Collaborative Settler Colonialism: Japanese Migration to Brazil in the Age of Empires (University of California Press, 2025) examines the history of Japanese migration and community building in Brazil, which currently has the largest population of Japanese ancestry outside of Japan in the world. Through the lens of Japanese migration to Brazil, this book uses the concept of “collaborative settler colonialism” to capture the complex connections between migration and settler colonialism in the modern world. The concept refers to three levels of collaboration exemplified by the history of Japanese migration to Brazil in which migration and settler colonialism became intertwined.

At the first level, Japanese immigration to and community-building in Brazil revealed the oft-unintentional collaboration between the two settler colonial regimes in Japan and Brazil. Both strove to turn migrants into vanguards of colonial expansion and saw migration itself as a means of improving the racial stock. At the second level, I argue that Japanese immigrants served as collaborators of the Brazilian state in the latter’s efforts to colonize indigenous land. Existing literature has well documented the indisputable fact that Japanese immigrants were victims of Brazil’s ethnic nationalism. At the same time, however, Japanese immigrant laborers and farmers were also contributors to and beneficiaries of state-led indigenous dispossession in Brazil. At the third level, I examine the partnership between Japanese immigrants and Japanese colonialism by placing the origin, development, and transformation of Japanese communities in Brazil within the context of the fate of Japan’s colonial empire in Asia. I explain how Japanese colonial expansion had continuously impacted the identity-making process of the Japanese communities in Brazil. Japanese Brazilians, in turn, participated in Japan’s project of empire-making in Asia. Through analyses at these three levels, this book aims to provide new insights into our existing understanding of the Japanese empire, the history of immigration in Brazil and Latin America, and settler colonialism in the modern world.