Japanese Diaspora - Americas

Americas

People from Japan began migrating to the U.S. and Canada in significant numbers following the political, cultural, and social changes stemming from the 1868 Meiji Restoration. (See Japanese American and Japanese Canadians).

In Canada, small multi-generational communities of Japanese immigrants developed and adapted to life in outside Japan.

In the United States, particularly after the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Japanese immigrants were sought by industrialists to replace the Chinese immigrants. In 1907, the "Gentlemen's Agreement" between the governments of Japan and the U.S. ended immigration of Japanese workers (i.e., men), but permitted the immigration of spouses of Japanese immigrants already in the U.S. The Immigration Act of 1924 banned the immigration of all but a token few Japanese, until the Immigration Act of 1965, there was very little further Japanese immigration. That which occurred was mostly in the form of war brides. The majority of Japanese settled in Hawaii where today a third of the state's population are of Japanese descent, and the rest in the West Coast (California, Washington and Oregon), but other significant communities are found in the Northeast and Midwest states.

The Japanese diaspora has been unique in the absence of new emigration flows in the second half of the 20th century.

With the restrictions on entering the United States, the level of Japanese immigration to Latin America began to increase. Japanese immigrants (particularly from the Okinawa Prefecture) arrived in small numbers during the early 20th century. Japanese Brazilians are the largest ethnic Japanese community outside Japan (numbering about 1.5 million, compared to about 1.2 million in the United States), and São Paulo contains the largest concentration of Japanese outside Japan. The first Japanese immigrants (791 people, mostly farmers) came to Brazil in 1908 on the Kasato Maru from the Japanese port of Kobe, moving to Brazil in search of better living conditions. Many of them ended up as laborers on coffee farms. (see also Shindo Renmei)

The first Japanese Argentine Nisei (second generation), Seicho Arakaki, was born in 1911. Today there are an estimated 32,000 people of Japanese descent in Argentina according to Association of Nikkei and Japanese Abroad.

Japanese Peruvians form another notable ethnic Japanese community and count among their members former Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori.

See also Japanese Paraguayan.

There was a small amount of Japanese settlement in the Dominican Republic between 1956 and 1961, in a programme initiated by Dominican Republic leader Rafael Trujillo. Protests over the extreme hardships and broken government promises faced by the initial group of migrants set the stage for the end of state-supported labour emigration in Japan.