Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America

"Eiichiro Azuma’s book explores how before the Second World War, Japanese in the United States lived in a racialized in-between space, pulled by forces from both the United States and the empire of Japan. While most histories about Japanese migrants and Japanese Americans focus on Japanese internment, Between Two Empires explores the complicated loyalties, racial understandings, and national alliances that Japanese in the United States experienced. I consider it one of the most important histories of immigration because of Azuma’s chosen framework. Rather than focusing only on the pressures and experiences Japanese people faced in the United States, he also examines how they felt about and related to their homeland. Azuma’s work was one of the first to extend US migration history beyond the confines of the US nation-state. By being fluent in both Japanese and English and using archives located in both countries, Azuma is able to provide a compelling analysis of the lives of Japanese in the United States and to show how they were caught between two empires. Through this book Azuma modeled how to do this type of cross-border history that is associated with the transnational turn. Still, Azuma himself describes his work as “inter-National” rather than transnational so as not to lead readers to assume that Japanese immigrants were “free-floating cosmopolitans” who could “enjoy a postmodern condition above and beyond the hegemonic structures of state control.” The term “inter-National” Azuma argues, shows how interstitial structures affected the lives of immigrants."