Lumpy Japanese Diaspora in a Well

Jonathan Dresner has a tantalizing post about lesser-known participants in the Japanese diaspora at Frog in a Well. Here's the introduction.

I’m always interested in interesting tales and connections regarding the Japanese diaspora. Here’s a couple that I’ve run across: New research on Japanese settlers in Korea; Jorge Luis Borges, the great surrealist, married a Nikkei Argentinian woman late in life; Japanese post-WWII settlers in the Dominican Republic abandoned by both governments. I love being part — a small part, but nonetheless — of the diaspora studies movement. We’re complicating the history of the world, chronicling the wonderful diversity of seemingly simple things.

I followed Konrad’s note about Sayaka’s new blog and the post at the top points me to this Asahi report about a new research conference about “Japantowns” in colonial Korea. The tendency of Japanese migrations to be … lumpy? maybe there’s a better word… anyway, they often involve a lot of people from the same region ending up in the same place. It happened in the Hokkaido settlement, it happened in the migration to Hawai‘i, it was deliberately built into the Manchurian settlement program.