The Japanese Empire and Latin America (University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2023), coedited by Pedro Iacobelli and Sidney Lu, challenges the intellectual separation between Japanese colonial history in Asia and the experiences of Japanese migration to Latin America by putting together the cutting-edge research of several scholars from North America, Japan and Latin America.

What was the relationship between the Japanese empire and Latin America? How important is Latin America in our understanding of the history and legacy of the Japanese empire? These are the central questions this book aims to answer. This collaborative research delineates  multi-dimensional links between the rise and fall of the Japanese colonial empire in Asia and the Japanese presence in Latin America. From different perspectives,  it demonstrates that we cannot fully comprehend the Japanese empire, its colonial expansion, its domestic politics, as well as its transition to a nation state after World War II without taking its connections with Latin America seriously.

Conventionally, the experience of the Japanese empire in Asia and that of Japanese migration to Latin America have been studied in isolation with few connections with each other. Accordingly, these experiences often fell into contrasting narratives, with a tragedy of colonialism and imperialism on the one hand and a saga of migration and ethnic integration on the other. This book only challenges this intellectual separation but also places the Japanese migration to Latin America in the global history of modern settler colonialism, in which migration and colonial expansion entwined.

The printed and kindle editions of the book are available here.