Black Transnationalism and Japan introduces to classroom and scholarly audiences more than a century of cultural activity and intellectual movements, created, shaped, and led by Japanese and Black people. Black and Japanese transnational encounters and cultural productions have challenged hierarchies of gender, race, class, culture, and imperialism throughout history. The lens of Black transnationalism reveals diverse meanings of the concept of “Japan” for different groups of Black and Japanese people who interacted with one another. For these groups, the meaning of “Black” and “Blackness” were simultaneously concepts and categories in perpetual motion, within and vis-à-vis Japan. The sites in which they operated and the geographies they imagined were non-imperial, anti-imperial, and alternative cultural spaces, and their coalescent productions and practices can be discovered in both ordinary and extraordinary historical spaces and times. The study of transnational activity can reveal not only heretofore hidden historical actors, mutual learning and collaboration, friendships and solidarities, but also discourses of knowledge connected to race, gender, and culture that challenged the Western, modern, civilization discourse. The hierarchies naturalized by this discourse have so far defined our historical understanding of racialized encounters in relation to Japan.

While some Pan-Asianisms and Pan-Africanisms urged a uniting of colonized spaces against the colonizer, and were expressed in the form of decolonization movements, the chapters in this volume introduce various transnational phenomena that transcended such dichotomies. Black American-Japanese transnational encounters often occurred at the non-state level from within the two new competing empires of America and Japan. Their transnational encounters are reduceable to neither anti-Westernism, nor the “countergaze” of the West, nor even being anti-“white.” It was their nuanced relations and the subtle historical context for doing transnational intellectual and cultural history in which they interacted that interested us from the outset. As a nuanced phenomenon, the history of Black-Japanese relations certainly has been difficult to uncover.