Project Proposal – Japanese Immigrants in America and the Wartime contexts of Japan’s East Asian empire, 1894-1945

Japan’s entry into the modern, globalised era arguably came in the 1850s with Commodore Matthew Perry’s expedition to Japan in 1853 and the forced opening of Japanese ports to Western trade and commerce. The bluntness of Western imperialism, as epitomised by Perry’s expedition, encouraged Meiji Japan’s own imperial expansion in East Asia, driven further by state aims of modernization and the growing need to protect its fragile national security. Migration became a crucial facet in the growth of this Japanese empire in two interconnected ways; firstly, in places that Japan occupied such as Taiwan (1894), Kwantung Province (1905) and Korea (1910), settler colonialism helped to establish a lasting Japanese presence and secondly, Japanese emigration and settlement across the Pacific to sites on America’s Western frontier like Hawaii and California from the mid-1880s was increasingly utilised by Japan as a model to aid in modernization and empire-building back home. This project’s focus lies in the latter – exploring this link between emigration to America and Japan’s imperialism in East Asia, focusing on the context of wartime policy.

The historiography in this field has so far sparsely addressed the transnational linkages between Japanese American immigrants and the empire back home largely due to the gulf between Japanese American history and modern Japanese history. This gulf has largely been sustained by Asian Americanists since the 1960s who have emphasised their racial history against Eurocentric narratives within histories of America’s national formation. This issue points not only to the politics of ethnic studies but also the conventional nationalisationof fundamentally transnational experiences. Yet some pioneering work has been able to escape these limiting trends. Notably, Eiichiro Azuma’s work ‘Between two empires’ has greatly contributed to a nuanced understanding of the Issei (first-generation Japanese to immigrate to America), their simultaneous negotiation of American and Japanese identities and issues of racial subordination. Pedro Iacobelli’s (et al.) volume Transnational Japan as History has also highlighted Japan’s interconnectedness to regions beyond the Asia-Pacific from a variety of different scales.

However, scholars bridging fields of Japanese-American history are yet to assess the role of war in the Issei’s (and their descendant ‘Nisei’) engagement with the Japanese nation-state and empire and reciprocal use of Issei experiences by the Japanese state, which is surprising given the frequent passing comments to Issei patriotism during wartime across existing research. This project seeks to address this gap, whilst re-balancing the focus towards the ideas, motives and actions of the immigrants themselves, not only how the Japanese state managed them.

With this in mind, this project currently forwards a three-pronged hypothesis; firstly, that Japanese immigrants in America from 1894-1945 did provide a fitting example for Japanese imperial strategy in East Asia. Secondly, and more importantly, that Japanese Americans themselves forwarded nationalist and colonial narratives – interacting with their homeland in the context of their marginalisation within American society. Thirdly, that this sentiment grew stronger in the contexts of Japan’s wars in this period.

To construct this argument, Japanese immigrant experiences in America will be contextualised in the cases of the first Sino-Japanese War (1894-95), the First World War (1914-1918) and the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945). These cases are chosen pragmatically for the scale of impact these wars had on Japan, and to a lesser extent, America.

From a methodological standpoint, because the central focus of research is on how far Japanese immigrants across the Pacific were affected by, and subsequently contributed to (directly and indirectly), Japan’s East Asian wars, the analytical perspective will begin and end with them. In doing so it will also have to evaluate the driving motives of immigrant actions – was it marginalisation by American society or an existing deeply-held allegiance to Japan that drove Issei (and Nisei) patriotism? To answer this question requires the roughly fifty-year timeframe adopted by this project. With all this in mind, this research will use a micro-historical approach, particularly when making the empirical and analytical connections to Japanese state policy in wartime. Similarly, it will follow the transnational turn within migration studies to view migrant lives in the context of an ever-evolving reciprocal relationship between homeland and receiving country.

Forming this composite argument, which accounts for the perspectives of actors within America and Japan and covers scales from the ordinary Japanese American immigrant to the Japanese military official, will require primary source material to be diverse. In particular, this project will look at the writings of immigrant intellectuals (termed by Azuma as ‘Issei Pioneers’), the numerous political pamphlets published by the Japanese Association of America and Japanese Chamber of Commerce and translated statements of Japanese officials – amongst other sources from digital archives charting the Japanese American immigrant experience, such as the Densho digital archives.

Reference List

Azuma, Eiichiro, Between two empires race, history, and transnationalism in Japanese America (Oxford, 2005).

Iacobelli, Pedro (eds.), Transnational Japan as History: Empire, Migration, and Social Movements (New York, 2016).

Densho Digital Archives, http://densho.org/archives/ (accessed 07/03/19).