Homecoming During the War: Repatriation Policy and Civilian Exchange of Japan, 1937-1944
This presentation examines how the Japanese government conceptualized and implemented civilian repatriation and exchange policies between 1937 and 1944, situating them within the continuous trajectory from the Second Sino-Japanese War to the Pacific War. Although civilians in wartime are generally described as persons to be protected and removed from the battlefield, this presentation exposed the difficulty of distinguishing between noncombatants and those embedded in imperial economic, administrative, and strategic structures.
In 1937 alone, more than fifty thousand Japanese nationals were repatriated from China. Yet during the early stage of the war, despite numerous requests for return, the government deliberately restricted repatriation in order to sustain its continental strategy. Civilians were treated not merely as protected subjects but as strategic resources whose movement required careful control. This wartime management in China established a policy logic that later shaped trans-Pacific exchanges.
When Japan declared war on the United States in 1941, the exchange ships of 1942 were therefore not unprecedented humanitarian initiatives but extensions of an existing framework of selective repatriation. Drawing primarily on records of the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, this presentation situates the U.S.–Japan exchange ships within this longer policy trajectory. The inclusion of civilians—particularly businessmen and financial personnel—reflected calculations of economic and strategic value rather than purely humanitarian concerns, and selection remained tightly controlled by the state.
After the second exchange in 1942, the establishment of the Bureau in Charge of Japanese Nationals in Enemy Countries reclassified civilians in the United States within a Geneva Convention framework as “prisoners.” This shift coincided with the effective termination of further exchange ships, revealing unresolved tensions in Japan’s wartime repatriation policy and in the legal status of civilians under modern war.