The U.S. occupation of Japan transformed a brutal war charged with overt racism into an amicable peace in which the issue of race seemed to have disappeared. During the Occupation, the problem of racial relations between Americans and Japanese was suppressed and the mutual racism transformed into something of a taboo so that the two former enemies could collaborate in creating democracy in postwar Japan. In the 1980s, however, when Japan increased its investment in the American market, the world witnessed a revival of the rhetoric of U.S.-Japanese racial confrontation. Koshiro argues that this perceived economic aggression awoke the dormant racism that lay beneath the deceptively smooth cooperation between the two cultures. This pathbreaking study is the first to explore the issue of racism in U.S.-Japanese relations. With access to unexplored sources in both Japanese and English, Koshiro is able to create a truly international and cross-cultural study of history and international relations.

“In this exhaustively-researched and beautifully-written book, Onishi uncovers a hidden history of Afro-Asian radicalism and internationalism. He presents bold and generative arguments about the ways in which the affiliation of kindred spirits across the Pacific enabled anti-racist intellectuals and activists from Japan and the U.S. to forge a new philosophy of world history and formulate practical programs for liberation.” —George Lipsitz, author of How Racism Takes Place “This fascinating and ground-breaking book offers a new window into the vital history of Afro-Asian solidarity against empire and white supremacy. Meticulously researched, it recovers the epistemological breakthroughs that emerged at the intersection of radical struggle and geographical reorientation. Through his sharp analysis of cross-cultural and transnational collectivity, Onishi provides a guidepost for all those interested in the study of utopian, boundary-crossing projects of the past, as well as the creation of future ones.” — Scott Kurashige, author of The Shifting Grounds of Race and co-author of The Next American Revolution Transpacific Antiracism introduces the dynamic process out of which social movements in Black America, Japan, and Okinawa formed Afro-Asian solidarities against the practice of white supremacy in the twentieth century. Yuichiro Onishi argues that in the context of forging Afro-Asian solidarities, race emerged as a political category of struggle with a distinct moral quality and vitality. This book explores the work of Black intellectual-activists of the first half of the twentieth century, including Hubert Harrison and W. E. B. Du Bois, that took a pro-Japan stance to articulate the connection between local and global dimensions of antiracism. Turning to two places rarely seen as a part of the Black experience, Japan and Okinawa, the book also presents the accounts of a group of Japanese scholars shaping the Black studies movement in post-surrender Japan and multiracial coalition-building in U.S.-occupied Okinawa during the height of the Vietnam War which brought together local activists, peace activists, and antiracist and antiwar GIs. Together these cases of Afro-Asian solidarity make known political discourses and projects that reworked the concept of race to become a wellspring of aspiration for a new society. Yuichiro Onishi is Assistant Professor of African American & African Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.

As the inaugural volume of the new Brill book series Gendering the Trans-Pacific World: Diaspora, Empire, and Race, this anthology presents an emergent interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary field that highlights the inextricable link between gender and the trans-Pacific world. The anthology features twenty-one chapters by new and established scholars and writers. They collectively examine the geographies of empire, the significance of intimacy and affect, the importance of beauty and the body, and the circulation of culture. This is an ideal volume to introduce advanced undergraduate and graduate students to Transpacific Studies and gender as a category of analysis. Gendering the Trans-Pacific World: Diaspora, Empire, and Race is now available in paperback for individual customers.

Trans-Pacific Japanese American Studies is a unique collection of essays derived from a series of dialogues held in Tokyo, Kyoto, and Los Angeles on the issues of racializations, gender, communities, and the positionalities of scholars involved in Japanese American studies. The book brings together some of the most renowned scholars of the discipline in Japan and North America. It seeks to overcome past constraints of dialogues between Japan- and U.S.-based scholars by providing opportunities for candid, extended conversations among its contributors. While each contribution focuses on the field of “Japanese American” studies, approaches to the subject vary—ranging from national and village archives, community newspapers, personal letters, visual art, and personal interviews. Research papers are divided into six sections: Racializations, Communities, Intersections, Borderlands, Reorientations, and Teaching. Papers by one or two Japan-based scholar(s) are paired with a U.S.-based scholar, reflecting the book’s intention to promote dialogue and mutuality across national formations. The collection is also notable for featuring underrepresented communities in Japanese American studies, such as Okinawan “war brides,” Koreans, women, and multiracials. Essays on subject positions raise fundamental questions: Is it possible to engage in a truly equal dialogue when English is the language used in the conversation and in a field where English-language texts predominate? How can scholars foster a mutual respect when U.S.-centrism prevails in the subject matter and in the field’s scholarly hierarchy? Understanding foundational questions that are now frequently unstated assumptions will help to disrupt hierarchies in scholarship and work toward more equal engagements across national divides. Although the study of Japanese Americans has reached a stage of maturity, contributors to this volume recognize important historical and contemporary neglects in that historiography and literature. Japanese America and its scholarly representations, they declare, are much too deep, rich, and varied to contain in a singular narrative or subject position.

Though there is no biological validity to race, it continues to play a central role in various aspects of our daily lives. What, then, generates and reinforces the reality of race, and in what ways? In order to explore these questions, this book examines racial representations from both scientific and humanistic perspectives, taking into account both historical and contemporary views. This incisive anthology is the product of an interdisciplinary collaboration among scholars from Japan, Korea, Singapore, Germany, Israel, Iraq, and the US. The discussion consists of studies in history, literature, sociology, cultural anthropology, and genetics, while the primary focus is on racial representations in Asia. The book elucidates issues and phenomena that have been neglected or marginalized in the literature on racial representation, and it serves to broaden our understanding, both in the theoretical and empirical realms. Looking at these phenomena, it is realized that racism has become increasingly obscure and harder to identify and articulate, thus posing the question: Are we really beyond 'race' and heading towards a future of 'integration?'

Since 1954, Japan has become home to a vibrant but little-known tradition of Black Studies. Transpacific Correspondence introduces this intellectual tradition to English-speaking audiences, placing it in the context of a long history of Afro-Asian solidarity and affirming its commitments to transnational inquiry and cosmopolitan exchange. More than six decades in the making, Japan’s Black Studies continues to shake up commonly held knowledge of Black history, culture, and literature and build a truly globalized field of Black Studies.

Introduction: the trans-Pacific imagination - Rethinking boundary, culture and society / Naoki Sakai and Hyon Joo Yoo -- Towards a transnational history of victimhood nationalism: on the trans-Pacific space / Jie-Hyun Lim -- The trans-Pacific migrant and area studies / Lisa Lowe -- Imprinting the Empire: Western artists and the persistence of colonialism in East Asia / Tessa Morris-Suzuki -- The political formation of the homoerotics and the Cold War: the battle of gazes at and from Okinawa / Ikuo Shinjou -- Securing Okinawa for miscegenation: gender and trans-Pacific Empire of the United States and Japan / Annmaria Shimabuku -- The politics of postcoloniality and the literature of "Being-in-Japan" (Zainichi) / Hyoduk Lee -- The incurable feminine: women without a country in East Asian cinema / Hyon Joo Yoo -- Inter-Asia comparative framework: postcolonial film historiography in Taiwan and South Korea / Soyoung Kim -- Postcolonial Hiroshima, mon amour: Franco-Japanese collaboration in the American shadow / Yuko Shibata -- Reconceptualizing "East Asia" in the post-Cold War era / Sun Ge -- Trans-Pacific studies and the US-Japan complicity / Naoki Sakai