The conclusion summarizes the four analytical loci through which this book has examined the nexus between Japanese migration – both inside and outside of the empire’s sphere of influence in Asia – and the multi-dimensional continuities in the history of Japanese migration before and after 1945. They include the history of Malthusian expansionism, the human connections and institutional continuities between Japanese emigration campaigns in different time periods, the ideological connections between Japanese emigration campaigns on both sides of the Pacific, and the intellectual conflation between migration and colonial expansion in modern Japanese history. Through the lens of Japanese history, this book also reveals the inseparability between the experience of migration and that of settler colonialism in the modern world. Thinking of the experience of migration from the angle of settler colonialism helps to bring the indigenous perspective into our understanding of the history of migration. Analyzing settler colonialism as a process of migration also reveals the crucial role of Malthusian expansionism in justifying modern empires’ migration-driven expansion, beginning with British settler colonialism in North America.

Part I, including chapters 1 and 2, focuses on the formative period of Malthusian expansionism, from the very beginning of the Meiji era to the eve of the Sino-Japanese War in the mid-1890s, and examines the international and domestic contexts in which Malthusian expansionism emerged in the archipelago. By defining the home archipelago as overpopulated while Hokkaido as conveniently empty, the Meiji government justified its policy of shizoku migration as a way to balance domestic demography and a strategy to turn these declassed samurai into the first frontiersmen of the empire. Japan’s imitation of Anglo-American settler colonialism in Hokkaido also inspired the Japanese expansionists to turn their gaze to the American West as an ideal target of shizoku expansion in the 1880s. The blunt white racism that Japanese settlers and travelers encountered in California, however, forced the Japanese expansionists to shift their focus to the South Seas, Hawaiʻi, and Latin America. In their imaginations, these areas remained battlegrounds of racial competition in which the Japanese still had chances to claim a share, and the declassed samurai in the overpopulated archipelago were the ideal foot soldiers in this fight.

This chapter discusses how the first wave of Japanese migration to the U.S. stimulated Japanese expansion in the South Seas and Latin America in the 1880s and 1890s. Shizoku settlers and travelers on the US West Coast encountered blunt white racism. Chinese exclusion in the U.S. not only allowed Japanese expansionists to re-interpret the imperial competitions in the world as racial conflicts but also forced them to temporarily shift their colonial gaze from North America to the South Seas and Latin America. Malthusian expansionism continued to link shizoku-centered political tension at home with colonial expansion abroad. Promoters of Japanese expansion in the South Seas and Iberian America continued to use the claim of overpopulation to justify their agendas. They also had profound connections with shizoku migration in Hokkaido in the recent past.

This chapter focuses on the history of Japanese community building in Aliança in the State of São Paulo, Brazil by Japanese migration leaders in Nagano Prefecture. It reveals three characteristics of Japan’s Malthusian expansion during the 1920s and 1930s. First, as the first prefecture-led migration project in imperial Japan, Aliança’s success stimulated a wave of prefecture-centered Brazilian migration throughout the archipelago in the late 1920s. Second, Aliança was also the first Japanese settler community that exemplified a new Japanese colonial ideology that challenged white racism and promoted the principle of “co-existence and co-prosperity”. Third, the history of Aliança also demonstrates the intrinsic connections between Japanese migration to Brazil and later to Manchuria. State institutions involved in the promotion and management of migration were first established for Japanese Brazilian migration but later became engines of mass migration to Manchuria. Core leaders of Brazilian migration, such as Nagata Shigeshi and Umetani Tadaatsu, also enthusiastically participated in the government-led Manchurian migration campaign. The principle of co-existence and co-prosperity was also transplanted from Brazil to Manchuria and eventually became the ideological core of Japan’s Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere during the Asia Pacific War.

This chapter examines Japanese overseas migration from the end of World War II to the beginning of the 1960s, when it began to decline following Japan's economic boom. It highlights the similarities between Japan’s overseas migration in the postwar era and the migration-driven expansion that came before it. These similarities, the chapter argues, were rooted in institutional and intellectual continuities centered around Malthusian expansionism that survived the collapse of the empire. After the US occupation ended, institutions and individuals formerly in charge of the empire's migration-related matters found themselves once again playing vital roles to steer the ship of Japan’s migration to Latin America, and they continued to embrace the discourse of overpopulation to legitimize their agendas. The trans-war continuity in the history of Japanese overseas migration is crucial for our understanding of the trans-Pacific legacies of Japanese settler colonialism in the postwar era.

The collapse of the empire at the end of World War II brought an abrupt end to Japanese colonial expansion, but the institutions in charge of previous migration campaigns largely remained intact during the US occupation. Part IV, also the final part of this book, analyzes the unexpected resurgence of Japanese Malthusian expansionism during the 1950s and 1960s. This was also the final phase in its history. Policymakers and migration leaders, many of whom had led and participated in Japanese expansion before 1945, saw the returnees from the former colonies of the empire – as well as others who lost their livelihood due to the war – as the new nation’s surplus people. Utilizing pre-1945 migration institutions and networks, they were able to restart Japanese migration to South America right after the enactment of the Treaty of San Francisco. In the 1960s, Japanese overseas emigration quickly declined as a rapid growing economy enabled its domestic society to accommodate most of the Japanese labor force. Malthusian expansionism eventually lost its material ground in the archipelago.

This chapter examines how Malthusian expansionism emerged in the first two decades of the Meiji era as a justification for Japan’s settler colonialism in Hokkaido. It elaborates how Japanese leaders carefully emulated Anglo-American settler colonialism in Japan’s own expansion in Hokkaido by focusing on the emergence of the overpopulation discourse and its political impact in early Meiji. This colonial imitation also inspired Japanese expansionists to view the American West as an ideal destination of Japanese emigration in the late nineteenth century.

Following a series of domestic and international changes around the mid-1920s, Japan’s migration-driven expansion entered its heyday, which lasted through the end of World War II, examined in chapters 6 and 7 in Part III. Two aspects distinguished Japanese Malthusian expansionism in this phase from the previous decades. First, the Japanese government involved itself in migration promotion and management on an unprecedented scale at both the central and prefectural levels, giving rise to “the migration state.” Second, most Japanese expansionists who had been pursuing a seat for Japan in the club of Western empires were left severely disillusioned by the Immigration Act of 1924. They turned to an alternative model of settler colonialism to challenge Anglo-American global hegemony, marked by the principle of coexistence and coprosperity on the one hand and the emigration of grassroots farming families from rural Japan on the other. This new model was first carried out in Brazil and then applied to Japanese expansion in Manchuria and other parts of Asia during the 1930s and 1940s.

Unlike in Hokkaido and the American West, shizoku migration to the South Seas, Hawaiʻi, and Latin America failed to materialize on a significant scale. The decline of shizoku as a social class itself brought Japanese Malthusian expansionism to its second phase that lasted from the mid-1890s to the mid-1920s, examined in chapters 3, 4, and 5 in Part II. These chapters detail how the focus of Japanese expansionists returned to North America when they replaced shizoku with the urban and rural commoners (heimin) as the backbone of the empire. These chapters also explain how the Japanese struggles against white racism in the US West Coast and Texas set the agendas for Japanese expansion in Northeast Asia, the South Seas, and South America and turned farmer migration into the most desirable model of Japanese settler colonialism in the following decades.

This chapter examines the origin, development, and demise of the short-lived campaign of Japanese farmer migration to Texas in the first decade of the twentieth century. Similar to the movement of Japanese labor migration to the United States that took place around the same time, the call for farmer migration to Texas was also grounded in the discourse of Malthusian expansionism, inviting the common Japanese to leave the overpopulated archipelago and to become successful rice farmers in Texas. Though it was a part of the heimin migration wave, the Texas campaign marked the beginning of a paradigm shift in Japanese migration-driven expansion from labor to agriculture. Subsequently, the failure of this campaign prompted Japanese expansionists to cast their gaze further south, paving the way for Japanese farmer migration into South America in the decades to come.

The successful development of Japanese agricultural settlement in Brazil and the growth of agrarianism in the Japanese archipelago jointly led to the formation of Japan’s migration state. Officially recognizing emigration as a critical solution to poverty in the allegedly overpopulated archipelago, the imperial government expanded its power unprecedently in the areas of migration promotion and management. The formation of the migration state and its financial and political aids, in turn, made the migration of hundreds of thousands of rural poor possible. In collaboration with the KKKK, the central government began providing full subsidies to all authorized Japanese subjects who would like to pursue a future in Brazil. Some prefectural governments also came to the fore and launched their own campaigns of land acquisition and settler migration in Brazil. Therefore, the birth of the migration state perpetuated the marriage between the grassroots agrarianism and Japanese migration to Brazil. The financial and political support of the government allowed the landless farmers to become the backbone of Japan’s migration-driven expansion in South America.

This chapter analyzes the two courses of action taken jointly by Japanese Malthusian expansionists in the years between 1908, when the Gentlemen’s Agreement took effect, and 1924, when the Immigration Act was passed in the US. The first course was to explore alternative routes and modes of expansion, and the second was to facilitate Japanese immigrants’ assimilation into American society with the aim of placating anti-Japanese sentiment in the US and removing the restriction on Japanese immigration. Both of these two courses of action were legitimized by the logic of Malthusian expansionism. The campaign to foster Japanese American assimilation ended with failure, and the collaborative efforts of the imperial government and social groups in settling Japanese migrants in Northeast Asia and the South Seas also resulted in disappointment. However, during these processes farmer migration gradually became the dominant mode of Japanese migration-driven expansion. The initial success in Japanese agricultural settlement in Brazil also invited an increasing number of Japanese expansionists to cast their gaze to Brazil as a primary target of Japanese settler colonialism.