Japanese Labor Migration Remittances / 日本劳工移民汇款

Japanese labor migration remittances are the episode 168 frame for reading overseas Japanese workers through wages, family support, state oversight, and financial infrastructure. 168. 银与信：一部日本劳工移民的跨洋汇款史 starts from Japanese workers in Hawaii / 夏威夷 and the U.S. West Coast, then follows the money back to Japanese households, village officials, ministries, consulates, and Yokohama Specie Bank.

The concept matters because it shifts migration history from identity alone into a material operating system. Workers left for higher wages, families waited for support, officials tried to preserve national reputation, banks turned small transfers into foreign-exchange business, and U.S. observers sometimes converted the same family transfers into Racialized Remittance Politics / 种族化汇款政治.

Key Claims

• Remittances reveal the economic reason labor migration was undertaken and sustained.
• Migrant money connected overseas work to household survival, public buildings, status, and return-home imagination.
• Japan’s system became unusually legible because officials and banks standardized petitions, lists, deposits, and transfer records.
• Remittance history has to be read together with labor exploitation, family pressure, national image, and immigration restriction.

Connections

• State-Mediated Remittance System / 国家中介汇款体系 — institutional design that made Japanese remittances recordable.
• Migrant Family Remittance Obligation / 移民家庭汇款义务 — household pressure and petitions behind many transfers.
• Yokohama Specie Bank — bank infrastructure for transfer and settlement.
• Hawaii / 夏威夷, Japan, and United States — main trans-Pacific route in the source.
• Qiaopi Remittance Networks — Chinese comparison case.
• Racialized Remittance Politics / 种族化汇款政治 — U.S. receiving-country interpretation of outbound migrant money.