Crafting Citizens Beyond Borders: Japanese Education on the Frontier of Japan’s Empire in the Americas

Abstract

To be nikkei means to be of Japanese descent living abroad. The goal of my dissertation is to investigate how the 1930s Japanese Empire interacted with overseas Japanese communities and developed nikkei citizenship across the Pacific. Japanese education codified a set of civic and moral responsibilities defined in conjunction with Japan, creating competing notions of civic belonging to the Japanese Empire. Overseas communities also used education to position their communities within these competing demands, balancing Japanese influence with the demands of their countries of residence. By examining a range of educational archival materials within Japan and beyond, I uncover a new dimension to the global Japanese Empire: one fuelled by education and citizenship. Japan, over the first half of the 20th century, embodied an expansionist empire that aimed to increase its standing in the global world order. Recent scholarship has advanced the idea of Japan’s “borderless empire”, part of which was encouraged by the transnational education of nisei (second generation migrants) in the United States. My research expands on Japanese transnational imperial history to showcase a global network of education, through which Japan fostered simultaneous civic and moral connection to Japan in different territories around the world. From Hawaiʻi to Peru and beyond, ideas of nikkei citizenship were developed through a co-productive process that reconciled local, national, and Japanese influences. Japanese overseas communities constructed citizenship education in active dialogue with Japan, and in doing so, forged the components characteristic of a transnational nikkei citizenship that bound overseas communities to Japan and to each other - a citizenry that was not beholden to any one territorially bounded sphere, but existed across the Pacific World.