Japanese agrarian immigrants

Mariko Asano Tamanoi, “Victims of Colonialism? Japanese Agrarian Settlers and Their Repatriation to Japan” The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 6-1-09, February 2, 2009.

"Manchukuo is the state that Japan created in Northeast China (Manchuria) in 1932 to serve its interests. To populate this vast overseas empire with Japanese, the government sent approximately 380,000 farmers and their families as “agrarian immigrants (nōgyō imin).” Many of them were victims of the depression at home. By participating in the construction of Manchukuo, they joined the circle of “colonizers”: they received large tracts of land which the Japanese military had confiscated from Chinese farmers. Their life as settlers, however, was by no means easy. Many did not know what to plant or how to till the land. When they hired Chinese agricultural laborers,” many tensions arose. The settlers’ relations with more than six hundred thousand Korean rice-cultivating farmers, who also settled in Manchuria in the 1930s, were also fraught."

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