Before further discussion of the case of Manchuria, it will be helpful to outline the general contours of twentieth-century emigration from Japan. As shown in Figure 8.1, the number of Japanese immigrants resident in such Japanese colonies as Korea, Karafuto (southern Sakhalin), Taiwan and Southern Manchuria (a Japanese leasehold since 1905) began to increase in the years following the Russo—Japanese War.
During the 1920s, the increase in Korea was particularly striking, rising from about 300,000 in the late 1910s to almost 600,000 in 1930. During the 1930s, however, the largest increase took place in Manchuria, with the total number of Japanese immigrants resident there surpassing the number in Korea about 1935. In addition, we can also see that the number of Japanese immigrants resident in China Proper escalated from a fairly low level from the mid-1930s, especially after the outbreak of hostilities between China and Japan in 1937. That is to say, it is clear that from about 1930 onward the balance shifted from emigration to Korea, Karafuto and Taiwan to emigration to Manchuria and China Proper, with the number of Japanese resident in Manchuria rising from 200,000 in 1930 to 1,000,000 in 1940.
Beyond Japan’s colonial empire, the number of Japanese immigrants resident in North America increased until the mid-1920s, but stabilized after passage of the Immigration Act of 1924 in the United States, one of the chief aims of which was to end immigration from Japan. From about that time, an increasing number of Japanese began to emigrate to Central and South America. During the initial four decades of the century, then, there were two main categories of emigration from Japan: that destined for Japan’s formal and informal empire and that destined for the Americas. The former consisted of ‘colonists’ backed by national policy, and the latter consisted of ‘economic migrants’ who sought to improve their lives and who received relatively little in the way of official encouragement. That Manchuria was the focus of emigration during the 1930s is also clear.