Forced Wartime Labour Migration: Comfort women & Diasporic Entrepreneurship: Japanese Immigrants in Peru and Global Cotton Trade (1899-1945)

Title 1: Forced Wartime Labour Migration: Comfort women

This presentation analyses comfort women prevalent in the Asia-Pacific region during the expansion of the Japanese empire in World War II. Such extensive mobility would not have been possible without the establishment of a system to facilitate it. This presentation views comfort women as (forced) subjects of wartime labour migration, and attempts to reconstruct the system governing and managing their international mobilities by employing a migration infrastructure framework. The primary sources include military documents from archives and a collection of military records related to wartime comfort published in Japan.

Title 2: Diasporic Entrepreneurship: Japanese Immigrants in Peru and Global Cotton Trade (1899-1945)

This paper analyzes the nexus of empire-building, commercial expansion, and migration, focusing on Japanese immigrants in Peru who acted as brokers between Japan and Peru in trading and retailing cotton and textile products (1899-1945). I narrate three interlacing histories: (1) how Japanese migrants were sent to Peru as part of Japan’s empire-building project; (2) how the migrants played a role in cultivating trade and commercial routes between the two countries, and (3) how their role as intermediaries shaped their economic mobility and being treated as racial others in Peru. This history illustrates how Japanese Peruvians have established a solid and prosperous ethnic community today by continuing to maintain ties with Japan, and how the sending state plays a role in immigrant integration more generally.

Speakers

Yasuko Hassall Kobayashi is a professor at the School of Liberal Arts and Science, Musashi University, Japan. She is also Honorary Associate Professor at the School of Culture, History and Language, ANU College of Asia and the Pacific, The Australian National University. Her main research interest lies in modern history of transnational migration and mobilities within the Asia and Pacific region, as well as contemporary migration and mobilities in the region. She is an advisor of International Logistics Strategy Team, Kinki Regional Development Bureau Port and Airport Relation Affairs Division, Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, Japan. She holds multiple grants and is chief investigator for a JSPS grant entitled ‘History of Asia and Pacific studies in Australia during the Cold War: a global history.’  Her recent articles are: (2024) The significance of local government in disaster management for international migrants: the case of Minoh City, Osaka Prefecture, Disasters, https://doi.org/10.1111/disa.12636, and a coauthored article, (2023) Governance and the provision of roads and mobility in five Japanese ‘societies’,  Case Studies on Transport Policy,   10.1016/j.cstp.2023.101000.

Ayumi Takenaka (Ph.D. in Columbia University, USA) is a professor of sociology in the Faculty of Social Sciences at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo, Japan, specializing in the studies of migration, ethnicity, and gastronomy. Having long engaged in ethnographic research in Peru, the US, Spain, and Japan, she now works on three projects: (1) gastronomy and the historical process of creating a Japanese and Peruvian fusion cuisine, called Nikkei food; (2) diaspora engagement and the role of sending countries in immigrant integration; (3) trade diasporas and the role of Japanese emigrants in global cotton trade (1920s-1950s).