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The numbers of new arrivals peaked in 1907 with as many as 30,000 Japanese immigrants counted (economic and living conditions were particularly bad in Japan at this point as a result of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5). [6]: 25 Japanese immigrants who moved to mainland U.S. settled on the West Coast primarily in California. [5]
Japanese immigrants were primarily farmers facing economic upheaval during the Meiji Restoration; they began to migrate in large numbers to the continental United States (having already been migrating to Hawaii since 1885) in the 1890s, after the Chinese exclusion (see below). [20] By 1924, 180,000 Japanese immigrants had gone to the mainland.
Following the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Japanese immigrants were increasingly sought by industrialists to replace the Chinese immigrants.However, as the number of Japanese in the United States increased, resentment against their success in the farming industry and fears of a "yellow peril" grew into an anti-Japanese movement similar to that faced by earlier Chinese immigrants. [1]
Anti-Japanese sentiment against American citizens of Japanese descent in the United States would peak during World War II, when the Empire of Japan became involved in the Pacific War theater. After the war, the rise of Japan as a major economic power in the 1970s was seen as a widespread economic threat to the United States and also led to a ...
Japanese Americans have been returning to their ancestorial homeland for years as a form of return migration. [1] With a history of being racially discriminated against, the anti-immigration actions the United States government forced onto Japan, and the eventual internment of Japanese Americans (immigrants and citizens alike), return migration was often seen as a better alternative.
In the 1980s, with Japan's growing economy facing a shortage of workers willing to do so-called three K jobs (きつい, kitsui [difficult], 汚い, kitanai [dirty] and 危険, kiken [dangerous]), Japan's Ministry of Labor began to grant visas to ethnic Japanese from South America to come to Japan and work in factories.
This led to hostility and eventually in 1924 Congress passed the Immigration Act. Japanese immigration was no longer allowed from Japan. In the 1930s with the luring second World War, trade with Japan across the pacific dwindled and so did the relationships the Issei had created in America.
The Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) was appointed by the U.S. Congress in 1980 to conduct an official governmental study into the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. It concluded that the incarceration of Japanese Americans had not been justified by military necessity. [10]