History and the Bonin (Ogasawara) Islands: connecting Japan and the Pacific

At the end of the nineteenth century one of Japan’s earliest encounters of the outside world was with a culturally, linguistically and ethnically diverse community living on the eastern fringe of the country’s expanding borders. When Japanese authorities encountered Europeans, Americans, British and Pacific Islanders inhabiting space that Japan had earmarked as its own it not only tested the Meiji government’s interpretations of race and ethnicity, it also challenged the definition of Japanese legal identity that had to be determined within a mostly Western bureaucratic and legal context. This little-known history reveals much about early notions of race and ethnicity in Japan and the process through which the initial concepts of Japanese legal status were conceived and tested. This history also reveals the path by which Japan gained a sovereign presence in the Pacific region that it still maintains to this day.