In Search of Our Frontier explores the complex transnational history of Japanese immigrant settler colonialism, which linked Japanese America with Japan’s colonial empire through the exchange of migrant bodies, expansionist ideas, colonial expertise, and capital in the Asia-Pacific basin before World War II. The trajectories of Japanese transpacific migrants exemplified a prevalent national structure of thought and practice that not only functioned to shore up the backbone of Japan’s empire building but also promoted the borderless quest for Japanese overseas development. Eiichiro Azuma offers new interpretive perspectives that will allow readers to understand Japanese settler colonialism’s capacity to operate outside the aegis of the home empire.

About the Author

Eiichiro Azuma is Alan Charles Kors Term Chair Associate Professor of History and Asian American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also the author of Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America and a coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of Asian American History.

List of Illustrations
Preface and Acknowledgments

Introduction: Transpacific Japanese Migration, White American Racism,
and Japan’s Adaptive Settler Colonialism

PART ONE. IMAGINING A JAPANESE PACIFIC, 1884–1907
1. Immigrant Frontiersmen in America and the Origins of Japanese
Settler Colonialism
2. Vanguard of an Expansive Japan: Knowledge Producers, Frontier
Trotters, and Settlement Builders from across the Pacific

PART TWO. CHAMPIONING OVERSEAS JAPANESE DEVELOPMENT,1908–1928
3. Transpacific Migrants and the Blurring Boundaries of State and
Private Settler Colonialism
4. US Immigration Exclusion, Japanese America, and Transmigrants
on Japan’s Brazilian Frontiers

PART THREE. SPEARHEADING JAPAN'S IMPERIAL SETTLER COLONIALISM, 1924–1945
5. Japanese California and Its Colonial Diaspora: Translocal Manchuria
Connections
6. Japanese Hawai‘i and Its Tropical Nexus: Translocal Remigration to
Colonial Taiwan and the Nan’yō

PART FOUR. HISTORY AND FUTURITY IN JAPAN'S IMPERIAL SETTLER COLONIALISM, 1932–1945
7. Japanese Pioneers in America and the Making of Expansionist
Orthodoxy in Imperial Japan
8. The Call of Blood: Japanese American Citizens and the Education
of the Empire’s Future “Frontier Fighters”

Epilogue: The Afterlife of Japanese Settler Colonialism

Glossary of Japanese Names: Remigrants from the Continental
United States and Hawai‘i
Notes
Index

Reviews

"One of the most ambitious and expansive studies yet undertaken in the field of Japanese migration history. . . . Azuma deftly unravels the complex and tangled history of Japanese overseas migration."
— Ethnic and Racial Studies

"A landmark study that should definitively reshape research and teaching agendas for some time to come."
— Journal of Japanese Studies

"This is a ground-breaking thesis, to date the boldest expression in English of ideas that have been percolating for more than a decade in research projects in Japan and elsewhere. Masterfully researched and boldly conceived, In Search of our Frontier should begin to redefine the terms of Japanese imperialism for years to come."
— H-Soz-Kult

"An important and provocative contribution to the fields of Japanese and Japanese American history, as well as the global history of modern imperialism. Azuma has offered a new way to think about Japan’s empire, showing us how many of the institutions and societies of the formal empire had deep ties to the informal empire of Japanese America."
— H-Net

"Azuma provides a valuable glimpse into a certain daring and confidence that accompanied Japan’s emergence as a modern nation-state."
— Monumenta Nipponica

"Azuma has written a compelling new master narrative for Japan’s rise as a Pacific power . . . bringing East Asian Area Studies into direct engagement with the Ethnic History of Japanese America, makes In Search of Frontiers an instant classic."
— Journal of American- East Asian Relations

"In Search of Our Frontier is a truly ambitious and groundbreaking work in Japanese American studies."
— Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies

"In Search of Our Frontier offers a pathbreaking study of the history of an economically savvy, politically well-connected, and vocal segment of Japanese men on the move. Current and future scholars in the fields of Japanese American history, Japanese history, and global Japanese studies will benefit immensely from it."

— Japan Review

"This book underscores the fallacy of 'Asian American' as a historical category in demonstrating the distinctive characteristics of Japanese migration and settlement to the United States as citizens of the only Asian imperial power. It is ambitiously conceived, meticulously researched, and soundly organized, and it will significantly impact the fields of history of empire, migration and critical race studies, Asian American history, Japanese history, and intellectual history."—Madeline Hsu, author of The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority

"Taking readers from California to Taiwan, Manchuria, and beyond, this erudite and profound study of settlers, settlement projects, and frontier visions re-charts the landscape of Japanese expansionism. In Search of Our Frontier is a landmark work that reveals the racial politics of Japanese migration and colonialism for the first time in their full complexity."—Jordan Sand, Professor of Japanese History, Georgetown University

Awards

John K. Fairbank Prize 2020, American Historical Association

About the Book

About the Author

Table of Contents

Reviews

Awards