The Making of Japanese Settler Colonialism: Malthusianism and Trans-Pacific Migration, 1868–1961 by Sidney Xu Lu (review)

Those from outside Japan who have lived there for even a short while have likely run into someone explaining to them that "Japan is a small country." This might have been followed by further details, such as how large the nation's population is compared with its territory, less than a quarter of which is habitable as opposed to covered by forest or mountains. Sidney Xu Lu's monograph gives us one explanation for the origins of this preoccupation: the debates that emerged in Japan from Meiji onward promoting both fear of and national pride in the idea of untrammeled population growth and offering migration overseas as a solution.

Population at a global scale and the Malthusian fears engendered by its growth are the topics of two recent books, one authored by Alison Bashford and one coauthored by Bashford and Joyce Chaplin, both of which Lu references in his introduction.¹ In their 2017 volume, Bashford and Chaplin show the importance of the New World in the development of Malthus's ideas on colonial settlement as a solution to overpopulation, of which he was never in simple support. And in her 2014 monograph, Bashford recounts how in the 1920s and 1930s (the central pivot of Lu's book), Malthusian nightmares were invoked in international debates over the pressing need for living space for certain growing populations, which, without migration or further land cultivation, threatened to draw nations and empires into wars at "danger spots" around the globe.² Lu's actors likewise viewed migration and settler colonialism—the removal of populations from Japan's dense home islands and their settlement elsewhere, including in Japan's sphere of influence in Asia as well as sovereign territories across the Pacific in the Americas—as two sides of the same coin. For the promoters of such migration, or "Malthusian expansionists" as Lu calls them, the settlement of Japanese on either side of the Pacific was useful for Japan's growth as a rich and powerful nation-empire.

The Making of Japanese Settler Colonialism not only applies recent reassessments of Malthus and his reception to the Japanese case, but also forms part of a growing body of work bridging a divide created by postwar historiographic and academic circumstances. Lu argues that the clinical removal of Japanese settlers in Asia from "the epic of Japanese overseas migration" (p. 269) has its origins in the Cold War, when the arc of Japan's national history was retrofitted to align with that of the West. As someone who has visited the Japan Overseas Migration Museum in Yokohama and searched in vain for any mention of the millions of Japanese migrants who settled outside the Americas or Hawaiian Islands, I appreciated Lu's recounting of how the anthropologist and curator Umesao Tadao, who oversaw JOMM's construction, shaped the narrative on display to fit his beliefs that Japan's history of migration connected it to the West, not Asia.

Lu positions himself against this narrative, arguing that "we cannot fully grasp the history of Japanese expansion in Asia without an understanding of Japanese migration outside the empire and vice versa" (p. 273). His analysis focuses on the continuities and connections found in Japanese migration "both inside and outside the Japanese sphere of influence in Asia" at four "interlocked analytical loci": Malthusian discourse, individuals and institutions connected to migration, migration campaigns on either side of the Pacific, and "the intellectual conflation between migration and expansion in modern Japanese history" (p. 266). These four loci are examined alongside the four "threads" of Japanese "Malthusian expansionism," enumerated in the introduction as "the intellectual, the social, the institutional, and the international" (p. 11). This is an ambitious scope for one book; the study of Japanese migration and expansion through any one of these eight lenses would be enough for a single research project.

The book is structured chronologically around...