Tessa Morris-Suzuki: Comparative Perspectives on Nationality in the Prewar Japanese Empire
[Tessa Morris-Suzuki is Professor of Japanese History, Convenor of the Division of Pacific and Asian History in the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University, and a Japan Focus associate. Her book Exodus to North Korea: Shadows from Japan's Cold War has just been published at Rowman & Littlefield.]
Former Prime Minister Mori Yoshiro seems an unlikely champion of a multicultural Japan. His brief term of office is, after all, perhaps best remembered for the furore he evoked by a speech in which he described Japan as a “Divine Nation headed by the Emperor”. This echo of prewar nationalism stirred fears at home and abroad that senior Japanese politicians still subscribed to Shinto myths of a unique and racially superior Japan. Yet Mori today is an active participant in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s “Diet Members’ League for Promoting Exchanges of Foreign Human Resources” (Gaikoku Jinzai Kōryū Suishin Giin Renmei), an awkwardly-named body whose mission is to promote mass immigration by making Japan a magnet for skilled workers from around the world. (Akashi and Ogawa 2008, 69)
Mori’s capacity to combine nostalgia for wartime nationalism with enthusiasm for boosting the number of foreigners in Japan is, however, perhaps not so odd after all. The inspiration for the activities of the Diet Members’ League is a fear that a low birth rate and declining population will irrevocably damage Japan’s power and prestige. For this reason, its members have given a friendly reception to the views of Sakanaka Hidenori, former head of Japan’s Immigration Bureau, who advocates an expansion in the size of Japan’s foreigner population to 10 million, or even maybe 20 million (ten times the current size) by the middle of this century, thus creating a “Big Japan” with enhanced global power and prestige. (Sakanaka 2005; Akashi and Ogawa 2008)
Public statements by the Diet Members’ League are part of an intensifying debate in Japan about immigration and the place of foreigners in Japanese society. Against a background of impending population decline and global competition for skilled labour, the conventional battlelines of the migration debate are being redrawn. Now some conservative politicians are looking seriously at the need to revise social policies, and even to reform Japan’s nationality law, in order to adapt to an age of higher migration. Meanwhile, leading members of the opposition Democratic Party have been debating a proposal to give local voting rights to foreign permanent residents: a proposal which Sakanaka firmly excludes from his vision of Big Japan, and which LDP politician Hirasawa Katsue describes as “the first step towards the loss of Japanese identity and the dissolution of the heart of the nation state”. (Nishi Nihon Shimbun, 18 April 2008). Such political crosscurrents highlight a complex relationship between nationalism and internationalism, between belief in a “unique Japan” and in “coexistence [kyōsei] with foreigners”, and between nostalgia for the past and visions for the future.
Colonial Origins
These controversies surrounding migration and nationality are deeply embedded in Japan’s colonial history, just as current debates on multiculturalism and citizenship in Britain and 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 debates have a lineage that goes back to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The legal framework of Japanese nationality was first set in place at a time when the creation of the Japanese colonial empire was just beginning, and this framework was further refined and developed as the empire grew. The boundaries of nationality, subjecthood and citizenship were therefore dynamic and contested. They were also riven with paradoxes, many of which arose from a central contradiction: the need for the Empire to unite its diverse subjects into a single loyal body while simultaneously seeking to divide rulers and ruled into a hierarchy of groups with separate sets of rights. As the Japanese empire expanded during the Asia Pacific War, colonial subjects in Korea and Taiwan were encouraged to see themselves as part of the inner circles of a multiethnic Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere [Dai Tō-A Kyōeiken], in which increasingly complex layers of rights and duties distinguished peoples of the metropolitan core, the formal colonies, quasi-colonies like Manchukuo and occupied areas. Identity, subjecthood, legal nationality and voting rights did not necessarily go together, and seldom coalesced into a single national heart....
Read entire article at Japan Focus (This excerpt is from a long article entitled: "Migrants, Subjects, Citizens: Comparative Perspectives on Nationality in the Prewar Japanese Empire." Click here for pictures.
Former Prime Minister Mori Yoshiro seems an unlikely champion of a multicultural Japan. His brief term of office is, after all, perhaps best remembered for the furore he evoked by a speech in which he described Japan as a “Divine Nation headed by the Emperor”. This echo of prewar nationalism stirred fears at home and abroad that senior Japanese politicians still subscribed to Shinto myths of a unique and racially superior Japan. Yet Mori today is an active participant in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s “Diet Members’ League for Promoting Exchanges of Foreign Human Resources” (Gaikoku Jinzai Kōryū Suishin Giin Renmei), an awkwardly-named body whose mission is to promote mass immigration by making Japan a magnet for skilled workers from around the world. (Akashi and Ogawa 2008, 69)
Mori’s capacity to combine nostalgia for wartime nationalism with enthusiasm for boosting the number of foreigners in Japan is, however, perhaps not so odd after all. The inspiration for the activities of the Diet Members’ League is a fear that a low birth rate and declining population will irrevocably damage Japan’s power and prestige. For this reason, its members have given a friendly reception to the views of Sakanaka Hidenori, former head of Japan’s Immigration Bureau, who advocates an expansion in the size of Japan’s foreigner population to 10 million, or even maybe 20 million (ten times the current size) by the middle of this century, thus creating a “Big Japan” with enhanced global power and prestige. (Sakanaka 2005; Akashi and Ogawa 2008)
Public statements by the Diet Members’ League are part of an intensifying debate in Japan about immigration and the place of foreigners in Japanese society. Against a background of impending population decline and global competition for skilled labour, the conventional battlelines of the migration debate are being redrawn. Now some conservative politicians are looking seriously at the need to revise social policies, and even to reform Japan’s nationality law, in order to adapt to an age of higher migration. Meanwhile, leading members of the opposition Democratic Party have been debating a proposal to give local voting rights to foreign permanent residents: a proposal which Sakanaka firmly excludes from his vision of Big Japan, and which LDP politician Hirasawa Katsue describes as “the first step towards the loss of Japanese identity and the dissolution of the heart of the nation state”. (Nishi Nihon Shimbun, 18 April 2008). Such political crosscurrents highlight a complex relationship between nationalism and internationalism, between belief in a “unique Japan” and in “coexistence [kyōsei] with foreigners”, and between nostalgia for the past and visions for the future.
Colonial Origins
These controversies surrounding migration and nationality are deeply embedded in Japan’s colonial history, just as current debates on multiculturalism and citizenship in Britain and 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 debates have a lineage that goes back to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The legal framework of Japanese nationality was first set in place at a time when the creation of the Japanese colonial empire was just beginning, and this framework was further refined and developed as the empire grew. The boundaries of nationality, subjecthood and citizenship were therefore dynamic and contested. They were also riven with paradoxes, many of which arose from a central contradiction: the need for the Empire to unite its diverse subjects into a single loyal body while simultaneously seeking to divide rulers and ruled into a hierarchy of groups with separate sets of rights. As the Japanese empire expanded during the Asia Pacific War, colonial subjects in Korea and Taiwan were encouraged to see themselves as part of the inner circles of a multiethnic Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere [Dai Tō-A Kyōeiken], in which increasingly complex layers of rights and duties distinguished peoples of the metropolitan core, the formal colonies, quasi-colonies like Manchukuo and occupied areas. Identity, subjecthood, legal nationality and voting rights did not necessarily go together, and seldom coalesced into a single national heart....