Oceanic Japan––Islands of the Kuroshio Froniter, or: Building the Infrastructure of an Archipelagic Empire

“Oceanic Japan” is a snapshot of the rapidly evolving historiography of Japan’s aquatic dimensions. Bringing together 31 authors around a broad palette of questions pertaining to Japan’s historical relationship with the ocean, this book draws up a big, terraqueous picture of a country that is often unduly reduced to being an “island” nation.

In 28 chapters and framing essays, we walk the reader through different sites, times and social processes that illustrate how the archipelago’s modern emergence was shaped by the ocean and how the ocean was shaped in turn by Japanese ideologies, economy and imperial expansion. We study the role of animals, tides and seismic waves in the development of industry and technology, and we observe how sailors, migrants and travelers crisscrossed their ways across the ocean into the heterogeneous society of modern Japan.

My chapter “Islands of the Kuroshio Frontier” (pp. 325–39) discusses how Japan’s incorporation of Pacific islands over the second half of the 19th century laid the infrastructural groundwork and figured as a colonial sandbox from which strategies and modalities of later colonial expansion emerged. With this, the chapter offers a teaser to my book “The Kuroshio Frontier: Empire and Environment in the Making of Japan’s Pacific,” which is forthcoming in 2025.

“Oceanic Japan” will become accessible in full open access one year after publication.––Thank you to our wonderful editors Stefan Huebner, Nadin Heé, William Tsutsui and Ian J. Miller for this inspiring collaboration!

Oceanic Japan @ University of Hawai’i Press

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