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

I have been conducting research on immigrants 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 U.S. immigration, there was a period when Japanese immigrants were numerous.

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

My research primarily involves collecting, organizing, and quantitatively analyzing various demographic data. For example, the rosters of over 100,000 Japanese immigrants and their descendants who were forcibly 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 U.S. Census, linked by name and age, allow us to track occupational transitions. 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 has revealed that while the social classes of Japanese people who chose to settle on the U.S. mainland during the Meiji and Taisho eras were diverse, they included a significant number of individuals from the "old middle class," such as rural farmers and former samurai families. 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 the education and cultural resources they acquired in Japan were passed down to their children in the U.S., forming the foundation for success across generations.

Theoretically, such phenomena are (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 mean that they are often skewed toward the middle and upper classes within the "context" of the sending country. For example, immigrants living in the U.S. today may be considered poor by U.S. standards, but they often belonged to relatively high social classes in their countries of origin. They, too, seek to pass on the advantages they held in their home societies to the next generation.

The flow of people moving between Japan and the rest of the world never ceases. In the future, I intend to expand the temporal scope of my research to the present day and study not only Japanese people living in the U.S. but also those living abroad more broadly, as well as foreign nationals living in Japan.