Japan’s Empire through the Lens of Settler Colonialism in Latin America
By Sidney Xu Lu, author of Collaborative Settler Colonialism: Japanese Migration to Brazil in the Age of Empires
Many may be surprised to know that Brazil has been home to the largest population of people of Japanese descent outside of Japan. The conventional account of this migration typically begins with the arrival of the Kasato Maru in 1908, which transported the first group of Japanese migrants to the port of Santos. This narrative describes Japanese immigration as a saga of impoverished laborers who managed to establish themselves in this Latin American society by overcoming many difficulties. While compelling, this perspective is incapable of capturing the bigger picture.
My book challenges the traditional narrative in two key ways. First, it situates Japanese migration within the broader context of settler colonialism in both Japan and Brazil, highlighting the unexpected parallels between these two non-Western nations as they pursued settler colonial expansion. Japanese immigration to Brazil in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries was not merely a labor movement but a state-backed settler colonial endeavor, which I term "collaborative settler colonialism." Alongside European immigrants, Japanese settlers played a key role in Brazil’s efforts to appropriate Indigenous lands. At the same time, Japanese immigrants benefited from these policies: although many arrived as plantation workers, over half had acquired land by the time of the Pacific War, largely due to Brazilian land policies.
Second, my book integrates the history of Japanese migration to Brazil into the broader trajectory of Japan’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century history. It emphasizes how Japanese Brazilians contributed to Japan’s colonial expansion in Asia and its postwar national reinvention. Throughout various historical periods, leaders of the Japanese communities in Brazil actively engaged in political and intellectual debates in Japan. They linked their community-building efforts in Brazil with Japan’s imperial agenda in Asia. Prominent first-generation figures such as Saibara Seitō, Nagata Shigeshi, and Koseki Tokuya later returned to Asia in the 1930s and 1940s, advocating for accelerated territorial expansion and seeking to establish Japanese settler colonies in Southeast Asia to support Japan’s war efforts.
In the immediate postwar years, a new generation of Japanese Brazilian leaders redefined their community in alignment with Japan’s emerging identity as a “cultured nation.” Figures like Yamamoto Kiyoshi, Suzuki Tei’ichi, and second-generation leader Saitō Hiroshi collaborated with Japanese and Western scholars to construct a narrative of Japanese exceptionalism during the Cold War. This intellectual movement laid the groundwork for the popularization of Nihonjinron in the 1970s—a theory that attributed Japan’s postwar economic and technological success to its unique cultural and racial characteristics.
Examining Japanese migration to Brazil provides an opportunity to reassess Japan’s imperial expansion beyond traditional colonial boundaries. By rejecting rigid temporal and geographical limits, my book introduces a revised chronology of Japanese settler colonialism, beginning with Japan’s colonial migration to Hokkaido in the Meiji era and culminating in the 1978 anniversary of Japanese immigration to Brazil. As the late Patrick Wolfe famously asserted, "settler colonialism is a structure, not an event." In this sense, the history of Japan’s empire, viewed through the lens of settler colonialism, extends into the present. The 1978 celebration marked a significant turning point: it represented both the symbolic separation between Japan and its overseas Japanese communities and the end of first-generation (Issei) leadership in Brazil’s Japanese community. This transition coincided with Japan’s transformation from a migration-sending to a migration-receiving nation, as its rapid economic growth created a domestic labor shortage. While my book concludes with the 1978 anniversary, Japanese settler colonialism did not end there. Instead, it entered a new phase, with migration flows reversing as Japanese descendants from Brazil and other Latin American countries moved to Japan as laborers, creating a new dynamic between Japan and Latin America.