Guarding the Exits: Emigration Control in Japan, 1853-1981

Center for East Asian Studies

Stiteler Hall

The field of migration studies has devoted much of its energy to examining the contested politics of immigration control, in large part reflecting the preoccupation with the topic in the Global North. The history of emigration or exit controls is, by contrast, under-theorised. Where they are addressed at all, exit controls are often pathologized as both symptom and cause of backwardness, authoritarianism or both. Historians of Japan have neglected emigration control for more specific reasons. Many early modernist scholars have been keen to undermine the seclusion (sakoku) paradigm, which wrongly portrayed Tokugawa Japan as hermetically sealed from the outside world, while modernists have largely preferred to focus on the emigration promotion campaigns that accompanied Japan's imperial expansion in the 20th century. As a result, state efforts to stop people from leaving Japan in the years after its “opening” have not yet been treated systematically. This talk situates Japan’s evolving exit controls as key components in global regimes designed to regulate human mobility. In particular, it explores the persistence of paternalism as a feature of border controls. It traces institutional continuities between Hideyoshi’s attempts to curb the global slave trade, efforts to prevent emigration under indenture during the Tokugawa-Meiji transition, late Meiji attempts to control the type and destination of emigrants during a period of increasing cross-border mobility, and postwar efforts to prevent communist sympathisers travelling to the Soviet bloc, showing how US and Japanese state interests often converged to restrict travel by Japanese subjects - primarily across the Pacific but also to Asia and Europe. It invites comparisons with parallel emigrant protection policies in Eastern Europe (Zahra, 2014) and Qing China (McKeown, 2008; Fofana, 2024), and also with contemporary regimes of emigration control in Central America (Hipsman &amp; Meissner, 2015) and Southeast Asia (Shivakoti et al, 2021). Paul Kreitman is an associate research scholar and Unson Microcollege Program Director at Columbia University’s Weatherhead East Asian Institute. His article “Attacked by Excrement: The Political Ecology of Shit in Wartime and Postwar Tokyo” was published in the journal Environmental History in 2018 and won the Association for the Study of Environmental History’s Leopold-Hidy Prize for that year. His book, "Japan’s Ocean Borderlands: Nature and Sovereignty," was published by Cambridge University Press in 2023.