This paper provides an analysis of the racial theories and conceptions prevailing in Japan during the Asia-Pacific War, a period spanning approximately 15 years from the Mukden Incident of 1931 until 1945, highlighting Japan’s imperialism in East Asia, Southeast Asia, and Oceania. The central theme explores how the Japanese Empire positioned itself in comparison to Western nations and other Asian peoples, leading to the creation of a racial hierarchy with the “Yamato race” at the pinnacle, while categorizing all other Asian ethnicities into different levels below. Particular emphasis is placed on the racial theories and hierarchies constructed around the region back then referred to as “South Sea Islands”, Nan’yō guntō.

Educational Colonialism in the Republic of the Marshall Islands is very real where Marshallese ways of knowing and being remain on the margins. Institutional racism and structural violence in the academy and most importantly within the Marshallese education system is mainly to blame. Indigenous Decolonization focusing on cultural continuity and language maintenance can be the solution for promoting a growth mindset by decolonizing the mind of the existing student populace. This paper argues in brief, the "importance of cultural maintenance and language maintenance by Marshallese and for Marshallese" via their own ways of doing things (e.g. JiTDam Kapeel) and how this is crucial and needs to be culturally prioritized for the overall well-being of Marshallese and the Marshall Islands in general.

This chapter explores the history and the present situation of educational policies in Japan, focusing on the case of schooling in the Ryūkyūs . I investigate the situation of indigenous education in the Ryūkyūs, comparing it with the case of the Ainu, the only nationally recognised indigenous group of Japan. I investigate (1) how the educational policies of Japan have dealt with education for its indigenous population historically and today, and (2) how indigenous groups pursue their indigenous identities in the current Japanese educational system? First, I discuss the lack of foundation for a multilingual and multicultural education system that would recognise the rights of indigenous peoples in Japan. Secondly, I demonstrate the reality of Japan as a multicultural, multilingual, and multi-ethnic society. Japan is often considered a culturally, linguistically, and ethnically homogeneous nation, partly because policy has rarely acknowledged the presence of indigenous peoples within the Japanese state. Educational policies reproducing the dominant ideology of a monolingual, monocultural, and monoethnic nation have played an important role in shaping the discourse of the largely invisible indigenous peoples in Japan. I conclude that educational policies in Japan need to provide choices and tolerance for indigenous peoples, for the sake of the indigenous peoples to have a real choice to be indigenous in Japan.

Further research on the operations of empire and on Indigenous histories offers the opportunity to examine how Indigenous communities in the Japanese Empire experienced competing currents of loyalty and identity during the Pacific War. This article examines how three Indigenous populations—Ainu, Indigenous Taiwanese and Micronesian Islanders—survived the ideological and social pressures of an empire at war and, despite the intense assimilationist demands of Japan’s kōminka program and traumatic wartime experiences, retained cultural identities sufficiently robust to allow expression at the end of the century in the form of action to maintain community lives apart from, while engaged with, the nation-state.

Under the policies of the United States, it will be very difficult to prohibit schools of this kind unless it were definitely proven that they were teaching treasonable things.—P. P. Claxton, U. S. Commissioner of EducationThis article critically examines how the 1919 Federal Survey of Education in Hawai'i, under the guise of a scientific study to guide educational reform, was used as the means to implement colonial policies over the territory's largest ethnic group, the Nikkei, people of Japanese ancestry. Furthermore, the survey was also used by various other political and religious parties and individuals to further their own objectives. Although there were many facets to the federal survey, this study focuses only on the debate surrounding Japanese language schools, the most sensational issue of the survey. The battle over the control of Japanese language schools among the white ruling class, educational authorities, and the Nikkei community in Hawai'i created the fo...

Naoto Sudo’ s Nanyo-Orientalism: Japanese Representations of the Pacific is a fascinating and informative addition to the field of colonial/postcolonial studies, providing a fresh perspective to theory that (in English-language terms, certainly) has all too often concentrated solely on British and American hegemonic relationships with the South Pacific region. The author clearly delineates the geographical region in question to assess Japan’s problematic relationship with the Pacific Islands in light of Edward Said’ s seminal work, Orientalism (1978 ). The Korean scholar, Kang Sang-jung’ s reinterpretation of Japanese Orientalism, in which Kang argues that Japanese textual interpretations of Micronesia reflect “ the simultaneous operation of double desires: the desire to avoid Western territorial ambition directed at Japan and the desire to use Orientalism’ s hegemonic power over other Asian/Pacific regions also forms a touchstone for Sudo’ s theoretical framework. The earlier literature of Nanyo-Orientalism , the author proposes, implies a dual moral imperative, encapsulating as it often does the propagandistic desire to “ save” indigenous culture from itself through tying it to Japanese protection, while also seeking to redress the perceived wrongs of Western imperialism and colonization, a “ primordial chaos [which must] be reclaimed from or liberated from Western rules by the Japanese” .

This book is a collection of interwoven historical narratives that present an intriguing and little known account of the Ogasawara (Bonin) archipelago and its inhabitants. The narratives begin in the seventeenth century and weave their way through various events connected to the ambitions, hopes and machinations of individuals, communities, and nations. At the center of these narratives are the Bonin Islanders, originally an eclectic mix of Pacific Islanders, Americans, British, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, and African settlers that first landed on the islands in 1830. The islands were British sovereign territory from 1827 to 1876, when the Japanese asserted possession of the islands based on a seventeenth century expedition and a myth of a samurai discoverer. As part of gaining sovereign control, the Japanese government made all island inhabitants register as Japanese subjects of the national family register. The islanders were not literate in Japanese and had little experience of Japanese culture and limited knowledge of Japanese society, but by 1881 all were forced or coerced into becoming Japanese subjects. By the 1940s the islands were embroiled in the Pacific War. All inhabitants were evacuated to the Japanese mainland until 1946 when only the descendants of the original settlers were allowed to return. In the postwar period the islands fell under U.S. Navy administration until they were reverted to full Japanese sovereignty in 1968. Many descendants of these original settlers still live on the islands with family names such as Washington, Gonzales, Gilley, Savory, and Webb. This book explores the social and cultural history of these islands and its inhabitants and provides a critical approach to understanding the many complex narratives that make up the Bonin story. Reviews: The story of the Bonin Islands is an extraordinary and little-known part of Japan's frontier history. A place of multiple cultural encounters, migrations, displacements, and occupations, the Bonins offer a vantage point for a fresh look at the shaping of modern Japan. David Chapman provides a superb historical analysis of the islands' history, while also recounting their fascinating and sometimes tragic history with the skills of a consummate storyteller. — Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Australian National University David Chapman narrates a fascinating chapter of global history through the story of the Bonin (Ogasawara) Islands, their people, and shifting regional power dynamics. He reveals a space and time of cosmopolitanism in the history of Japan and the Pacific. — Vera Mackie, University of Wollongong, author of Feminism in Modern Japan: Citizenship, Embodiment and Sexuality