Tate Kihara: Tracing the Footsteps of Japanese Immigrants Through Historical Data

2024/12/23

I have been conducting research on immigration in the United States using theories and methods from sociology and demography. While people often think of Mexican or Chinese immigrants when they hear about US immigration, there was also a period when there were many people of Japanese descent.

One of my research projects focuses on the socioeconomic trajectories of Japanese people who immigrated to the US mainland during the Meiji and Taisho eras and their descendants. Despite facing hardships such as discrimination and internment during World War II, the US-born second generation achieved such socioeconomic success that they came to be called a "model minority." What lay behind this success?

My research primarily involves collecting, organizing, and quantitatively analyzing various types of demographic data. For example, the rosters of over 100,000 Japanese immigrants and their descendants who were interned during the war contain information such as educational background and prefecture of origin, making them valuable resources for understanding their social backgrounds in Japan. Additionally, panel data from the US Census, linked by name and age, allows for the tracking of occupational changes. Analyzing individual records from a social survey of three generations of Japanese Americans held in the historical archives at UCLA reveals the transition of social status across generations.

My research shows that while the social classes of Japanese people who chose to settle in the US mainland during the Meiji and Taisho eras were diverse, a significant number came from the "old middle class," such as rural farmers and former samurai (shizoku). While not necessarily wealthy, they were slightly more affluent than the Japanese average at the time, and many had attended secondary educational institutions under the old system. It is thought that they passed on the educational and cultural resources they acquired in Japan to their children in the US, which served as the foundation for success across generations.

Theoretically, this phenomenon is (partially) explained by "immigrant selectivity" and "contextual selectivity." While it is often assumed that immigrants come from the poorest segments of their home country, the various costs and barriers to migration often result in a bias toward the middle and upper classes within the "context" of the sending country. For example, even immigrants living in the US today who might be considered poor by US standards often belonged to relatively high social classes in their countries of origin. They, too, seek to pass on the advantages from their original society to the next generation.

The flow of people between Japan and the rest of the world never ceases. Moving forward, I intend to expand the temporal scope of my research to the present day and study not only Japanese people living abroad beyond the US but also foreign nationals living in Japan.