The Meiji era (1868–1912) marks the initial process of Japan's passage into modernity through Westernization, and its identification as a modern nation-state. As part of the process of identifying with European discourses, of altering its position in Asia, and of adopting Western models and values, Japan changed its political, social and cultural dispositions towards industrialization and capitalism, as well as towards nationalism and colonialism, cultural and artistic creation.

Over the course of modernization, and of adapting various Western discourses on science and culture, Japan accepted several new approaches, especially those setting Europe apart and above from the rest of the world. As a result, Japan saw the rise of racial discourses, which eventually contributed to the state's imperial expansion into Asia.

Japan's path to modernity was a twofold movement: on one hand, it was an internal struggle for association with Western civilizations and adoption of their modernity. On the other hand, Japan sought to conceptually distance itself from Asia, only to return a few decades later as a conquering and imperial power. In the Japanese imagination, European cultures served as a perfect model for its own reformation, yet, at the same time, Japan found itself on a pendulum movement between Europe and Asia. Japan distanced itself from what it perceived as a primitive, underdeveloped region and its cultures, while simultaneously seeking to include China and India in its vision of a unified Orient, a stronghold of Asian cultures positioned against the Occident. Ultimately, Japan's self-definition came about through the notion of Otherness: the concept of “Japan” was defined primarily against the background of European civilization, but also, against a range of other cultures, including China and the United States, as well as its own immediate past of Tokugawa Japan.

In the first stage, the primary task was to set Japanese culture apart, and essentialize “Asia” as its Other. The desire to associate Japan with the West then led to a sense of Japan's “inferiority” (especially in terms of technological and scientific achievements), at the same time that Japanese leaders adopted a Western position in claiming “superiority” over Asia. The double movement of association (with Europe) and disassociation (from Asia) produced a new subtext to the binary opposition between the advanced and sophisticated, versus the primitive and simple-minded. This double movement, much like the binary logic that drove Western colonialism, laid the foundations for racial ideologies and imperial practices in Hokkaidō and Ryūkyū, Korea and Taiwan, Manchuria and China, as well as the South-Pacific Islands and Southeast Asia.

The articles in this issue look at the roots of the discourses on race in the Meiji era, in tandem with the Japanese empire's development in the latter part of the 19th Century. These concepts of race and empire lay at the center of Japan's racist ideologies and imperialist fantasies, and now serve as the focus of our discussions.

Shortly after the Meiji government assumed administrative responsibilities in 1868, the Iwakura Mission left Japan to circumvent the globe, searching for information on institutions that could centralize a divided archipelago. In so doing, it encountered a world embarking on a new phase of imperial expansion. While the majority of the Mission's participants returned with visions of a large, expansion-oriented Japan, others saw their country's future as a small, neutral state. Debates over the suitability of either vision continued throughout the Taisho period, especially as Japan incorporated territories at its peripheries, including Ezo (Hokkaidō), the Ryūkyū Islands (Okinawa), Taiwan, and Korea. This paper examines the impact of the Mission participants' perspectives, which were informed by their first- and second-hand experience of American and European amalgamation of peoples of diverse cultural, ethnic, and racial origins. How did the participants' experiences influence their views on Japan's future as an expansionist state? What did their experiences teach them about the assimilation of peoples of diverse backgrounds? This paper identifies the legacy of these debates as extending to the present, where Japan seeks to rescind postwar restrictions against extending military powers beyond its borders.

Japan's attitude towards Okinawa during the Meiji and Taishō periods defied concrete definition. Although nominally a prefecture, Okinawa retained a semi-colonial status for two decades after its annexation in 1879. Despite the fact that Okinawan people accepted Japanese rule with little resistance, which ultimately turned into active support for the assimilation policy, Japanese policy makers never lost their distrust of Okinawan people. Similarly, Japanese society did not fully embrace them, perceiving them as backward and inferior, and even questioning their Japanese-ness. The experience of discrimination strengthened the Okinawan people's motivation to fight for recognition as true Japanese citizens. Local intellectuals, such as historian Iha Fuyū, embarked on a mission to prove that Okinawa was and always had been Japanese.

From a certain perspective, Okinawan modern history falls into the paradigm of colonization or integration under the Japanese nation-state. The crucial clue to understanding Okinawa's case lies in the fact that it was a poor country, with little natural resources to offer. Unlike Hokkaido, there was no mass migration from mainland Japan to Okinawa. Unlike Taiwan and Korea, Okinawa did not attract skillful and ambitious administrators. Accordingly, Okinawa was turned neither into a model colony, nor a modern prefecture, but remained a forgotten and abandoned region.

The nineteenth century saw the consolidation of a pattern: the high age of imperialism had divided the globe into two spheres, one for the colonizers and the other for the colonized. Various justifications were used to rationalize the colonial venture, one of these being the idea of racial superiority. Geopolitical and scientific developments gave birth to the idea of an unbreachable gulf between the superior “white race” and the inferior “colored races.” While circumstances in the colonies seemed to confirm that idea, Japan had, through a process of modernization, reached the civilizational level of the Western powers, thereby becoming a racial anomaly. To cope with this anomaly, the nations in the West had to devise a negotiation zone, in which the Japanese were temporarily granted privileged racial status without upsetting the racial status quo.

This essay takes a constructionist approach to Representation Studies, examining Fukuzawa Yukichi's elementary geography textbook Sekai kunizukushi (1869) and its hierarchical images of the West, juxtaposed against representations of Japan as framed by concepts of race and civilization. Furthermore, it compares these images to their “recycled” versions as constructed in the vast extra-textual apparatus of Fukuzawa Yukichi no Sekai kunizukushi de sekai wo manabu (2017), a recent translation of Fukuzawa's textbook into modern Japanese. The move to reintroduce older textbooks is here examined as an “imagebuilding” strategy, one that allows the (re-) construction of influential images in support of an ideological agenda.

This article examines the role of forced labour within the context of Ezo/Hokkaidō's colonization. I draw attention to how in this process, different groups of subaltern people – the indigenous Ainu, political convicts, indentured labourers and Korean workers – contributed to the making of imperial Japan's first colony and the building of the modern Japanese nation state. Yet, even with their shared conditions of working under a Japanese ruling class, these subaltern labourers were not united. My article highlights how their experiences were instead, largely shaped along ethnic, gendered and generational lines.