HISTORICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF EMIGRATION FROM RURAL JAPAN IN THE PRE-WORLD WAR II ERA

Abstract

Spatial mobility like rural–urban migration is an important social phenomenon to measure the degree of freedom and dynamism of a society that is directly related to industrialization. The same applies to spatial mobility of emigration, which is permanent or long-term transmigration from a nation to another nation. Compared with Europe after the Industrial Revolution where emigration was a major social mobility, Japanese emigration after the Meiji era until World War II, was an exceptional social mobility in its industrialization process. This paper aims to clarify the historical characteristics of Japanese emigration during the prewar period. Three approaches were introduced. The first was to extract periodicity from the trend of migration, finding four medium-term cycles with 15-20 years; shifting the destination from Hawaii, North America, South America and China; and changing their intensions from tentative emigration of contracted labor for remittance to permanent emigration for settlement of agricultural firm in the receiving country. The second is to clarify the Japanese government framework which created institutionalized marginality to the emigrants, causing a discrimination structure within the emigrants society. The third is to identify push and pull factors of Japanese emigrants, finding seven factors: natural environments and natural disasters, increasing population and surplus people, commercialized agricultural products and faded crops, poverty and income differences, accessibility to external society, value of performance orientation, and emigration encouraging agency. Although the situation of emigration is directly affected by the international relations around Japan as well as tense relations between the value and behavior of Japanese emigrants and those of the receiving society, emigration itself results from the personal initiative of an emigrant and thus its mechanism is complicated and diversified, requiring multidimensional framework of ordinary income opportunities in the sending community in which emigration is positioned as one of their income opportunities.