Introduction
Japanese people began migrating overseas more than 150 years ago, when the national seclusion order that prohibited them from leaving Japan was lifted in 1866. Japanese people migrated first to the Kingdom of Hawai‘i to work on sugarcane plantations, and then to the USA and Canada, followed by Peru in 1899 and Brazil in 1908. When the USA banned Japanese people from entering the country in 1924, the immense flow of migrants shifted from North America to South America. All told, roughly 770,000 people migrated from Japan before World War II, with another 260,000 people migrating after the war.
Consequently, as of 2021, it is estimated that more than 3.8 million Japanese and Nikkei people live outside Japan, 2.2 million of whom reside in Central and South America.
Additionally, as of 2017, roughly 210,000 Nikkei people—descendants of Japanese people who migrated from Japan—had left their home countries with their families to work and study in Japan. This is the background behind the establishment of the Japanese Overseas Migration Museum to further understanding of the history of Japanese emigration and of the migrants and their Nikkei descendants among the general public (especially younger generations).
The museum exhibits historical materials related to overseas migration, focusing mainly on North America (including Hawai‘i), which was the initial destination of migrants from Japan, and Latin American countries, where JICA fulfilled a role in postwar migration projects.
A migrant colony under construction (Pirapó, Paraguay in the 1960s)
The story of our establishment
Research activities for establishing the Japanese Overseas Migration Museum began roughly three years before it opened. Specifically, we obtained information from similar institutions such as the Japanese American National Museum (Los Angeles) and the Historical Museum of Japanese Immigration in Brazil (São Paulo) as well as universities and public institutions with collections of materials associated with Nikkei people, and local Nikkei organizations. We then went around asking individuals and organizations if they had any materials, and negotiated to have them donated or loaned to us. This is how we managed to collect roughly 12,000 items before the museum opened.
Additionally, our parent organization, the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), had already amassed a collection of nearly 40,000 books, photographs, videos, and audio recordings.
Please click the link below to learn more about the history of the museum from its opening to the present.
Basic philosophy of the Japanese Overseas Migration Museum
- Dedicated to those Japanese who have taken part in molding new civilizations in the Americas
Materials in our collection
The materials in our collection are divided into four main categories, with the oldest dating back to the 1860s. One example is a reproduction of a document known as gomen no insho, which is akin to a passport today. The table below shows the four types of materials in our collection.
| Type | Quantity | Remarks |
|---|---|---|
| Documents and books | 20,000 | |
| Archival materials | 5,000 | Registers of names, passports, identification documents, contracts and certificates, newspapers, bulletins, reports, textbooks, and more |
| Photographs, videos, and audio recordings | 10,000 | Photographs, negatives, positives, video film, cassette tapes, records |
| Other items (artifacts) | 2,000 | Wicker trunks and trunk suitcases brought by migrants to their new countries; daily necessities; farming and fishing equipment; taiko drums, baseball equipment, and other recreational supplies used by migrants in their new countries |
Information accurate as of January 2006. Includes items in the process of organization.
Medals commemorating the 50th anniversary of immigration to the Amazon (Brazil, 1979)
Tags from a tanomoshiko rotating savings and credit association (Brazil)
Exhibit structure
Our permanent exhibition is broadly divided into five categories with roughly 1,500 items on display. For more information, please see the Permanent Exhibition page.
Director
Hiroe Ono (Director, JICA Yokohama)
Special Supervisor
Tadao Umesao (deceased) (First Director, National Museum of Ethnology)
Academic Supervisors
Yasuo Sakata (Faculty of International Studies, Osaka Gakuin University)
Hirochika Nakamaki (Department of Ethnocultural Research, National Museum of Ethnology)
Tadashi Yamamoto (Department of Museum Ethnology, National Museum of Ethnology)
- ※Note: Affiliations are as of the museum’s opening
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