The “oceanic turn” has emerged as one of the most significant innovations in recent humanities scholarship, enabling innovative analyses of historical events by revealing previously unconsidered connections. This approach transcends the traditional historiographical view that regarded peoples and nations as isolated entities, demonstrating how, in reality, distant societies were geopolitically interconnected, influencing one another across vast distances. Sidney Xu Lu’s book elevates the historiography of Japanese immigration to Brazil to a new level by analyzing it through the lens of “settler colonialism,” a concept previously little explored in this field. Using this framework, the author shifts the discussion from the field of migration to reveal enduring policies associated with colonialism.
In this sense, by conceptualizing Japanese immigration as part of settler colonialism, the author brings to light the contemporary relevance of this problem. It is no longer merely an emigration-immigration project, but rather a project that serves the political and economic interests of both the Brazilian and Japanese governments and elites in occupying territories, expanding zones of influence, expropriating Indigenous lands, and removing fundamental rights from the native peoples of both countries. This nineteenth-century settler colonialism was cloaked in a civilizing project based on racism and white superiority, labeling other peoples, deemed racially inferior, as backward and barbaric. It was through the construction of race-based inferiority that settler colonial practices could continuously justify the idea of manifest destiny and land usurpation.
The book’s opening chapters examine how, at the end of the nineteenth century, the histories of Brazil and Japan shared profound affinities in their nation-building projects and in how they perceived themselves as modern states. Influenced by the colonialist discourses of the period—particularly the westward expansion of the United States—Brazil and Japan also produced processes of racialization and social hierarchization. The author demonstrates that the successful colonization of U.S. territory, with the expropriation of Indigenous lands in the name of a civilizing project, was viewed as exemplary and emulated both in Meiji-era Japan and in Brazilian republican thought.
Both in Japan and Brazil, the American model of settler colonization was followed meticulously: in Japan, through the expropriation of Ainu lands in Hokkaido and the use of systematic violence against the native population, justified by the ideology of Japanese racial superiority; in Brazil, through the republican project of population whitening (branqueamento) and the invisibilization of Black and Indigenous populations, thereby promoting European immigration.
Chapters 3 and 4 demonstrate how this alignment between Japanese and Brazilian settler colonialisms, situated within a global geopolitical context, catalyzed relations that would materialize within a few years into one of the largest transnational flows ever observed. A series of convergences and aligned interests stimulated what the author calls “collaborative settler colonialism,” showing how Japanese immigration to Brazil was of interest not only to the Japanese state but also to the political objectives of Brazil and Brazilian elites of the time.
Japan’s emigration policy aimed to expel the country’s poorest population and alleviate internal social pressures, in addition to expanding its global influence. Japanese alignment with the U.S. settler colonial project made the United States the preferred destination for Japanese emigrants in the late nineteenth century. The rise of anti-Japanese sentiment and the virtual prohibition of Japanese immigration to the United States in 1907 through the Gentlemen’s Agreement prompted the Japanese government and elites to rethink their migration policies.
Supported by the racial ideology of the era, the Brazilian government yearned for labor that was necessarily foreign for the coffee plantations, thereby disregarding Indigenous peoples and formerly enslaved Africans. Japanese victories in the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars repositioned the country and its people in the Brazilian racial imaginary, facilitating negotiations with the Japanese government to establish a continuous migratory flow that began in 1908 with the arrival of the ship Kasato Maru at the Port of Santos. As discussed in chapter 5, within the framework of collaborative settler colonialism, Japanese immigrants in Brazil served Japanese interests in fostering Japanese colonization of American territory and Brazilian interests in colonizing territory previously occupied by Indigenous populations, considered racially inferior by Brazilian elites.
The discourse of the Japanese intelligentsia and those disseminated in “colony newspapers” (chapter 5), promoted an identity discourse that proposed a colonizers’ “mentality” still anchored in racial terms, positioning the Japanese as racially superior to native Brazilians. This perspective precluded interracial marriages with Brazilians and Okinawans. At the same time, the Japanese “mentality” emphasized the altruistic character of educating native peoples through colonization.
The final chapters carefully detail the successes and challenges of Japanese immigration to Brazil, including the colonization project in the Amazon. The author also suggests a new starting point and chronology for understanding the history of Japanese immigration, commonly conceived in the literature and by authorities as having begun only in 1908 with the arrival of Kasato Maru. For the author, it is important to observe that collaborative settler colonialism is the result of movements and discourses articulated in previous decades.
A particularly notable achievement that distinguishes this book from others in the literature on the subject is the fact that the author consistently addresses the topic while attending to simultaneous events occurring in both Brazil and Japan throughout the aforementioned period. The author also takes care to highlight events that occurred in the United States, China, and Southeast Asia that directly and indirectly propelled Japanese immigration to Brazil. By pointing to the mechanisms of migration and the simultaneous influences that one country exerts on another, the reader finally gains a clear understanding of the importance of an expanded geopolitical analysis.
However, bearing in mind that the book concerns Japanese immigration to Brazil, it is disconcerting to observe that the author does not mention any research conducted by Brazilian scholars in his analysis. Such research has been carried out at Brazilian universities by scholars both of Japanese descent and non-descendants since the 1950s, at internationally recognized centers of academic excellence, yet none of it appears in the text.
The failure to engage with Brazilian scholarship undermines the originality of the analysis, since several of the points addressed by the author have already been extensively explored by researchers such as Ruth Corrêa Leite Cardoso (1959, 1972), Rogério Dezem (2005), and Célia Sakurai (1999), among others. The author claims not to use these references because they fall within what he calls “ethnic studies” in Latin America (10) and due to their “ethnographic character.” However, this is precisely how this field of study consolidated itself in the country, initially at the University of São Paulo, through intensive exchanges among Brazilian history, anthropology, and sociology.