The aims of this carefully crafted book are clear-cut: to add to the growing global literature on Nikkeijin, individuals of Japanese descent who are predominantly overseas and do not have Japanese citizenship. It seeks to shed light on lesser known populations outside of Brazil and the United States, focusing on the history and experiences of Nikkeijin from the Philippines. Ohno does this by bringing a complex narrative to a period surpassing a century and spanning two World Wars through meticulous historical research and oral history paradigms commonly found in social anthropology, investigative journalism, and human rights law. The work is also informed by the larger philosophical premise of the intrinsic value of a “history from below.”
Countries in the Asia-Pacific war theatres, the author argues, are distinct from Brazil and the United States, because in this region Japan directly engaged in sustained military operations. The smaller numbers of Nikkeijin in the Asia Pacific when compared to the Americas result from postwar outcomes often characterized by the death or removal of militarized and auxillary civilian populations to Japan. The Philippine segments of this global story are both typical and unique. Japanese descendants of mixed (mestizo) Filipino heritage did not all repatriate to their father's country for fear of their mothers or themselves being unwelcome; years of Japanese schooling for some, however, inculcated a race ideology where the Emperor's subjects were deemed superior to Filipinos. The question of their citizenship and identity laid bare larger structural forces that exceeded their experiences. Here was a trifecta: a modern twentieth-century colonialism (in this case, by the US) and imperialist/ethnic-nationalist expansionism (in this case, by Japan) converging on an incipient state (in this case, the Philippines) which was occupied, in turn, by both powers.
The presentation of the “below” view is the book's greatest strength. How can we know more about a small but significant population of first-generation Japanese (or Issei), economic migrants who transitioned from sojourner to settler in Northern Luzon and Mindanao? Somewhere along the way, we know that they built a culturally and ethnically heterogenous Japanese diaspora, one that unintentionally diverged from the unitary ideology of a homogenous Japanese nation. Throughout the book, Ohno presents interviews and narratives collected over a period of two decades that show both practical and emotional reasoning, integrating our understanding of individual agency within the larger processes of dagiseki, or migration for work. What opportunities were available to poor men from Japan that were absent back home? What kinds of social conditions would cause migrant men to stay and start families? Why were Okinawan men who left situations of extreme poverty more likely to bring brides from home than their counterparts from the mainland? The book builds for us an adaptive framework for understanding why economic migration is not always about economics, but about lived interpretations of a more expansive idea of a better life.
The chapters of the book are organized chronologically as well as generationally with self-explanatory titles. The introductory first chapter presents the flow of the book along with excellent maps and a glossary; the second chapter focuses on the first generation Japanese during the years 1903 to 1937. Issei who married Filipino women (whether from the lowland majority or from indigenous communities) built formal and informal relations of reciprocity and exchange within the expatriate Japanese community. Ohno fills gaps in the published literature that have mostly accounted for the initiatives of Issei leaders of business, industry, and education in Baguio in the north and Davao in the south. It balances these with the stories and experiences of previously nameless men from the rural areas of the Japanese mainland and Okinawa, as well as the distinctions that Okinawans and their mainland counterparts made amongst themselves in the new land. Small insights lead to big implications. For instance, we get a more nuanced understanding of the migrant Japanese workers who moved from the Baguio-Benguet area in northern Luzon all the way to Davao in southern Mindanao upon completion of that massive American road project in 1905. The distinctions between the agricultural orientation of Japanese farmers in Davao vis a vis the skilled craft/artisanal trades of their counterparts in the Mountain Province in northern Luzon add to our later understanding of their descendant's contrasting wartime and postwar experiences. We learn that land-dependent Davao migrants were more likely to enter common-law as opposed to registered marriages with Filipino women, one of many strategies designed to circumvent Philippine laws of the day that assigned married women their husband's citizenship as well as prohibit non-citizens from owning land. Northern Issei who did not need this loophole for their livelihood were more likely to enter the names of official spouses and their children in family registries or koseki in their home villages.
The third chapter focuses on Nisei (second-generation Japanese) from 1937 to 1942: the implications of Issei intermarriage with daughters of indigenous community leaders especially Bagobo women in the Davao region are discussed, as well as the growth of Japanese private schools to which Nisei children were sent. Layers of complexity (and irony) build up during this period with shifts in Philippine citizenship and naturalization laws shaped by anti-Oriental race laws in the American mainland. We learn of a more nuanced place for abaca as a global commodity in Davao. As Japanese migrants enter more diversified economic niches in the late 1930s, for instance, fluctuations in the price of abaca became decoupled and less predictive of migrant inflows. This section ends with the outbreak of the Second World War: the internment of Japanese and their families by the commonwealth government, their subsequent liberation by Japanese forces, and the particularly violent episodes in Davao of which Issei and Nisei as translators and recruits became witnesses and participants.
The fourth chapter cogently titled “Father or Mother Nation” presents the crisis of ethnic identity presented by the monoculture citizenship model that Japanese men, their Filipino wives and mestizo Nisei children faced during the years 1942–1945. It is probably the most compelling and most challenging to read not because of any shortcomings in writing style but in terms of content. Despite a consistent and even-handed prose, the buffeting forces of American and Japanese macro-military viewpoints and their impact on civilian Filipino and mixed-Japanese-Filipino lives create a monumental stage filled with almost frighteningly banal vignettes of repeated acts of violence on and by civilians that are both comprehensible yet reprehensible. The author provides an unblinking account of Issei collaboration, the mobilization of mestizo Nisei conscripts in gunzoku pacification squads, the lesser known role of Muslims (whose communities had seen intense pacification campaigns by Americans in Western Mindanao) and Bagobos (who long suffered poor treatment from lowland Filipinos) in volunteer militias, among others. Ohno also presents the many instances of mestizo Nisei who chose to fight against the Japanese. He ultimately links these to the failure of Filipinization campaigns during Japanese military occupation, saying that the Philippine occupation by Japan was “possibly the most coercive and violent … [with] the biggest numbers of Japanese and native war casualties in Southeast Asia, partly because of the Filipinos’ persistent anti-Japan struggles” (p. 98). In a landscape of utter ruin, the book has among the most evocative scholarly accounts of a lesser known corner of the war in the Asia Pacific that is written from multiple political perspectives.
The fifth chapter on the postwar lives of Nikkeijin from 1945 to 1995 presents the diversity of Nisei and Sansei (or third-generation Japanese) experiences along with structural shifts in international relations, government policy, and public perception of Philippine Nikkeijin. Here, the book turns a corner, sketching out the outlines of Nikkeijin identity politics not limited to the Philippines but defined nevertheless by specific challenges: conscription by Japanese occupying forces in the Philippines near the end of the war, the break-up of families by choice or lack thereof, the gradual restoration of political and economic ties between the Philippines and Japan, and the emergence of Nikkeijin organizations within the Philippines. Equally important is the role of supporting groups that were organized in Japan as a result of increased public awareness and empathy for their liminal situation overseas. The shift is also marked by the first time Philippine Nikkeijin are acknowledged and studied by the Japanese government, even if relatively little is accomplished in the subsequent time period. The sixth and seventh chapters cover the years 1995 to 2013 and build on similar themes: shifts in Japanese domestic policies that in turn responded to widespread advocacy by ordinary Japanese, voluntary organizations such as the federation of bar associations, as well as civil society sectors seeking citizenship or permanent residency for even later generations of “Japanese left behind.”
Throughout the book, Ohno successfully shifts from macro to micro perspectives, from a consideration of socio-structural factors to decisions made with individual subjectivities. Written for the English reader, the author interweaves precise terminologies in Japanese in ways that avoid cumbersome usage. For instance, the concept and model of “Japanese-orphans-left-behind-in-China” (Chūgoku zanryū Nihonjin-koji) and how it was utilized in legal processes advocating for a variety of Philippine Nikkeijin rights, was clearly and effectively demonstrated. In addition, institutions like the koseki and the obligation to register family members was reinterpreted and cast by the author as a reasoned adaptation to life in the diaspora.
Although the book is case-specific and represents an important contribution to the scholarly literature on the war in Southeast Asia, on human rights and international law, the anthropology and sociology of migration and identity, among others, its contributions to social science theory needs to be underscored. The interface between Japan and the Philippines, with both societies adopting a similarly jus sanguinis (or citizenship by blood) model bifurcates at the point where cultural theories of “blood” itself come into play. On one hand, bilateral kinship principles in the Philippines make blood citizenship from either parent possible with no requirement for a patronymic koseki. Because by tradition Filipino women also have equal inheritance rights to their brothers, their Nisei children who stayed behind had some economic as well as cultural prerogatives, no matter how limited, especially in the years immediately after the war when stigmatization of perceived Japanese collaborators was at its strongest. On the other hand, reconstruction of records destroyed by war, or fleshing out past actions or intentions of Issei ancestors leading to the creation of new family registries or shuseki extends the lineal principle into new areas. Ohno questions “koseki fundamentalism” (p. 194) in the book's closing page, ultimately making a deeper argument for a profound philosophical reflection on what Japanese society is. If Philippine Nikkei seek recognition for an identity that has always been there, the book makes a well-reasoned call to recognize a de facto Nikkei diversity viewed not as an anomaly but a natural outcome of a country that situates itself well within a globalized world.
