This book tackles the question of border control in and around imperial Japan in the first half of the twentieth century, with a specific focus on its documentation regime. It explores the institutional development, media and literary discourses, and on[1]the-ground practices of documentary identification in the Japanese empire and the places visited by its subjects. The contributing authors, covering such regions as Korea, Manchuria, Taiwan, Siberia, Australia, and the United States, place the question of individual identity in the eyes of the respective governments in dialogue with the global developments of the identification and mobility control practices. The chapters suggest the importance of focusing more than previously on the narrative of individual identification, not as a tool for creating nation states but as a tool for generating, strengthening, and maintaining asymmetrical relationships between people of different socioeconomic backgrounds who moved in and out of empires. This book joins the effort in the recent scholarship in migration history to highlight experiences of migrants beyond the transatlantic world, and that in East Asian history to investigate the space and connections beyond the boundaries of the nation states. By bringing together the analyses on the trans-Pacific mobility and Japan's imperial expansion and its aftermath in East Asia, it shows a complex interplay between state power and moving individuals, two forces whose relationships went far beyond simple competition.

Histories of remote islands around Japan are usually told through the prism of territorial disputes. In contrast, Takahiro Yamamoto contends that the transformation of the islands from ambiguous border zones to a territorialized space emerged out of multilateral power relations. Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands, Tsushima, the Bonin Islands, and the Ryukyu Islands became the subject of inter-imperial negotiations during the formative years of modern Japan as empires nudged each other to secure their status with minimal costs rather than fighting a territorial scramble. Based on multiarchival, multilingual research, Demarcating Japan argues that the transformation of border islands should be understood as an interconnected process, where inter-local referencing played a key role in the outcome: Japan’s geographical expansion in the face of domineering Extra-Asian empires. Underneath this multilateral process were the connections forged by individuals. Translators, doctors, traffickers, castaways, and indigenous hunters crisscrossed border regions and enacted violence, exchanged knowledge, and forged friendships. Although their motivations were eclectic and their interactions transcended national borders, the linkages they created were essential in driving territorialization forward. Demarcating Japan demonstrates the crucial role of nonstate actors in formulating a territory.