Nation-Empire is Sayaka Chatani’s first monograph building upon her dissertation focused on “Japan’s assimilation policy in its colonies” and “how assimilation and nationalization occurred within Japan in the first place” (42). Chatani utilizes a series of case studies focused on rural youth and state sponsored programs which sought to cultivate a new generation across the empire―internally in Japan and externally in the colonies of Korea and Taiwan (Formosa). At its core, Nation-Empire argues that the “transformation of individuals to make them useful to the state…was a product of changing social relationships” pushing against the idea of a monolithic state organ and ideology operating on violence common in scholarship on Japanese fascism and instead offers a more passive social element which generated a constantly negotiated space between the internal and external peripheries of the Empire and the state’s vision (9,10).

Chatani bisects her work geographically into the domestic and foreign spheres with a brief chapter that examines the hybrid nature of Okinawa where assimilation policy mirrored a “same but different” schema. The first chapters focus on the state development of agrarian Japanese youth through the seinendan, youth groups akin to the global scouting movements, in Shida Village in the northern province of Miyagi. It was through these youth groups, Chatani argues, that the state fostered grassroots support and incorporated young adults, both male and female, into the developing national identity following a structure similar to Euguene Weber’s famous Peasants into Frenchmen thesis (49). 

On one hand, Chatani follows how the state progressively made these youth more legible and coherent through education programs and the kyoka (mobilization) campaigns which sought to provide social education and integrate them into the broader “Japanese” body (31). On the other, she explores how youth utilized the opportunities presented by these state organs to advance themselves through what she coins as the “social-mobility complex” which transformed youth from “perpetual farmers [to] success-oriented career seekers” and provided the tools to challenge old societal norms through the lens of nationalism (45-46). These societal changes to agrarian nationalism transformed and challenged prior landlord structures and opened pathways to a more “modern” Japanese country-side that often existed parallel to national goals generating “grassroots” support of the state (67). 

Simultaneously, the work focuses on colonial and post-colonial themes examining the Japanese Empire’s extension to its foreign subjects. As Chatani notes for “Meiji Japan, building a nation and building an empire meant essentially the same thing.” (4) Perhaps differently from its European and American counterparts, Japan primarily pursued assimilationist rather than associationist policies utilizing Pan-Asianist discourse of uniting the Asian race. However, the Japanese assimilationist policy met mixed success which Chatani explores via youth sentiments highlighting the way in which the imperial project failed to incorporate this body into the more granular “Yamato” race. 

Unlike the seinendan of the mainland, Chatani argues youth programs in the colonies lacked the same sort of “grassroots” veneer. There was a general incompatibility with pre-Japanese colonial youth groups creating redundancy. Further, seinendan tended to be viewed as a top-down colonial organ due to youth groups leaders being Japanese or Japanese educated adults. Yet, like many colonial projects, there was a level of success in integration. Colonial subjects created their own “social mobility” complex within the colonial structure, which opened advancement paths via social prestige by serving the state (either militarily or as a functionary) which in turn generated new economic pipelines and avenues of advancement out of the rural and into the state bureaucracy (207). 

Chatani’s final section offers direct comparatives as youth groups from across the empire intermingle, building upon colonial identity and its lasting memory. Chatani explores how colonial youth came to define “Japanese” identity and competed to become more “pure” Japanese in nature by becoming the model imperial citizen (223). It also showcases the underlying tensions between ethnic Japanese and their colonial subjects as racial superiority/inferiority played heavily into social dynamics and integration. 

Overall, Nation-Empire is a rare work which—like its material—is not confined to a geographical or temporal space but offers something for all scholars involving impressive transnational research. Chatani navigates historiography and archival documents across multiple languages covering a massive geographical space while simultaneously dipping into colonial narratives writ large. As someone whose research mostly intersects with the French Empire, I was intrigued by Japan’s own internal colonial aspect and the way metropolitan and colonial spheres served as a foil for each other in developing identity and ideology. Occasionally due to its incredible breadth, individual threads can become muddled or potentially overstated/understated. But this is more emblematic of the complexity of colonial spheres and less a critique of Chatani’s monumental work.