The Making of Japanese Settler Colonialism: Malthusianism and Trans-Pacifi c Migration, 1868–1961 by Sidney Xu Lu

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Making of Japanese Settler Colonialism: Malthusianism and Trans-Pacifi c Migration, 1868–1961 by Sidney Xu Lu Martin Dusinberre (bio) The Making of Japanese Settler Colonialism: Malthusianism and Trans-Pacific Migration, 1868–1961. By Sidney Xu Lu. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2019. xvi, 310 pages. $99.99, cloth; $32.99, paper; $26.00, E-book. Open Access. Some 70 pages into The Ideological Origins of the British Empire, the historian David Armitage turns his attention to the career of Richard Hakluyt the younger (1553–1616) and offers a close reading of "A particuler discourse concerninge the greate necessitie and manifolde comodyties that are likely to growe to this Realme of Englande by the Westerne discoveries lately attempted" (1584). Better known as the "Discourse of Western Planting," the text appealed to Elizabeth I for the crown to finance Sir Walter Raleigh's planned permanent English settlement in Roanoke (today's North Carolina). As such, the "Discourse" was a failure—as, indeed, Roanoke Colony would be. But Armitage nevertheless devotes several pages to Hakluyt's ideas: the apparent need to counter overpopulation at home with colonization abroad; the export of people to achieve such colonization; and the new outlet for English markets that would thereby be created.1 I recalled Armitage's treatment of Hakluyt's "Discourse" as I was reading Sidney Xu Lu's extraordinary first book, The Making of Japanese Settler Colonialism. Any serious analysis of ideological origins, Armitage implicitly argues, must encompass the ideas that failed as much as those later considered to be "successes"; by logical extension, the same must be as true for the sites where colonization did not take root as those where it did. For many decades, scholarship on Japanese imperialism avoided this logic, with many works focusing exclusively on the Northeast Asian sites of modern Japan's colonies. And, for obvious reasons, these formal colonies still remain central to the story of empire. But Lu's book, read alongside Eiichiro Azuma's In Search of Our Frontiers,2 makes the powerful case for a new sensibility in our understanding of Japanese imperialism: that its sites—like Roanoke for England—were as much failed projects in Texas (Lu) or Mexico (Azuma) as the "successes" of Taiwan, Korea, Karafuto, and Manchuria; and that Japanese imperialism was a product of "ideological [End Page 477] interaction between Japanese migration campaigns on both sides of the Pacific" (p. 265). Indeed, for my money, the transpacific focus of Lu's analysis over the period of almost a century (1868–1961) adds up to a new way of conceptualizing the ideological origins of the Japanese empire. At the heart of Lu's thesis lies what he calls Malthusian expansionism: "a set of ideas that demanded extra land abroad to accommodate the claimed surplus people in the domestic society on the one hand and emphasized the necessity of the overall population growth of the nation on the other hand" (p. 3). In other words, overpopulation was as much a claim as a reality; and, unlike Thomas Malthus's original emphasis on the need to check growth in An Essay on the Principle of Population (1789), Japanese intellectuals celebrated increased population at home, both as the mark of a strong nation and also as a justification for further overseas expansion. True, Malthusianism was not the only ideological show in town, nor the only means by which to articulate a language of expansionism in post-1868 Japan. But with examples from Hokkaido, California, Texas, Brazil, and Manchuria, plus passing analyses of Hawai'i and Korea, Lu constructs a convincing case for historians to consider Malthusian expansionism as central to practices of Japanese settler colonialism across the Asia-Pacific world—about which more later. But first to the methodological elephant in the room. The tendency to size up Japanese imperialism according to European normative models has a long and problematic pedigree in postwar Japanese- and English-language scholarship. So when, in order to explain the expansive history of modern Japan, Lu offers a conceptual framework—Malthusianism—whose "intellectual roots can be traced back to the formative years of modern nationstates in Europe" (p. 26—and, we might add with a nod to...