Japanese settlement in the Dominican Republic

Latin America was the only potential outlet for emigration; the United States' Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907 and Immigration Act of 1924 and Australia's White Australia policy eliminated the option of settlement in those two countries, while anti-Japanese sentiment in Asia due to Japan's wartime atrocities meant that none of those countries would accept Japanese migrants either.

[7] Rafael Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic since 1930, for his part sought to use European and later Japanese migrants as a demographic buffer against black Haitian squatters, by settling them along the country's western border with Haiti.

[4][5] However, the May 1961 assassination of Rafael Trujillo and a subsequent civil war, plunged the country into chaos and political violence, leaving many of the governmental promises of assistance and protection broken.

[9] Japanese settlement in the Dominican Republic never grew to a very large scale; protests over the extreme hardships and broken government promises faced by the initial group of migrants set the stage for the end of state-supported labour emigration in Japan.

[9] Backlash would continue for decades; in 2000, more than 170 of the migrants sued the Japanese government, charging that it lied to them about conditions in the Dominican Republic in order to trick them into leaving Japan.

[12] Their spoken Japanese is also full of archaisms, such as the Sino-Japanese-derived shashinki (写真機) instead of the modern loanword kamera (カメラ) for "camera".