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Eastward Ho! Japanese Settler Colonialism in Hokkaido and the Making of Japanese Migration to the American West, 1869–1888

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 June 2019

Sidney Xu Lu
Sidney Xu Lu*
Affiliation:
Sidney Xu Lu (sidneyxulu@gmail.com) is Assistant Professor of History at Michigan State University.
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Abstract

This article examines how Japanese colonial migration to Hokkaido in the first two decades of the Meiji era paved the way for Japanese trans-Pacific migration to the United States in the 1880s. It elaborates how Japanese leaders carefully emulated the Anglo-American settler colonialism in Japan's own expansion in Hokkaido by focusing on the emergence of the overpopulation discourse and its political impact in early Meiji. This colonial imitation also inspired the Japanese expansionists to consider the American West an ideal destination for Japanese emigration in the late nineteenth century. This study thus challenges the nation-centered and territory-bound history of the Japanese empire by showing that Japan's colonial expansion in Northeast Asia and Japanese trans-Pacific migration to North America were intertwined since the very beginning of the Meiji era.

Keywords

AinuAmerican WestHokkaidoJapanese empireMalthusianismmigrationoverpopulationsettler colonialismshizoku
Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 78 , Issue 3 , August 2019 , pp. 521 - 547
Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 2019 

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