Panel 2: Migration and Mobility

Wei-ti Chen is a PhD doctoral candidate at University of Chicago. As a historian of modern Japan and East Asia, she uses medicine as a lens to analyze the interplay among society, state, and transnational forces including imperialism, modernization, globalization, and migration. Her current project, tentatively entitled Cosmopolitan Medicine Nationalized: the Making of Japanese State-Empire and Overseas Physicians in a Global World, examines the movement of Japanese physicians across Asia and the globe in the first half of the twentieth century. By discussing how doctors migrated to enhance their opportunities for career success, this study investigates the historical emergence of a cosmopolitan medical profession in Japan, its colonies, and other countries. How did the globalization of the medical profession impact and challenge the formation of Japan’s modern state and colonial empire?

Advancing with the Empire: Taiwanese Migrant Doctors under the Japanese Imperialism and Its Medical Profession

Eric Han is associate professor of history at the College of William & Mary. He received his Ph.D. in Japanese History from Columbia University in 2009, and specializes in the histories of China and Japan from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. His work engages with Sino-Japanese relations, Chinese and Japanese nationalisms, minorities in Japan, and the Chinese diaspora. He is author of Rise of a Japanese Chinatown: Yokohama 1894–1972 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2014), and several articles, including: “‘Tragedy in China-Town’: Murder, Civilization, and the End of Extraterritoriality,” Journal of Japanese Studies (summer 2013); and “A True Sino-Japanese Amity? Collaborationism and the Yokohama Chinese (1937–1945),” Journal of Asian Studies (August 2013).

The Instrumentalities of Local Citizenship: the Case of the Yokohama Chinese

Sidney Lu is a historian of modern Japan, with research interests in the areas of colonialism, diaspora, gender, and transnational flow of people, materials and ideas. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Pennsylvania and is currently an assistant professor of history at Michigan State University. He is completing on a book manuscript, titled Diasporic Colonialism: Japan’s Trans-Pacific Migrations and the Making of the Japanese Empire, 1869-1964. It examines Japan’s migration-based colonialism through the nexus between Japanese migration to North and South America and Japan’s colonial expansion in Asia. His publications include “Good Women For Empire: Educating the overseas female emigrants in Imperial Japan, 1900-1924,” Journal of Global History 8: 3 (Nov. 2013), “The Shame of Empire: Japanese Overseas Prostitutes and Prostitution Abolition in Modern Japan, 1880s-1920s,” (positions: asia critique, forthcoming).

Expansive Malthusianism: Japanese Colonial migration to Hokkaido and the origin of Japanese American migration, 1869-1889

Lori Watt is Director of the Program in East Asian Studies and Associate Professor of History and International & Area Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.  She is the author of When Empire Comes Home:  Repatriation and Reintegration in Postwar Japan (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Asia Center, 2009).  She is currently working on a manuscript called The Allies and the Decolonization of the Japanese Empire, which explores the intersection of decolonization, foreign occupation, and population transfers throughout the Asia-Pacific region after World War Two.

The 'Disposition of Japanese Civilians':  American Wartime Planning for the Colonial Japanese

Nobuko Toyosawa is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. She is a cultural and intellectual historian of early modern and modern Japan.  Her main research interests are in the geographic imagination of the modern nation, the history of proto-national and national identity from the 17th through the 20th centuries, and the relationship between nationalism and aesthetics.

Louise Young is a Professor of History at UW-Madison and is affiliated with the Center for East Asian Studies, where she served as director from 2005-2008.  As an historian of modern Japan, her successive major research projects have focused on the relationship between culture and empire, urban modernism between the wars, and most recently, the history of sociology and the idea of class. She is the author of Japan's Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (University of California Press, 1998) and Beyond the Metropolis: Second Cities and Modern Life in Interwar Japan (University of California Press, 2013).  Of particular relevance to this workshop are two recent essays:

  • “Japan’s New International History,” introduction to AHR Forum: Early-Twentieth Century Japan in a Global Context, American Historical Review, 119, 4 (October 2014): 1117-1129.
  • “Rethinking Empire in the Twentieth Century: Lessons from Imperial and Post-imperial Japan,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Ends of Empire, eds., Andrew Thompson and Martin Thomas (forthcoming 2016, Oxford University Press)