Postwar Emigration To South America From Japan And The Ryukyu Islands PDF Download

This dissertation examines the role of states in shaping migration flows, in particular in East Asia during the Cold War, by exploring the genesis of the state-led emigration from Japan and the Ryukyu Islands to South America in the mid-twentieth century. This work proposes an alternative perspective on migration history (political migration history) to analyse the rationale behind the establishment of migration programs by the sending state. To develop this perspective, the thesis examines the state's emigration policies, their determinants and their execution for the Japanese and Okinawan cases. In the pre-war period Japan was actively promoting emigration to the Americas, Asia and Oceania, but in the years after the end of the Pacific War (1941-1945), the American-led occupation effectively dismantled the emigration apparatuses used by the Japanese government. Only when the US occupation of the country concluded in 1952 were state-led emigration efforts fully resumed in Japan. In the Ryukyu Islands, territory severed from the mainland as a result of the peace treaty between Japan and the Allied powers and governed by the hybrid co-existence of two nominal governments: the United States Civil Administration of the Ryukyu Islands and the Government of the Ryukyu Islands, state-led emigration was resumed in 1954. But what elements triggered the beginning-almost simultaneously-of emigration programs in these two territories? What were the political considerations which affected migration policy in mainland Japan and in the Ryukyu Islands? How did the sending governments organise, promote and execute these early groups of state-led migration? Political migration history, the theoretical approach used in this thesis, complements the existing research on the determinants of international migration by focusing on the state's selection of a course of action to address perceived emergencies. This perspective involves the examination of the decision-making process in state-endorsed migration, and of the establishment of specific institution and political discourse to support the realisation of these programs. A political interpretation of the Japanese and Okinawan post-war migration cases represents a contribution to the field since the bulk of the literature on post-war Japanese migration has centred its analysis on socio-economic explanations for the establishment of the emigration flows. The thesis argues that the states in Japan and the Ryukyu Islands played an important role in establishing emigration flows during the early post-war period, and that those migration policies were based on political cost-benefit calculations that were not necessarily connected with economic factors. In essence, it examines the historical contingencies, the mechanism and institutions involved in the emigration program from the viewpoints of each of the governments involved: the mainland Japanese government (Chapters 3 and 4), the United States Civil Administration of the Ryukyu Islands (Chapters 5 and 6) and the Government of the Ryukyu Islands (Chapters 7 and 8). From this perspective, this dissertation deepens our understanding of state-led migration in East Asia and contributes to the historiography of post-occupation Japan and US-administered Ryukyu Islands in the 1950s.