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

Histories of remote islands around Japan are usually told through the prism of territorial disputes. 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 their status with minimal costs rather than fighting a territorial scramble. 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.

Based on multiarchival, multilingual research, Demarcating Japan argues that the transformation of border islands should be understood in as an interconnected process, where inter-local referencing played a key role in the outcome: Japan's geographical expansion in the face of domineering Extra-Asian empires.