Migrants, Subjects, Citizens: Comparative Perspectives on Nationality in the Prewar Japanese Empire
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Volume 6 | Issue 8 | Article ID 2862 | Aug 01, 2008 The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Migrants, Subjects, Citizens: Comparative Perspectives on Nationality in the Prewar Japanese Empire Tessa Morris-Suzuki Migrants, Subjects, Citizens: Comparative even maybe 20 million (ten times the current Perspectives on Nationality in the Prewar size) by the middle of this century, thus Japanese Empire creating a “Big Japan” with enhanced global power and prestige. (Sakanaka 2005; Akashi Tessa Morris-Suzuki and Ogawa 2008) Former Prime Minister Mori Yoshiro seems an Public statements by the Diet Members’ unlikely champion of a multicultural Japan. His League are part of an intensifying debate in brief term of office is, after all, perhaps best Japan about immigration and the place of remembered for the furore he evoked by a foreigners in Japanese society. Against a speech in which he described Japan as a background of impending population decline “Divine Nation headed by the Emperor”. This and global competition for skilled labour, the echo of prewar nationalism stirred fears at conventional battlelines of the migration home and abroad that senior Japanesedebate are being redrawn. Now some politicians still subscribed to Shinto myths of a conservative politicians are looking seriously at unique and racially superior Japan. Yet Mori the need to revise social policies, and even to today is an active participant in the ruling reform Japan’s nationality law, in order to Liberal Democratic Party’s “Diet Members’ adapt to an age of higher migration. League for Promoting Exchanges of Foreign Meanwhile, leading members of the opposition Human Resources” (Gaikoku Jinzai Koryu Democratic Party have been debating a Suishin Giin Renmei), an awkwardly-named proposal to give local voting rights to foreign body whose mission is to promote mass permanent residents: a proposal which immigration by making Japan a magnet for Sakanaka firmly excludes from his vision of Big skilled workers from around the world. (Akashi Japan, and which LDP politician Hirasawa and Ogawa 2008, 69) Katsue describes as “the first step towards the loss of Japanese identity and the dissolution of Mori’s capacity to combine nostalgia for the heart of the nation state”. (Nishi Nihon wartime nationalism with enthusiasm for Shimbun, 18 April 2008). Such political boosting the number of foreigners in Japan is, crosscurrents highlight a complex relationship however, perhaps not so odd after all. The between nationalism and internationalism, inspiration for the activities of the Dietbetween belief in a “unique Japan” and in Members’ League is a fear that a low birth rate “coexistence [kyosei] with foreigners”, and and declining population will irrevocably between nostalgia for the past and visions for damage Japan’s power and prestige. For this the future. reason, its members have given a friendly reception to the views of Sakanaka Hidenori, Colonial Origins former head of Japan’s Immigration Bureau, who advocates an expansion in the size of These controversies surrounding migration and Japan’s foreigner population to 10 million, or nationality are deeply embedded in Japan’s 1 6 | 8 | 0 APJ | JF colonial history, just as current debates on did not necessarily go together, and seldom multiculturalism and citizenship in Britain and coalesced into a single national heart. France are deeply embedded in the history of the British and French Empires. The prewar past has a bearing on the present for several reasons. First, the policies pursued by Japanese governments in the first half of the twentieth century helped to determine the nature of the foreign presence in Japan today. Many Koreans in Japan are descendents of migrants from the colonial era. Many members of Japan’s Brazilian and Peruvian communities, which together numbered over 370,000 in 2006, are descendents of those who emigrated in the first half of the twentieth century, often under schemes supported by the Japanese state as a means of strengthening their nation’s social cohesion and international influence. (Immigration Bureau 2007, 18-19) Second, the ideas that resurface in present-day Map showing stages of incorporation in debates have a lineage that goes back to the Japanese Empire, 1870-1943 nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The legal framework of Japanese nationality was The age of colonial empires, like the present first set in place at a time when the creation of day, was a time of mass migrations, and the the Japanese colonial empire was justprewar Japanese empire was a space crossed beginning, and this framework was further by a complex web of movement. By 1932, there refined and developed as the empire grew. The were estimated to be some 825,000 Japanese boundaries of nationality, subjecthood and nationals living in foreign countries, Japan’s citizenship were therefore dynamic and mandated territories and the quasi-colony of contested. They were also riven with paradoxes, many of which arose from a central Manchukuo, as well as about a million Japanese contradiction: the need for the Empire to unite settlers in the colonial territories of Korea, its diverse subjects into a single loyal body Taiwan and Karafuto. (Allison 1934a) The while simultaneously seeking to divide rulers number of foreigners in prewar and wartime and ruled into a hierarchy of groups with Japan was relatively small - around 54,000 in separate sets of rights. As the Japanese empire 1930 and 39,000 in 1940. (Homusho Nyukoku expanded during the Asia Pacific War, colonial Kanrikyoku 1964, 10) This figure, however, did subjects in Korea and Taiwan were encouraged not include the large number of Korean and to see themselves as part of the inner circles of Taiwanese colonial subjects who migrated to a multiethnic Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Japan particularly from the late 1920s onwards. Sphere [Dai ToA Kyoeiken], in which By 1938 there were probably some 800,000 increasingly complex layers of rights and duties distinguished peoples of the metropolitan core, Korean residents in Japan - over 1% of the total the formal colonies, quasi-colonies likepopulation of metropolitan Japan [naichi], and Manchukuo and occupied areas. Identity, by 1945 the number had exceeded two million. subjecthood, legal nationality and voting rights (Pak 1975, 9) 2 6 | 8 | 0 APJ | JF “There are only two nations, East and West”. This quotation, from no less an authority than Napoleon Bonaparte, forms the opening sentence of a discussion paper on imperial citizenship written in 1914 by the forum of British foreign affairs experts known as the Round Table. The document’s authors go on to observe: “in this Napoleon’s aphorism is essentially correct, that history has been for the most part a settling of accounts between East and West. The chief pieces have been those of Europe and Asia, and uncivilized races Around 42,000 Chinese labourers were also have occupied the position of pawns in the transported to Japan during the War, of whom game”. (Round Table 1914, 1) The Round some 31,000 were still in Japan at war’s end. In Table’s reflections on the evolution of the addition, there were about 28,000 migrants British Commonwealth, which they portrayed from the Japanese colony of Taiwan in Japan, as “the highest development of political ideas making a total Chinese population of almost typical of Europe”, exposed the profound 60,000 in 1945. (Vasishth 1997, 132) Japan’s ambiguities and dilemmas of subjecthood and imperial expansion was also associated with nationality in the colonial world. On the one other movements of people between colonial hand, the might of an empire is demonstrated territories or across the frontiers of empire: by the size of its population. From this point of mass emigration from Korea to Manchuria, for view it is desirable to have an inclusive system example, as well as a smaller flow ofof membership which defines all inhabitants as immigrants from China to the Japanese colony sharing a single nationality. On the other hand, of Taiwan. it is necessary to justify the right of one section of the population to exercise control over Migration was the lifeblood of empire, and others. Hence the tendency for most colonial those who governed the empire sought to empires to develop an increasingly sharp maximise the economic and strategic benefits distinction between the formal status of for cross-border movement while alsonationality (shared by all or most inhabitants of controlling, channelling and filtering it so as to the empire) and substantive citizenship (rights contain its subversive potential. The tools they to participate in the political process, which devised for this purpose were often ingenious. were unequally distributed between colonisers Here I shall begin by using a comparison and colonised.) between the British and Japanese empires to clarify both commonalities and distinct features The Japanese model of colonialism is often of the Japanese system. I shall then go on to likened to the assimilationist French model, look at the way in which prewar migrations which involved an extension of the challenged and sometimes shifted themetropolitan order to the colonies, and boundaries of Japanese subjecthood and contrasted with the British model, which is nationality, before concluding with some seen as involving a higher degree of autonomy reflections on the implications of this history for local people. (See for example Tanaka 1984, for the current migration and nationality 159) This distinction, however, seems too debates. sharp. France, Britain and Japan all had highly complex imperial systems in which the strength Imperial Subjects of metropolitan control and the degree of 3 6 | 8 | 0 APJ | JF assimilationism varied both between regions automatically and without choice - to have and over time, and Japan in fact borrowed and become Japanese subjects, but a local version adapted eclectically from both French and of the Nationality Law was never introduced, British precedents.