1st Edition
End of Empire Migrants in East Asia Repatriates, Returnees and Finding Home
This book provides an interdisciplinary study about the migration of approximately 9 million people who became end of empire migrants in East Asia following the collapse of the Japanese Empire in 1945.
Through the collection of first-hand testimonies and examination of four key themes, the book uncovers how the Japanese government’s repatriation policy intersected with people’s experiences of end of empire migration in East Asia. The first theme, repatriation as historiography and discourse, examines how repatriation has been studied, debated and represented in Japan since the end of the Second World War. The second theme, finding home in the former empire, reveals the diversity of experiences of the peoples of former colonies as the borders ‘shifted under their feet’ through first-hand testimony. The third theme, government policy, explores the changing Japanese government policy from the 1950s to the 1970s. The fourth theme, integration after repatriation, reveals how Japanese former colonial residents integrated into Japanese society following repatriation.
Presenting the collective research of 14 international authors, this book will be of interest for researchers of East Asian history, modern Japanese history, migration studies, postcolonial studies, Japanese studies, Korean studies, post-war international relations and Cold War history.
Introduction
Svetlana Paichadze and Jonathan Bull
Part 1: Repatriation in historiography, political discourse and the history of Indigenous Peoples
1. Japanese-language historiography about end of empire migration: revising the extruded history of repatriation and hikiagesha
Jonathan Bull
2. Hikiagesha and other terms for returnees in the minutes of the National Diet of Japan
Ayako Tominari
3. Travel, forced movement, ‘repatriation’: multiple mobilities in the history of the Indigenous Peoples of Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands
Tessa Morris-Suzuki
Part 2: Finding ‘home’ in the former Japanese Empire
4. The ‘repatriation’ of Japanese wives from Manchuria to Taiwan: a presence hidden by multiple factors
Yōhei Fujino
5. The social movement for Sakhalin Korean repatriation after the Second World War: the establishment of the Korean Communist party
Yulia Din
6. The ‘Remembered’ Sakhalin Koreans in the South Korean Press, 1946-1980
Kim Yehbohn Lacey
7. Between loving the country and loving the land: the case of waishengren and hwagyo
Hisahiko Kamizuru
Part 3: Repatriation policy and returning home in the 1950s-1960s
8. The boundary formation between ‘hikiage’ and ‘kikoku’: the case of the ‘honkoku kikansha’ from China
Makoto Minami (Liang Xue Jiang)
9. Individual multiethnic repatriation from the Soviet Union
Svetlana Paichadze
10. The ‘delayed "repatriation"’ of Japanese women in Korea: the beginning of the return policy in postwar Japan
Mooam Hyun
Part 4: Repatriation and integration: life after hikiage
11. Industry-induced movements of people and connections among repatriates from the Karafuto coal industry
Takefumi Hirai
12. The socioeconomic reintegration of repatriates: evidence from Gifu prefecture
Steven Ivings
13. An anthropology of nostalgia: wansei’s postwar life and their Taiwan recognition
Yu Nai Hui
14. Border, Indigenous Peoples, self-identification: contested memory as seen in the social activities of Ainu, Uilta and Nivkh
Svetlana Paichadze and Jeffry Gayman
Biography
Svetlana Paichadze is an Associate Professor at the Research Faculty of Media and Communication, Hokkaido University, Japan. Her main research themes are the education, identity and language issues of Russian-speaking diaspora and her publications include Identity, Language and Education of Sakhalin Japanese and Koreans: Continual Diaspora (2022), Voices from the Shifting Russo-Japanese border: Karafuto/Sakhalin (co-edited, 2015) and Saharin zanryū: nikkanro hyakunen ni wataru kazoku no monogatari [Left-behind on Sakhalin: A Centenary History of Families Living Between Japan, Korea, and Russia] (co-authored, 2016).
Jonathan Bull is a Lecturer at the Research Faculty of Media and Communication, Hokkaido University, Japan. His research focuses on the social and cultural history of Japanese end of empire migration and has been published in the Journal of Contemporary History, Journal of Migration History and Cultural and Social History.
