Shedding the unwanted: Japan's emigration policy in a historical perspective

This study examines political implications of Japan's emigration policy towards Latin America as well as the policy's impacts upon historical evolution and patterns of this trans-Pacific human mobility from a historical perspective. Identifying the complexity, contradictions, and elusiveness of the Latin-American-bound emigration phenomenon and the Japanese state's emigration policy in both the prewar and postwar periods, it argues that the Japanese state powerfully shaped the cross-border migration movement, independent of structural (both international and domestic) conditions. Intent and interests of state emigration promoters who continued to advance the controversial policy despite external constraints are the focal of this study.First, this study explains why the "conventional" structuralist Perspective (overpopulation and macroeconomic crises) is insufficient in explaining the origins of emigration policy and the state's policy rationale. A close examination of the causal linkage between the policy and socio-economic conditions reveals the major paradoxes of emigration policy---i.e. the regional concentration of the origins of emigrants in the Southwest and the state's insistence upon a continuation of emigration policy towards the region.Second, this study seeks a partial explanation of the policy rationale to the realm of international economy. It conceptualizes emigration policy as part of Japan's comprehensive profit-maximization strategy, in which emigrants were used as a conduit of domestic capital accumulation by way of international trade and capital transfers.Lastly, this study argues that domestic political considerations dictated emigration policy---i.e. the state intent to efficiently and effectively solve a political crisis by means of removing the "politically unwanted" population abroad Emigration policy was the state's political device to sterilize social opposition and restore political equilibrium outside the formal institutional structure of crisis resolution. In addition, the study conceptualizes emigration policy as a derivative of Japan's organic mechanism of social domination in the continuum of modern state orthodoxy. After overseas relocation of the "unwanted" people, the state re-incorporated former dissidents into its inclusive yet paternalistic polity and imposed its "ideal" state-society relations upon the diaspora community beyond its territorial boundaries.