Transnational Japan as History Empire, Migration, and Social Movements (original) (raw)

Rule by Association: Japan in the Global Trans-Imperial Culture, 1868-1912

2018

This dissertation was shortlisted for the ICAS Humanities Dissertation Prize, 2019 and received an "honorable distinction" for the 2019 Walter Markov Prize in global history. The dissertation argues that during the height of the New Imperialism during the latter half of the long nineteenth century, the various colonial powers around the world co-produced a “global trans-imperial culture” that was facilitated by a common knowledge infrastructure, including international congresses, trans-imperial scholarly exchange and expositions. Japan was an important member of this “colonial club” and was deeply engaged with evolving global colonial discourse and practice throughout this period. The dissertation has three interrelated aims. First, it applies new theories of inter-imperial exchange and cooperation to the Japanese Empire. Second, it works to dismantle persistent notions of Japan as a marginal latecomer to the community of imperial powers by demonstrating that Japan engaged with trans-imperially circulating discourses and practices from as early as 1868 and contributed to the development of the culture as a whole. Finally, it employs a series of case studies to illustrate how colonial knowledge was transferred across imperial boundaries: the transmission of American technologies of settler colonialism to Hokkaido in the 1870s, domestic and international debates over the “colonial” status of Taiwan around the turn of the twentieth century and the representation of Japan’s colonial territories at expositions in the 1910s. Throughout the dissertation, theories of colonial association, an anti-assimilationist approach to colonial administration that became popular in the late nineteenth century, serve as a kind of overarching case study that illuminates the consistency and “timeliness” of Japanese colonial discourse in the global trans-imperial culture. Although assimilation and association are frequently treated as unchanging traits of specific empires (with France and Japan typically identified as assimilationist and Britain and the Netherlands as associationist), this dissertation contends that shifts between assimilation and association happened concurrently in different empires around the world, providing important evidence of a common trans-imperial culture. It will demonstrate that Japanese colonial elites engaged with these ideas at the same time as their counterparts in Western empires, with Japan’s famous radical assimilation campaign coming only in the final years of its empire.

Japan: Migration and a Multicultural Society (book)

Japan: Migration and a Multicultural Society, 2014

The Japanese are aware of the ethnic and cultural diversity existing in today’s Japanese society. In the face of this, the increasing ambivalence and circumspection towards foreigners who are seen as competitors with the locals for available jobs; whose different ethnic or racial origins are considered affronts to the “purity” of the Japanese race; and who are perceived as contributing to the increase rates, is paradoxical. This brings to the fore questions like who are to be included in Japanese society ad who are within the constitutive category of “Japanese” and other unanswered questions about Japan’s situation in contemporary times and increasing foreign migration into the country. Addressing important issues about Japan and migration, the book is divided into three sections. The first section, “Migration and the Empire,” looks at the beginning of migration in the modern world as being linked to imperialism and processes of nation-building that characterized geopolitics in the early years of the twentieth century. The second section, “Migration to Japan and the Birth of the Second Generation,” mainly addresses female migration to Japan and the children born of mixed marriages. The third section addresses the bigger issue of multiculturalism from a personal narrative and the experience of being “foreign” in Japan.

JAPAN: THE RISE AND FALL OF AN EMPIRE

JAPAN: THE RISE AND FALL OF AN EMPIRE, 2023

Japan: THE RISE AND FALL OF AN EMPIRE is a book of information and training; a reference document that I would like to present as an educational tool, not as a catalog of events or an exhaustive profile in malevolent behavior. At minimum, I would like readers to be outraged at the phenomenon of “invasion,” per se.