About the Book : Demarcating Japan : Imperialism, Islanders, and Mobility,
18551884
Histories of remote islands around Japan are usually told through the prism of
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 their status with minimal costs rather than fighting a
territorial scramble. Based on multiarchival, multilingual research, Demarcating
Japan argues that the transformation of border islands