Colonialism and Migration
Abstract
Emerging transnational visions of Japanese history draw attention to two dimensions of Japan’s modern historical experience that had been relatively neglected until the last decades of the twentieth century. The first is the dimension of migration both into and out of the Japanese archipelago. Japan’s relatively low levels of migration in the period from the 1950s to the early 1980s encouraged an image of the nation as an enclosed and homogeneous unit; but this image obscured the very complex flows of people between the Japanese archipelago and Japan’s overseas empire, which had profoundly shaped the history of East Asia in the first half of the twentieth century.