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 pathologised as both symptom and cause of backwardness, authoritarianism or both. This helps to explain why generations of historians in the Japan field have neglected to think systematically about emigration. The master narrative of Japanese history used to rest on the pivot of 1853, which marked Japan’s transition from a premodern, “secluded” society to an modern, open one. In the past forty years much work has been done to emphasise the connectedness (and implicit modernity) of Tokugawa Japan, and studies of post-1853 Japanese globalisation (particularly its imperial form) proliferate as never before. Much less work has been done to examine how Tokugawa-era restrictions on mobility evolved in the modern period, never vanishing entirely and in some ways becoming more sophisticated. Here I begin to trace this process, from the Hideyoshi’s attempts to curb the global slave trade, to efforts to prevent emigration under indenture during the Tokugawa-Meiji transition, to late Meiji attempts to control the type and destination of emigrants during a period of increasing cross-border mobility, to Occupation-era efforts to prevent communist sympathisers travelling to the Soviet bloc, and finally to efforts to crack down on postwar sex tourism to Southeast Asia. I show that exit controls never disappeared but simply transformed. becoming key components in global regimes designed to regulate human mobility.

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About the speaker:

Paul Kreitman is currently Associate Professor of 20th Century Japanese History in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University. His research interests include Japanese history, Pacific history, environmental history, the history of science and technology, and the global history of sovereignty since the 19th century. His monograph Japan’s Ocean Borderlands: Nature and Sovereignty was published by Cambridge University Press in 2023 in its Oceanic Histories series.