Reflections on Doing Trans-Imperial History

In this roundtable featuring four top-notch scholars, I am gratified to know that they have engaged in the critical and yet constructive reading of my book in such a way as to raise important questions from the vantage point of their respective expertise. I also appreciate a comparative approach by which to frame their respective reading of my work in relation to Greg Dvorak’s excellent monograph—an approach that makes their queries and critiques well focused. The four reviews cover a wide range of issues, and I cannot engage all their questions and observations. Yet, I detect a few poignant issues that allow me to reflect on my intentions and agendas behind writing this book. In this short piece, I would like to speak to the problems of Indigeneity, Blackness, labor, theorization versus empirical research, and place-specific history versus trans-spatial/regional history.

Let me start with the last question. Contrary to Dvorak’s work that concentrates on Kwajalein and Ebeye in the Marshall Islands, my narrative traverses the broader Pacific Basin that encompasses the Americas, East Asia, and, to a lesser degree, Oceania/Micronesia. It also crisscrosses the divided racial-imperial spaces of the American Pacific and the Japanese Pacific. In my book, specific places, like California, Hawai‘i, Korea, Taiwan, Mexico, Brazil, Queensland, and Saipan, function as local case studies as much as they point to nodes of Japanese settler mobility through the Pacific. My work also “offers a top-down approach,” as one reader puts it, because I primarily trace the footsteps of US-based Japanese as settler colonists and remigrants.1 Regrettably, it means that an in-depth discussion of a local political economy and race relations is outside the scope of my work.

This one-sided approach, albeit a strategic choice, forms a major deficiency of my work; conversely, Dvorak’s locally rooted analysis of imperial and racial formation in Kwajalein and Ebeye is capable of what my “top-down” approach fails to explicate, that is, the asymmetric relations that Japanese and American settlers forged with local inhabitants as well as the salvaging of “indigenous voices and lives.” A specific question a reader asks—“what was the effect of Japan’s colonialism upon Indigenous groups”—pertains to this limitation in my work.2 My trans-spatial analysis has an advantage of providing a broader context of how adaptive settler colonialism worked across the different terrains.3 Yet, addressing the above question would require a place-specific analysis and narrative—one that I could not develop for the reasons I explain later.

Why then did I decide to write this book while being fully aware of these shortcomings? The answer is that I have been rather dissatisfied with the state of historical scholarship on US-Japan trans-imperial relations, the imperial Pacific, and Asian immigrant settler colonialism, which stay chiefly at the level of theoretical formulations and conceptual discussions. As a historian who cares about archival research, I wanted to produce an “empirical” study that drew on primary source materials. I felt it high time to do something with many useful concepts and theoretical insights that had been generated, and the result of such an attempt is my monograph—albeit full of deficiencies. My agenda for this undertaking was that my research monograph would catalyze more empirical studies by others, and I actually expected the glaring examples of its deficiencies should serve as an invitation to further research, especially a kind of locally based research, like Dvorak’s, that seriously probes the “effect of Japan’s colonialism upon Indigenous groups” in a specific political economy. This move, of course, should involve an act of decentering Japaneseness by paying more attention to “Native” inhabitants for a more holistic understanding of the operations of settler colonialism from both “top-down” and “bottom-up” perspectives.

In this sense, “What would it mean for Azuma to engage Indigenous histories and archives” is such a perceptive question because it speaks to the biggest challenges to my empiricist ambitions for writing this trans-imperial history of Japanese settler colonialism.4 These challenges are: one, the dearth of historical primary source; and two, the contingency of Indigeneity’s place in this history.

First, the unavailability of written or nonwritten source material was a persistent obstacle I stumbled upon, and for this reason addressing the question about the effect of settler colonialism on Indigenous people in a specific location was rather daunting. In a book chapter on Hawai‘i-Taiwan colonial nexus, I attempted to tackle that question, but it was still rather cursory. An ethnographical research method was not viable for various reasons. “Indigenous voices and lives” thus form a missing piece of the puzzle in my narrative.

Second, as my narrative traverses various locations and spaces of the American Pacific and the Japanese Pacific, I must point out that the state of settler/Native relations was not stable or consistent; nor did such binaristic relations exist in every local context. My reading of available sources suggests that adaptive Japanese settler colonialism sometimes weaponized Indigeneity and Blackness in different ways than Anglophone settler society or White supremacist regime.5 At the same time, in many parts of the Japanese empire or Mexico and Brazil, Indigeneity largely escaped the racist/colonialist gaze of Japanese settlers/immigrants because “Natives” were mostly East Asians or Latin Americans. And in early Japanese America, Chineseness was the most significant point of reference in their identity politics, as they were first and foremost compelled to distinguish themselves from already-excluded Chinese immigrants under the clutching hands of Orientalist US racism.

In Japanese colonies of Micronesia and Taiwan or in US-dominated Hawai‘i, the Indigeneity of native islanders did get recognized as a special source of their enhanced inferiority. Yet, Japanese settlers/immigrants did not explicitly tie it to the notion of Blackness—the foundation of White imagination of colored inferiority—as islanders were usually called banjin (savage), or more often dojin (do = soil or earth; jin = person). Considering the intersection of Indigeneity and Blackness, or the lack thereof, it is important to note that the diverse targets of Japanese settler racism were not referred to as “yellow,” “brown,” or any kind of color. In the context of White settler racism and colonialism, skin color served as a central marker of demarcation; Japanese racism had other mechanisms of racial differentiation and hierarchization, depending on who it dealt with.

Viewed from what primary sources can tell us, Japanese settler racism revealed a high degree of adaptiveness and contingency in relation to Indigeneity or Blackness. For example, outside Micronesia, Taiwan, or perhaps Hokkaido and South Sakhalin inhabited by Ainu people, Indigeneity did not form a major component of their settler racism’s articulations. Indigeneity (and Nativity as a separate construct) should require theoretical reworking before lifting it from a confine of US race/imperial politics and bringing it into a Japanese imperial context.

As for Blackness, I would argue that Japanese settler racism deemed it important in a varied way—not only by way of embracing its negative meanings, but also by way of its omission from what they learned from White settler practices. When resettlers from Japanese America criticized White exclusionist politics and advocated paternalistic pan-Asianist assimilationism toward East Asian “Natives,” they sometimes drew a parallel between their own US experience of exclusion and White supremacist violence against other “colored” people in the Jim Crow South, thereby flattening the difference between Asianness and Blackness in their anti-White rhetoric. Therefore, as much as my formulation of Japanese settler colonialism seeks to destabilize the binary categorizations of White/settler versus. non-White/Native, it may be necessary to similarly destabilize the assumed relationality of Indigeneity/Blackness vis-à-vis settler racism.

This begs a broader question. Can we project what we deem important on our reading of human experiences in an undifferentiated way, especially when our mode of problematization is rooted in US academia/American studies fields? Put differently, even though the questions of Indigeneity and Blackness are central to ethnic studies scholars and historians of US race relations and empire, can we assume that these questions always occupied a central place in the perspectives of Japanese settler colonists, including those in the American West?

Here, it is important to keep in mind an institutional problem my book tries to illuminate in the context of scholarly knowledge production: the divides between Asian studies (area studies) and Asian American studies (US ethnic studies). I suspect most Critical Ethnic Studies readers are trained as Americanists, albeit with different disciplinary backgrounds. In US academia, we become propelled to think in a certain way and ask certain questions once we undergo graduate education. Historians of US race relations or empire are supposed to be expert in the specific historiographies and associated methodologies; Asian historians have their own historiographies and methods to master. Rarely do these historiographies cross, thereby paving the way for the divergent formations of field-specific problematics. Whereas historians of modern Japan seldom ask questions about race when they deal with colonialism or imperialism (a problem in that field that still grapples with the legacy of Orientalism/Eurocentrism), many ethnic studies scholars would look at Blackness or Indigeneity as central to questions of racism, colonialism, and empire. The different modes of problematization are as much to do with individual political agendas as with how the different fields operate in a national academia.

This does not mean that we should stop asking questions about the roles of Indigeneity or Blackness in interimperial relations between the United States and Japan. My point is that it is also important to consider how these key problematics in American studies may require critical reformulations before they are applied outside of that field. Such reformulations are only possible when we have a good understanding of the inner workings of political economies and race relations in a specific local context—an understanding that would necessitate scholars to engage the historiography of a different area field and even non-English source materials in area studies archives. This could be a formidable challenge when the graduate training in American studies tends to devalue foreign language acquisition or research, for example. This point may explain why scholarly production in a Pacific history and trans-imperial/national history has been more slanted toward conceptualization than empirical archival research that cuts across the hitherto divided turfs of Asian history and Asian American history. The idiosyncrasies of Japanese settler colonialism would be hard to decipher if only the conventional Anglophone model is used as the springboard of theoretical formulations. What I realized during my reading of primary source materials is that nothing should be deemed a given and that we may sometimes need to be driven by what sources might tell us—however they are slanted and partial—rather than by some preconceived ideas that derive from a particular context of an Anglophone settler case study.

Backed by the careful reading of primary sources, my attention to the adaptability of Japanese settler colonialism enabled me to detect what one reader perceptively calls “traces of labor,” which “throws into question the nature of settler colonialism—in particular, the relationship between ‘settlers’ and ‘Natives.’”6 As I would argue, another product of theoretical binarism embedded in the scholarly formulations of Anglophone settler colonialism is an erasure of labor or “class history.” In writing a history of adaptive settler colonialism through the experience of resettlers from early Japanese America, I could not ignore the presence of dekasegi itinerant workers among them, who became seamlessly integrated into the discourse on and practices of national settler colonialism inside and outside Japan’s colonial empire. My analysis of settler colonialism therefore offers room for shifting (unsettling) labor migrants with a detailed analysis of a contentious nexus between imin and shokumin.7

Finally, I would like to come back to the theme of Indigeneity, not so much as a concept to be reformulated but as one to elucidate what is often missing in the study of the Pacific as a settler colonial space, including my own book. Because the key feature of settler colonialism supposedly entails the usurpation and control of land properties by colonial newcomers, scholars tend to privilege the continental “rims” of the Pacific, thereby treating the in-between ocean as an unsettled/empty space where colonists and migrants only pass through. Including a chapter on Hawai‘i-Taiwan connections was useful for me to delve into the question of Indigeneity in relation to the latter’s colonial economies of Hawai‘i-style pineapple and coffee plantations. However, other parts of my book tend to valorize the mobility and settler colonist endeavors on and between the continents/land masses of Asia and the Americas—Mexico, Brazil, and Manchuria—that surround the Pacific, but not the Pacific itself. In this respect, as some readers signal in relation to the importance of Okinawa, an island-based/focused analysis would tell us a lot more about the maritime histories and realities of settler coloniality and its relationship to Indigeneity across the different imperial spaces through the Pacific Basin.8 This, I hope, would point to another possibility of empirical research that my work may generate because of its deficiencies.

It is an honor that I had the opportunity to engage the careful reading and constructive critiques of my monograph—the critiques that should be useful for all people interested in the complex and multiple histories of the trans-imperial Pacific and cross-border settler colonialisms.

Eiichiro Azuma is a professor of history and Asian American studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is author of In Search of Our Frontier: Japanese America and Settler Colonialism in the Construction of Japan’s Borderless Empire (California, 2019) and Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America (Oxford, 2005). With David K. Yoo, Azuma also coedited the Oxford Handbook of Asian American History (2016, 2020).