Placing a distinct focus on the role of the sending state, this book examines the history of postwar Japan's migration policy, linking it to the larger question of statehood and nation-building in the postwar era. Pedro Iacobelli delves into the role of states in shaping migration flows by exploring the genesis of the state-led emigration from Japan and the US-administered Ryukyu Islands to South America in the mid-20th century. The study proposes an alternative political perspective on migration history to analyze the rationale and mechanisms behind the establishment of migration programs by the sending state. To develop this perspective, the book examines the state's emigration policies, their determinants and their execution for the Japanese and Okinawan migration programs to Bolivia in the 1950s. It argues that the post-war migration policies that established those migration flows were a result of the political cost-benefit calculations, rather than only economic factors, of the three governments involved. With its unique focus on the role of the sending state and the relationship between Japan, Okinawa and the United States, this is a valuable study for students and scholars of postwar Japan and migration history.

Placing a distinct focus on the role of the sending state, this book examines the history of postwar Japan's migration policy, linking it to the larger question of statehood and nation-building in the postwar era. Pedro Iacobelli delves into the role of states in shaping migration flows by exploring the genesis of the state-led emigration from Japan and the US-administered Ryukyu Islands to South America in the mid-20th century. The study proposes an alternative political perspective on migration history to analyze the rationale and mechanisms behind the establishment of migration programs by the sending state. To develop this perspective, the book examines the state's emigration policies, their determinants and their execution for the Japanese and Okinawan migration programs to Bolivia in the 1950s. It argues that the post-war migration policies that established those migration flows were a result of the political cost-benefit calculations, rather than only economic factors, of the three governments involved. With its unique focus on the role of the sending state and the relationship between Japan, Okinawa and the United States, this is a valuable study for students and scholars of postwar Japan and migration history.

This collection provides a multidisciplinary study of postwar and contemporary Okinawa. The contributors analyze the unique social and cultural transformations that have occurred outside the context of American military control or US–Japan relations.

By examining chanoyu - the custom of consuming matcha tea - in the Meiji period, Gathering for Tea in Modern Japan investigates the interactions between intellectual and cultural legacies of the Tokugawa period and the incoming influences of Western ideas, material cultures and institutions. It explores the construction of Japan's modern cultural identity, highlighting the development of new social classes, and the transformation of cultural practices and production-consumption networks of the modern era. Taka Oshikri uses a wealth of Japanese source material - including diaries, newspaper, journal articles, maps, exhibition catalogues and official records – to explore the intricate relationships between the practice and practitioners of different social groups such as the old aristocracy, the emerging industrial elite, the local elite and government officials. She argues that the fabrication of a cultural identity during modernisation was influenced by various interest groups, such as the private commercial sector and foreign ambassadors. Although much is written on the practice of chanoyu in the pre-Tokugawa period and present-day Japan, there are few historical studies focusing on the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Gathering for Tea in Modern Japan thus makes a significant contribution to its field, and will be of great value to students and scholars of modern Japanese social and cultural history.

This ground-breaking book provides the first English-language survey of economic thought in modern Japan. Significantly, it offers both a detailed study of economic thought from 1600 to 1945 and a nuanced analysis of Western and Asian perspectives on the field of Japanese economic history. Expertly translated from Japanese and written by leading scholars in the field, this exciting study includes: * A novel approach to economic thought which contextualizes the core values of thinkers across the period * A comparative analysis of Japanese economic history which looks at the continuities across the Meiji divide * The extensive use of archival sources, many of which were previously unavailable in English A History of Economic Thought in Japan, 1600 - 1945 serves as a case study of how Western economic ideas spread to non-Western regions and interacted with indigenous ideas. It will therefore be of immense value to both scholars of economic thought and those seeking a deeper understanding of the moral, intellectual, and societal forces that shaped modern Japan.

Informed Western understanding of Imperial Japan still often conjures up images of militarism, blind devotion to leaders, and fanatical pride in the country. But, as Imperial Japan and Defeat in the Second World War reveals, Western imagination is often reductive in its explanation of the Japanese Empire and its collapse. In his analysis of the Emperor, Imperial Japanese Army and Navy during the Second World War, Peter Wetzler examines the disconnect between nation and state during wartime Japan and in doing so offers a much-needed nuanced and sensitive corrective to existing Western scholarship. Rooted in the perspective of the Japanese, Wetzler makes available to readers vital primary and secondary Japanese archival sources; most notably, this book provides the first English assessment of the recently-released Actual Record of the Showa Emperor. This book is an important advance in English-language studies of the Second World War in Asia, and is thus essential reading for all those wishing to understand this crucial period in Japanese history.

What is a bureaucracy, from where does it come, and how does it develop? Japanese have long described their nation as a “kingdom of bureaucrats", but until now, no historian has fully explained the historical origins of the mammoth Japanese executive state. In this ground-breaking study, translated into English for the first time, Yuichiro Shimizu traces the rise of the modern Japanese bureaucracy from the Meiji Restoration through the early 20th century. He reveals how the making of the bureaucracy was none other than the making of Japanese modernity itself. Through careful political analysis and vivid human narratives, he tells the dynamic story of how personal ambition, new educational institutions, and state bureaucratic structures interacted to make a modern political system premised on recruiting talent, not status or lineage. Bringing cutting-edge Japanese scholarship to a global audience, The Origins of the Modern Japanese Bureaucracy is not only a reconceptualization of modern Japanese political history but an account of how the ideal of “pursuing one's own calling” became the foundational principle of the modern nation-state.

As a transnational history of science, Japan's Empire of Birds: Aristocrats, Anglo-Americans, and Transwar Ornithology focuses on the political aspects of highly mobile Japanese explorer-scientists, or cosmopolitan gentlemen of science, circulating between Japanese and British/American spaces in the transwar period from the 1920s to 1950s. Annika A. Culver examines a network of zoologists united by their practice of ornithology and aristocratic status. She goes on to explore issues of masculinity and race related to this amidst the backdrop of imperial Japan's interwar period of peaceful internationalism, the rise of fascism, the Japanese takeover of Manchuria, and war in China and the Pacific. Culver concludes by investigating how these scientists repurposed their aims during Japan's Allied Occupation and the Cold War. Inspired by geographer Doreen Massey, themes covered in the volume include social space and place in these specific locations and how identities transform to garner social capital and scientific credibility in transnational associations and travel for non-white scientists.