Asia-Pacific Week 2006 Japanese Studies Graduate Summer School ABSTRACT

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The end of the Pacific War in August 1945 marked the beginning of the United States' occupation not only of Japan proper but also parts of its Asian empire. The division of empire into new nation-states in practice meant that the American military established occupational control of the four main Japanese islands, the southern half of the Korean peninsula, and the Ryukyu archipelago. In the process of dismantling the Japanese empire, one of the chief tasks for the three coeval US occupations was to establish and maintain control over newly resurrected national borders. An intra-regional history that weaves together the US occupations of the Ryukyus and southern Korea with that of Japan can reveal the connections and commonalities among them.

The main focus of this presentation is to examine the intimate relationship between repatriation and the evolving boundaries of Japan. To this end, three themes will be emphasized: 1) Self-repatriation as a challenge against Japan's restrictive border controls; 2) mass repatriation as the Allies' policy of ethnic dissimilation; and 3) reconstructing political and legal boundaries between "Japanese" and "non-Japanese." The regional scale of such border-crossings was highly variegated in time and space. This study will therefore be limited mainly to the flow of Koreans and Ryukyuans out of Japan proper, from the last days of the Japanese Empire to the termination of the US occupation of Japan in April 1952.

The presentation will focus on the central role that repatriation played in the transformation of the Japanese empire into divided nation-states that the United States occupied in Northeast Asia. The official mass repatriation program that was coordinated among occupations in Japan (SCAP), Korea (USAMGIK), and the Ryukyu archipelago (USCAR) involved a three-stage operation that eventually oversaw the return of 930,000 Koreans and 160,000 Ryukyuans (who were no longer referred to as Okinawans by the US) in Japan to their respective homelands by January 1947. But a closer examination of SCAP and Japanese government records reveal that a combination of repatriation and deportation continued to be the most convenient way of expelling undesirable minorities in Japan throughout the occupation period. In fact, US forces developed a close working relationship with Japanese institutions and personnel who were formerly in charge of controlling the migration of colonial subjects into and out of imperial Japan.

An examination of SCAP's restrictive border controls, which prohibited Japanese citizens from traveling abroad and Asian immigrants from entering the country, reveals the nature of occupied Japan's isolation from the rest of the region. By segregating and containing people based on racial origins in a process I call "ethnic dissimilation," SCAP and USAMGIK directly contributed to the transformation of Japan's multi-ethnic empire into mono-ethnic nation-states in Japan and Korea. USCAR also attempted to divide and isolate the Ryukyus from Japan by repatriating as many Ryukyuans as could be sent home, but American efforts at promoting separatistism only drove the Ryukyuans to identify more closely with Japan.

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