Return Migration and Reintegration: The Case of Manchuria

What determines the successful (or failed) reintegration of return migrants? This paper examines the reintegration of Japanese postwar repatriates from Manchuria to understand return migration challenges in a case where the majority (remainee) and minority (returnee) groups are most similar. I use data from the 1956 National Survey on Repatriates Postwar Lives to estimate how different household attributes affect the likelihood of remigration and unemployment - as proxies for failed reintegration - amongst repatriates. These include standard socioeconomic factors such as profession and gender, as well as war-related factors such as household mortality and Manchuria settlement location. I supplement this with findings on the sociocultural reintegration experiences and challenges, taken from interviews of postwar repatriates and survey reports of late repatriates. The study aims to identify heterogeneous patterns of reintegration that inform the narratives of settlement and postwar return of repatriates to Japan. Broadly, this contributes towards further understanding migration experiences through an understudied phenomenon, return migration.