In Search of Our Frontier: Japanese America and Settler Colonialism in the Construction of Japan's Borderless Empire

In Search of Our Frontier explores the complex transnational history of Japanese immigrant settler colonialism, which linked Japanese America with Japan’s colonial empire through the exchange of migrant bodies, expansionist ideas, colonial expertise, and capital in the Asia-Pacific basin before World War II. The trajectories of Japanese transpacific migrants exemplified a prevalent national structure of thought and practice that not only functioned to shore up the backbone of Japan’s empire building but also promoted the borderless quest for Japanese overseas development. Eiichiro Azuma offers new interpretive perspectives that will allow readers to understand Japanese settler colonialism’s capacity to operate outside the aegis of the home empire.
 

ISBN-13: 9780520304383

Media Type: Hardcover

Publisher: University of California Press

Publication Date: 10-08-2019

Pages: 368

Product Dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.40(d)

Series: Asia Pacific Modern #17

Eiichiro Azuma is Alan Charles Kors Term Chair Associate Professor of History and Asian American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also the author of Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America and a coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of Asian American History.

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CHAPTER 1

Immigrant Frontiersmen in America and the Origins of Japanese Settler Colonialism

The United States is the emergent center of world civilization, a land of new development with an untouched landmass that awaits the coming of the adventurous and strong-willed. Come thy ways, our brothers and sisters of 3,700,000 [in Japan]! Why must you cling onto the tiny ancestral home? But when you come to the United States, you must have the determination to create the second, new Japan there.

Entitled "Come Japanese!," an 1887 treatise celebrated the popular act of international border crossing and overseas settlement making with America's frontier land as the focal point from the dual standpoint of Japanese "compatibility with white" settler-civilization builders and the "national honor and interest of Japan." As this first "guide" to overseas settler colonialism, authored by a resident of San Francisco, articulated so poignantly, the modernizationist visions of "progress" and "civilization" catalyzed the rise of Japanese interest in emigration and colonization in the mid-1880s. Simultaneously, in much the same way that the "New World" had aroused the "expansive" minds of Europeans to desire colonial conquest and pursue new markets in earlier centuries, the imported concept of the "frontier" drew the attention of the early Japanese colonialist imagination toward the American West and the Hawaiian Islands — the most authentic frontier of all New World frontiers. More than a decade after US-inspired agro-industrial development had taken hold in the domestic wilderness of Hokkaido, North America appeared increasingly attractive as the ideal overseas site to build a "new Japan" in the eyes of the exponents of national expansion and borderless settler colonialism during the mid-1880s.

Before Japan attained the world's recognition as an imperial newcomer following its victory over China in 1895, certain Japanese intellectuals and political factions had already begun to look favorably on emigration-led national expansion during the decade between 1884 and 1894. The mainstay of early Japanese settler colonialism featured what later would be referred to as "eastward expansionism" (toshinron), in which transpacific migration from Japan was deemed the best means to further Japan's destiny as a global colonial empire. A competing discourse promoting "continental (northward) expansionism" (tairiku shinshutsuron or hokushinron) initially did not garner much support — except within a small segment of military strategists and political hawks — before the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895. Nor did the idea of "southward (maritime) expansion" (nanshinron) present itself as an equally notable discourse until around the 1890s.

The critical decade 1884–1894 witnessed the Japanese encounter with the Western Hemisphere and the Pacific Islands, the initial colonial "promised lands" that would be gradually overshadowed by newer frontiers of northeast Asia and the Nan'yo (South Seas) after the 1910s. This shift in the Japanese expansionist gaze accompanied two significant factors in the history of settler colonialism in pre–World War II Japan. The first has been well studied in the cases of Korea and Manchuria, where settler colonialism was supported and augmented by the increasing scale of state intervention, including the use of imperial armed forces, the displacement and subordination of local residents by Japanese colonizers, and the politics of cultural assimilation directed at "natives." The second, almost completely neglected by historians, is concerned with the role of the United States — and its Anglo-Saxonist racism, which took the lead in "white world supremacy" — as a major stumbling block to Japan's attempt to expand freely in various directions. The existing literature on Japanese colonialism generally concentrates on the Asian continent and surrounding maritime areas only, defining the first Sino-Japanese War as the official beginning of Japan's empire making in this contained region. Nevertheless, transpacific migration and settler colonialism in the Western Hemisphere, especially in the US West, played a crucial role in informing and even helping shape Japanese imperialism on the Asian continent and in the Nan'yo. Thus, salvaging the role of the United States and the neglected theme of "race" is not only necessary, but it should also require the reconsideration of what historians have presumptuously taken for granted as Japan's colonial "space" in the story of imperialism. Unbound by the physical limits of the empire's sovereign power, the borderless dimensions of Japan's expansionism, especially overseas migration and settlement making, are discernible when we factor in the impacts of US racism and immigration exclusion on the complex unfolding of Japanese settler colonialism.

With a focus on the decade 1884–1894, this chapter sets out to shed light on interrelated historical developments, in which state-sponsored imperialism over China and Korea took shape in response to Japanese immigrant entanglement with white American racism. What happened to early Japanese immigrants in California and Hawai'i influenced Japanese discourse on national expansion and global racial struggle, and for that reason it illuminates the extent to which eastward expansionism came to dictate the basic terms of public debates and policy formulation in Meiji Japan before the turn of the twentieth century. As the chief advocates and practitioners of transpacific migration and agricultural colonization, immigrant intellectuals in San Francisco were instrumental in presenting a prototypical definition of a "frontier" for the modern Japanese and their emergent empire to conquer. The nascent phase of Japanese settler colonialism, which would subsequently figure largely in the state-led colonization of Korea, Manchuria, and other parts of the formal empire, entailed a close collaborative endeavor between early Japanese America and imperial Japan.

FUKUZAWA YUKICHI AND THE NATIVIZING OF SETTLER COLONIALISM IN 1880S JAPAN

Japanese fascination with the New World frontier resembled white Americans' enchantment with the mythical image of China as a new market for expanding US industrial capitalism and Christian evangelism. As the popular ideology of Manifest Destiny advocated, many Americans found it imperative to extend US commercial and moral power westward to China and other parts of the Asia-Pacific "frontier" beyond the US shores in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Though subsumed under a logic of altruistic uplift, the pursuit of material gain and racial supremacy served as a driving force for the making of America's Pacific empire, which eventually engulfed Hawai'i, Guam, and the Philippines as way stations to the China market and Asia in general during and after the Spanish-American War of 1898.

Looking in the opposite direction across the Pacific, contemporary Japanese discussions about the North American frontier bore many similarities, albeit without conspicuous Christian undertones, insofar as pundits viewed the area with a mixture of romanticism and adventure, a sense of entitlement as modern men, and utilitarian economic and geopolitical calculations. And just as white Americans looked on Chinese (and other "Orientals") as the uncivilized masses who should be assimilated into or subjugated by Americans' superior way of life and sociopolitical system, early expansionists of Japan believed that they had a "sacred" role to play in bringing civilization and modernity to undeveloped lands and uncultured peoples around them and in the New World. As a modern nation and a civilized race, the Japanese reasoned, they must join the historic project of global conquest and development that had been carried out by European settler-colonists since the seventeenth century. Viewed from their embrace of the universalist progressivism that western modernity purportedly promised, the Japanese initially did not question whether or not they were sufficiently qualified in terms of their racial and cultural background to partake in the teleological project hitherto spearheaded and monopolized by white Euro-Americans. Not until after 1892 did many Japanese begin to realize that the purported universalism of western modernity entailed racially prescribed boundaries and Eurocentric exclusivity in accordance with Orientalism and social Darwinism.

In Japan, the mid-1880s saw the first notable articulation of this type of "innocent" expansionism, which defined transpacific emigration and colonization as a duty of modern Japanese in the global community of civilized nations. Advocates came from a circle of early westernizers and their nationalist-minded students: the "new generation in Meiji Japan." These pundits were by no means politically homogeneous and were not simply moved by their embrace of western modernity or reactive love for Japan. A diverse group that included Meiji oligarchs, government bureaucrats, party politicians, journalists, scholars, businessmen, and impecunious young students (shosei), early expansionists produced specific discourses for specific audiences in accordance with their divergent agendas and goals. The heterogeneity of the ideological terrain, as well as the diversity of the ideologues, characterized the formative process of early Japanese expansionism. Yet there also emerged a set of common visions and preferences that would characterize Japanese-style settler colonialism, one that emphasized the importance of migration and overseas community making in the form of agricultural colonization and commercial development. In this discursive process, the landmass of North America and the historical precedent of the Anglo-Saxon conquest of the US frontier served as inspirations and a crucial reference point.

Fukuzawa Yukichi was the most influential ideologue in the initial phase of the formation of this expansionistic discourse, because he had hundreds of dedicated disciples who took his words to heart and often acted on them. Japan's foremost scholar in "western studies," Fukuzawa founded the prestigious Keio Academy, started the Jiji Shinpo newspaper, and published myriad books and articles that helped the transition of the Japanese nation from feudalism to modernity. In this context, he first propagated new ideas associated with overseas migration and colonization around 1884 and 1885. Although scholarship on this important Meiji intellectual generally fails to acknowledge his contribution, it was Fukuzawa who forged the central underpinnings of emigration-based national expansionism, which would subsequently become systematized as a coherent discourse on "overseas development" (kaigai hatten) by the turn of the twentieth century. Fukuzawa's core assertions included mercantilist expansion, racial superiority, and agricultural settler colonialism.

An admirer of British imperial success, Fukuzawa first put forth a vision of Japanese emigrant mercantilism modeled after the global ascendancy of English commerce. Rather than seeking the outright takeover of foreign lands by military force, this position envisioned the peaceful establishment of overseas trade hubs, exemplified by the ubiquitous presence of British merchant posts all over the world. Japanese traders, Fukuzawa elaborated, similarly should emigrate abroad in large numbers, creating new markets for Japanese products in the land of their new residence. The growth of exports through the medium of emigrant merchants would promote Japan's domestic industrial expansion, he anticipated. The origin of Fukuzawa's interest in entrepreneurial expansionism (albeit not a British example) was his trip to California in 1860 as a member of the first Tokugawa Shogunate mission to the United States. In San Francisco's Chinatown, the then lower-ranking samurai bureaucrat witnessed the impressive commercial "success" of Chinese immigrants and fantasized about "the future migration of Japanese people to California" to experience the same result. Fukuzawa thought to himself then that "those with resources should conduct trade and commerce, and those without them work in gold mines" to create capital. Despite the passage of the US Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Fukuzawa's naïve faith in the universalist virtue of modern civilization blinded him to the problem of race, making Japan's foremost scholar continuously optimistic about his people's ability to emulate not just Chinese but also Anglo-Saxon accomplishments.

Although he might have discussed these ideas in his classroom at an earlier date, Fukuzawa expounded publicly for the first time in 1884 on the need for promoting popular emigration to build up the mercantilist foundation of imperial Japan. His newspaper became the main vehicle for disseminating such ideas, especially among the emergent urban bourgeoisie of Japan. By that time seventeen years had passed since the Meiji Restoration, and Fukuzawa's school had produced hundreds of business-minded youth equipped with a capitalistic mind-set and strong national consciousness. Directed primarily at an educated readership, Jiji Shinpo printed a series of commentaries and editorials to expound on the centrality of emigration relative to the national motto of the time: "Enrich the nation, strengthen the military (fukoku kyohei)." In Fukuzawa's view, fukoku kyohei had to be followed in the order stated; amassing national wealth would precede building up military power. With a weak industrial base and a small domestic market, Japan in the mid-1880s badly needed to increase its exports to earn foreign currency. For Fukuzawa, trade was the best way to enrich the country to ensure its independence, much less its expansion. This argument in and of itself was nothing unique, but he was the first intellectual of prominence to link commercial development to the question of emigration in the context of contemplating national security and empowerment, the number one priority in Japanese diplomacy and statecraft at the time.

Fukuzawa emphasized that emigration was not simply a pursuit of individual happiness and profit, but rather a patriotic deed that had serious implications for the future of modern Japan. He envisioned that emigrant traders would serve as a "commercial linkage between their homeland and their new country of residence." Fukuzawa likened such traders to loyal soldiers who would sacrifice their lives to defend their homeland. Comparing the past expansion of the British Empire with the future rise of imperial Japan, one of his Jiji Shinpo editorials in 1884 urged readers to "leave your homeland at once":

In considering the long-term interest of the country, the wealth that [English traders abroad] have garnered individually has become part of England's national assets. The land they developed has turned into regional centers of English trade, if not its formal colonial territories. This is how Great Britain has become what it is today. In a similar vein, [a Japanese emigrant] shall be regarded as a loyal subject. For while sacrificing himself at the time of national crisis is a direct way of showing loyalty, engaging in various enterprises abroad is an indirect way of demonstrating patriotism.

In particular, Fukuzawa recommended North America as offering abundant opportunities for entrepreneurial-minded emigrants.

The second theme in Fukuzawa's expansionist thought stemmed from his belief in the competitiveness of Japanese immigrants once they settled in the United States. His idea of Japanese racial superiority, however, was neither monolithic nor categorical. It valorized the moral character of upper-class individuals rather than the biological traits that comprised the entire nation. According to Fukuzawa, not everyone was capable of competing as an immigrant entrepreneur and demonstrating innate superiority. He was very specific about who should emigrate, for he felt that "the enrichment of Japan" was contingent upon whether an emigrant possessed certain traits that would enable him to act as a "loyal subject" of the modern nation-state. Fukuzawa's thinking specifically mirrored the Meiji intellectuals' class bias toward shizoku, or people of samurai background, as well as their prevailing distrust of the Japanese peasantry's capacity to be self-conscious "nationals." Sharing the same social origin, Fukuzawa believed that shizoku youth should be given an opportunity to leave for North America for trade and business ventures. "[These] Japanese do not compare unfavorably to various European nationals [in the United States] at all," he proudly argued, "because they, too, are a superior race." With tens of thousands of immigrants in North America, Fukuzawa forecasted, "new Americans of Japanese birth might even exert tremendous political influence" after achieving commercial success "to produce the president of the United States or control the Congress." This was how these shizoku should "erect dozens of new Japans all over the world." Not only did the notion of Japanese racial compatibility with Europeans (especially Anglo-Saxons) shore up Fukuzawa's optimism about their entrepreneurial ascent abroad, but it also led him to see relations between the Japanese and other nonwhites (including Asians) hierarchically.

(Continues…)

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Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface and Acknowledgments

Introduction: Transpacific Japanese Migration, White American Racism,
and Japan’s Adaptive Settler Colonialism

PART ONE. IMAGINING A JAPANESE PACIFIC, 1884–1907
1. Immigrant Frontiersmen in America and the Origins of Japanese
Settler Colonialism
2. Vanguard of an Expansive Japan: Knowledge Producers, Frontier
Trotters, and Settlement Builders from across the Pacific

PART TWO. CHAMPIONING OVERSEAS JAPANESE DEVELOPMENT,1908–1928
3. Transpacific Migrants and the Blurring Boundaries of State and
Private Settler Colonialism
4. US Immigration Exclusion, Japanese America, and Transmigrants
on Japan’s Brazilian Frontiers

PART THREE. SPEARHEADING JAPAN'S IMPERIAL SETTLER COLONIALISM, 1924–1945
5. Japanese California and Its Colonial Diaspora: Translocal Manchuria
Connections
6. Japanese Hawai‘i and Its Tropical Nexus: Translocal Remigration to
Colonial Taiwan and the Nan’yō

PART FOUR. HISTORY AND FUTURITY IN JAPAN'S IMPERIAL SETTLER COLONIALISM, 1932–1945
7. Japanese Pioneers in America and the Making of Expansionist
Orthodoxy in Imperial Japan
8. The Call of Blood: Japanese American Citizens and the Education
of the Empire’s Future “Frontier Fighters”

Epilogue: The Afterlife of Japanese Settler Colonialism

Glossary of Japanese Names: Remigrants from the Continental
United States and Hawai‘i
Notes
Index
  Show More