page_title: Japanese diaspora
section_title: Americas
hierarchical_section_title: Japanese diaspora / Americas
caption_attribution_description: English: View of Ujo Nakano's farm house at Port Hammond, B.C.
context_page_description: The Japanese diaspora, and its individual members known as nikkei or nikkeijin, are the Japanese emigrants from Japan and their descendants that reside in a foreign country. Emigration from Japan was recorded as early as the 15th century to the Philippines, but did not become a mass phenomenon until the Meiji period, when Japanese began to go to the Philippines and the Americas. There was also significant emigration to the territories of the Empire of Japan during the colonial period; however, most emigrants repatriated to Japan after the surrender of Japan and the end of World War II in Asia.
  According to the Association of Nikkei and Japanese Abroad, there are about 3.8 million nikkei living in their adopted countries. The largest of these foreign communities are in Brazil, the United States, the Philippines, China, Canada, and Peru. Descendants of emigrants from the Meiji period still hold recognizable communities in those countries, forming separate ethnic groups from Japanese people in Japan. Nevertheless, most Japanese are largely assimilated outside of Japan.
context_section_description: People from Japan began migrating to the U.S. and Canada in significant numbers following the political, cultural, and social changes stemming from the 1868 Meiji Restoration. (see Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians)
  In Canada, small multi-generational communities of Japanese immigrants developed and adapted to life outside Japan.
  In the United States, particularly after the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Japanese immigrants were sought by industrialists to replace Chinese immigrants. In the early years of the 20th century, anxiety about the rapid growth of cheap Japanese labor in California came to a head when in 1906, when the School Board of San Francisco passed a resolution barring children of Japanese heritage from attending regular public schools. President Roosevelt intervened to rescind the resolution, but only on the understanding that steps would be taken to put a stop to further Japanese immigration. In 1907, in the face of Japanese government protests, the so-called "Gentlemen's Agreement" between the governments of Japan and the United States ended immigration of Japanese workers (i.e., men), but permitted the immigration of spouses of Japanese immigrants already in the US. The Immigration Act of 1924 banned the immigration of all but a token few Japanese, until the Immigration Act of 1965, there was very little further Japanese immigration. That which occurred was mostly in the form of war brides. The majority of Japanese settled in Hawaii, where today a third of the state's population are of Japanese descent, and the rest in the West Coast (California, Oregon, Washington, and Alaska), but other significant communities are found in the Northeast and Midwest states.
  The Japanese diaspora has been unique in the absence of new emigration flows in the second half of the 20th century. However, research reports that during the post-war many Japanese migrated individually to join existing communities abroad.
  With the restrictions on entering the United States, the level of Japanese immigration to Latin America began to increase. Mexico was the first Latin American country to receive Japanese immigrants in 1897, when the first thirty five arrived in Chiapas to work on coffee farms. Immigration into Mexico died down in the following years, but was eventually spurred again in 1903 due to the acceptance of mutually recognized contracts on immigration by both countries. Immigrants coming in the first four years of these contracts worked primarily on sugar plantations, coal mines, and railroads. Unfortunately, Japanese immigrants in Mexico proved to have far less continuity than those in other South American countries, as disease, mining accidents, and discrimination caused many Japanese to pass away or simply leave without seeing their contracts through to completion. Less than 27% of the total number of Japanese who immigrated into Mexico before 1941 remained there 40 years later.  Japanese immigrants (particularly from the Okinawa Prefecture, including Okinawans) arrived in small numbers during the early 20th century. 
  Japanese Brazilians are the largest ethnic Japanese community outside Japan (numbering about 1.5 million, compared to about 1.2 million in the United States), and São Paulo contains the largest concentration of Japanese outside Japan. The first Japanese immigrants (791 people, mostly farmers) came to Brazil in 1908 on the Kasato Maru from the Japanese port of Kobe, moving to Brazil in search of better living conditions. Many of them ended up as laborers on coffee farms (for testimony of Kasato Maru's travelers that continued to Argentina see es:Café El Japonés, see also Shindo Renmei). Immigration of Japanese workers in Brazil was actually subsidized by São Paulo up until 1921, with around 40,000 Japanese emigrating to Brazil between the years of 1908 and 1925, and 150,000 pouring in during the following 16 years. The most immigrants to come in one year peaked in 1933 at 24,000, but restrictions due to ever growing anti-Japanese sentiment caused it to die down and then eventually halt at the sta
caption: View of Ujo Nakano's farm house at Port Hammond, B.C.
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