@article{ambaras_2021, title={In Search of Our Frontier: Japanese America and Settler Colonialism in the Construction of Japan's Borderless Empire}, volume={47}, ISSN={["1549-4721"]}, DOI={10.1353/jjs.2021.0033}, abstractNote={Reviewed by: In Search of Our Frontier: Japanese America and Settler Colonialism in the Construction of Japan's Borderless Empire by Eiichiro Azuma David R. Ambaras (bio) In Search of Our Frontier: Japanese America and Settler Colonialism in the Construction of Japan's Borderless Empire. By Eiichiro Azuma. University of California Press, Oakland, 2019. xii, 353 pages. $75.00, cloth; $75.00, E-book. Studies of the Japanese empire have experienced an "unbordering" in recent years. Influenced by global history and the "new mobilities paradigm," scholars of Japan and its imperial world have increasingly focused on the movement and connections of people, things, and ideas across established boundaries and the reconfigurations of historical and scholarly spaces that these movements permitted.1 Of particular significance has been the effort to bridge what Martin Dusinberre and Mariko Iijima have called "one of the most problematic epistemological divides in Japanese historiography, namely between scholars who work on Japanese colonialism and those who study Japan's transpacific diaspora."2 Eiichiro Azuma has led this effort. In his 2005 book Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America, he argued that "[t]he American West constituted a borderland where America's westward expansion met Japanese imperialism around the question of immigration from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries." In that study, Azuma highlighted the construction of a "collective self as an American minority that was, at the same time, part of the Japanese nation-state" by Issei immigrants "who selectively took in and fused elements of nationalist arguments, modernist assumptions, and racist thinking from both imperial Japan and white America." These historical actors, he argued, endeavored to "transform themselves into quasi whites … [and] present themselves as quintessential Americans."3 [End Page 224] Now, in In Search of Our Frontier, Azuma looks at those Issei whose realization of the impossibility of inclusion in white America (including Hawai'i) led them to champion the "overseas development" of the "Japanese race" both in the expanding formal empire in Northeast Asia, Taiwan, and Micronesia, and in Latin America. In Azuma's strikingly original argument, the key to understanding Japanese settler colonialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries lies in the "transnational collaboration between advocates of agricultural colonization who shared life experiences as selfstyled frontiersmen and victims of racial discrimination in the US" (p. 149). At the heart of his study, which is organized chronologically and geographically, are thus the biographies of transpacific remigrants who brought not only their bodies but also "colonialist ideas, agricultural expertise, science and technology, labor management methods, and investment monies" as they worked to build "new Japans" across and beyond the Asia-Pacific (p. 12). Yet Azuma also highlights the role of political and financial elites in enabling their projects and narrates a shift from multiple privately driven colonial ventures to an all-encompassing state-led project of "borderless settler colonialism" (pp. 7–8 and passim). In the 1880s, champions of Japanese transpacific emigration, both those who moved and metropolitan boosters such as Fukuzawa Yukichi, envisioned a system in which educated, elite colonists (mainly former samurai) would oversee the growth of settlements built on the labor of their lower-class compatriots. They founded associations dedicated to promoting this project along the U.S. West Coast and in the independent kingdom of Hawai'i, and emigration companies (imin gaisha) emerged to provide the labor power. These companies in turn served as financial and political bases for their directors, who forged close ties to prominent politicians and capitalists in Japan. Despite activists' belief that the Japanese, in contrast to the Chinese, could participate equally with whites in the grand project of taming the frontier, by the early 1890s Japanese settlers and migrants experienced exclusionary racism similar to what the Chinese had encountered a decade earlier. In response, they embraced a discourse of the frontier that accepted the Social Darwinian concept of "racial struggle" but excised its Eurocentric, Orientalist premises and began to explore alternative sites of settlement beyond the U.S. border where Japanese could position themselves as the master race. In Hawai'i, meanwhile, the 1893 coup and 1898 U.S. annexation frustrated Japanese settler advocates' dreams of turning the...}, number={1}, journal={JOURNAL OF JAPANESE STUDIES}, author={Ambaras, David R.}, year={2021}, pages={224–228} }
 @article{ambaras_2019, title={The Affect of Difference: Representations of Race in East Asian Empire}, volume={31}, ISSN={["1469-932X"]}, DOI={10.1080/09555803.2018.1538159}, number={1}, journal={JAPAN FORUM}, author={Ambaras, David R.}, year={2019}, pages={132–134} }
 @book{ambaras_mcdonald_2019, title={What We're Doing: Overview Essay for Bodies and Structures}, url={https://zenodo.org/record/7097940}, DOI={10.5281/ZENODO.7097940}, institution={Zenodo}, author={Ambaras, David R and McDonald, Kate}, year={2019}, month={Jan} }
 @misc{ambaras_2018, title={Japan's Imperial Underworlds}, ISBN={9781108556149 9781108470117 9781108455220}, url={http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/9781108556149}, DOI={10.1017/9781108556149}, abstractNote={This major new study uses vivid accounts of encounters between Chinese and Japanese people living at the margins of empire to elucidate Sino-Japanese relations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Each chapter explores mobility in East Asia through the histories of often ignored categories of people, including trafficked children, peddlers, 'abducted' women and a female pirate. These stories reveal the shared experiences of the border populations of Japan and China and show how they fundamentally shaped the territorial boundaries that defined Japan's imperial world and continue to inform present-day views of China. From Meiji-era treaty ports to the Taiwan Strait, South China, and French Indochina, the movements of people in marginal locations not only destabilized the state's policing of geographical borders and social boundaries, but also stimulated fantasies of furthering imperial power.}, publisher={Cambridge University Press}, author={Ambaras, David R.}, year={2018}, month={Jul} }
 @book{japan's imperial underworlds: intimate encounters at the borders of empire_2018, url={http://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/history/east-asian-history/japans-imperial-underworlds-intimate-encounters-borders-empire?format=HB#mqE3ckz4xLcBIUva.97}, journal={Cambridge University Press}, year={2018}, month={Aug} }
 @misc{ambaras_2016, title={Daily Life in Wartime Japan, 1940-1945}, volume={80}, number={4}, journal={Journal of Military History}, author={Ambaras, D. R.}, year={2016}, pages={1263–1264} }
 @article{ambaras_2014, title={Tokyo vernacular: Common spaces, local histories, found objects}, volume={119}, DOI={10.1093/ahr/119.5.1676a}, abstractNote={In Tokyo Vernacular: Common Spaces, Local Histories, Found Objects, Jordan Sand considers how, in the late twentieth century, neighborhood activists, architects, artists, and others promoted urban preservation projects and claimed rights to common spaces, thus fostering new modes of political engagement in Japan's postindustrial society. The micropublics they created, however, existed in ambivalent relation to both the capitalist forces that captured ever growing shares of urban life and the metropolitan authorities who sought to remake Tokyo in conjunction with the demands of the market. Noting Tokyo's lack of monumental structures and history of repeated destruction through natural and man-made disasters, Sand reflects on the meanings of urban preservation in a city with ostensibly little to preserve (p. 1). He presents these movements as reactions to the failure of a set of ideas of postwar nationhood in which the monumental public plaza (hiroba) served as the locus of unified action by sovereign citizens. This form of mobilization reached its apex in the 1960 demonstrations against renewal of the United States-Japan Security Treaty; but by the end of the decade, state agencies actively denied citizens the right to the plaza, seeking instead to ensure that urban space was amenable to capitalist development. The forcible expulsion in 1969 of anti-Vietnam War demonstrators from Shinjuku Station's West Exit Underground Plaza (which was renamed a pedestrian concourse) constitutes the symbolic starting point for Sand's study. Not only rapid economic growth but also Japan's increasing participation in the global tourism industry stimulated transformations in the urban landscape and the property regime shaping it. The “dematerialization of wealth” (p. 12) that followed the 1971 “Nixon shock” and accelerated in the 1980s gave even greater impetus to the waves of destruction and speculative construction that turned Tokyo into the global city of the present, a city with little in the way of a “secure foundation in any notion of tradition” (p. 5).}, number={5}, journal={American Historical Review}, author={Ambaras, David}, year={2014}, pages={1676–1677} }
 @article{ambaras_2013, title={Dans le piège du fourmilion: Japonaises et Fujianais aux marges de l’Empire et de la nation}, volume={120}, DOI={https://doi.org/10.3917/ving.120.0125}, abstractNote={Au début du 20 e siècle, les journaux japonais rapportèrent l’« enlèvement » de Japonaises parties à Fuqing, au Fujian, en compagnie de colporteurs chinois qu’elles avaient rencontrés au Japon. Les autorités japonaises, soucieuses de sauvegarder le prestige national, s’efforcèrent de les rapatrier et d’empêcher l’émigration d’autres femmes à Fuqing, mais il leur fallut affronter la coopération douteuse des forces chinoises à une époque d’hostilité croissante envers le Japon. De plus, l’idée même qu’avaient ces femmes de leur propre intérêt allait souvent à l’encontre de la rhétorique et de la politique officielles. Cet article explore ces relations interethniques intimes et leurs rapports à l’impérialisme japonais avant 1937.}, number={4}, journal={Vingtième siècle: Revue d’histoire}, author={Ambaras, David}, year={2013}, pages={125–137} }
 @article{ambaras_2011, title={Tokyo in Transit: Japanese Culture on the Rails and Road}, volume={116}, ISSN={["0002-8762"]}, DOI={10.1086/ahr.116.5.1462}, abstractNote={Alisa Freedman's book explores the impact of urban mass transportation on social relations and cultural production in Japan in the early twentieth century, and the lasting effects of these developments. Following analysts of European modernity including Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Walter Benjamin, and Michel de Certeau, Freedman suggests that “The daily commute became implicated in and characteristic of people's changing sensory perceptions of crowds and the cityscape and of their psychological adjustments to new systems of signs and practices.” She also considers how Tokyo's new transport systems appeared as “the sites of urban pathologies and seductions and, therefore … metonymies for the rapidly modernizing city itself” (p. 16). Freedman works with literary and journalistic sources, emphasizing the mutual imbrication of these modes of narration: as evinced by her selection of materials, middle-class men's perceptions tended to dominate the new transportational and textual cityscape. Freedman focuses first on the emergence of middle-class salarymen and female students as urban commuters in the years following the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905). Through a close reading of Tayama Katai's 1907 short story “The Girl Fetish” (Shōjobyō) and complementary texts, Freedman highlights the redefinition of class and gender roles and the sexualization of public transit spaces in early twentieth-century Tokyo, the emergence of a new, unfulfilled everyman as literary protagonist, and the ways in which death on the rails—by accident or suicide—came to be perceived as a jarringly frequent yet literarily useful byproduct of urban modernity. Freedman then analyzes Natsume Sōseki's 1908 novel Sanshirō, about the world of an elite male university student, to show how the Meiji era's foremost author used different kinds of trains as vehicles for his critique of Japan's state-led modernization and imperialist growth. To Sōseki, who drew on his own experiences in Europe, mechanisms of rapid transit engendered a condition of febrile anxiety and paradoxically hindered individuals' freedom to plot their own trajectories (and destinies) while dramatically expanding their physical mobility.}, number={5}, journal={AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW}, author={Ambaras, David R.}, year={2011}, month={Dec}, pages={1462–1463} }
 @misc{ambaras_2010, title={Ruffians, Yakuza, nationalists: the violent politics of modern Japan, 1860–1960}, volume={11}, ISSN={1744-0572 1744-0580}, url={http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17440570903475816}, DOI={10.1080/17440570903475816}, abstractNote={a year. At the time the manuscript was being researched and written, contemporary pirates were a minor issue. Moreover, Leeson is clear that his focus is on seventeenth and eighteenth century pirates. Given the differences between past and current pirates, a complete analysis would be beyond the scope of a single volume. The good news is that there is plenty of material for Leeson to write a second book focusing on contemporary pirates. One can only hope that he chooses to do so.}, number={1}, journal={Global Crime}, publisher={Informa UK Limited}, author={Ambaras, David R.}, year={2010}, month={Feb}, pages={71–73} }
 @book{topographies of distress: tokyo, c. 1930_2010, year={2010} }
 @misc{ambaras_2010, title={Uchida Hyakken: A Critique of Modernity and Militarism in Prewar Japan. By Rachel DiNitto. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2008. x, 285 pp. $39.95 (cloth).}, volume={69}, ISSN={0021-9118 1752-0401}, url={http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0021911810001749}, DOI={10.1017/S0021911810001749}, number={3}, journal={The Journal of Asian Studies}, publisher={Cambridge University Press (CUP)}, author={Ambaras, David R.}, year={2010}, month={Aug}, pages={902–904} }
 @misc{ambaras_2010, title={Uchida hyakken: A critique of modernity and militarism in prewar Japan.}, volume={69}, number={3}, journal={Journal of Asian Studies}, author={Ambaras, D. R.}, year={2010}, pages={902–904} }
 @article{ambaras_2008, title={Under an Imperial Sun: Japanese colonial literature of Taiwan and the south}, volume={67}, ISSN={["0021-9118"]}, DOI={10.1017/s0021911808000442}, abstractNote={of the regime, its sumptuary laws, and status privilege. In their needless exaggeration, Hur’s assertions do injustice to both his splendid material and the important story he crafts about mortuary rites that—beyond contests over lucre and control—did come to serve spiritual purposes. “[N]ot strictly Buddhist in either content or structure” (p. 195), those rites increasingly focused on ancestral veneration and a religion of family. The accommodation of clerical, lay, and state interests in an effectively new culture of commemoration (exalting household continuity) is the occluded core of the book. And mutually negotiated advantage helps explain, more powerfully than an anti-Christian regime bent on national engineering, the confounding survival of the “danka system” throughout the Tokugawa period.}, number={1}, journal={JOURNAL OF ASIAN STUDIES}, author={Ambaras, David R.}, year={2008}, month={Feb}, pages={323–325} }
 @book{ambaras_2006, title={Bad Youth: Juvenile Delinquency and the Politics of Everyday Life in Modern Japan}, ISBN={0520245792}, DOI={10.1525/california/9780520245792.001.0001}, abstractNote={List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Unruly Youth and the Early Modern Polity 2. Assimilating the Lower Classes 3. Civilizing "Degenerate Students" 4. Popularizing Protection 5. Preparing Modern Workers, Policing Modern Play 6. Juvenile Delinquency and the National Defense State Epilogue: The Century of Juvenile Protection Notes Selected Bibliography Index}, publisher={University of California Press}, author={Ambaras, David}, year={2006} }
 @article{ambaras_2006, title={Burning and building: Schooling and state formation in Japan, 1750-1890.}, volume={61}, ISSN={["0027-0741"]}, DOI={10.1353/mni.2006.0002}, abstractNote={One disappointment was the paucity of maps and other illustrations. If “customs,” including personal appearance, played as important a role as Howell says in marking status differences, it would have been nice to see more pictures of clothing, hairstyles, and so on. But this is a minor quibble and one that does not detract from my larger point: Geographies of Identity is an important book, and one that no serious scholar of Japan can afford to miss. Go out and buy (or borrow) a copy today; you won’t regret it.}, number={1}, journal={MONUMENTA NIPPONICA}, author={Ambaras, DR}, year={2006}, pages={115–117} }
 @misc{ambaras_2006, title={House and home in modern Japan: Architecture, domestic space, and bourgeois culture, 1880-1920}, volume={66}, number={1}, journal={Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies}, author={Ambaras, D. R.}, year={2006}, pages={255–259} }
 @misc{ambaras_2004, title={Juvenile delinquency and the national defense state: Policing young workers in wartime Japan, 1937-1945}, volume={63}, ISSN={["0021-9118"]}, DOI={10.1017/S0021911804000051}, abstractNote={From July 1937 to August 1945, as Japan fought a war to establish first a “New Order in East Asia” and then a “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” the Japanese state conscripted an increasing number of adult workers into the military and mobilized hundreds of thousands of elementaryand middle-school graduates to replace them as “industrial workers” (sangyō senshi) in the nation’s munitions factories. By early 1943, authorities estimated that “from 50 to 80 percent of workers in important industries are youths (seishōnen), and in particular virtually all of those working in aircraft manufacture are aged fifteen to twenty” (Moriyama 1943a, 6). As their prominence increased, so did elite anxieties. Police agents repeatedly swept through the streets of Tokyo, Osaka, and other cities, rounding up thousands of young workers allegedly engaged in criminal or immoral behavior, while experts in fields such as juvenile corrections, social work, labor management, and education produced a constant stream of articles, reports, and conferences about the dangers that a mass of inadequately socialized industrial warriors posed to themselves and the nation. As the cabinet’s January 1943 “Outline of Emergency Measures for the Protective Guidance of Working Youths” (Kinrō seishōnen hodō kinkyū taisaku yōkō) revealed, this social group occupied a central position, along with spies and thought criminals, in the regime’s schema of internal threats.}, number={1}, journal={JOURNAL OF ASIAN STUDIES}, publisher={Cambridge University Press (CUP)}, author={Ambaras, DR}, year={2004}, month={Feb}, pages={31–60} }
 @article{ambaras_2004, title={The  new Japanese woman: Modernity, media, and women in interwar Japan}, volume={59}, number={1}, journal={Monumenta Nipponica}, author={Ambaras, D. R.}, year={2004}, pages={129–131} }
 @misc{ambaras_2003, title={The human tradition in modern Japan}, volume={29}, number={1}, journal={Journal of Japanese Studies}, author={Ambaras, D. R.}, year={2003}, pages={103–106} }
 @misc{ambaras_2002, title={Becoming apart: National power and local politics in Toyama, 1868-1945}, volume={27}, number={3}, journal={Social History}, author={Ambaras, D. R.}, year={2002}, pages={404} }
 @article{ambaras_2001, title={The pursuit of power in modern Japan, 1825-1995.}, volume={32}, DOI={10.1162/002219502753364704}, abstractNote={as well) was still not armly rooted in Chinese soil. Prewar scholars make essentially the same claim, that China really was not a nation but still in the declining years of an empire. Did nationalism not make sense to many Chinese because China was simply too big and diverse—in the way that a united Europeanism is a mere abstraction to many Europeans today? Mitter does not go down this avenue. He focuses squarely on Manchuria—an area, incidentally, that is larger than virtually any Western European country. Although in that context, he makes a compelling case, the book is not as successful as it might have been. For one thing, it examines only two or three years of history. Had Mitter chosen to enlarge the chronological scope by going back a few years, he might have engaged an immense secondary literature in Japanese. Nonetheless, this is an important addition to English-language scholarship.}, number={3}, journal={Journal of Interdisciplinary History}, author={Ambaras, David}, year={2001}, pages={513} }
 @article{ambaras_2000, title={Passages to modernity: Motherhood, childhood, and social reform in early twentieth-century Japan}, volume={55}, ISSN={["0027-0741"]}, DOI={10.2307/2668435}, abstractNote={Contemporary Japanese women are often presented as devoted full-time wives and mothers. Yet child-tending by non-maternal caregivers was widely accepted at all levels of Japanese society at the beginning of the 20th century. This study traces the rise of day-care centres and related areas.}, number={2}, journal={MONUMENTA NIPPONICA}, author={Ambaras, DR}, year={2000}, pages={293–296} }
 @misc{ambaras_2000, title={Passages to modernity: Motherhood, childhood, and social reform in early twentieth-century Japan}, volume={55}, number={2}, journal={Monumenta Nipponica}, author={Ambaras, D. R.}, year={2000}, pages={293–296} }
 @misc{ambaras_1999, title={Mirror of modernity: Invented traditions of modern Japan, ed. by Stephen Vlastos}, number={1999}, author={Ambaras, D. R.}, year={1999} }
 @misc{ambaras_1998, title={Social knowledge, cultural capital, and the new middle class in Japan, 1895-1912}, volume={24}, ISSN={["0095-6848"]}, DOI={10.2307/132937}, number={1}, journal={JOURNAL OF JAPANESE STUDIES}, publisher={JSTOR}, author={Ambaras, DR}, year={1998}, pages={1–33} }