ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is to outline the beginnings of the Japanese diaspora and to summarize the development of Asian immigration to the Caribbean, Hawaii, the United States, and Canada.1 To understand the Japanese diaspora in the New World it is useful first to consider the prior migration of other Asians, chiefly from China, to various parts of the plantation world beginning early in the nineteenth century. The British civil servant and scholar Hugh Tinker (1974) has called this migration “a new system of slavery,” in which Asians, mostly indentured, were used as surrogates for enslaved Africans at a time when first the Atlantic slavetrade and then slavery were being outlawed. There had been a fragmentary migration of East Asians to the New World as early as the seventeenth century. Spanish and Nahuatl texts describe both Chinese and Japanese in early seventeenth-century Mexico, who came as supercargoes on the fabled Manila galleons. Chinese seamen were present in American east coast ports in the years immediately after the American Revolution, followed by the occasional merchant (Nuttall 1906; Brunhouse 1940; Schurz 1959; Leon-Portilla 1981; Calvo 1983). These and other migrations from Asia involved very few individuals, probably fewer than a hundred before 1800.
