From Island Nation to Oceanic Empire: A Vision of Japanese Expansion from the Periphery

This article examines the diasporic thought of Sugiura Shigetake (1855–1924), an early and largely overlooked proponent of Japanese empire. Written during the Tokugawa-Meiji transition, Sugiura’s work illustrates a crucial link between domestic reform and maritime expansion while demonstrating a debt to the new ideologies of Japanism, Pan-Asianism, and liberalism. His perspective as a native of Ōmi Province, moreover, reveals a distinctive strain of colonial thought that envisioned people on the periphery of a newly unified Japan, from Ōmi merchants to social outcastes, as central agents of expansion.