Demarcating Japan: Imperialism, Islanders, and Mobility, 1855-1884

Histories of remote islands around Japan are usually told through the prism of territorial disputes. In contrast, Takahiro Yamamoto contends that the transformation of the islands from ambiguous border zones to a territorialized space emerged out of multilateral power relations. Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands, Tsushima, the Bonin Islands, and the Ryukyu Islands became the subject of inter—imperial negotiations during the formative years of modern Japan as empires nudged each other to secure th...