Hashima, a small island off the coast of Nagasaki, has become one of the most recent stages for Japan’s “history wars.”1 From the 1910s through World War II, thousands of Korean and Chinese workers were brought to the island as forced labor for its coal mines, deep below the ocean’s surface. Abandoned since the 1970s when the coal deposits were depleted, the island was reopened in 2009 to tourists drawn to the dramatic ruins of its mine shafts and dilapidated apartment blocks. Hashima was recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2015, alongside a number of other industrial areas meant to represent Japan’s rapid modernization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But the World Heritage declaration has been mired in controversy as the Japanese government refuses to acknowledge forced labor in Hashima, despite agreements between the Japanese and Korean governments and the UNESCO World Heritage Committee information about this history would be provided at the site.2 Hashima, like so many islands in the Pacific, can be understood as a kind of microcosm for historical and contemporary transpacific systems of imperialism, labor, migration, and race. The conflict around the World Heritage designation is also part of larger struggles for control over the history of Asia and the Pacific and the many peoples who have traversed it, willingly or under coercion, for centuries.

More than four thousand kilometers to the southwest, Kwajalein Atoll’s coralline islets rise from the rim of an undersea volcano to breach the surface. There, too, the remnants of Japanese “modernization,” imperial expansion, and the forced labor of Koreans, Okinawans, and Indigenous Marshallese are legible in the rubble strewn across the islets and lagoons. In Coral and Concrete: Remembering Kwajalein Atoll Between Japan, America, and the Marshall Islands (2018), Greg Dvorak writes a history of the atoll that is at once deeply personal and expansively transnational. By reading the layers of coral and concrete that make up the atoll, he shows how the imperial ambitions of Japan and the United States have been inscribed and reinscribed into the land and waters of Kwajalein. Dvorak details the Japanese and US militaries’ staggering projects to transform the atoll by dredging, blasting, and expanding the islets, and contrasts these enduring concrete constructions with the fugitive remains of the workers whose labor sustained these projects. These include the “traces of the Korean conscripted laborers who were ordered to build the causeway that connected the islets of Roi and Namur during the war years.”3 Dvorak writes,

The son of one of these men, a Korean immigrant to the United States who worked at Kwajalein in the 1980s, described how he discovered the names of workers etched in Hangul script in the concrete of the causeway deep in the jungles of Roi-Namur. These writings, probably the only mark left behind by the Koreans of Kwajalein, are lost in the entangled vines and foliage of the atollscape. I searched for several days but could not find them.4

On the islands that constellate the Pacific, countless workers—forced, coerced, unfree—moved the land and sea to build the foundations of Japanese and US imperialist projects.

While Dvorak focuses on the geographically “small” space of Kwajalein Atoll to reveal a history that binds together distant places and peoples, Eiichiro Azuma’s In Search of Our Frontier: Japanese America and Settler Colonialism in the Construction of Japan’s Borderless Empire traverses the Pacific basin to focus on a single group: Japanese immigrants to the United States, especially those who returned to Japan or migrated again to its formal colonies and extraterritorial migrant settlements. The first generation of migrants departing Japan for the frontiers of western North America in the 1880s were a heterogeneous group. The majority were dekasegi, or temporary workers, who traveled to plantations in Hawai‘i or farms in California, Oregon, and Washington.5 On the other hand, a powerful minority of educated, moneyed immigrants cast themselves as pioneers on a mission to build a “new Japan” as part of a broader project of imperial expansion.6 Azuma’s history reveals the active participation by some of these Japanese American issei in future sites of Japan’s “borderless” and “adaptive” settler colonialism, as well as the state’s retroactive appropriation of all Japanese Americans, regardless of class, into a grand narrative of Japanese subjects as an expansionist race following the occupation of Manchuria in the 1930s.7 Indeed, the state’s conviction that blood ties between issei, nisei, and the Japanese empire overrode all other national, cultural, and linguistic ties necessitated an erasure of class difference in the diaspora, especially the previously significant distinction between imin, or temporary migrant workers, and shokumin, or settlers.8 The material realities of the bulk of issei Japanese Americans who toiled in the fields of the US American frontier were subsumed in a “concrete”—to borrow Dvorak’s term—national narrative to support burgeoning colonial projects in Northeast Asia and the Pacific Islands.

In their own unique ways, Dvorak’s and Azuma’s works both greatly nuance our dominant paradigms for understanding race, labor, and migration in the Pacific and beyond. In particular, both works suggest the complex interaction of class with the racializations that emerged from Japanese and US colonialism in the Pacific. Indeed, they excavate the material histories of labor from the sweeping national narratives of conquest and liberation that Japan and the United States both cast over their Pacific enterprises. When we consider the engravings of Korean workers’ names in the concrete of the Roi-Namur causeway, lost to us among the sprawling US military infrastructure that dominates the Marshall Islands today, or the way that formerly reviled Japanese migrant workers were recast in state ideology as a glorious first wave of global Japanese pioneering, we exhume the role of labor and class in Pacific history from the concrete racial ideologies propagated by imperial powers in the region. There is no critical historical understanding of Kwajalein, the Japanese diaspora, or Japanese and US colonialism and its contemporary ramifications to be had without an accounting of the many workers who moved, or were forced to move, great distances across Pacific waters as fuel for the engines of imperialism.

A focus on labor, and migration for reasons of labor, also throws into question the nature of settler colonialism—in particular, the relationship between “settlers” and “Natives” throughout the Pacific. While Patrick Wolfe famously argued for “recuperating” the binarism of settler and Native to understand the history and politics of settler colonies, Azuma’s application of some of the tenets of settler colonial studies to the Japanese context provocatively complicates any such binary.9 Indeed, at its apex, the Japanese empire sought to recuperate its own binary—that of Japanese settlers over and against the natives of its colonies and settlements—by eliding previous distinctions between imin and shokumin, yoking together all overseas Japanese under the banner of ishokumin.10 In contrast to concrete narratives that polarize the positions of settler and Native, labor histories in the region reveal layers of displacement and mobility. In my reading, what is of most value for understanding the complexity of race in the Pacific in both Azuma’s and Dvorak’s work are the moments when class impinges on presumed racial categories. Take, for another example, Dvorak’s discussion of the many Marshall Islanders relocated to Ebeye, the island adjacent to Kwajalein, from which many Marshallese commute to work for the military or for the surrounding US American community. These workers, many of whom are native to other parts of the Marshall Islands but who do not have claims to the land on Ebeye or Kwajalein, make a home on Ebeye, in the outskirts of the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Site.11 What does solidarity, belonging, and decolonization look like in a place where overlapping imperialisms have moved people and land, when there is no land to return to for some, and where there is a new home in the making for itinerant workers who manage to carve out a place for themselves somewhere, anywhere?

As Dvorak and Azuma both skillfully demonstrate, the legacies of Japanese imperialism continue to play a key role in the geopolitics of Asia and the Pacific. Informed by US imperialism in the region, Japanese imperialism was at once “mimetic” and “adaptive,” responding to US immigration exclusion, White settler racism, and European and American military incursions throughout the region.12 Following defeat in World War II, Japanese expansionist ambitions were adapted again: “Japanese remained to be ‘leaders of the Asiatics,’ albeit now as America’s junior partner in the region.”13 Superseded by US military bases in the South Pacific and by its hegemonic status the world over, Japan nevertheless continued to carry out its goals of “overseas development,” perpetuating its “polite racism” under the wing of US Cold War diplomacy.14

As is clear in the controversy surrounding Hashima today, the place of workers in this history remains contested. Did Korean miners inscribe their names on the walls of Mitsubishi’s coal mines at Hashima, just like at Roi-Namur? How do their inscriptions challenge the presentation of the UNESCO Sites of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution: Iron and Steel, Shipbuilding and Coal Mining as a celebration of Japan’s “place on the world stage” as “the first non-Western nation to industrialize through a self-determined strategy”?15 In other words, when we consider class history to theorize race, how does it challenge the dominant paradigms that have concretized around studies of the Pacific Basin? How might we nuance the racial categories of “Asian” and “Japanese” around the Pacific Rim and the islands in between in light of Dvorak’s and Azuma’s histories, both haunted by forced and coerced workers, Korean, Okinawan, Chinese, Marshallese, and dekasegi? Who is “settler” and “Native” in a sea of workers, dispossessed, displaced, returned, and moved again on an island like Ebeye? What other concepts arise from the rubble of concrete, the accretion of coral, and the transpacific migrations that link them?

Jane Komori is a PhD candidate in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research is concerned with Japanese Canadian conceptions of food, land, and nature in relationship to their settler colonial, capitalist contexts.