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Postwar Emigration to South America from Japan and the Ryukyu Islands

2020; Duke University Press; Volume: 100; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-8178600

1527-1900

Mieko Nishida,

Japanese History and Culture

In Postwar Emigration to South America from Japan and the Ryukyu Islands, Pedro Iacobelli discusses postwar Okinawan (Ryukyuan) emigration to South America, focusing on the role of the sending country. Under the United States Civil Administration of the Ryukyu Islands (USCAR), Okinawa started its state-led emigration in June 1954, with Bolivia as the destination. Critical of the push-pull approach to international migrations, Iacobelli strongly advocates “political migration history” to “analyze the rationale behind the state's involvement in out-migration” (p. 2).The book begins with an overview of Japan's overseas migrations, with emphasis on the government's role in creating emigration flows. Postwar Japan's “overpopulation problem” intensified with 6.3 million military and civilian repatriates, and the reduction of the country's population became the state's business for recovery from the war. Postoccupation Japan launched its emigration project to South America, with support from the International Labour Organization (ILO) for its promotion of “international cooperation,” as well as with US$45 million in loans from three major US banks in 1954 (p. 50). Meanwhile, postrevolutionary Bolivia was provided the most US foreign aid from 1953 to 1961 and emerged as a new destination, as its land reform made vast tropical lowlands available for immigrants. Thus postwar Japan's emigration to Bolivia started in 1955. The Ryukyu Islands' overpopulation was escalated further by the US military's aggressive confiscation of available land for base building. Unlike its Japanese counterpart, the Ryukyu Emigration Program was formed as a US Cold War policy in the Pacific. Chapter 5 is focused on the program's two major architects on the US side: James L. Tigner and Walter H. Judd. Chapter 6 covers the state history of the Ryukyu Islands from the Ryukyu Kingdom to the Government of the Ryukyu Islands (GRI), which was established in April 1952 as a “state in mode of latency,” promoting Okinawan political identity and demanding a higher level of autonomy from the US military government (p. 115). Iacobelli argues in chapter 7 that during the term of Shuhei Higa (1952–56), which promoted a strong anti-American sentiment, the GRI developed an emigration discourse based on a popular narrative of Okinawans as migratory people as well as victims of the war. While migration to Indonesia and other countries was not permitted by the USCAR, the GRI successfully proposed emigration to Bolivia, established two agencies (the Emigration Bank and the Ryukyu Overseas Association), sent a two-man delegation to Latin America, and even secured transportation funds from the US Department of State by bypassing the USCAR authorities. In the midst of “emigration fever,” the GRI recruited and prepared the first groups of emigrants to Bolivia (p. 158). Iacobelli concludes that state-led Okinawan emigration to Bolivia in the 1950s was not “a process framed within a neutral geopolitical context” but “a result of the early Cold War constraints and determinants” (p. 170).This reviewer would like to raise several questions. First, one may wonder why the book ends with the arrival of the first group of Okinawan immigrants in Colonia Uruma of Santa Cruz department in September 1954. The second group arrived later in the same year, but all abandoned the settlement soon after 15 of the emigrants succumbed to the so-called Uruma disease. It took two years for them to finally settle permanently in Colonia Okinawa. Furthermore, in 1956 the Japanese government decided to make its loans available for Okinawan emigration to South America so that the number of Okinawan emigrants would increase rapidly. Did this decision change the patterns of postwar Okinawan emigration to South America? Second, the author researched extensively in Australia, Japan (including Okinawa), and the United States, in English, Japanese, and Spanish, but did not conduct any research in Bolivia as a receiving country. The author could have researched at the Museo Histórico Okinawa in Bolivia, established in August 2004, and interviewed some of the original Uruma immigrants in order to examine the migrants' view of the state's role in their emigration as well as their own agency. Third, the book does not consider the collective agency of Okinawan networks, which not only facilitated Okinawan emigration but also helped immigrants with their international relocations and with new socioeconomic opportunities, as in the case of Okinawan immigrant families who left for Brazil to start over in the Okinawan neighborhood Vila Carrão, in São Paulo city. Fourth, one may wonder if there were any interactions or collaborations in the late 1950s between Okinawan settlements and Japan's Colonia San Juan de Yapacaní, also of Santa Cruz department, where not only European immigrants but Bolivian nationals refused to settle.All in all, Pedro Iacobelli has produced an interesting study on postwar Okinawan history through the lens of state ideologies and emigration policies from 1945 to 1954. This book contributes to our understanding of the US military occupation of Okinawa, Okinawan and Japanese immigration to South America, US foreign relations, and the early Cold War in East Asia.