Moving towards the North: Internal migration in Modern Japan

The chapter 1 focuses on two cases of internal displacement in Meiji Japan regarding the northern island of Hokkaido and the southern extreme of Okinawa respectively. After Japan’s annexation of Hokkaido (1869) and Okinawa (1879), two different waves of internal migration affected these peripheral regions of the new-born nation-state, the first receiving the mainland’s excess population, and the second providing the workforce for the mainland’s labour market. The centrally planned migration of mainlanders to Hokkaido, the ancestral land of the Ainu people, began at the start of the Meiji era and was projected along the pathway of no return, driving a population growth in the northern island that rose from less than sixty thousand in 1869 to almost one million at the turn of the century. The Japanese newcomers displaced the natives, who lost their hunting and fishing areas, as well as their traditional societal practices and customs, and were given the epithet ‘dying race’. The migration flow of Okinawans to other prefectures which began at the turn of the twentieth century was much less sizeable but still significant in terms of the number of natives involved, and thus for the loss of the local population. While government policy promoted overseas migration, mainly directed towards Latin America, Hawaii and the Japanese colonies, the move to mainland industrial centres was due to both the worsening of socio-economic conditions in the southern archipelago and the growing demand for labour throughout Japan. Okinawans were often temporary unskilled workers, mostly young women, whose unfamiliar language and customs were interpreted by mainlanders as markers of inferiority. Job and housing advertisements often explicitly excluded Okinawans as well as colonial subjects and, like the latter, they were subject to unequal treatment in the ethnicised labour markets of Imperial Japan. The chapter investigates the socio-economic and political meaning of these two cases of migration inside the new national boundaries, which involved groups of people who differed in term of language, culture and ethnicity. They seem to both reflect the ambiguities of the Japanese nation-building project and attest how the numerous barriers that generally affect international migrants may also play an active role in internal moves.