Harvard East Asian Monographs 460. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2023. US$50.00, cloth. ISBN 9780674291386.
Few states seem as naturally legitimized as island nations, yet their boundaries are by no means more historically determined than those of political entities on the continent. Takahiro Yamamoto’s Demarcating Japan asks how Japan’s borders solidified between the 1850s and the 1880s, a time in which the centuries-old and vaguely defined outskirts of Japan’s bakuhan state were delineated from abutting imperial spheres of influence. By framing the demarcation of modern Japan as a trans-Meiji process, the book joins an emerging body of scholarship that questions prescriptive chronologies, and it redefines the space and place of Japan’s modern reinventions. It is structured regionally rather than chronologically, consisting of five chapters centred on one region each, where the modalities of modern Japan’s territorial claims were laid out in competition against Russia, the Qing empire, Britain, and the United States.
Yamamoto argues that although different imperial interests were at play in each of these border regions, negotiations over territory were never bilateral, but the result of an “inter-state” (7) dynamic and ad-hoc action on the ground. He makes this argument by foregrounding sites and actors far remote from the classical sites of diplomatic negotiations, dedicating one chapter each to the Tsushima incident and its aftermath, the disposal of Ryukyu, border negotiations over Sakhalin and the Kuriles, and the incorporation of the Bonin Islands. Government agents on the ground seemed to improvise and amend strategies on the spot, while local individuals subverted or instrumentalized their still-permeable policies. The biography of Ainu chief Konkamakuru, also known as Yakov Strozev, who reconfigured the national affiliations of his Kuril village community (chapter 4), or the career of the commoner-diplomat Shiga Uratarō, who picked up Russian when the Czar’s navy set up a supply station in his native Inasa village in 1858 (chapter 1), embody these decentralized agencies particularly well. Yet eventually, this is a story of endings rather than of beginnings: the Meiji government and the borders it created ultimately disempowered regional agencies and pinned down trans-border migrants as it centralized decision making in the capital.
The book is ambitious in scope and it delivers by connecting policy reforms during the last years under the shogunate to the pervasive political reforms of the early Meiji period––elegantly sidelining the “heroes” that conventionally dominate narratives of the reform era. Yamamoto distinguishes the incorporation of border regions from Japan’s later colonial expansion, citing concerns about teleologies of “island-hopping” (8, 223), yet he remains somewhat inconsistent with the analytical terminology necessary for this distinction. His nomenclature of border, boundary, and border region (10–11) seems evasive of the frontier/borderland controversies that have been debated among historians including Paul Kreitman, Bruce Batten, Brett Walker, Tessa Morris-Suzuki, or myself with regards to the same places and eras. The related question whether the “recollection” (198) of the Bonin Islands––as the incorporation was euphemistically labelled at the time––was an act of colonization or annexation, for example, eventually hinges on the problem of whether Japan could at any point be called a nation-state before it turned into a sprawling, archipelagic empire.
Each chapter hints at but forgoes active engagement with such conceptual questions that have become hotly debated again in the context of the ongoing oceanic turn in the field. Embedding border formation in specific regional environments could have engendered a greater conversation with those historians whose work has recently been drawn together in the volume Oceanic Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2024), edited by Nadin Heé, Stefan Huebner, Ian Miller, and Bill Tsutsui. How does Yamamoto’s choice of maritime sites across 23.5 degrees in latitude offer insight into the ecological and economic contexts of Japan’s border formation? How did developments in other parts of the Pacific affect this geopolitical reorientation? Or, to ask with Catherine Phipps, what is it that ultimately enabled Japan to add to its territory while its sovereignty was curtailed by unequal treaties?
One of the most compelling interpretive models for this last question is found in Yamamoto’s 2015 PhD dissertation, which he decided to drop in the monograph. A “balance of favour,” Yamamoto explains, incentivized treaty powers to keep each other from seizing territory exclusively (“Balance of Favour: The Emergence of Territorial Boundaries around Japan, 1861-1875,” PhD dissertation, LSE, 2015). Accordingly, the expansion of Japan to places such as the Bonin Islands was also a vector of foreign treaty privileges. To my excitement, Yamamoto delivers the smoking gun for this line of thought: foreign affairs magistrate Mizuno Tadanori invited a Russian officer to join the shogunate’s expedition to the Bonins in early 1862, just months after Russia’s invasion of Tsushima (which had ended with a British intervention), in the hope of gaining backup against British interests in the Bonins (198).
Borders are always specific to a certain moment in time, and Japan’s outlines remain contested until the present. Unlike Sakhalin, the southern Kuriles are considered an integral part of Japan, even though they have been occupied by Russia since 1945, a status quo each Japanese administration has since vowed to revert. The Bonin Islands were reversed from postwar occupation in 1968, five years prior to Okinawa, and until today, Bonin Islanders refer to Japan as the Naichi––the term used in the colonies to refer to the imperial motherland. This complex afterlife of locally construed incorporation processes put the making of Japan’s modern ideologies, or the experience of disempowered peripheries, in conversation with a greater historiography of the Japanese Empire.
Demarcating Japan uncovers agents previously locked up in local histories and international negotiations that transcend the shogunal/imperial watershed, making for an inspiring and thought-provoking piece of scholarship. It is narrative and not too heavy on theory, well suited to assign chapter-wise in thematic survey classes or to enjoy as a leisurely read. I especially recommend it to students of Japan’s modern revolution and to historians interested in trans-imperial dynamics in the making of the modern Asia Pacific.
Jonas Rüegg
The University of Zurich, Zurich