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Review of Tamamoto Takahiro’s “Demarcating Japan” (Harvard, 2024) in Pacific Affairs

Yamamoto, Takahiro: Demarcating Japan: Imperialism, Islanders, and Mobility, 1855–1884. Harvard East Asian Monographs. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2023. 284 pages, US$ 50,00.

Harvard East Asian Monographs 460. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2023. US$50.00, cloth. ISBN 9780674291386.

Few states seem as naturally defined as island nations, yet their boundaries are by no means more historically determined than those of political entities on the continent. Takahiro Yamamoto’s new book “Demarcating Japan” (Harvard University Press, 2024), which I had the pleasure to review for the journal “Pacific Affairs,” asks how the borders of Japan came about. The book analyzes on the border negotiations of the 1850s–80s, instances in which the modalities of modern Japan’s territorial claims were laid out in competition against Russia, the Qing empire, Britain, and the United States.

Demarcating Japan features previously little-known agents, such as Ainu chief Konkamakuru, also known as Yakov Strozev, who reconfigured the national affiliations of his Kuril village community, or commoner-diplomat Shiga Uratarō, who picked up Russian when the Czar’s navy set up a supply station in his native Inasa village near Nagasaki in 1858. Rigorously researched, the book is narrative and well-suited to enjoy as a leisurely read as well. I especially recommend it to students of Japan’s modern revolution and to historians interested in those trans-imperial dynamics that shaped the modern Asia-Pacific.

Read the full review here:

DEMARCATING JAPAN: Imperialism, Islanders, and Mobility, 1855–1884 | By Takahiro Yamamoto

More on the reviewed book on the publisher’s website:

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674291386