“Pioneers of Overseas Japanese Development”: Japanese American History and the Making of Expansionist Orthodoxy in Imperial Japan

Abstract

Focusing on intersections of Asian area studies and U.S. ethnic studies, this article probes overlapping but hitherto neglected trajectories of Japanese colonialism and transpacific migrant experience and of modern Japanese history and Japanese American history. Constructed during the 1930s, expansionist orthodoxy of imperial Japan justified and idealized the agricultural colonization of Manchuria on the basis of historical precedence found in a contrived chronicle of Japanese “overseas development” in the American frontier. This study documents how Japanese intelligentsia, popular culture, and the state concertedly co-opted U.S. Japanese immigrant history in service of the policies of imperial expansion and national mobilization in Asia before the Pacific War. While involving conflicting agendas and interests between the colonial metropolis in imperial Japan and the expatriate society in the American West, the example of transnational history making elucidates borderless dimensions of prewar Japanese colonialism, which influenced, and was concurrently influenced by, the presence and practices of Japanese emigrants across the Pacific.

Recent scholarship on the Japanese empire has unveiled totalizing aspects of imperial colonialism that not only called into service the nation's human and economic resources but also involved the production of knowledge and culture suitable for the goal of national expansion. As Stefan Tanaka (1993, 68–104) traces, through academic studies of “eastern history” (toyō-shi) in tandem with the Orientalization of the Asian continent (shina), Chinese history and culture were redefined as an inferior other to be conquered or overcome. The mass culture of imperial Japan, including films, magazines, and even stage revues, meanwhile helped consolidate “a doctrine of assimilation (dōka; lit., ‘same-ization’), or Japanization (Nipponka),” thereby cultivating popular enthusiasm for a mission “to civilize … the peoples of Asia” (Robertson 1998, 89–138, esp. 91–92). In this context, the construction of a historical metanarrative for the expansive nation also formed a significant aspect of Japan's empire building. Expansionist orthodoxy, as it took shape during the mid-1930s, traced the origins of modern Japan's “overseas development” (kaigai hatten) to labor migrations to Hawaii and Guam in 1868, and to the establishment of the so-called Wakamatsu tea and silk colony in rural California the following year. Whereas the 1868 endeavors were altogether characterized as a disastrous failure due to the virtual peonage of “ignorant” workers by unscrupulous white merchants, the agricultural colonization of the American frontier was celebrated as a project that “almost offered an example of ideal colonization”—in the words of a foremost expansionist historian of early Showa Japan—and hence an appropriate starting point of modern-day imperial colonialism, which was purportedly in full bloom in Manchuria when the master narrative was crafted (Iriye [1936] 1942, 1:9–29).

The maiden Okei, a seventeen-year-old member of the 1869 California expedition from Aizu Wakamatsu, Fukushima Prefecture, figured particularly large in the teleological story of Japan's imperial beginning abroad. The young woman was said to have joined the group as a nanny for the children of its leader, but she quickly became something of a “heroine” who dwarfed other early emigrants in importance to imperial Japan. Okei's rise in a domestic expansionist narrative provides a glimpse into a fundamentally transnational process of prewar knowledge production and history making that brought together the Japanese expatriate community in the United States and the home empire in Japan. During the 1930s, the two sides inadvertently collaborated in the remembering of Okei and similar figures, as well as the forgetting of others, in history. In California, for example, when the members of the Japanese American Citizens League honored the tribulations and triumphs of their parents' generation at its 1934 convention, the American-born Japanese leaders singled out “Miss Okei” as “an inspiration that has guided others [Japanese immigrants] to pioneer along the same lines” in the western frontier (Shin Sekai, September 12, 1934). Almost concurrently in Tokyo, using similar language, a popular writer glamorized the young emigrant woman for having purportedly spearheaded the “cultural” and “expansionistic” developments of Meiji Japan in the New World (Kimura 1935). As a trailblazer in the formation of two communities—ethnic and national—Okei emerged at the crossroads of their respective histories, rendering Japanese American history into imperial Japan's orthodoxy of “overseas development” during the era of aggressive colonial expansion in Manchuria and into other parts of Asia.

The duality of Okei's identities elucidates not only the fluid positionality of Japanese emigrants between the two national spaces but also the contested relationship between the histories of the Japanese in America and their compatriots in imperial Japan. The contemporaneous development of Okei legends on both sides of the Pacific during the 1930s represented only one of the many instances in which the overseas ethnic community and the domestic national community became entangled in their respective quests for racial survival in white America and for imperial expansion in Japanese Asia. For the residents in the United States (Issei) and their American-born children (Nisei), the narrative of the young woman pioneer played a significant role in the construction of a group history and its collective identity, through which they attempted to consolidate their resources for ethnic empowerment in a racist society that discriminated against these “Orientals.” On the other hand, for the Japanese state and public of the militarist era, Okei provided a romanticized symbol of the nation's colonial genesis and destiny that amplified the usefulness of the Japanese migrant experience in America to its nascent expansionist metanarrative and official policy of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. By placing the circulation of historical discourses and representations in a transnational context, this study proposes a new way to understand the complexities of prewar Japanese colonialism, which often confounded emigration with colonial expansion in the building of a “total empire.”

In American academia, emigration traditionally falls into the domain of Japanese American studies, and colonial expansion constitutes a central research agenda for modern Japan specialists. Despite the numerous intersections, historians of modern Japan and Japanese America seldom acknowledged the pertinence of these intersections until the last decade. The most important reason for this disciplinary and epistemological compartmentalization is the artificial insulation between U.S. ethnic studies and Asian area studies—one that mirrors contemporary politics within American scholarly discourse more than actual historical circumstances. Nonetheless, though the two fields have generally operated in accordance with separate problematics, their recent trajectories demonstrate a noteworthy contrast. Whereas ethnic studies scholars, especially historians, have tended to remain more cautious about, if not oblivious to, the overlapping research agendas of the two fields, a number of scholars in area studies have risen to the challenge of crossing disciplinary boundaries to produce solid monographs of a transnational and interdisciplinary nature.¹

Indeed, the divorce of Japanese American history from modern Japanese history was initiated by, and has been sustained chiefly through the efforts of, Asian Americanists, who since the late 1960s have demanded the incorporation of their racial history in hitherto Eurocentric narratives of U.S. national formation and the immigrant saga.² In line with the liberal agenda of antiracism and inclusion, their basic goal was to stretch the bounds of a racially circumscribed national experience within the U.S. history field, but not beyond it. While participating in domestic racial politics, Asian Americanists have also challenged the prevailing Orientalism that earmarks their long-standing discursive exclusion from U.S. domestic life, a theoretical approach that has concurrently reinforced their insistence on their distinct identity from Asian foreigners across the Pacific, as well as from Asia itself.³ Common interpretive modes in studies of Japanese American internment have further shored up such a mononational frame of thought, keeping scholarly inquiries from aspects of the ethnic experience that might contradict a narrowly legalistic concern and domestic(ated) research agenda, that is, the violation of the Nisei's citizenship rights by the U.S. government, and their undivided loyalty despite such egregious acts of official betrayal (Azuma 2005b).

The recent popularity of diasporic perspectives has not translated into substantive research on transnational dimensions of Japanese American history, either. Revolving chiefly around theoretical questions, or at best, specific cases of South Asian diaspora or transpacific Chinese migration, existing academic discussions of Asian diaspora rarely include an analysis of Japanese American experiences, and not in the least of crossroads between colonialism and migration. And beneath these tendencies to nationalize the ethnic Japanese history lies the general neglect of vernacular immigrant sources, which, if examined, would show numerous instances of transnational ties and negotiations between the Japanese in America and their home empire, including the exchange of expansionistic ideas and symbols, such as Okei (Azuma 2005a). Combined with the political priorities embedded in ethnic studies, this methodological problem has contributed to a slanted orientation of Japanese American studies—one that defines Japanese Americans' history almost exclusively as a U.S. national experience.

Although our historical understanding still tends to be structured according to a rigidly nationalized system of knowledge and a spatially organized way of learning, many scholars of modern Japan—and Asian studies in general—have made notable strides beyond such confines. Traditional focuses on major state institutions, well-known national figures, and hegemonic state ideologies have given way to broader themes of society and culture, as well as more nuanced treatments of ordinary women and men, who often posed alternative visions to the bounded meanings of state and nation. Understandably, most specialists rest their eyes on the discursive spaces and social practices that evolved within the physical boundaries of the Japanese state or the formal territories of the empire, but transnational studies of Japanese imperialism or even studies of “borderless colonialism” have also emerged in recent years. While Mariko Asano Tamanoi's edited volume (2005) brings Chinese, Manchu, Korean, and Polish views and experiences into the complex histories of Manchuria, Louise Young sheds light on “a long-standing association of emigration with Japanese expansion” (1998a, 311) to various parts of the world, which culminated in the erection of Japan's total empire in northern China. Prasenjit Duara (2003, 179–208) delineates the broader regional context in which a “frontier” was formed in a contested borderland of Manchuria in the interwar era. Not only Japanese intellectuals and colonialists but also Chinese nationalists have taken part in this transborder endeavor, producing varied representations and visions of a national collectivity and sovereign control in accordance with their respective efforts of state building there.

Shifting attention from the Asian continent to the Pacific as a site of similar entanglements and contestations, John J. Stephan (1984, 1997) has examined the precarious relations between Japanese in Hawaii and in their homeland empire, as well as the involvement of some Nisei in Japan's war planning. Takashi Fujitani (2001a, 2001b, 2002, 2006) has authored pathbreaking essays on other aspects of historical convergence between ethnic and national histories, and his forthcoming book will probe the similarities of white American racism and imperial Japanese racism during the Pacific War, especially relative to the use of assimilated Nisei and colonized Koreans as conscripted soldiers in the respective empires.

As exemplified by these developments, Japanese area studies is better prepared to bridge the disciplinary and epistemological divides between Asia and America, which have obfuscated the overlapping trajectories of Japan's colonial expansion and the transpacific migrant experience in particular, and of Japanese history and Issei history in general. While avoiding flattening critical differences between the lives of a racial minority in white America and the colonial master in imperial Japan, this essay first unveils intersections between emigration and colonialism in the modern Japanese experience, and briefly explains the construction of an expansionistic racial history among the Issei after the era of anti-Japanese exclusion in the United States. The bulk of the essay discusses how imperial expansionism manipulated the story of Okei and the Japanese migrant struggle on the American frontier, absorbed the Issei's historical constructions into an official domestic narrative, and finally enshrined all American residents in imperial Japan's pantheon of national heroes on the eve of the Pacific War.

Intersections of Emigration and Colonialism

The root of this conflation of the trajectories of prewar Japanese America and imperial Japan lay first and foremost in the muddling of emigration (imin) and colonialism (shokumin) in a public “discourse on overseas development” (kaigai hattenron). Popularized after the late 1880s, the idea of overseas development was predicated on the supposition that ordinary people would take the lead in Japan's external expansion through emigration. A prevailing interest in maritime trade, the Malthusian urge to disperse the “surplus” rural population, and the general mimicking of Western imperialist practices in Meiji Japan were woven into kaigai hattenron, but at its core, the discourse entailed nationalistic populism that attempted to involve the hitherto forsaken masses in the crucial national project of empire building (Duus 1995, 295–301; Peattie 1988, 1–33; Young 1998a, 310–17).⁴

Using the idea of Japan as an “expansive nation” (bōchō minzoku), ideologues of overseas development envisioned the mobilization of imperial subjects through a common expansionist past and future. Lamenting that they had suppressed the calling of their “expansive blood” under the seclusion policy of the Tokugawa regime, these ideologues typically dwelled on a scheme of dialectical racial struggle, in which the conflicts between the “Aryan race” and the “Mongolian race” had determined the course of world history in the entire span of human history. In the language of social Darwinism, some early expansionists compared the ongoing conquest of the uncivilized by the West to the Mongol domination of Eurasia during the thirteenth century, predicting that the coming era would see another rise of the Mongolian race in the world under Japanese initiative. While advocating popular emigration for overseas colonization in the neighboring regions, this line of thought also formed a powerful support for the 1894 war against China, as Japan, the awakened “leader of the Asiatic,” was destined to set a new tone for world history by overcoming the remnants of the old, represented by the Chinese (Genkakusei 1896; Nagasawa 1894, 11–16, 38–39).⁵ Hence, from the outset, the politics of emigration-led colonialism was deeply intertwined with the formal military ventures of Japanese imperialism.

Consisting of young intellectuals, a political society called the Seikyōsha played a key role in advancing emigration-led colonialism at its formative stage between 1888 and 1894. After the sweeping Westernization of the previous decade, the 1880s ushered in nativist backlashes, giving birth to a number of so-called Japanist groups. In the middle of these political shifts, a fierce debate over diplomacy broke out, inducing the nationalists to launch an attack on the conciliatory attitude of the central government toward the West. Originally imposed on Japan during the Tokugawa regime, the unequal treaties, which the Meiji government subsequently inherited, accorded extraterritoriality to foreign residents and placed Japanese tariffs under international control. Until 1911, the revision of these treaties remained a top priority for Japanese diplomacy. In 1886, Tokyo first entered into negotiations with the West for the abolition of extraterritoriality with a proposal that Japan accept a mixed court including foreign judges for criminal trials of Europeans and Americans. Once news of this compromise leaked out to the public, the government found itself in a storm of criticism. Among the most vocal critics were members of the Seikyōsha, who went on to form a fluid group of bellicose “hard-liners” (taigaikō) in alliance with other antigovernment proponents and anti-West chauvinists (Nakasone 1993, 101–45; Pyle 1969, 99–117; Satō 1998, 11–38).

The hard-liners had a different answer to the problem of unequal treaties. Instead of conciliation, they asserted, Japan must expand externally by acquiring formal and informal territories, so that the West would take the nation seriously as a legitimate player in international power politics. For the first time, these nationalists presented a vision of “overseas development” as an alternative course for diplomacy and national empowerment. Instead of simply creating the infrastructure of imperial rule within Japan proper, they argued that the country should embark on a project of real empire building through mass emigration, international trade, and, if necessary, proactive military deployment. Because the emigration of rural people to Hawaii and the American West had just begun in the mid-1880s, nationalists willingly mistook the popular practice of temporary work abroad (dekasegi) for the first instance of Japanese colonialist expansion in the modern era. Founded by the hard-liners in 1893, the Colonization Society (Shokumin kyōkai) reified such conceptual confusions because its members equated state-supported colonialist ventures in Asia and the Pacific with mass labor migration to the Americas (Shokumin Kyōkai hōkoku1893, 102–18). While calling for an imperialist war, such pundits expressed a desire to see more and more subjects of their “expansive nation” migrating abroad for the “conquest of frontiers” and the building of “new Japans” beyond Japanese shores (Azuma 2000, 39–40).

Depending on the directions and methods, there were three types of early expansionist schemes, which conflated, rather than distinguished, the concepts of imin and shokumin. The first—that is, continental expansionism—mirrored a mounting interest in Korea and Manchuria as a theater of Japanese economic and military activities. In light of the Russian threat, security concerns had smoldered among leading circles of Japan since Saigō Takamori's 1873 plan to invade Korea, but advocates of continental expansion became a formidable political force only in the context of deteriorating relations with China and Russia between 1890 and 1904. Core members of the Seikyōsha were instrumental in organizing the Oriental Society (Tōhō kyōkai) in 1891, which provided an important forum for the discussion of Japan's colonial destinies in northeastern Asia on the eve of the first Sino-Japanese War. Second, advocates of southward expansion combined a romantic notion of adventure with a naked imperialistic urge to expand into the southwestern Pacific (Nan'yō) for trade and settlements. A harbinger of Japanese naval operations during the First World War, this current of thought tended to look to Micronesia and its vicinity as a chief destination for entrepreneurs and labor emigrants (Nakasone 1993, 207–11; Peattie 1988, 1–30; Pyle 1969, 156–60).

Meanwhile, supporters of a transpacific movement envisaged what historian Akira Iriye calls “peaceful expansionism” through the transplantation of ordinary Japanese to the Western Hemisphere. Without resorting to military force, they theorized, the superior qualities of the expansive nation would allow Japanese emigrants to compete successfully with other races in economic endeavors, especially agriculture, on the frontiers of the New World. With the largest Japanese population abroad, albeit mostly of a working-class background, on par with Korea and Manchuria, North America and Hawaii (and later Brazil) were seen as preferable sites for overseas Japanese expansion by the turn of the twentieth century, insofar as they served Japan's interests as overseas “centers of economic and social activities closely linked to the mother country” (Iriye 1971, 131). Blurring demarcations between labor migration and colonization therefore induced many Japanese to gloss over crucial differences between the lives of colonizers under the protection of Japan's military might and those of indigent migrants in another sovereign country through the encompassing language of “overseas development.”

Educated Japanese—both domestic and abroad—consequently had the tendency to view all foreign settlements of their countrymen and women as aspects of national expansion. Japanese emigrant leaders in the United States were no exception, and they, too, were strongly influenced by transpacific expansionism (Azuma 2000, 40–47). Dissociating themselves from the rest of the population who came as temporary dekasegi workers, many Issei intellectuals and elite businessmen identified themselves as colonial settlers, and strove to present their experiences of “triumphs and tribulations” in the American context according to the doctrine of peaceful expansionism. However, not until the 1930s did they finally have an organized historical discourse that fused their American experiences into a synthesized record of overseas national development, for neither Japanese America nor imperial Japan was compelled to produce a systematic narrative before that decade.

Issei History Making

Expansionist history making was a reciprocal process, and dramatic (or traumatic) changes in Japanese immigrant society in the United States helped spur that process first among the leading Issei. In the early 1920s, when discriminatory American laws took their agricultural and immigration rights away on the basis of their status as “aliens ineligible to citizenship,” Japanese immigrants were collectively faced with a prodigious crisis that appeared to threaten the survival of their economy and community. Institutionalized American racism against the Issei generation, many felt, expedited the coming of a second-generation era, wherein the Nisei's “superior” racial traits, coupled with their birthright of U.S. citizenship, would soon enable them to defeat white racism and further enlarge America's “new Japan.” In this context, some immigrant intellectuals took on a teleological project of summing up the passing first-generation era for future resurrection, chronicling their records of collective struggle and racial persecution as a contrived story of overseas Japanese development—the nation's progress on American soil that was temporarily arrested by white racism. Significantly, in that narrative, Issei writers not only juxtaposed their trajectory with the disparate footsteps of other Japanese emigrants and colonialists elsewhere, but also they asserted their doubly pioneering roles in the expansion of Japan's national influence in the United States, as well as in an American epic of frontier conquest (Azuma 2003, 1401–13).

Incorporating elements of Japan's peaceful expansionism and the U.S. frontier discourse, Japanese immigrant history was thus fundamentally transnational, directed to the audiences of both countries. Avoiding choosing one over the other, Issei writers attempted to carve out a legitimate place in the histories of their native and adopted countries, and the emergent narrative of progress usually combined two-pronged arguments, which may well have appeared contradictory to the nationalized eyes of each domestic public. On the one hand, a typical example read,

On the other,

Predicated upon the theme of double national contributions, the history of the Issei “pioneers” unfolded with an emphasis on their remarkable ascent in American agriculture and their fight against Western racism, using terms similar to Japan's contestation with the Euro-American powers in international politics. Immigrant intellectuals adopted this rhetorical strategy to argue for socioeconomic parity with white Americans and cultural compatibilities between the two races because of their recent exclusion. Thus, in order for the Japanese in America to (re)elevate their status in American society, a redefinition of racial meaning was necessary, and their homeland offered perfect material support for it. In seeking acceptance into white America on an equal basis, Issei writers deliberately likened their preexclusion achievements as American frontiersmen to the current rise of the Japanese empire as a world power. Not only had the Issei tamed much of the forsaken western land, the immigrant historians reasoned, they had “always kept their farms green and supplied produce of higher quality” owing to their “superiority in [farming] skills” and outstanding racial fortes—the ones that also made it possible for Japan to compete so effectively with the West (Zaibei Nihonjinkai 1940, 157). Such historical inventions were also predicated on the view that their community was a partner with Japan in a struggle against white racism, local and global, and this contention was canonized in Zaibei Nihonjinshi (History of the Japanese in America), namely, that the Issei had preceded all other groups of Japanese, including those in the homeland, in confronting the challenges posed by Anglo-Saxons (Azuma 2003, 1412–13; Zaibei Nihonjinkai 1940, 1–4).

Integral to these formulations was the simplification of the Japanese immigrant identity, whereby the contrasting images of settler-colonizers and dekasegi migrant laborers were reconciled in favor of the former. The majority of the Japanese in America initially had come to work on Hawaiian sugar plantations and western farmlands between 1885 and 1924, whereas smaller numbers of educated individuals and student immigrants had indeed arrived in search of a “new Japan” on American soil. That the numerical minority could dominate the process of identity formation in particular, and of history making in general, had to do with the access they enjoyed to community leadership, financial resources, and the ethnic print media. With the backing of propertied farming and business classes, Issei writers projected an undifferentiated image of nationalist colonists upon their group identity. While these self-proclaimed immigrant “frontiersmen” demanded inclusion into America through calculated historical constructions that countered the exclusionist accusation that they were an unassimilable laboring horde, the writers and their supporters also hoped to attire themselves in more honorable clothing with the goal of debunking the prevalent Japanese stereotype that American residents were an “abandoned people” (kimin), that is, a “worthless” lot of “uncultured” dekasegi field hands (Azuma 2003, 1408–09, 1412–17).

Compiled in 1940 by a committee of immigrant writers and community leaders in San Francisco, Zaibei Nihonjinshi characterized the Issei as “imperial subjects … with the determination to enrich the country and strengthen the military.” Indignant with Russia and other European powers for their domineering attitudes that had led to the Triple Intervention following the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95, this canonical Issei history argued that thousands of “young Japanese [had] pushed their way to the gold-filled United States, where they could tap into the wealth of no parallel in the world” for the benefit of the resource-deprived homeland (Zaibei Nihonjinkai 1940, 77). According to the immigrant orthodoxy, then, no dekasegi laborers had come to the United States. The Japanese in America were all patriotic trailblazers in pursuit not of trivial personal gains but of national interests, and “only with such a sense of mission could we build today's Japanese community and attained the present level of development” (Zaibei Nihonjinkai 1940, 77). This invented identity of Issei settler-colonialists proved to serve a pivotal agenda for imperial Japan during the 1930s, as it inflated the value of permanent colonial settlement over a more common historical practice of temporary work abroad. Brushing aside earlier connotations of shiftlessness and selfishness, immigrant history redefined the word imin to bring it in line with the notion of takushi, or colonial fighter—the official designation Tokyo gave to agricultural emigrants to Manchuria in that decade.⁶

Buoyed by the discourse on overseas development, history making allowed Japanese residents in the United States to claim legitimacy in terms of Japan's imperialistic imagination, even though their purpose was to win respect from their homeland, not necessarily to collaborate in state-sponsored expansionist aggression in Asia. Because peaceful expansionism had permeated both Japanese America and imperial Japan, the particular historical visions Issei writers presented did not ring hollow in the ears of the Japanese public. Not until the mid-1930s, however, did Japan proactively seek to co-opt Issei experiences and confer on the emigrants a recognizable place in the annals of national expansion. Prior to this time, Japan had no consistent position on overseas development, and as noted earlier, various factions of elites had advanced quite different types of expansionism. Yet the military seizure of Manchuria in 1931 prompted Tokyo to consolidate its resources to develop the so-called Mongol-Manchurian lifeline for the Japanese empire. Adopted in 1936, the twenty-year plan to send one million Japanese households (five million people) to the region marked the first systematic involvement by the state in emigration and colonization (Young 1998a, 307). With Manchurian development a national policy of the highest importance, the prior experiences of Japanese abroad suddenly became a matter of concern for officials and opinion makers in Japan. In order to convince the conservative agricultural population to give up the comfort of their native villages for new opportunities on the Manchurian frontier, imperial Japan needed a synthesis of national emigration history that would demonstrate that building a new Japan was not only a historical mandate for the nation but also as honorable an act for an imperial subject as dying for the emperor in war. It was in this context that Issei history finally attracted close attention from Japanese intellectuals and the print media.

Orthodoxy Making in Imperial Japan

In his Hōjin Kaigai Hattenshi (History of Overseas Japanese Development, originally published in 1936), Iriye Toraji first systematically appropriated the Issei's transnational narrative for the goal of imperial expansion by purging a key theme of the American pioneer story. A Foreign Ministry employee, Iriye was an ardent advocate of peaceful expansionism, having hoped to compile a comprehensive record of Japanese emigration and overseas colonization since the Meiji Restoration. Drawing on diplomatic papers, emigration company documents, and a wide range of secondary sources, his 1,100-page volume presented the subject as a serious academic study. While it might have turned away the ordinary reading public, Iriye's scholastic narrative had a tremendous impact on the shaping of historical knowledge of emigration in Japan. Reprinted in 1938 and again in 1942, the book became canonized as an official publication of the Society for the Study of the Emigration Problem, an affiliate to the Foreign Ministry, which looked to “disseminate information on the conditions of overseas Japanese development” in conjunction with the official Manchurian enterprise (IMK 1938, 1–2). As such, Iriye's History not only set the manner in which the historical epic of national expansion was subsequently interpreted and narrated, but also it defined the meaning of the Issei past for an educated audience of the empire.

Divided into two parts, the volume grouped divergent flows of emigration into a single trajectory of overseas Japanese development; it detailed the varied but unified experiences of residents in Hawaii, the United States, Micronesia and other Pacific islands, Southeast Asia, Mexico, Canada, Peru, Australia, the Philippines, Brazil, and Manchuria in chronological order between 1868 and 1936. Iriye explained how Japan had reached the point at which the Japanese government, after many years of neglect and failure, had finally come to its senses to embrace Manchurian colonization as a national project. Filled with stories of “tribulation,” including the Issei's struggles in the United States, Iriye's narrative suggested by contrast a better future for emigrants to Manchuria in the post-1936 era. His optimism, accentuated by gloomy anecdotes of the past, hinged on one crucial difference between the trailblazers of overseas development and the current “colonial fighters.” Unlike the Issei, the residents in Manchuria could expect full support from Japan's Colonial Ministry and live comfortably under the protection of its mighty imperial forces. Learning from their mistakes, Iriye surmised, the Japanese of the 1930s were fully cognizant of their expansionist heritage, as well as their colonial destiny, which now looked brighter than ever (Iriye 1942).

Overall, Iriye faithfully adopted key aspects of the Issei's historical constructions, that is, their purported patriotism and status as pioneers of modern Japanese expansionism. Nevertheless, the position that the Japanese in America held in his book was very specific: victims of Anglo-Saxon racism and an inept government at home. Fifteen of its fifty-five chapters detailed the doings of Japanese residents in Hawaii and the continental United States, and their fight against white oppression was a particular focus of the volume, which suggested to readers that the lives of Japanese in America revolved mostly around interracial struggle (Iriye 1942, 1:75–82, 304–17, 450–57, 496–511; 2:162–78, 257–74, 313–32, 512–16, 522). Combined with similar stories of racial injustice and exclusionary politics in Australia and Canada, Iriye expressly elucidated the heroism of the emigrants, who stood up single-handedly to Anglo-Saxon racism despite no support from the homeland. While reiterating the Issei's arguments in most parts, the author also inserted a new interpretation that American racism derived from whites' “fear of Japanese superiority.” By resorting to discriminatory legislation, Iriye wrote, white Americans ironically “have confessed their defeat” as a race. Although the Issei's development in America fell victim to institutionalized practices of exclusion, they still proved themselves to be “victors of racial competition, because, after all, white Americans could not compete with them fair and square” (Iriye 1942, 2:326–27).

The moral of Issei history—as rendered by Iriye—was clear. Now, with the awakening of the home government and the full support of imperial armed forces, emigrant-colonizers bound for Manchuria would be able to exploit their racial superiority to the fullest. Iriye saw in the Issei's past a historical crystal ball that revealed Japan's bright colonial future. But at the same time, the incorporation of the Japanese in America into the chronicle of national expansion relegated them to a ruptured past, against which the redeemed present was appreciated as something qualitatively different. Indeed, this is why Iriye's metanarrative concluded the discussion of the Issei's experience with the subhead “Gravestone of the Victors”—as if they had altogether disappeared from history by the mid-1920s after the unfortunate conclusion of interracial struggle (Iriye 1942, 2:326–27). In the end, the record of the Japanese in America rhetorically justified why Tokyo must proactively intervene and take the lead in the project of overseas development, while concomitantly underscoring the immutability of Japanese superiority that the passage of time or difference in historical circumstances could not efface. This pattern of incorporation characterized the Issei's standing in other expansionist narratives that came out in imperial Japan in the ensuing years (Kikuchi 1940; Makishima 1937; Shibata 1941).

Okei: At the Crossroads of Agricultural Emigration and Manchurian Colonization

In tandem with Iriye's orthodoxy making, Okei was put on a historical pedestal during the mid-1930s. Just as Issei history became significant as a monument to illuminate the triumph of Japanese blood in the interracial struggle, her legend lived on as a threshold of national expansion through a modest tombstone in a desolate field in Gold Hill, California. A seventeen-year-old nanny, Okei was among a small group of Japanese emigrants, led by a German merchant named John Henry Schnell, who crossed the Pacific in 1869 to grow tea and silkworms in a “new Japan” on the American frontier. This endeavor nevertheless failed within a year due to financial problems, which led to a quick dispersal of its members. While the Schnells and some emigrants returned to Japan, others stayed near the remnants of the California colony. Okei lived with a sympathetic white family, but she fatally contracted malaria and died at the age of nineteen. A few decades later, another colony member built a modest grave in her memory. No Issei cared for it until the end of the 1920s, when her tombstone became suddenly memorialized in the Japanese immigrant community (Kawamura 1930, 11–20, 161–82; Zaibei Nihonjinkai 1940, 19–29).

No sooner had Issei ethnic history laid claim to Okei as its starting point than did their native land declare its proprietary rights to the female legend. The synchronous process of history making exemplified how the ethnic and national histories informed each other. In the United States, immigrant writers used Okei to transcend the recorded presence of Japanese prostitutes that they saw as a dishonorable past. By defining her as “the first Issei woman” who purportedly died a virgin, the immigrant master narrative did not connect Okei with the “women of disgraceful profession” who had congregated at Chinatowns, mining towns, and railroad construction sites in the American West during the 1880s and the 1890s. Instead, Okei—pure and dedicated—was rendered the authentic precursor of contemporary Issei women, many of whom came as “picture brides” to build immigrant households in California's new Japan between 1908 and 1920 (Azuma 2003, 1418). This cleansing of historical female identity went hand in hand with the invention of Issei patriotism, which obfuscated the migratory labor heritage of most Japanese immigrant men. Combined, Issei history making discursively transformed the Japanese in America into worthy members of the expansive nation of Japan, as well as moral American frontiersmen and women.

Whereas Japanese in America authenticated their dual national heritage through the deification of Okei, imperial Japanese found her story desirable for different reasons. Since the 1920s, bits and pieces of her story had been introduced to Japan, but it was the novelist and literary scholar Kimura Takeshi who played a central role in hijacking the Okei legend and putting it to use on behalf of the program of Japanese colonial expansionism. In January 1932, the writer first published a report of his visit to Gold Hill in a popular Tokyo magazine. While interviewing area residents about the female pioneer, Kimura was said to have stated that “the bravery of the beautiful Japanese Girl, Okei, first woman of her race to venture to California in 1870 [sic]” inspired him so much that he was determined to seek more information on her for a new book project (Kimura 1932, 33; Sacramento Bee1931). Three years later, the author published a novel, in which Okei was metamorphosed into a “forerunner” not simply of Japanese emigration to the United States but of “Japanese imperialism” (Kimura 1935, 1).

Entitled Meiji Kensetsu (Building Meiji [Japan]), the 1935 publication offered a mixture of historical fabrication and ideological indoctrination under the façade of romance and adventure. Set in Tokyo, Aizu, and Yokohama during the civil war of 1868–69, the story revolved around three protagonists: Fukuzawa Yukichi, Shijimi Heikurō, and Okei. In the first scene, Fukuzawa, Japan's foremost Westernizer, appeared as the founder of Keiō academy, where he was educating future leaders of Meiji Japan, including Shijimi, a fictive figure. While Fukuzawa epitomized the symbol of Japan's shift from feudalism to modernity, his nineteen-year-old disciple was depicted as a genius in English studies and a devoted nationalist—a quintessential leader of the first generation of modern Japan. In May 1868, the imperial forces clashed with pro-Tokugawa fighters inside Tokyo, which resulted in a significant victory for the new government. In the midst of warfare and turmoil, Fukuzawa continued to teach a normal course, admonishing his agitated students to concentrate on “learning for a new Japan” (Kimura 1935, 72). Yet Shijimi sneaked out to volunteer for the imperial forces because he believed destroying Tokugawa feudalism was necessary in order to “unify the nation as one” and “build a new Japan based on it” (Kimura 1935, 61–62).

The second scene moved to Aizu, where the imperial forces had their final confrontation with the retreating feudal factions in the summer of 1868. Shijimi was injured in this battle, but a local merchant took him in, leaving him in the care of a maid named Okei. Temporarily blinded by shell fragments, Shijimi was not able to see Okei, though he developed strong affections for her. Okei turned out to be an assassin from the pro-Tokugawa Aizu domain, but she, too, yielded to her feelings toward the young enemy (Kimura 1935, 158). Their romance was nonetheless short-lived, for Okei disappeared when Shijimi had his eyesight restored. After unsuccessfully searching for Okei in the town of Aizu Wakamatsu, Shijimi found himself in the port of Yokohama, where the dejected man subsequently eked out a living as a translator for foreign merchants. One evening, Shijimi saved a young woman from local gangsters; this woman was a live-in nanny at the Schnells. At first, Shijimi could not recognize her, but he soon realized it was Okei when he was invited to visit the Schnell residence. The young woman confided to him that she was about to leave for California with the other emigrants. On the following day, despite their wishes to stay together, the two reluctantly parted: Okei to America, and Shimeji to Tokyo. While Okei tragically died a few years later across the Pacific, Shijimi resumed his studies and in 1873 devoted himself to organizing the Meirokusha, Japan's first society of Westernized scholars, including Fukuzawa, which disseminated Enlightenment ideas in the nascent modern nation-state. As the editor of Meiroku Zasshi, the society's organ, Shijimi spearheaded the creation of a forum for free and civilized public discussions—an institution that had not existed in the feudal era. The novel concluded with Fukuzawa commenting that whereas the sword that Shijimi carried into the Aizu battle had left no mark on history, his pen was affecting the world more greatly than was the Meiji government (Kimura 1935, 346–47).

Key ideological messages, as far as “imperialism” was concerned, can be found in a conversation between Shijimi and Okei in Yokohama. First, Kimura tacitly affirmed Japan's current policy in Manchuria through the words of the female Japanese trailblazer in America. In the novel, Shijimi marveled when Okei told him that she was on her way to the United States to “establish a Japanese village” on its frontier. “This young woman is heading for America!” he muttered, for “even I, a student of western studies, have never dared to think of such a thing” (Kimura 1935, 213). He, however, cautioned Okei about the seemingly unrealistic nature of her undertaking, pointing out that no remnants of Japanese settlements were now detectable in Southeast Asia, where many emigrants were said to have moved before the seclusion policy of the Tokugawa regime. Okei's reply flabbergasted Shijimi: “That's because our ancestors did not take hoes with them.” Some, according to her, “took swords and conquered foreign places,” and others “took abacuses in pursuit of profits only” (Kimura 1935, 220–23). Okei continued,

In light of Japan's Manchurian policy that was under way at the time Kimura authored this treatise, Okei's idea of family-based agricultural colonization was full of ramifications. From the example of Okei, readers were led to believe that the expansion of modern Japan had since the very beginning taken the current form sanctioned by the militarist government. Fukuzawa's dismissal of the “sword” as an agent of change also bears a close parallel to Okei's preferences for a “hoe” over a sword as a means for overseas development. Through this agrarianist focus, Kimura's narrative implicitly likened peaceful expansionism in America, exemplified by the first Wakamatsu colony, to the state-sponsored colonialist enterprise in Manchuria of the 1930s. The theme of the Issei's agricultural success, which occupied a central place in their ethnic history, corroborated neatly with this process, shaping and reinforcing a popular belief in the inseparable ties between land and race, between farming and national expansion.⁷ Previously, as historian Louis Young argues, “almost no one considered Japanese agricultural migration an indispensable pillar of empire” (1998a, 310).⁸ Yet the appropriation and distortion of the Japanese immigrant legend enabled Kimura and other ideologues to invent an agrarian tradition in Japanese imperialism and to assert the authenticity of the family farm settlement over other ways of colonization on the grounds of the Issei experience in America.

By linking the American agricultural development of yesteryear to the Manchurian colonial enterprise of today, Okei's inclination toward domesticity played an especially important role. Before Tokyo adopted the 1936 guidelines for Manchurian colonization, Japan mainly shipped men of reserve military status as armed emigrant-settlers due to the general disorder of newly occupied territories. Still, in order to encourage family-based colonization, government and military authorities tackled the question of coupling these men with so-called continental brides (tairiku no hanayome). After the departure of the first thirty such women for Manchuria in 1934, a steady stream of emigrant wives ensued to “raise families” and “produce descendants” in Japanese agricultural settlements there. Imperial colonialism of the 1930s valorized the role of women precisely for the reasons Kimura outlined in terms of Okei's gendered utterances. In tandem with his novel, indeed, various outlets of the mass media—news reports, fictions, movies, and popular songs—glorified “continental brides” in a similar manner during the latter half of the decade (Aiba et al. 1996; Jin'no 1992). Together, they shaped a public opinion that normalized female emigration despite the contrary historical realities of masculinized working-class Japanese diasporas in the past.

While effacing the gender bias in emigration history, Building Meiji underscored the patriotic nature of Okei's emigration-led colonization, and hence of all Issei trailblazers and Manchurian emigrants as her followers. In the novel, Kimura emphasized Shijimi's dedication to Meiji Japan time and time again, and the young nationalist's approval of Okei testified to how much her dream of building a new Japan in America was to be revered as an act of patriotism as well. And that neither protagonist attempted to abort the colonialist endeavor for their romantic interests and personal happiness made clear what should be a priority to citizen-subjects of the expanding empire.⁹ Along the same line, the title of the novel inflated the meanings of emigration to America in the past and of that to Manchuria in the present. Whereas Shijimi helped to establish the modern press and a space for public discourse in the new civil society of Meiji, Okei laid the foundation for overseas Japanese development. They were both “builders” of modern Japan, but in the context of ongoing Manchurian colonization, Okei's deed was more relevant—and hence more important—to the contemporary agenda of the empire than Shijimi's contribution to the early stage of domestic modernization.

These messages underwent another ideological transformation with the production of a popular movie based on Kimura's novel in July 1940. A major presentation of the Tōhō Cinema featuring top celebrities of the time, The Flower in the Storm (Arashi ni saku hana) made notable changes to the identities of Okei and Shijimi. In the film, the former was of a prominent Aizu agriculturalist-samurai family, not of more humble origin, as commonly assumed. In the place of her aging father and soldier brother, Okei guided agitated peasant-servants for the defense of her family farms—and agriculture that she called “the foundation of nation”—from the devastation of the war. After her family members were killed and her servants dispersed, Okei and Shijimi encountered one another and parted in the same way that Kimura's novel described, but one notable difference in the film was that the dejected man subsequently participated in a gang of smugglers in Yokohama. Instead of a mere nanny, the movie made Okei a central figure in the Wakamatsu colony expedition, who was instrumental in reassembling her former servants and steering those hesitant peasant-emigrants toward the cause of overseas agricultural colonization. Right before her departure for America, Okei and Shijimi met again, and the former persuaded the latter out of the criminal organization, urging him to “dedicate [himself] to the country.” As Okei and her fellow agricultural colonizers sailed off at the crack of dawn in search of a new Japan across the Pacific, so Shijimi embarked on a new life as a determined nationalist for modern Japan, a country that had just awakened to the limitless possibilities of progress and expansion. Amid images of beaming morning light and overflowing hopes, the film ended with no suggestion of Okei's early death or of her colony's swift demise. Rather, only a bright future appeared to await both protagonists, whose lives appeared to be—albeit “separated tragically by fate”—still connected by and entangled in a larger destiny of the expansive nation.

Considering that most ordinary Japanese were unfamiliar with Issei history other than having a vague notion of their agricultural successes, the 1940 film resulted in more profound inventions than simple manipulations of the characters. First, The Flower in the Storm dehistoricized the experience of the Japanese in America by melting it right into the ongoing enterprise of Manchurian colonization. Although they both defined Okei as the origin of Japanese America, neither Iriye's academic narrative nor Kimura's fictive account denied a temporal distance between the Wakamatsu colonization and the mainstay of Japanese experience in the United States, because readers would know that Okei had died and her colony had gone under decades before the emigration of the current Issei residents. The film did away with that distance by not showing the aftermath of Okei's departure. Without the insertion of her death and her colony's failure, the film immortalized Okei and the Wakamatsu colony, and through the absence of vital historical information it hinted at a direct causal linkage between her and Japanese development in the United States and other new Japans, including “Manchukuo.” In The Flower in the Storm, the past was not simply a historical crystal ball for a different present; in it, what was unfolding in Manchuria directly mirrored what had happened in America.

Similarly, the film's representations of Okei flattened the class diversity of overseas Japanese in service of the state's colonialist project. Between Japan's colonial territories and foreign emigrant settlements, the populations actually ranged widely from family farmers to itinerant field hands, from affluent traders to indentured prostitutes, and from colonial masters to racial minorities. Eliding these distinctions between the settler-colonizer and the labor-migrant, The Flower in the Storm purged heterodox historical facts and presences in conformity with the essentialized imagery of overseas residents. Consequently, Japanese agriculturalists on the American frontier, whom Okei epitomized in the film, resembled colonial fighters and continental brides on Japan's Manchurian lifeline. The nationwide showing of the Okei film therefore marked an important moment, in which significant aspects of Issei history making overlapped orthodox renditions of national expansion, approved under a policy of state thought control. Although The Flower in the Storm did not offer as systematic a narrative as Iriye's academic history did, Okei's dramatized story probably did more to organize popular knowledge around her dual identity as the thresholds of Japanese America and of Manchurian colonization—knowledge that helped the masses to grasp the current imperative of Japanese imperialism relative to the Issei past, and vice versa.¹⁰

1940 Tokyo Conference of Overseas Japanese

In the history of Japanese imperial expansion, 1940 was a crucial year in another way. Extolling the exploits of all Issei, as Okei in the film, the 1940 Tokyo Conference of Overseas Japanese (Kaigai Dōhō Tokyo Taikai) was a total ideological project that fused Iriye's scholarly construction and Kimura's popular inculcation into an unprecedented national pageantry. Jointly sponsored by the Japanese Ministries of Foreign and Colonial Affairs, this conference placed the subject of overseas development at the center of a historic yearlong commemoration that celebrated the nation's beginning in 640 BCE and the 2,600th anniversary of the mythical first emperor Jinmu's accession to the throne.¹¹ Preceding the grand finale that featured Emperor Hirohito, the Conference of Overseas Japanese took place between November 4 and November 8, and attempted to assemble all segments of Japanese society—elites and commoners, domestic and overseas—in the glamorization of Japan's expansionist past, present, and future.

Apparently inspired by Hitler's rallying of worldwide Volksdeutschen, the Japanese government rested the basis of this national mobilization on the ties of blood among overseas ethnic comrades (kaigai dōhō) that cut across differences in class, gender, ideological, geographic, and even citizenship backgrounds.¹² Earlier that year, the Konoe Fumimaro administration had announced a set of guidelines to consolidate resources—human and material—for ongoing war efforts in China. The core doctrine of this totalitarian reform was predicated on hakkō ichiu (unifying every corner of the world under one roof), Jinmu's purported motto in founding the nation, which now connoted the creation of a supraregional “New Order” in Asia and the Pacific under Japanese leadership. This agenda became the ideological underpinning of imperial colonialism of the early 1940s, which found Iriye Toraji's synthesis, and the Issei's past in particular, useful in building a larger empire based on a network of overseas settlements. The Tokyo conference was therefore an official attempt to enlist the history of emigration, as well as emigrants themselves, in service of Japanese imperialism. An internal government document, which detailed the unpublicized but central goals of the 1940 event, prioritized “uniting and solidifying the bonds between the homeland and the organizations of overseas Japanese” for the general purposes of hakkō ichiu (“Jōshinsho” 1940, 498–500, esp. 499).¹³ The mass rally resulted in the formation of the Central Association for Overseas Japanese (Kaigai Dōhō Chūōkai) in Tokyo as the nucleus of the “expanding Yamato race” worldwide.

The coming together of overseas ethnic comrades gave the Japanese public an opportunity to learn of the “heroic” struggles of the emigrants firsthand, as well as to understand from their deeds the national mission to extend Japanese influence to “every corner of the world.” The government invited nearly 1,500 delegates from Japanese settlements in China and “Manchukuo,” Southeast Asia and Micronesia (Nan'yō), Latin America, and North America. Among all the regional groups, the North American contingent was the most prominent, represented by 794 delegates, followed by those from Nan'yō (314), East Asia (198), and Latin America (193). To “requite our compatriots throughout the world for their long-standing contributions to overseas development,” Prime Minister Konoe, Foreign Minister Matsuoka Yōsuke, Army Minister Tōjō Hideki, Prince Higashikuni, and other leaders were present at the opening session (HKD 1940, 2; KDC 1941, 4–8, 80–96) (see figures 1 and 2). In their speeches, which the censored press reported in detail, these distinguished guests honored the participants in keeping with the conference manifesto, which read,

Tied to the current policy mandate, the central themes of Issei experience—tribulations, triumphs, and racial superiority—were notable in this manifesto, and, as mentioned, these were what Iriye had woven into his synthetic History of Overseas Japanese Development. By turning Iriye's narrative into state orthodoxy, the 1940 event made the history of Japanese in America formally a national past. Nevertheless, just as Okei had been made an epitome of modern-day colonial expansionism in the 1940 motion picture, that nationalized past also saw itself being equated with the imperialist present, because the former reified “the spirit of hakkō ichiu” that defined the latter.

Indeed, the spectacular pageantry inundated the audience's sense of historical changes and differences. The dialectics of historicizing and dehistoricizing especially cluttered the minds of Japanese people with teleological symbolisms, resulting in an even greater confluence of emigration with colonization in their consciousness. Full of suggestive visual representations, the first day of the conference was most significant in its ideological effects. On November 4, a grand celebration march kicked off the five-day program. Accompanied by musical bands and thousands of domestic participants, overseas invitees paraded through central Tokyo between Hibiya Park and the Imperial Palace. Following the Rising Sun flag came the first overseas residents, two elderly Issei from northern California (see figure 3). Conference officials picked them to head the procession because their frail but dignified bodies symbolized the official starting point of Japan's seventy years of external growth that was still progressing under the banner of hakkō ichiu. The parade was a concrete expression of that history, which united the disparate paths of emigration and colonization into a monolithic, unilinear trajectory. After the two Issei came the entire Hawaiian delegation, then the continental United States, the Canadians, the Nan'yō, the Latin Americans, and finally the delegates from China and Manchukuo—the order clearly marking the undifferentiated chronology of Japanese emigration history (see figure 4). The end of the parade consisted of some 3,000 domestic high school and college students, who aspired to join the ranks of their overseas compatriots as colonial fighters and continental brides (KDC 1941, 2–3). After the procession reached the Imperial Palace, a metaphor of their return from faraway lands to the heart and soul of the “expansive nation,” one of the elder Issei led three cheers of hurrah for the emperor (Miyako, November 5, 1940; Tokyo Nichi Nichi, November 5, 1940; Yomiuri, November 5, 1940). The participants' “enthusiastic banzai” was then met with the prime minister's affirmation of the consolidated expansionist pasts and present. “Your presence here,” remarked Konoe, “is a reminder of the history of Japanese colonization [abroad], the opening pages of which have been written in your blood and that of your forerunners” (Trans-Pacific, November 7, 1940).

Demonstrating the history that Iriye had crafted in words with actual agents of overseas development, the 1940 commemoration formed a “mnemonic site,” which engaged, and enmeshed, both its participants and observers in the emerging state orthodoxy. As historian Takashi Fujitani explains, a mnemonic site refers to “non-verbal official signs and the dominant meanings, customs, and practices associated with them” (1996, 11) that unfold in national ceremonies and rituals. In order for Iriye's expansionist narrative to acquire public consent and to turn into a national common sense, such a site was indispensable. Choreographed by the state, the personified representations of the expansionist past and present communicated to the Japanese of every class and every age these official messages: that emigration and colonization were identical and indivisible, and that the Japanese in America were the pantheon of great exemplars—the “fighters of the nation's all-out struggle” for imperial expansion, as General Tōjō noted (KDC 1941, 6).

The Japanese government placed Issei participants at the helm to consolidate these orthodox meanings. At the opening ceremony, an immigrant newspaper publisher from San Francisco responded to the dignitaries' speeches on behalf of those from abroad. He pledged that each and every one of them would begin anew, taking to heart the glory of being an imperial subject, and “advance with the spirit of hakkō ichiu in a respective frontline of overseas Japanese development.” The closing ceremony on November 8 reinforced the notions of their unequivocal patriotism and their relevancy to the empire. For this event, conference officials brought the two North American pioneers to the center stage again, uniting them with Japan's foremost nationalist-expansionist, Tōyama Mitsuru, who had led the ultra-right Kokuryūkai (Black Dragon/Amur River Society) movement since the turn of the twentieth century. The revered national hero voluntarily approached the two Issei to shake their hands, an action that moved the audience of nearly 2,000 to a standing ovation. This emotional show was followed by another oath of commitment to the national cause, where a female representative from Hawaii repeated the Issei newspaperman's earlier comments (KDC 1941, 23–26; Kashū Mainichi, November 8, 1940; Nichibei, November 9, 1940; Shin Sekai, November 9, 1940).

In terms of their ideological effects, the second and fourth days were equally significant, albeit by the manner of historicizing rather than dehistoricizing. By adopting Iriye's narrative scheme, the conference established a nuanced gradation of the meaning that each regional group held in view of Japan's present policy mandate. At the discussion sessions on November 5 and 7, officials steered the Issei toward “talking specifically about the several decades of their tribulations,” the aftermaths of racial exclusion, and the resultant challenges they faced in the United States. The authorities dissuaded the American participants from taking up current affairs in Asia as subjects of deliberation at their group session; instead, Foreign Ministry officials simply briefed the Issei on “Japan's recent conditions and international politics” (ZHD, October 23, 1940). This focus on a localized past revealed a stark contrast to what transpired in the Nan'yō and East Asian sessions. There, the discussions revolved around future courses of their respective “developments,” because both contingents resided on the new frontiers upon which the fate and progress of the Japanese empire depended. While the Nan'yō group exchanged thoughts and opinions that “might serve as a compass for Japan's policy of southward expansion,” the delegates from Manchuria confidently declared “the centrality in the coming era of their status among overseas compatriots” (KDC 1941, 17–18; Takumushō and Gaimushō 1940, 36–37).

At the evening public lecture on November 5, this temporally organized order of priorities was still manifest. Unlike others, Issei speakers dwelled on highlights of their yesteryear. For example, American intelligence reported that a farmer from San Diego described the Japanese in America as “the winners of the [racial] struggle” who had

As Tokyo officials envisioned, the Issei's anecdotes were meant to serve as a source of inspiration for the expansive nation; yet the unambiguous reminder was also that the Japanese in America were not in the position to actively partake in the current phase of empire building in East Asia.

Fundamentally, the 1940 conference entailed a project of what Michel Foucault describes as “total history,” which drew “all [past] phenomena around a single center,” mainly that of the Manchurian colonization enterprise. With the help of the state's ideological apparatuses, this total history not only disavowed discontinuities and ruptures among Japanese experiences abroad but also denied the audience disparate interpretations of overseas “development.” The principles of continuity and unity shaped the grammar of popular historical consciousness relative to the question of national expansion, which subsequently determined the possibilities of knowing for a domestic public (Foucault 1972, 9–10; 1980, 168). The manner and circumstances in which Issei participants performed their parts deterred contemporary observers from appreciating their real standing as a persecuted minority in white America. And perhaps, more critically, the pageant made it impossible for the Japanese public to delve into the Issei's reasons for history making, as they looked perfectly congruent in their beliefs with those of Japanese officials, who simple-mindedly glorified “the superior quality of the Japanese as a race” without regard to their social standing in the United States, as well as the real meaning of their development there (Trans-Pacific, November 7, 1940).¹⁴

For the most part, many Japanese in America were willing accomplices, taking sincere jubilance in the formal acknowledgment of their historical role and the homeland's acceptance of U.S. residents as its worthy members. As auspicious as it was, however, that official recognition accounted for only a partial fulfillment of the Issei's goal. Having lived in the interstices of both countries, they wished to reconcile their in-betweenness by claiming an integral place in each nation and history, simultaneously. Thus, while vouching for their Japanese patriotism, Issei writers and leaders always stressed how much they had contributed to American society in what historian Gary Gerstle calls “the political language of Americanism” (2002, 8–13). And in order to convince white America to admit them as equals despite their Oriental ancestry, Issei opted to emphasize their outstanding racial character through the example of imperial Japan's rise as a world power. This politics of dualism, which set apart Issei from their compatriots at home, turned out to be no match for a totalizing imperial nationalism and its insistence on a monolithic Japanese identity. The compromised designation of the Issei as “soldiers of hakkō ichiu” at the expense of their other, American identity revealed the fundamental vulnerability of their diasporic imagination to the nationalist binarism that disallowed cosmopolitan ambiguities and ambivalence. But it was also true that without such eclectic emigrant transnationalism, Japan would have found it much harder to co-opt the experience of American residents, and all the convenient ideas it offered.

Indeed, the Japanese press made certain that the dedication of overseas patriots was transparent, undiluted, and most importantly, singular. Newspapers throughout the nation meticulously reproduced the doings of rapturous Issei and other participants at the conference, embellishing the reports with tales of their struggles and other historical facts appropriate solely for the agendas of imperial Japan. Their stories were accompanied by exaggerated headlines such as “Overflowing Patriotism!” and “The Spirit of National Foundation Kept Alive in a Distant Foreign Land” (Hōchi, November 5, 1940; Tokyo Nichi Nichi, November 5, 1940). Other, more theatrical expressions included “The Spectacular Procession of Overseas Compatriots with Tears in Their Eyes,” or “Watering Eyes under the [Rising Sun] Flag” (Yomiuri, November 5, 1940; Miyako, November 5, 1940). Tokyoites who witnessed the parade, according to the press, held the marchers in high esteem (see figure 5). Along both sides of the route were layers of cheering crowds, and “from the windows of buildings young office women cried out, waving their hands and handkerchiefs,” as if to send off loyal soldiers bound for the war front (KDC 1941, 3). As a reporter of the Tokyo Nichi-Nichi Shinbum (November 5, 1940) noted, the two Issei elders at the head of the procession made a particularly strong impression (see figure 3):

Aided by powerful graphic imagery to “touch [their] hearts,” hegemonic renditions of expansionist history encroached on the minds of the Japanese masses, helping to homogenize their way of seeing their overseas compatriots, especially the Issei pioneers from America. As effective as it might have been, however, Tokyo officials knew well that the 1940 conference alone would not suffice to make the people suddenly enthusiastic about a policy of mass emigration to Manchuria, the ultimate purpose of the event. Whereas the spectacular pageantry moved, exhilarated, and engulfed the audience in a flood of emotion, other means of ideological mobilization took a subdued approach that was repetitive and reinforcing. In the beginning of 1940 and during the conference, the Japanese government generated additional mnemonic sites that packaged Issei history more comprehensively in national history—projects aided by other unofficial endeavors, including the showing of The Flower in the Storm.

Organized by the Cabinet Information Bureau, a grandiose exhibition named “Our New Frontiers” was held in January 1940, when the 2,600th anniversary celebration commenced. Although it offered a relatively minor place for the Japanese in America, this exhibition contextualized the Issei record within Japan's history of 2,600 years, thereby making it neatly dovetail with major historical episodes and legendary figures of overseas development through the entire span of the nation's existence. Some of the topical features that purportedly mirrored the Issei experience were the so-called advance of the Yamato state into Korea (200–600 CE), the penetration of Japanese commerce into Southeast Asia (1400–1600), and various displays of Japan's modern colonization endeavors. Utilizing photos, documents, dioramas, and mannequins of emigrants and colonialists, the exhibition attracted over one million visitors, including Prince Chichibu, Hirohito's younger brother (Isetan 1940; Naikaku Jōhōbu 1942, 11:429–59; NMK 1940).

At the conclusion of the 2,600th year festivities, a second exhibition showcased emergent expansionist orthodoxy in tandem with the overseas Japanese conference. At a Nihonbashi department store, the “Grand Exhibition of Overseas Japanese Development” presented “the microcosm of our modern-day national expansion” in order to “cherish the memory of the pioneers with a view to promoting further overseas development” (KDC 1941, 54). Sent directly from abroad, the displayed artifacts consisted of local agricultural specialties; large panorama photos of Japanese farms, businesses, and community activities; materials related to regional pioneers; and published histories. Just as in the grand celebration march, the exhibition placed a particular focus on the achievements of the Japanese in America (see figure 6). At the entrance, for example, one hundred boxes of Sunkist brand products from Issei farm organizations in Los Angeles were laid out to form “an impressive mountain of fragrant oranges and lemons that make the visitors' mouths water” (KDC 1940; 1941, 54–71; Naikaku Jōhōbu 1942, 12:204, 211) (see figure 7). A large farm tractor with a life-size mannequin of an Issei agriculturalist sat in the hallway to the North American section, which arrested visitor attention with the central theme on a large sign board: “It was the Japanese who have built the foundation of development and prosperity on the [U.S.] Pacific Coast!” (KDC 1940) (see figure 8). While singing the praise of colonial success and racial superiority through a variety of artifacts, the exhibition also highlighted the undiluted patriotism of overseas Japanese through a display of thousands of their imon bukuro, or care packages for imperial soldiers (see figure 9). These symbols were conspicuously placed at the main show windows along a trolley route and throughout the exhibit halls inside the department store (KDC 1941, 54–59, 74–76). More than 690,000 people visited this mnemonic site during the first two weeks of November 1940.

Other means of the total ideological project included the fixing of the meanings engendered by the state-sponsored pageantry and exhibitions. In an effort to elevate the social status of emigrants and promote the popular appreciation of emigrating in line with emergent orthodoxy, the government decorated 628 overseas residents, including 91 leading Japanese from North America, with a commemorative sake cup and a letter of commendation signed by the foreign minister. On November 10, the climax of the yearlong national commemoration, five leading Issei men were conferred the Sixth Order of the Sacred Treasure and the Medal of Honor with Green Ribbon, as were five other emigrants from elsewhere. Just like distinguished scholars, meritorious statesmen, devoted bureaucrats, and self-sacrificing military men, the Issei gained officially sanctioned “distinction,” as Pierre Bourdieu (1993, 61–67) puts it, to enter into the ranks of national heroes (Tokyo Nichi Nichi, November 11, 1940; Shin Aichi, November 11, 1940; Rafu Shimpō, November 12, 1940; Nichibei, November 12, 15, 1940). Yet what the Japanese in America did not realize at this juncture was the price of that recognition, and of their pivotal place in imperialist orthodoxy that the recognition betokened in the distrusting eyes of American authorities. Indeed, after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, they were to pay that price with confinement in U.S. internment camps as “dangerous enemy aliens.”

With a focus on borderless dimensions of Japanese colonialism, this essay was an attempt to write an international history overarching the hitherto compartmentalized historiographies of modern Japan and Japanese America. While being mindful of the political need to defend the distinctiveness of the Japanese American experience from the national history of Japan, the author looked to elucidate their intersections with an eye toward understanding a convoluted process of expansionist orthodoxy formation. Because a rigid dichotomy between ethnic studies and area studies has created many blind spots in our nationalized knowledge, this study demonstrated how a transnational approach could throw light on some of those spots. The more complicated our historical understanding is, the better it reflects the complexities of human experiences that refuse to be contained within a single national history. Crisscrossing the established disciplinary boundaries between Japanese history and Japanese American history is one way of achieving this, and the example of reciprocal history making in the two national spaces offers a good case study.

Three sets of hegemonic discourse partook in the formulation of Japanese expansionist orthodoxy before the Pacific War. In the aftermath of institutionalized racial exclusion, Japanese residents in the United States marshaled ideas selectively from Japan's peaceful expansionism and the American popular discourse of frontier conquest to compile their records of racial development. Interpreting the collective ethnic past in terms of the dominant national ideologies, Issei writers chronicled a trajectory of the binational pioneers in the context of their general quest for recognition as worthy citizen-subjects of both countries. Yet by divorcing the story of immigrant tribulations and triumphs from its constitutive context of American race relations, Japanese intelligentsia, popular culture, and the state concertedly co-opted Issei history in service of the new policies of agricultural colonization in Manchuria and national mobilization after the mid-1930s. The dualistic Issei pioneer thesis simply gave way to a contrived statist discourse on Japanese supremacy, when imperial Japan was about to engage the Anglo-American powers in its all-out race war.

Orthodoxy making entailed the synchronous process of dehistoricizing and historicizing to illuminate key ideological messages. For example, in the film on Okei, the quintessential female Issei pioneer was characterized simultaneously as the genesis of previous Japanese emigration to the United States and as the epitome of ongoing Manchurian colonization, and at the loci of her timeless dual identities laid Okei's agrarian belief and her unflinching commitment to overseas development. Furthermore, the skewed representations of the pioneer woman served to obfuscate labor dimensions of transpacific emigration at the expense of settler-colonialism à la the state-sponsored Manchurian project of the 1930s. Not only did the resultant narrative muddle the popular understanding of imin and shokumin, but also it unified diverse—and conflicting—paths of modern Japanese migration into a homogeneous, unilinear progression, upon which intellectuals and the state subsequently constructed a systematic, teleological metanarrative. Here, Japanese immigrant experience as a past looked no different from Japanese colonialism of the 1930s. In other moments of dialectic ideologizing, however, the Issei were simply relegated to the position of the ruptured past to elucidate the current political priority of imperial Japan, that is, national and racial development in northeast Asia, not in the Americas.

Prewar history making had important ramifications for the wartime histories of imperial Japan and Japanese America. The official U.S. rationale for the Issei's incarceration stemmed partially from their fashioning of a dualistic history, which inadvertently benefited Japan's political agendas in Asia. Tragically, just as Japanese officials unhesitantly nationalized the Issei's past without homage to their American identity, so the American authorities failed to look beyond the simplified notion of the resident Japanese as pro-Axis spies and enemy collaborators. When many Issei began to notice the vulnerability of their binational history in the face of clashing state nationalisms in the early months of 1941, it was already too late. The U.S. military and law enforcement agencies were busy translating their published chronicles and jubilant pronouncements at the 1940 Tokyo conference as incriminating evidence of their potential treachery, and as Federal Bureau of Investigation files reveal, major Issei authors and conference participants were blacklisted as the most imminent security risks (Azuma 2003, 1424–25). On Pearl Harbor Day, they were the first to be arrested for indefinite detention.

Meanwhile, for the duration of the war, imperial Japan refused to cut Issei history adrift from the established orthodoxy that was predicated on it. The warring state continued to find the pioneers of overseas development useful for the construction of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. The theme of racial struggle particularly compounded an official interest in Japanese emigrant experience in America during the Pacific War. The mass incarceration was a welcome development to the Japanese authorities, for the racial martyrdom of the Issei (and Nisei) offered additional propaganda material with regard to Anglo-American racism, against which the empire was purportedly fighting. The rhetoric of a race war needed symbolic victims, who were concomitantly superior to their white tormentors, as Tokyo's scheme of history had it that Japan was destined to win the struggle in the end.¹⁵ The political utility of Japanese residents in the United States remained intact so long as they played the role of patriotic pioneers wronged by white racism.

After 1945, however, the defeat of the Japanese empire quickly buried into oblivion the theory of overseas development and the Issei's pivotal place in expansionist national history that the theory had carved out. As a postwar narrative of their Nisei children as loyal Americans developed in popular and academic discourses of both countries, Japanese emigrants became simply Japanese “Americans,” a group of people whom few historians of modern Japan have considered thematically relevant until recently. Symbolically, too, Okei has since become the sole property of Japanese American history, for her grave now stands designated as part of an official California state historic landmark—one that commemorates the beginning of an immigrant success story, or what Nisei leaders proudly call an “American saga” (Van Sant 2000, 129).¹⁶ While rescuing Okei and the Issei from the shackles of such discrete national histories, this study has examined a transnational aspect of Japanese imperialism, which overflowed the formal boundaries of the empire itself.

Acknowledgments

A portion of this study was presented at a Center for Japanese Studies colloquium at the University of Michigan, and the author is grateful to the audience for their valuable feedback. Earlier versions of this article also benefited greatly from useful comments by Frederick Dickinson, Takashi Fujitani, Fred Notehelfer, and John J. Stephan. Emily Anderson provided invaluable editorial support, and so did Deborah Ring, copyeditor at the Journal of Asian Studies. Last but not the least, with their perceptive comments and helpful criticisms, JAS editors and anonymous readers enabled the author to clarify and sharpen his arguments. All translations—and any errors in them—are mine unless otherwise noted.

Notes

List of References