Transpacific Connections between Two Empires

In 1907 Charles Tetsuo Takahashi worked up a scheme to smuggle Japanese laborers into the United States through British Columbia. Circumventing borders was nothing new for the founder of the Seattle-based Oriental Trading Company. For nearly a decade, Takahashi and his partner, Ototaka Yamaoka, were at the forefront of supplying migrant workers from Japan to meet the growing demands of the agricultural and lumber industries in the Pacific Northwest. At every turn, their endeavors were forestalled by the exigencies of empire. In 1904, for instance, the Japanese Foreign Ministry stopped issuing passports to keep its citizens from evading military service at the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War. Restrictions on labor migration continued even after the war, as the Meiji government sought to assert itself as a world power and feared that its immigrant subjects would expose the country to national humiliation. Met with these challenges, Takahashi turned to the US Territory of Hawai‘i, where Japanese migrants had worked on sugar plantations for more than two decades. As residents of a US territory, Takahashi reasoned, these workers were free to travel to the continental United States beyond the purview of the Meiji government. But shortly after the Oriental Trading Company established its new labor circuits, President Theodore Roosevelt signed an executive order barring Japanese migration from Hawai‘i. The “Gentlemen’s Agreement” of 1907, as we know, emerged as a compromise to appease white segregationists on the West Coast while seeking to preserve amity with Japan, by then a budding power in the Pacific. This latest setback did not deter Takahashi. His plan to route Japanese workers from Hawai‘i through British Columbia in 1907 signaled his last-ditch effort to circumvent national and imperial boundaries to meet the demands of capital in the Pacific Northwest.

The networks he forged and knowledge he accumulated throughout his career might have set Takahashi apart from other Asian migrants of his time. But as the books reviewed here show, Takahashi was not an exceptional figure. Indeed, he emerged as part of a diaspora of Asian middling elites who traversed far-flung places of the Pacific world in the early decades of the twentieth century. Their lives were shaped by multiple, intersecting histories of colonialism and empire, unfolding within and beyond the boundaries of nation-states. Yet their stories largely have remained foreclosed by liberal narratives of immigration and exclusion that reify the nation as the primary driving force in their lives. Against this dominant nationalist paradigm, these four recent books have taken up the challenge to present a more complex view of these diasporic subjects within a transpacific framework: Shelley Lee’s Claiming the Oriental Gateway, Kornel Chang’s Pacific Connections, Jun Uchida’s Brokers of Empire, and Richard Kim’s Quest for Statehood. Each book situates local histories of Asian migration and community formation within the global context of emerging empires in the early twentieth century: Lee charts the formation of Seattle’s Japanese American community against the backdrop of the city’s rise as a hub of transpacific commerce; Chang traces the labor circuits of merchants, laborers, and activists who traversed the borderlands of the Pacific Northwest; Uchida demonstrates the varied aspirations and activities of Japanese colonial settlers in Korea; and Kim uncovers the efforts among Korean immigrants to build a Korean nationalist movement in the United States. In examining these various subjects, each book sheds light on how everyday actors navigated the routes of empire and illuminates the...