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Journal of Asian American Studies 4.1 (2001) 92-95



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Book Review

Pacific Pioneers: Japanese Journeys to America and Hawaii, 1850-80


Pacific Pioneers: Japanese Journeys to America and Hawaii, 1850-80. By John E. Van Sant. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000.

John E. Van Sant's Pacific Pioneers is a well researched and finely written study of the first Japanese who lived for more than a year in the United States or the Kingdom of Hawai'i between 1850 and 1880. The book's primary contribution is its compilation of historical information from Japanese and English language sources on these various individuals and groups of Japanese, not all of whom are well known in Japanese American studies. In describing his study as a "transnational and cross-cultural examination" (4) of these first Japanese sojourners, Van Sant cites Gordon Chang's "transnational approach" that Chang states seeks " to break from the imposed definitions of a nationally based historicism ... to understand Asians in America as part of a growing number of [End Page 92] internationalized people in the Pacific Rim whose lives do not fall neatly into a specific national pattern." Accordingly, Van Sant focuses on "the nineteenth-century worldview in Japan and its international relations; the relations among late nineteenth-century Japan, America, and Hawai'i; and the experiences of the handful of Japanese" who resided in the latter two countries during the period concerned. He clearly demonstrates the transnational relations of his book's subjects in Japan, Hawai'i, and the United States and their significant roles in the evolving international relations among those nations in the late nineteenth century. (4)

Van Sant's transnational perspective is consistent with theoretical developments during the past decade in Asian American studies that have been concerned with the significance of cultural, economic, and social linkages between Asians in the United States and their respective homelands in Asia. His book demonstrates the utility of transcending the increasingly porous boundaries between Asian studies and Asian American studies as evident from his discussion of political and economic events and processes in Japan during 1850 to 1880 that provides a necessary context for understanding the movements of Japanese to Hawai'i and America and their return, in some cases, to Japan. However, one would have appreciated more of an elaboration of the concept of transnational than general statements such as: "his [referring to Joseph Heco, one of the Pacific pioneers] ability to adapt to the transnational and cross-cultural challenges of nineteenth-century America was dependent upon personal ambition, determination, and a patron-client relationship with a benefactor...." (48)

Based on a review of a variety of historical sources, Van Sant estimates that only between 600 and 900 Japanese entered the United States between 1850 and 1880, the period immediately preceding the onset of labor migration of several hundred thousands of Japanese to Hawai'i and America. The first Japanese sojourners were roughly equally divided among government officials, businessmen, and students and were overwhelmingly male. Despite their relatively small number, they ventured from and, in some cases, returned to Japan during an especially turbulent period in its modern history. When U.S. Commodore Matthew C. Perry sailed into Uraga Bay near Tokyo with four large warships in 1853, he brought a dramatic end to Japan's more than 200 years of national isolation. Fifteen years later the Tokugawa shogunate was overthrown after more than 260 years of feudal rule, and the Emperor Meiji was restored to political power. Throughout the 1870s and the next few decades, Japan was engaged in a modernization program focused on its industrialization, westernization, and militarization that would lead to large-scale labor migration as economic [End Page 93] conditions declined and peasants rebelled. Several of the subjects in Pacific Pioneers played major roles in these political, economic, and cultural changes sweeping through Japan upon their return home or had departed because of them.

It is clear that the individuals and groups whose experiences in the United States and Hawai'i are described in Pacific Pioneers...

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