In Search of Our Frontier

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.
 

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