In Search of Our Frontier: Japanese America and Settler Colonialism in the Construction of Japan's Borderless Empire by Eiichiro Azuma (review)

Eiichiro Azuma's In Search of Our Frontier successfully makes the case for the role that late nineteenth-century Japanese migrants to the United States who remigrated to Japan played in shaping the prewar Japanese colonial empire, arguing that this role was informed by and inseparable from the white racism they experienced in California and Hawaii. Azuma brings critical attention to "transmigrants whose lives and experiences [have] been chopped up and presented simply as Japanese American (or sometimes only as imperial Japanese) in existing scholarship and public memory" (p. x), a group of historical actors who inhabit the interstices of two realms and risk being overlooked as a result. In their lifetimes these individuals moved between the Japanese and American imperial worlds, while today their stories are in danger of being lost in between the academic silos of Japanese and American history. Azuma skillfully recovers and marshals those stories to shift how we understand the prewar Japanese colonial empire in profound ways.

There are three key elements to Azuma's argument. First, the Japanese colonial empire was shaped through "settler colonialism," which over time took the form of eijū dochaku ("permanent residence to take root in the land") that emphasized settlers' assimilative ability and commitment to "their adopted land and its sustained development" (pp. 105–106). Second, this practice of settler colonialism was a "nativized idea" made possible by ishokumin—a compound notion that collapsed the distinction between "acts of 'migrating' overseas (imin) for temporary work and of 'colonizing' overseas territories (shokumin) as settlers" (p. 5). Japan's was thus a particular kind of borderless settler colonialism "that fused and confused the act of moving among imperial Japan's territories with immigrating to extraterritorial foreign lands" (p. 4). This meant that the Japanese migrants Azuma focuses on did not differentiate between lands that were under Japanese sovereign control and those that were not; both were viewed as equally viable for establishing "new Japans." Third, although originating in ideas from and initially put into practice by nonstate actors, settler colonialism was propelled by a combination of state and private interests into becoming the dominant mode of Japanese overseas expansion, one in which transmigrant experiences and knowledge retained their importance even after the state assumed a dominant role.

Part 1 (chapters 1 and 2) establishes the trajectory of Japanese migration to the United States. Azuma starts his narrative in the 1880s because this was the moment when Japan encountered "the Western Hemisphere and the Pacific Islands," which he posits were the "initial colonial 'promised lands'" (p. 30). Azuma identifies Fukuzawa Yukichi as an early advocate of migration to America but also shows that he was only one of many Japanese intellectuals across the political spectrum who participated in creating this discourse of expansion through migration. Importantly, early migrants to the United States contributed their real-life experiences and accounts to these intellectual debates, resulting in the formulation of "a reality-based theory of overseas expansion for the benefit of armchair homeland expansionists" (p. 40).

The effectiveness of this combination of migration theory and practice was boosted by Japanese political parties and politicians, on the one hand, and Japanese capital, on the other. Chapter 2 examines how political backing and economic capital contributed to a "transpacific expansionist network" of actors with similarly aligned interests. The Colonization Society of Japan (Nihon Shokumin Kyōkai) "provided hundreds of Japan's political elite, intellectuals, and business leaders with a unified public forum to discuss what the future might hold for the expansive race and empire in the greater Pacific basin" (pp. 55–56), while the emigration companies (imin gaisha), benefiting from favorable legislation, functioned as a "well-greased machine of systematic human trafficking" (p. 81) to move migrants overseas. Beginning in the 1890s, however, Japanese migration to the United States was checked by white...