Topic summary
Japanese diaspora
Note: For this country, only the number of residents with Japanese nationality is shown, since the number of naturalized Japanese people and their descendants is unknown.
The Japanese diaspora and its individual members, known as Nikkei (Japanese: 日系, IPA:) or as Nikkeijin (Japanese: 日系人, IPA:), comprise the Japaneseemigrants from Japan (and their descendants) residing in a country outside Japan. Emigration from Japan was recorded as early as the 15th century to the Philippines, but did not become a mass phenomenon until the Meiji period (1868–1912), when Japanese emigrated to the Philippines and to the Americas. There was significant emigration to the territories of the Empire of Japan during the period of Japanese colonial expansion (1875–1945); however, most of these emigrants repatriated to Japan after the 1945 surrender of Japanended World War II in Asia.
According to the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, about 5 million Nikkei live in their adopted countries. The largest of these foreign communities are in Brazil, the United States, the United Kingdom, the Philippines, China, Canada, and Peru. Descendants of emigrants from the Meiji period still maintain recognizable communities in those countries, forming separate ethnic groups from Japanese people in Japan. The largest of these foreign communities are in the Brazilian states of São Paulo and Paraná. There are also significant cohesive Japanese communities in the Philippines, Peru and in the American state of Hawaii. Nevertheless, most emigrant Japanese are largely assimilated outside of Japan.
As of 2025, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs reported the five countries with the highest number of Japanese expatriates as the United States (416,380), Australia (105,566), China (92,928), Canada (75,316), Thailand (72,113), and United Kingdom (62,270).