Edinburgh East Asian Studies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023. US$110.00, cloth. ISBN 9781399506892.
As the world’s first non-white power, Japan has engaged in a racial dynamism rarely observed in history. This is characterized by a number of factors: Tokugawa’s unification of a rather disparate populace, the promotion of monoethnicity in the Meiji period, multiethnic identity in imperial Japan with Yamato Japanese supremacy, and the post war “unmixing of Japan” (John Lie, Multiethnic Japan, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001) and enduring embrace of homogeneity. Japanese Racial Identities takes on some of these themes but delimits its analysis to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and processes of Japan’s racial construction and negotiation when race was generally regarded as a “scientific” fact (5). This insightful book of diplomatic and social history seeks to understand how Japan became a “racial anomaly” in its negotiations with the West (1). The work draws on a large body of scholarly literature in history, philosophy, and social science. Its range of sources include US and Japanese newspapers, magazines, scholarly journals, periodicals, personal letters, memoirs, and government sources.
Tarik Merida’s central argument is simultaneously straightforward and circuitous: “I argue at the end of the nineteenth century, the Western powers and Japan jointly created a negotiation zone in which the latter could temporarily receive the status of ‘honorary white.’ This enabled Japan to escape the subordinate status that was common for ‘coloured’ people and receive preferential treatment. It also enabled the preservation of the racial status quo and to cope with the anomaly of having a ‘coloured’ race equal to Whites.” (7). Merida theorizes that Japan occupied a “racial middle ground” which is identified as a negotiation zone where “racial concerns are temporarily set aside for the sake of more pressing issues” (11). This zone was constituted by “upper race,” “race in the middle,” and “race at the bottom” (11). For Merida, Japan’s emergence as a modern imperialist power on par with the white colonial powers enabled it to have the bargaining power to leave the inferior category. The author contends the racial middle ground enables a deconstruction and analysis well beyond the white vs. coloured binary.
The book is divided into two parts. The first part is comprised of just two chapters that contextualize race throughout Japanese history. The second part constitutes the remaining five chapters which theorize the racial middle ground from beginning to end. Chapter 3 explains the need for for Japan to have a special status that emerged from notions of racial insecurity and the specificities of the negotiation zone between Japan and the West. Chapter 4 discusses the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) as the probable start of the racial middle ground where Japan was to prove its departure from coloured Asia, and was nearly realized with the Russo-Japanese War of (1904–1905) in which white vs. coloured considerations were seemingly left out. Chapter 5 focuses on the “California Crisis” where Japanese children were excluded from San Francisco’s white schools and President Roosevelt intervened to create an exception for Japanese to the white order in the US. Chapter 6 deals with African American reactions to the California events as well as an examination of Japanese and African American race relations. Chapter 7 examines the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 as the end of the negotiation zone and how the racial middle ground subsequently became obsolete.
Among the book’s contributions is its historical discussion of Japan’s appropriation and adaptation of Western concepts of race from the seventeenth century onwards and its negotiation of race in the specific period between 1853–1919. Merida confronts social scientist Yasuko Takezawa and historian Herman Ooms and other scholars’ notions of race in Tokugawa Japan and beyond. He argues that, unlike race, inequality in pre-Meiji Japan was not constituted in biological terms. Merida values the sociological approach to race for understanding contemporary issues of discrimination but questions its usefulness as applied to a historical perspective with much attention to Japan’s Burakumin outcasts. This seems problematic as several scholars note Burakumin outcasts and other traditionally subordinated groups as being racialized in historical documents in immutable, biological, and hierarchical terms as “inferior races.” (George De Vos and Hiroshi Wagatsuma. Japan’s Invisible Race: Caste in Culture and Personality, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966). It is notable that the Buraku Liberation movement has long been aligned with global human rights and antiracist movements. A contemporary manifestation of this is the Buraku Liberation League’s aligned Tokyo-based international nongovernmental organization, the International Movement against all Forms of Discrimination and Racism (IMADR).
Merida’s application of the racial middle ground to Japanese-African American race relations around the California Crisis is particularly fascinating. In the author’s analysis, African Americans constituted a “race at the bottom” (118). More could have been made of the racial solidarity between African Americans and Japanese in the wake of Japan’s 1905 defeat of Russia and around the rejection of Japan’s racial equality proposal at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. For Merida, the question of whether Japan’s racial equality proposal was self-interested is secondary but rather an admission of Japan’s belonging to the coloured races and hence an end to the racial middle ground, and an appeal to racial equality. Given Japan’s Global North status and intersubjective notions of Japanese exceptionalism, a reader may question whether Japan’s “race in the middle” status ever really ended. One wonders whether Merida’s racial middle ground theory can be applied to other nonwhite powers? Despite the book’s rich conceptualization and theory building/testing, it is at times redundant. Yet all and all, this book has many more contributions than shortcomings and should be required reading for anyone interested in the history of racial construction in and outside of Japan.
Michael Sharpe
York College, New York