Repatriation and Reintegration: The Manchuria Case

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 also aim to highlight the role of pre-existing social networks in enabling sustainable return and reintegration for repatriates in the challenging postwar context.

Using data from the 1956 National Survey on Repatriates Postwar Lives, I estimate how different household attributes affect the likelihood of internal remigration and unemployment - as proxies for failed reintegration - amongst returnees. These include pre-emigration and post-return location in Japan, as well as war-related factors such as household mortality and overseas settlement location, alongside standard socioeconomic factors such as profession and gender. I supplement this with findings on sociocultural reintegration experiences and challenges, taken from interviews of postwar returnees and survey reports of late post-1972 returnees.

The study aims to identify differences in internal migration and employment patterns between the returnees and general population, and which factors contribute towards this. Additionally, I explore heterogeneous patterns of reintegration amongst returnees to inform the narratives of settlement and postwar return. Broadly, this contributes towards further understanding migration experiences and inter-group dynamics through an understudied phenomenon, return migration.