The introduction clarifies the book’s theoretical and political stakes. It argues that historical narratives, including those about Japan, crafted by scholars of bourgeois and Marxist persuasions alike, that pursue narrative closure through their belief in the possibility of archival mastery reinforce rather than free us from murderous structures, processes, and grammars. This is not least because closure is closely tied to (social) scientific assumptions about historical transformation that fail to reckon with the implications of narrating change over time in ways that, as Michel-Rolph Trouillot explained, are circumscribed by the positivism-constructivism dichotomy. It introduces the theoretical touchstones that reveal why analyses of how anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity are inscribed and reproduced in the grammar of Japanese modernity failed to register in the minds of most Japanese intellectuals and activists as indispensable to their own struggles, and how we might make them foundational in the present.