yokohama in 1916, directly offering emigrants classes on social manners, hygiene, foreign languages, child rearing, and housework. Over four hundred migrants – two-fifths were women – attended the classes at the training center within two months after it opened. The center was jointly founded by funds from the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs and donations from entrepreneurial tycoons. Nagata Shigeshi, the president of Japanese Striving Society, served as its first director.Footnote ³³

The Japanese expansionists’ growing interest in permanent settlement was reflected by the ascendency of the term 植民 over 殖民 when referring to the concept of colonial migration. As written forms for the concept shokumin, the Japanese translation for the Western word “colonization,”Footnote ³⁴ both terms first appeared during the early Meiji era. Even though their characters (kanji) differed, the Meiji intellectuals at times used the two terms interchangeably because they shared the same pronunciation, a common practice in the modern Japanese language.

The word 殖民, with the implication of reproducing, clearly dominated in governmental documents and intellectual works throughout most of the Meiji period – as the first chapter of this book had illustrated, Meiji colonial expansion was developed hand in hand with the original accumulation of modern Japanese capitalism. However, 植民 gained increasing popularity among Japanese intellectuals in response to the rise of anti-Japanese sentiment in the United States in the beginning of the twentieth century.Footnote ³⁵ The first Japanese book that adopted 植民 instead of 殖民 was On Japanese Colonial Migration (Nihon Shokumin Ron), authored by Tōgō Minoru in 1906. As the previous chapter showed, while Tōgō did not explain his choice of wording, this book marked only the beginning of the Japanese expansionists’ intellectual exploration of the model of permanent migration. In 1916, Nitobe Inazō, Tōgō’s coadvisor at Sapporo Agricultural College, penned an article that clarified the difference between these two written forms. As Nitobe pointed out, while 殖民 was a combination of the character 殖, literally meaning “reproducing,” with the character 民, literally meaning “people,” 植民 was a combination between 植, with the meaning of “planting,” with “people,” 民.Footnote ³⁶ The fact that Nitobe used 植民 instead of 殖民 throughout the article demonstrated that the choice of this written form was deliberate. From the 1900s onward, 植民 gradually replaced 殖民 as the written form of shokumin in Japanese. Its increasing popularity among Japanese expansionists mirrored the affirmation of agriculture-centered permanent migration as the dominant model of Japanese expansion throughout the Taishō and early Shōwa years.

Japanese Expansion in Northeast Asia and the South Seas

The transformation in the discourse of Japanese expansion was further solidified by Japan’s participation in World War I (1914–1918). As historian Frederick Dickinson forcefully argues, this first global war offered Japan a golden opportunity to join the club of modern empires as a valuable member.Footnote ³⁷ Although its proposal to write the clause of racial equality into the charter of the League of Nations was rejected at the Paris Peace Conference, Japan, as a victor of the war, was able to secure a position of leadership in the postwar world as a charter member of the league.Footnote ³⁸ It was also rewarded with Germany’s colonies in Micronesia and colonial privileges in the Shandong Peninsula in China. At the turn of the 1920s, it seemed that Japan had much to gain and little to lose by embracing the new world order. Under Anglo-American hegemony, this new order professed to reject territorial expansion in favor of peace and cooperation. Japan had to halt its military expansion, but migration with the expectations of permanent settlement and local engagement seamlessly fitted into this new world order as a peaceful means of expansion.Footnote ³⁹ Thus the years during and right after World War I witnessed increased Japanese efforts to expand via alternative routes by nonmilitary means.

The career trajectories of individual members of the Emigration Association around this time demonstrate how the Japanese American enlightenment campaign was intertwined with Japanese expansion campaigns in other part of the world that emerged at this time. Ōkuma Shigenobu, the president of the Emigration Association, was a long-standing advocate of Japanese conciliation with the West. Ōkuma was a passionate supporter of the enlightenment campaign, and his promotion of Japanese immigrants’ assimilation into white society was tied to his agenda of integrating Japanese expansion in Northeast Asia into the existing imperial world order. It was also Ōkuma who, during his tenure as the prime minister of Japan, forced the Yuan Shikai regime to accept the Twenty-One Demands in order to deepen Japan’s political and economic penetration in China while avoiding challenging the Western powers’ existing colonial interest in China.Footnote ⁴⁰ The aim of Japanese expansion in Northeast Asia, Ōkuma argued, should not only be solving the issue of domestic overpopulation and food shortage; Japan also needed to contribute to the economic prosperity and peace of local societies.Footnote ⁴¹

The call for expansion to the South Seas emerged prior to the first two decades of the twentieth century – the Seikyō Sha leaders in the 1890s had advocated nanshin as a way to prepare Japan for the inevitable race war against the West. However, the later proposals of expansion to the South Seas were shaped by the experiences of Japanese American enlightenment campaign and World War I. As a result, this new discourse of southward expansion was centered on cooperation with the Western powers instead of challenging them. Takekoshi Yosaburō, a politician-cum-journalist and member of the Emigration Association, was a leading proponent of this trend of thought. In order for Japan to shed its image of the invader (as American exclusionists described Japan), Takekoshi argued, Japan’s expansion must be carried out not via military invasion but instead by focusing on bringing civilization to the world: while Japan was a latecomer to the civilized world, it was now already a full-fledged member, thus it was time for the Japanese to partake in carrying the “White Man’s Burden” (Hakujin no Omoni).Footnote ⁴² The ideal direction for such a Japanese expansion was southward. Its targets included the South Pacific islands, originally proposed by the nanshin thinkers in the 1880s and 1890s, and Southeast Asia, which came under the Japanese colonial gaze after the annexation of Taiwan following the Sino-Japanese War.

Takekoshi acknowledged the fact that the majority of these areas were already under Western colonial rule. Yet Westerners, he contended, were too occupied with extracting profits from the colonies and ignored the task of civilizing these backward regions. Therefore, Japan should take this opportunity to bring civilization to Western colonies, guiding local peoples to make progress in developing commerce and acquiring education. If Japan took up the task to share the blessings of civilization with the native peoples, Takekoshi argued, its expansion would no longer be met with criticism.Footnote ⁴³

The calls for southward expansion also gained material support from the imperial government. In the 1910s, in addition to taking over Micronesia from Germany, the government also sponsored private Japanese enterprises to purchase lands for emigration in North Borneo. It also reached out to the French government in order to facilitate Japanese business expansion in Indochina.Footnote ⁴⁴ Another member of the association, a politician and entrepreneurial tycoon named Inoue Masaji, played a leading role in Japanese mercantile and migrant expansion in the South Seas from the 1910s to the 1940s. He was the founder of the South Asia Company (Nan’a Kōshi), a Singapore-based Japanese trading company operating in Southeast Asia. He also cofounded the South Seas Association (Nan’yō Kyōkai), a semigovernmental association that promoted Japanese expansion in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific.Footnote ⁴⁵ He later became the head of the government-sponsored Overseas Development Company (Kaigai Kōgyō Kabushiki Gaisha) and was in charge of the majority of the activities in Japanese Brazilian migration throughout the 1920s and 1930s.

The empire’s expansion in Northeast Asia and the South Seas in the 1910s provided new colonial privileges for Japanese agricultural migrants. Japan’s annexation of Korea not only safeguarded the land properties previously acquired by Japanese settlers but also gave them legal privileges for further land grabbing.Footnote ⁴⁶ The Twenty-One Demands allowed Japanese subjects to lease land throughout Manchuria. The empire’s annexation of German Micronesia in 1915 as a mandate territory gave Japanese expansionists a free hand for land acquisition and migration there.

However, despite the imperial government’s enthusiastic encouragement and political support by the end of the 1920s, the Malthusian expansionists were never fully satisfied with the state of Japanese agricultural migration to Northeast Asia and the South Seas. While the Korean Peninsula had one of the biggest Japanese overseas communities in the first half of the twentieth century, relatively few Japanese settlers there were farmers. Instead, they were either landlords or urbanites who worked for the colonial government and Japanese companies.Footnote ⁴⁷ The Oriental Development Company had originally planned to move three hundred thousand Japanese farming households to the Korean Peninsula, but it managed to settle only fewer than four thousand households by 1924.Footnote ⁴⁸ By 1931, only about eight hundred Japanese farmers were living inside Japan’s sphere of influence in Manchuria, constituting a tiny portion of the primarily urban settler population.Footnote ⁴⁹

A direct reason for this failure was that Japanese agricultural settlers had serious difficulty competing with local Korean and Chinese farmers, whose cost of living and labor were substantially lower than theirs.Footnote ⁵⁰ Japanese expansion to the South Seas in general primarily focused on commerce, accompanied by Japanese contract laborer migration to local sugar plantations. Specifically, Japanese farmer migration to the South Pacific began in the 1920s and the migrants mainly settled in the empire’s mandate territory in Micronesia. While the number of settlers steadily increased under governmental support from the 1920s to the end of World War II, the total size of Japanese population in the South Pacific did not exceed twenty thousand by 1930.Footnote ⁵¹

The Rise of Migration to Brazil, 1908–1924

While the migration experiments in Northeast Asia and the South Seas proved disappointing, Brazil, with its relatively friendly immigration policy toward the Japanese, turned out to be the most promising option for the Malthusian expansionists in Tokyo. Between 1908 and 1924, Japanese immigrants in Brazil not only grew steadily in number but also succeeded in agricultural settlement. In 1920, before the arrival of the bigger waves of Japanese migrants to Brazil, there were over twenty-eight thousand Japanese settlers in Brazil, 94.8 percent of whom were engaging in rural agriculture. By the time the Immigration Act of 1924 passed, the number of Japanese migrants in Brazil had already climbed to thirty-five thousand.Footnote ⁵² In the same year, an unprecedented number of migrants from rural Japan, fully subsidized by Tokyo, also began to arrive on the shores of the state of São Paulo. From then until 1936, Brazil remained the single country that received the most Japanese migrants outside of Asia.Footnote ⁵³ In that year, Japanese migrants to Manchuria eventually outnumbered those to Brazil. The following pages of this chapter discuss the reasons why Japanese agricultural migration eventually found success in Brazil.

Japanese expansionists had set their sights on Brazil decades before the Russo-Japanese War. As a result of the efforts of Enomoto Takeaki and his followers, Japan established diplomatic relationship with Brazil in 1895. This was soon followed by a Yoshisa Emigration Company project that recruited 1,592 laborers from Japan to work on coffee plantations in Brazil. However, this plan was suddenly canceled by Yoshisa Emigration Company’s partner in Brazil, Prado Jordão & Company, due to the coffee market’s collapse the same year. This aborted project revealed that the Brazilian government and coffee plantation labor contractors did not take Japanese migrants seriously, as European immigrant laborers’ numbers remained high while the global coffee market continued to lag. The failure of this migration project forced the policymakers in Tokyo to suspend all future plans of migration to Brazil in order to avoid economic loss and any further damage to Japan’s international prestige.Footnote ⁵⁴

After the Russo-Japanese War, the resurgent interest in migration to Brazil was a direct result of anti-Japanese sentiment in the United States. In 1905, Japan’s minister in Brazil, Sugimura Fukashi, sent a report to Tokyo that advocated Japanese migration to Brazil. Later published by Osaka Asahi News (Osaka Asahi Shimbun), this report pointed out that the Italian government’s decision to suspend migration to Brazil had led to a labor shortage in the country. While white racism against Japanese in the United States, Canada, and Australia had worsened, Sugimura argued, Brazil would be an ideal alternative for Japanese migrants. He also encouraged migration agents in Japan to visit Brazil in order to explore the opportunities firsthand.Footnote ⁵⁵

The state of São Paulo in Brazil welcomed the Japanese immigrants for two reasons. The first was that it expected these migrants’ arrival would foster the further growth of its coffee economy. The migrants would fill the labor vacuum created by the suspension of migration from Italy and open up Japanese market to Brazilian coffee – the ships that ferried the migrants to Brazil were expected to carry local coffee back to Japan. Paulista elites also believed that the Japanese migrants would turn the sparsely populated lowlands along the coast into productive farms.Footnote ⁵⁶ With such expectations in mind, the state of São Paulo offered financial support for the endeavor.

Two migration projects, spearheaded by Mizuno Ryū and Aoyagi Ikutarō, respectively, were carried out with Brazilian support. Both Mizuno and Aoyagi believed that overseas migration was necessary not only to solve Japan’s overpopulation issue but also to strengthen the Japanese empire,Footnote ⁵⁷ and both men had previous migration experience elsewhere.Footnote ⁵⁸ While their Brazilian migration projects represented two different models of migration – Mizuno’s focused on contract labor while Aoyagi’s focused on farmer migration with land acquisition—they were both ideological heirs to the earlier Texas migration project.

Uchida Sadatsuchi, the initial architect of Japanese agricultural migration to Texas, became the Japanese consul in the state of São Paulo in 1907. He served as an advocate for Mizuno’s plan of Brazil-bound migration within the Japanese government. Japanese labor migration to Brazil, he reasoned, would eventually result in agricultural settlement like it had in Texas. He further argued that this time around, the settlement project was destined for success because, unlike the Americans, the Brazilians were not racist against the Japanese.Footnote ⁵⁹ Uchida also played a central role during the initial negotiations between the state of São Paulo and the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs that made it possible for Mizuno Ryū to transport 781 Japanese migrants to Brazil in June 1908 via the ship Kasato-maru.Footnote ⁶⁰

The state of São Paulo had partially subsidized the migrants’ trip expenses with the expectation that they would work in the designated coffee plantations (fazendas) as laborers (colonos). The initial phase of the project, however, was not met with success, as Mizuno’s poor planning led to company bankruptcy and caused misery for many of the first-wave migrants.Footnote ⁶¹ Nevertheless, Mizuno was able to continue his migration career via the newly established Takemura Colonial Migration Company (Takemura Shokumin Shōkai).Footnote ⁶² Between 1908 and 1914, Japanese labor migration to Brazil remained unsuccessful due to conflicting expectations of the Japanese migrants and the Brazilian plantation owners. The former, misled by migration companies to a degree, thought they could quickly make a fortune in Brazil. The latter, on the other hand, saw the migrants as exploitable cheap laborers who would accept a low standard of living and below-average wage. In 1914, unsatisfied with the Japanese immigrant laborers’ performance, the state of São Paulo suspended its subsidy for Japanese migration. Worried that anti-Japanese sentiment would raise its head in South America like it had in the United States, Tokyo decided to halt further labor migration to Brazil.Footnote ⁶³

Aoyagi Ikutarō’s migration project, on the other hand, closely resembled the earlier Japanese rice farming experience in Texas. Its participants arrived in Brazil as owner-farmers with long-term settlement plans. To take advantage of a law enacted by the state of São Paulo in 1907 that provided subsidies and land concessions to any migration companies that brought in agricultural settlers, a group of Japanese merchants and politicians formed the migration company Tokyo Syndicate. As the head of this company, Aoyagi planned to establish Japanese farming communities in Brazil by purchasing the lands at a low price in São Paulo and then selling portions to individual Japanese farmers. In 1912, the state of São Paulo granted fifty thousand hectares of uncultivated land in the Iguape region to Tokyo Syndicate under the condition that the company would relocate two thousand Japanese families there within four years.Footnote ⁶⁴

The year 1913 was crucial to Aoyagi’s success. The California Alien Land Law of 1913 showed the Japanese leaders how important landownership was to successful migrant expansion. Aoyagi’s efforts in Brazilian land acquisition thus caught the attention of Shibusawa Ei’ichi, a founding member of the Emigration Association and the central figure in the Japanese American enlightenment campaign. Shibusawa was well aware of how Japanese immigrants in California had suffered when they were deprived of their landownership; he became a passionate donor to and supporter for Aoyagi’s campaign in Brazil. Under Shibusawa’s leadership, a group of Japanese entrepreneurial elites formed the Brazil Colonization Company (Burajiru Takushoku Gaisha). With endorsements from the second Katsura Cabinet, the Brazil Colonization Company took over from Tokyo Syndicate to further expand land acquisition in the state of São Paulo while keeping Aoyagi Ikutarō at its helm.

This new company not only secured the ownership of the Iguape Colony but also purchased fourteen hundred hectares of land in the Gipuvura region from the state of São Paulo. In recognition of the support offered by the Japanese government, the company named their new property Katsura Colony after Katsura Tarō, the prime minister.Footnote ⁶⁵ The imperial government was not the only party that was interested in experimenting with farmer migration in Brazil. Beginning with Shibusawa Ei’ichi, there was a number of Japanese entrepreneurial elites who also played a key role in Aoyagi’s Brazilian land acquisition initiative. As most of their businesses depended heavily on Japan-US bilateral trade, they were interested in exploring alternative overseas markets to make up for the possible profit loss caused by the Americans’ anti-Japanese stance. They believed that land acquisition in Brazil, coupled with Japanese farmer migration and permanent settlement, would open up more business opportunities for them.

Aside from government officials and business tycoons, Aoyagi Ikutarō’s project also had supporters in the intellectual circles. In 1914, Kyoto Imperial University professor Kawada Shirō published his study of Brazil as a potential colony for Japan. Titled Brazil as a Colony (Shokuminchi Toshite no Burajiru), this book was the most representative product of the Japanese Malthusian expansionists’ debate during the 1910s in response to the enactment of the Gentlemen’s Agreement and the passage of the Alien Land Law in California. It pointed to Brazil as the most pragmatic alternative to the United States for Japan’s surplus people. Brazil was the ideal destination for Japan’s surplus population because it had fertile and spacious land, a small population, and no race-based restrictions on citizenship or property rights.Footnote ⁶⁶ At the same time, Kawada also pointed out, not all types of migration were desirable. Like Tōgō and Ōkawadaira, he stressed the difference between the less desirable emigration (imin) and the more desirable colonial migration (shokumin). Kawada paid special attention to the Brazilian Colonial Company as the first Japanese company to conduct “colonial migration” (shokumin), which was different from the previous migration endeavors that exported only the less desirable imin – that is, the contract laborers and temporary emigrants.Footnote ⁶⁷ Kawada argued that Aoyagi’s campaign, with its mission of acquiring farmland and helping Japanese peasants to permanently settle overseas, represented colonial migration rather than emigration. More importantly, it was the former that best served the interests of the Japanese empire.Footnote ⁶⁸

The Success of Farmer Migration in Brazil

Farmer migration with land acquisition in Brazil was the Japanese expansionists’ answer to American racism against their compatriots. It was also ideologically complementary to the Japanese American enlightenment campaign that was under way at around the same time. However, the actual success of Aoyagi’s project depended on a few contingent but indispensable global and local factors. The outbreak of World War I, the existing flow of Japanese laborers to Brazil, and the specific conditions of coffee and cotton plantations in the state of São Paulo all contributed to the campaign’s success.

Although Aoyagi was successful in securing financial support, he had considerable difficulty recruiting migrants from Japan to Brazil. Japanese farmers were naturally reluctant to join this venture: not only did they have to permanently leave their homeland, they also had to fork over a significant amount of cash in order to purchase farmlands from the Brazil Colonization Company. Farmers who already owned land in Japan had few reasons to take the risk, while the landless farmers struggled to meet the financial requirement. For the latter group, migrating to Brazil as plantation laborers was only possible if their trips were subsidized. As a result, a majority of the initial setters in the company’s colonies were Japanese contract laborers in coffee plantations who were already living in Brazil. For example, among the first thirty-three families who settled in the Katsura Colony in 1913, only three were recruited from the archipelago; all the rest were Japanese laborers who had left their previous plantations in Brazil.Footnote ⁶⁹

Thus, in a stroke of irony, even though agricultural migration was slated to replace the “outdated and undesirable” model of laborer migration, it was the latter that provided the former with sufficient human capital for its initial success. The revival of Japanese labor migration was an immediate result of World War I, as the outbreak of the war led to a catastrophic decline in labor supply for the Brazilian coffee plantations. The annual number of new immigrants arriving in Brazil dropped from 119,758 in 1913 to a mere 20,937 in 1915. To make matters worse for the plantations, some European laborers already in their employment returned to their home countries, while still many others left for the cities to work in the more lucrative war-related industries.Footnote ⁷⁰ Such an unexpected and urgent need for coffee plantation laborers eventually pushed the state government of São Paulo to resume its subsidy for labor migration from Japan in 1916.Footnote ⁷¹

While the constant flow of laborers from rural Japan to coffee plantations in São Paulo provided a stable supply of potential farmer-settlers, the very structure of the Brazilian rural economy made it not only possible but also necessary for the Japanese laborers working on coffee plantations to gradually transform themselves into landowning farmers. The low wages these laborers received caused them much disappointment, but it also made it impossible for them to quickly return to Japan; thus they had to focus on improving their station in life while staying in Brazil. At the same time, the cultivation of alternative crops such as rice and cotton proved to be highly lucrative. While urbanization and industrialization increased the demand for rice as food and cotton as raw material, most of Brazil’s rural landlords showed little interest in switching from coffee to these crops. The increasing demand for rice and cotton and the lack of local supply left a niche spot that the Japanese immigrants could ably fill. Having grown up in rural Japan, most of them had farming skills before coming to Brazil, and a lack of competition from the locals all but guaranteed their profits. In addition, unlike coffee, which required a multiple-year cycle to yield investment return, rice and cotton were annual crops that allowed farmers to quickly accumulate wealth with little initial investment. Therefore, even though their income levels were low, it was not difficult for Japanese migrants working on coffee plantations to purchase their own lands by cultivating rice and cotton in their spare time.

Under the management of Brazil Colonization Company, the region of Iguape became highly attractive to Japanese migrant laborers. In addition to dividing its land into small portions and allowing immigrants to purchase them by annual installments, the company’s management of Iguape provided the Japanese immigrants with a sense of community. For example, the residents of Katsura Colony, the first settler community in Iguape, were able to communicate in Japanese in daily life, enjoy Japanese food such as rice and miso, and purchase Japanese goods at reasonable prices in local stores.Footnote ⁷² The Registro Colony, the second settler community in Iguape, founded in 1916, featured a medical clinic and its own brick and tile factories. Later on, both Katsura and Registro colonies also established schools.Footnote ⁷³ In 1917, the Brazil Colonization Company started offering loans to every Japanese family – be they located in Japan or Brazil – that would come live in Registro. As a result, the number of new families who moved in grew from twenty in 1916 to one hundred fifty in 1918.Footnote ⁷⁴

Figure 5.2 Japanese immigrants harvesting cotton in the field. This picture was used by Japanese Striving Society’s president Nagata Shigeshi for his speeches around Nagano prefecture in the late 1910s to promote Japanese migration to Brazil.

Courtesy of the Japanese Striving Society.

Iguape: A Turning Point

Between 1914 and 1917, while the total settler population in Iguape remained low, the number of recruits grew rapidly every year. The growth and stability of Japanese settler communities in Iguape during these years marked a turning point in the history of Japanese migration in Brazil for two reasons. For one thing, long-term opportunities in Iguape attracted more and more Japanese immigrants who came to Brazil as contract laborers to stay and give up their plan of returning. For another, the prosperity of Iguape also drew increasing support from the imperial government in Brazilian migration.

Figure 5.3 Hundreds of bags of rice produced by Japanese immigrants piled up on a railway that connected the Japanese community in Registro with other parts of Brazil. This picture was also used by Japanese Striving Society’s president Nagata Shigeshi for his speeches around Nagano prefecture in late 1910s to promote Japanese migration to Brazil.

Courtesy of the Japanese Striving Society.

First, to those who initially migrated from Japan to Brazil as plantation laborers with the goal of returning home, the success of their peers in Iguape helped to motivate them to settle down and acquire lands for themselves. By 1920, Japanese immigrants in Brazil were more likely to own farmland than any other ethnic group. During that year, the Japanese immigrants held 5.3 percent of the alien-owned farmland in São Paulo, while they constituted only 4.3 percent of the state’s foreign population.Footnote ⁷⁵ In the same year, 94 percent of Japanese living in Brazil were engaged in agriculture in one way or another,Footnote ⁷⁶ a figure that was in sharp contrast to the Japanese communities in Northeast Asia and the South Seas. By then, expansionists in Tokyo were convinced that agricultural migration was the most desirable migration model for the expanding empire. Yet only in Brazil, buoyed by specific local and global contextual factors, did agricultural settlement prove to be the most profitable choice for Japanese migrants.

Second, the prevailing trend of Japanese laborers in Brazil repositioning themselves as independent farmer also prompted the imperial government to take a fresh look at the value of labor migration. Indeed, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs endorsed Mizuno Ryū’s initial campaign of labor migration to Brazil in 1908 because it expected that these labor migrants would eventually settle down in South America as independent farmers.Footnote ⁷⁷ However, it was the growing size of laborer-turned-independent farmers in Japanese Brazilian communities that proved the model’s merits to Tokyo. Thus convinced, the Japanese government became further involved in expanding and managing labor migration projects overseas in general and to Brazil in particular.

Between 1917 and 1918, four leading Japanese migration companies, including the South America Colonial Company (Nanbei Shokumin Kabushiki Gaisha), managed by Mizuno Ryū, merged into the Overseas Development Company (Kaigai Kōgyō Kabushiki Gaisha), commonly known as Kaikō for short.Footnote ⁷⁸ After acquiring the Morioka Emigration Company (Morioka Imin Gaisha) in 1920, the Kaikō became the only government-authorized Japanese migration company operating in Brazil. At the time of its formation, the Kaikō primarily ran on private funds, but it maintained close ties with the government.Footnote ⁷⁹ Not only was its first director Kamiyama Jūnji a former bureaucrat, its very inception was endorsed by Tokyo with the goal of consolidating the migration companies so that the government could monitor and manage overseas migration more effectively.Footnote ⁸⁰

The Kaikō’s initial task was recruiting farmers from rural Japan and relocating them overseas as contract laborers. Aside from coffee plantations in Brazil, it also sent migrants to work on sugar plantations and mines in other places around the Pacific Rim such as the Philippines, Australia, and Peru. Nevertheless, labor migration to Brazil claimed an increasing share of the Kaikō’s business and became its dominant source of revenue from 1920 onward.Footnote ⁸¹

In 1919, the Kaikō expanded into South America by merging with Aoyagi’s Brazil Colonization Company, taking over the latter’s land property and business in Brazil. Through this merger, the Kaikō combined the previously separate labor migration and farmer migration projects. More human and financial resources were then poured into the program of land acquisition in Iguape.Footnote ⁸² During the next year, the Kaikō established a third settler community named Sete Barras Colony in Iguape next to Registro. The company built roads to interconnect the three Japanese communities, linking them with river ports and adjacent Brazilian towns. With support from the imperial government, the Kaikō also began to integrate the domestic aspects of the migration campaign such as public promotion, candidate selection, and predeparture training. The migrants were expected to show their absolute dedication to the empire by permanently settling overseas as independent farmers, extending the Japanese empire’s influence to the other side of the Pacific.

While the social mobility of the Japanese laborers-turned-owners in Brazil attracted increasing support from Tokyo, it also prompted the state of São Paulo to suspend its subsidy to Japanese immigrants. As more and more Japanese laborers left their original plantations to take up independent farming, São Paulo’s policymakers became convinced that it was no longer cost-effective for their coffee plantations to seek out laborers from Japan.Footnote ⁸³ This conclusion was also made at the moment when migrants from Europe once again began to pour into Brazilian plantations at the end of World War I. Despite the Japanese perception of racial equality in Brazil, the Brazilian government had always deemed European immigrants to be more desirable than those from Asia. In 1922, the state of São Paulo officially ended its subsidy for Japanese labor migration.

Toward a New Era of Japanese Settler Colonialism

The decline of São Paulo’s interest in Japanese laborers, however, did not put an end to the flow of Japanese migration to Brazil. On the contrary, the number of Japanese immigrants in Brazil grew at a rapid pace after the turn of the 1920s. Growth of the Japanese migration flow to Brazil was accompanied by the overall changes in Japanese migration-based expansion in general, marked by the emphases on permanent settlement and the importance of women and the increasing involvement of the Japanese government in migration promotion and management. These changes were consolidated by a series of international and domestic events that took place in the first half of the 1920s.

In 1920, the California Alien Land Law was revised to close many significant loopholes that had existed in the original 1913 version. With Japanese American farmers as its primary target, the revised law banned aliens ineligible for citizenship from purchasing land in the names of their American-born children or in the names of corporations. Both practices were popular with Japanese immigrant farmers in California as ways to circumvent the original law. In addition to the right of purchasing and long-term leasing lands, the Japanese immigrants’ right of short-term land leasing was also taken away from them. This revised law not only dealt a fatal blow to Japanese American farmers in California but also convinced Tokyo that the Japanese American enlightenment campaign had failed. In 1922, the Japanese government had to “voluntarily” stop issuing passports to picture brides to avoid fanning further anti-Japanese sentiment in the United States. In the meantime, while Asia and the South Pacific appeared to be unattractive destinations, white racism in North America spurred the Japanese expansionists to gaze into Brazil. The success of Japanese agricultural settlement in Iguape convinced Japanese policymakers that migration to Brazil was worth the financial investment.

Emerging amid the waves of anti-Japanese sentiment in the United States and the Japanese American enlightenment campaign, Japanese Brazilian migration immediately inherited the campaign leaders’ emphasis on the principle of permanent settlement and the importance of women in Japanese community building. The Brazilian migration was carried out with efforts in fostering both land acquisition and family-centered settlement. For example, the Overseas Development Company that sent most of Japanese migrants to Brazil in the 1920s and 1930s, recruited migrants in family units instead of individually. To be qualified to sign the contract of migration with the Kaikō, each migrant family had to comprise at least three adults (above the age of twelve).Footnote ⁸⁴

Figure 5.4 Kaikō poster from around the mid-1920s to recruit Japanese for Brazilian migration. It clearly illustrates two expectations on the migrants: (1) they were supposed to migrate in the unit of family; (2) with the hoe in hand, the central figure in the poster is a farmer. This indicates that migration should be agriculture centered.

Courtesy of Museu Histórico da Imigração Japonesa no Brasil, São Paulo.

Figure 5.5 Magic lantern slide that the Japanese Striving Society’s president Nagata Shigeshi used during his speeches around Nagano prefecture in late 1910s to promote Japanese migration in Brazil. It is a picture of the family of Nakamura Sadao, a schoolteacher from Kamiminochi County in Nagano prefecture, who migrated to Registro, Brazil, together in 1918. Family migration had begun to be the norm for Japanese migration to Brazil around that time.

Courtesy of the Japanese Striving Society.

White racism in North America not only made Brazil increasingly attractive as a colonial target for Japanese Malthusian expansionists but also convinced them of the importance of permanent settlement and the role of women in Japanese overseas community building. On the other hand, the continuation of rural depression in Japan brought about a structural change in the imperial government’s support for migration. Two years after the Rice Riots (Kome Sōdō) of 1918, the government created a Bureau of Social Affairs under the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Aside from tending to issues such as unemployment and poverty, the Bureau of Social Affairs was also tasked with promoting and managing overseas migration. This institutional change signaled that the Japanese government had come to recognize overseas migration as an important tool to combat domestic social issues; it was no longer a purely diplomatic matter under the sole management of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The Great Kantō Earthquake (Kantō Dai Shinsai) of 1923 further stimulated the Bureau of Social Affairs’ migration promotion. To forestall unrests following the disaster, the bureau began to provide full subsidies for migration to Brazil through the Kaikō. It offered thirty-five Japanese yen for each Brazil-bound migrant whom the company recruited, a sum that covered the costs of both enrollment and transportation, making migration to Brazil free of charge for the migrants themselves.Footnote ⁸⁵ The number of Japanese migrants to Brazil jumped from 797 in 1923 to 3,689 in 1924.Footnote ⁸⁶

Meanwhile, the Immigration Act of 1924 put a complete stop to Japanese immigration to the United States. At the Imperial Economic Conference held in Tokyo in the same year, Japanese Diet members, government officials, and public intellectuals reached an agreement that the existing government policy on overseas migration needed an overhaul. The participants recognized the importance of overseas migration both as a way to alleviate overpopulation and rural poverty at home and as a means of peaceful expansion abroad. To avoid repeating the migration project’s failure in North America, they demanded that the government increase its support for migration by playing a central role in protecting and training the emigrants.

The imperial government carried out this conference’s agenda in the following years, and a new era of Japan’s migration-based expansion thus began. From 1924 onward, the Japanese state – at both central and local levels – took on an unprecedented degree of responsibility in financing, promoting, and organizing emigration programs to Brazil and later Manchuria. This new era of migration also saw a radical departure from its past practices in terms of the migrants’ social status. Given the continuing rural depression and full government subsidy for the migrants, the most destitute residents in the Japanese countryside became involved in the imperial mission of expansion.

Conclusion

This chapter has examined the two courses of action in Japanese overseas expansion between the enactment of the Gentlemen’s Agreement in 1907 and the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924. Seeing overseas migration as an effective solution to the ever-growing surplus population in Japan, the Malthusian expansionists sought to placate the anti-Japanese sentiment in the United States while exploring alternative migration destinations. Both courses of action were marked by their efforts at embracing the logic of Western imperialism so that Japan’s own expansion could fit into the existing world order as to share the “White Man’s Burden” instead of challenging the hegemonic powers.

At the same time, most migration-related campaigns during these years were ultimately unfruitful. In the United States, the enlightenment campaign spearheaded by the Emigration Association ended with the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924. While the period between the late 1900s and the 1920s witnessed an expansion of Japanese colonial presence in Northeast Asia and the South Seas, Japanese farmer migration and settlement in these parts remained disappointing when measured against the expansionists’ visions. An exception to this norm was Brazil, where Japanese migrants were able to build and expand their farming communities. Encouraged by what happened in Brazil, the Japanese government began to provide unprecedented support to expand Japanese migration to Brazil when the outlook for US-bound migration grew dim. The history of Japan’s migration-based expansion entered a new era (from the mid-1920s to 1945) with a radical departure from the past in terms of the degree of the state’s involvement, the social statuses of migrants, and the relationship of Japanese expansion with Western imperialism. The next two chapters will examine these radical changes and explain the new ways in which the discourse of overpopulation legitimized and shaped Japanese expansion in this new era.