During the mass migrations at the end of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, the Japanese who left their home islands for other Asian shores actually outnumbered those who crossed the Pacific. However, the devastation of World War II and the ensuing repatriations shrunk the Japanese settlements in Asia to such a degree that today 90 percent of the three million people of Japanese descent outside of Japan reside in the Western Hemisphere. Given this situation, the decision of the editors to restrict the scope of this volume to the Americas is a valid one, and so is their geographical coverage within the hemisphere. The book’s 20 chapters deal not only with the large Nikkei communities of Brazil and the United States but also with the midsized groups of Peru and Canada, the small settlements of Bolivia and Paraguay, and the three hundred thousand Latin American dekasegi...
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