IMMIGRANTS FROM JAPAN

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 4324, 27 July 1937, Page 2

IMMIGRANTS FROM JAPAN

SOUTH AMERICA CALLS HALT r lhe tide of immigration from crowded Japan to the unfilled spaces of South America, which rose rapidly and steadily until three or four years ago, has dwindled to a small percentage of its former proportions, states the ‘ Christian Science Monitor.’ One South American nation after another, alarmed at the influx of colonists from across the Pacific who kept their homeland customs and allegiances, lias put up the bars. Brazil, whose rich coffee plantations and cotton fields had called to Japanese immigrants for a generation, this year will admit only 3,540 from Japan, about one-seventh of those admitted when the tide was at full flow. Down in Rio de Janeiro for years they have been watching the efforts of Tsukasa Uetsuka, former member of the Tokio Parliament, and parliamentary councillor of Japan’s Finance Ministry, to build a vast Japanese Utopia in the wilds of the Amazon basin. But the new restrictions have dealt a severe blow to his plan, if not killed it altogether.

Brazil, where most of the approximately 225.000 Japanese in South America are concentrated, recently re-

voked a jungle land grant of about 2.000,000 acres which had been given Mr Uetsuka in the huge State of Amazonas

Even before this Brazil had taken action to stem the influx of Japanese settlers by new immigration restrictions, which established a quota system under which only about 3,400 Japanese were permitted to enter yearly. Japanese emigration to Brazil totalled 23,389 in 1933, according to Japanese Government figures, and the following year is understood to have reached almost 28,000.

The Brazilian Ministry of Labour set •Japan’s 1937 quota on the basis of a constitutional law adopted in 1935, limiting immigrants from any one country to 2 per cent, of the total immigration from that country during the past 50 years. Since Japan then had about 170,000 colonists in Brazil, it made her quota about 3,-100. Japan protested that this law was unfair to her.

* The 1937 quota for Italy has been set at 27,074, and for Portugal at 22,956.

PERU SETS UP BARRIERS. Peru, where the next greatest number of Japanese are settled in South America, has set up barriers even more stringent than Brazil’s. The Lima Government was alarmed when a year ago it found of 43,317 foreign colonists in the country. 22,5(30 were Japanese. Moreover, the Japanese were not being assimilated. They set up their own schools and temples, kept the customs and traditions of their race. Peru met the problem with its own quota system. It permitted entry of two immigrants per year for each thousand of each nationality then in Peru, but fixed the maximum for each nationality at 16.000. The Japanese total already is well over that figure; hence no new immigrants are admitted. Moreover, a Japanese leaving Peru cannot return so long as the total of his compatriots there remains over the 16,000 mark.

Hence .Japanese migration to Peru, dated back to 1899, has come to a .stop. Before South American Governments acted to limit the flow, that continent had drawn more Japanese colonists than any other region except Manchuria. The tide to South America had even surpassed the rush of Japanese farmers to California in the years about the turn of the century.

The Japanese population of Manchuria—including Japan's leased territory of Kwantung as well as Manchukuo—has passed the half-million mark, having more than doubled since the Japanese conquest began in 1931. Migration to Manchuria has been generally supported by the Tokio Government —as was migration to Brazil in former years.

Tokio estimated that the Japanese population of North America in 1933 was 171,230 —and there has been little increase.

The tide of Japanese emigration swerved to South America after the Tinted States put up the bars, with the so-called “ gentlemen’s agreement ” in 1907.

Early in the twentieth century Japanese migrated in large munbejrs to Mexico. Since then emigration to Mexico has decreased and is now almost negligible. Japan sets its South American population from figures of October 1, 1934, at: —Brazil 173.500, Peru 21,127, Argentina (where Japanese immigration Ims declined sharply) 5,492, Bolivia 7(51, Chile 638, and Colombia 109.