¹ Tsurumi Yūsuke, Taiwan jidai, 1898–1906, vol. 3 of Seiden Gotō Shinpei: ketteiban, rev. and annot. (Ikkai Tomoyoshi Fujiwara Shoten, 2005), 567. On the Japanese geographic term Nan'yō, see “Note to the Reader” in the Front Matter.

² Tonio Andrade, How Taiwan Became Chinese: Dutch, Spanish, and Han Colonization in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); Xing Hang, Conflict and Commerce in Maritime East Asia: The Zheng Family and the Shaping of the Modern World, c. 1620–1720 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016); John R. Shepherd, Statecraft and Political Economy on the Taiwan Frontier, 1600–1800 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993); Emma J. Teng, Taiwan's Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and Pictures, 1683–1895 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004).

³ Leonard H. D. Gordon, Confrontation over Taiwan: Nineteenth-Century China and the Powers (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), chaps. 2–3.

⁴ Japanese officials called Han Taiwanese subjects who lived in Taiwan “islanders” (J. hontōjin, C. bendaoren) or “Taiwanese” (J. Taiwanjin, C. Taiwanren). The English convention for Taiwan's indigenous peoples since the 1990s has been “Indigeneous Taiwanese” (J. genjūmin, C. yuanzhumin). Paul D. Barclay, Outcasts of Empire: Japan's Rule on Taiwan's “Savage Border,” 1874–1945 (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017). On Austronesians as the island's first inhabitants and their common ancestry with indigenous peoples across Southeast Asia and the Pacific, see Peter Bellwood, “Formosan Prehistory and Austronesian Dispersal,” in Austronesian Taiwan: Linguistics, History, Ethnology, and Prehistory, ed. David Blundell (Taipei: SMC Publishing, 2001), 337–65.

⁵ Tay-sheng Wang, Legal Reform in Taiwan under Japanese Colonial Rule, 1895–1945: The Reception of Western Law (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000).

⁶ Kodama Gentarō, “Taiwan tōchi no kiō oyobi shōrai ni kansuru kakusho” (June 1899), reprinted in Tsurumi, Taiwan jidai, 493–506.

⁷ On the socioeconomic challenges that the Government-General faced during its first few years, see Reo Matsuzaki, Statebuilding by Imposition: Resistance and Control in Colonial Taiwan and the Philippines (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019), chap. 3.

⁸ On the conceptualization of gates as thresholds and liminal spaces that navigate power, see Daniel Jütte, The Strait Gate: Thresholds and Power in Western History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015).

⁹ On migratory ties between South China and Southeast Asia, see Huei-Ying Kuo, Networks beyond Empires: Chinese Business and Nationalism in the Hong Kong-Singapore Corridor, 1914–1941 (Leiden: Brill, 2014); Shelly Chan, Diaspora's Homeland: Modern China in the Age of Global Migration (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018); Soon Keong Ong, Coming Home to a Foreign Country: Xiamen and Returned Overseas Chinese, 1843–1938 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021); Melissa Macauley, Distant Shores: Colonial Encounters in China's Maritime Frontier (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021).

¹⁰ Recent studies on intra-imperial competition among Japanese officials in Korea, Manchuria, and Japan include Jun Uchida, Brokers of Empire: Japanese Settler Colonialism in Korea, 1876–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2011), 272–302; Erik Esselstrom, Crossing Empire's Edge: Foreign Ministry Police and Japanese Expansionism in Northeast Asia (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2009), chaps. 2–3; Emer O'Dwyer, Significant Soil: Settler Colonialism and Japan's Urban Empire in Manchuria (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2015), chaps. 2–3, 8; Joseph A. Seeley, “Liquid Geography: The Yalu River and the Boundaries of Empire in East Asia, 1894–1945” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 2019), chaps. 3–5; David Fedman, Seeds of Control: Japan's Empire of Forestry in Colonial Korea (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2020), chap. 5.

¹¹ Western powers obtained extraterritoriality in China with the unequal treaties in 1842. Pär Cassel, Grounds of Judgment: Extraterritoriality and Imperial Power in Nineteenth-Century China and Japan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

¹² Eileen P. Scully, Bargaining with the State from Afar: American Citizenship in Treaty Port China, 1844–1942 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); Robert A. Bickers, “Legal Fiction: Extraterritoriality as an Instrument of British Power in China in the ‘Long Nineteenth Century,‘” in The Long Nineteenth Century, vol. 2 of Empire in Asia: A New Global History, ed. Brian P. Farrell and Donna Brunero (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 53–80.

¹³ By “semi-colonial” China, I adopt Shu-mei Shih's definition of treaty port zones where foreign nationals enjoyed concessions and extraterritoriality. Shu-mei Shih, The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 30–32; Ruth Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Bryna Goodman and David S. G. Goodman, Twentieth-Century Colonialism and China: Localities, the Everyday and the World (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012).

¹⁴ Takahiro Yamamoto, “Balance of Favour: The Emergence of Territorial Boundaries Around Japan, 1861–1875” (PhD. diss., London School of Economics, 2015), chaps. 3–6; Wendy Matsumura, The Limits of Okinawa: Japanese Capitalism, Living Labor, and Theorizations of Community (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); David Chapman, “History and the Bonin (Ogasawara) Islands: Connecting Japan and the Pacific,” in Routledge Handbook of Race and Ethnicity in Asia, ed. Michael Weiner (London: Routledge, 2021), 381–92.

¹⁵ Robert Eskildsen, Transforming Empire in Japan and East Asia: The Taiwan Expedition and the Birth of Japanese Imperialism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), chaps. 3–6; Danny Orbach, Curse on This Country: The Rebellious Army of Imperial Japan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017), 38–53.

¹⁶ Peter Duus, The Abacus and the Sword: The Japanese Penetration of Korea, 1895–1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 13–24.

¹⁷ Gotō Ken'ichi, Kindai Nihon no ‘Nanshin’ to Okinawa (Iwanami Shoten, 2015), 13–22.

¹⁸ Gordon, Confrontation Over Taiwan, 24–37, 55–66.

¹⁹ Liang Hua-huang [Liang Huahuang], Taiwan zongdufu de “duian” zhengce yanjiu: Riju shidai TaiMin guanxi shi (Daoxiang, 2001), 29.

²⁰ Gordon, Confrontation Over Taiwan, 184–86.

²¹ Oguma Eiji, Nihonjin no kyōkai: Okinawa, Ainu, Taiwan, Chosen, shokuminchi shihai kara fukki undo made (Shin'yōsha, 1998), chaps. 1–4; cf. Alan S. Christy, “The Making of Imperial Subjects in Okinawa,” in Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia, ed. Tani Barlow (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 141–70.

²² Han Taiwanese were legally distinguished from the Japanese by separate regional family registration systems. Haruka Nomura, “Making the Japanese Empire: Nationality and Family Register in Taiwan, 1871–1899,” Japanese Studies 30, no. 1 (April 2010): 69–71.

²³ Tessa Morris-Suzuki, “Migrants, Subjects, Citizens: Comparative Perspectives on Nationality in the Prewar Japanese Empire,” Japan Focus 6, no. 8 (August 2008): 6; Michael Kim, “‘Sub-Nationality’ in the Japanese Empire: A Social History of the Koseki in Colonial Korea, 1910–45,” in Japan's Household Registration System and Citizenship: Koseki, Identification and Documentation, ed. David Chapman and Karl Jakob Krogness (New York: Routledge, 2014), 112.

²⁴ The Japanese placed upland indigenous Taiwanese in separate “Savage District Registers” (bansha daichō). Masataka Endō, State Construction of ‘Japaneseness’: The Household Registration System in Japan, trans. Barbara Hartley and ed. Miriam Riley (Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press, 2019), 142–43, 168; Barclay, Outcasts of Empire.

²⁵ Louise Young, Japan's Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Yoshihisa Tak Matsusaka, The Making of Japanese Manchuria, 1904–1932 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001); O'Dwyer, Significant Soil; Uchida, Brokers of Empire.

²⁶ Jun Uchida, “Island Nation to Oceanic Empire: A Vision of Japanese Expansion From the Periphery,” Journal of Japanese Studies 42, no. 1 (Winter 2016): 57–68, 81–89; J. Charles Schencking, “The Imperial Japanese Navy and the Constructed Consciousness of a South Seas Destiny, 1872–1921,” Modern Asian Studies 33, no. 4 (October 1999): 771–78; Mark R. Peattie, Nan'yō: The Rise and Fall of the Japanese in Micronesia, 1885–1945 (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1988); Paul Kreitman, Japan's Ocean Borderlands: Nature and Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

²⁷ On Pan-Asianism and Manchukuo, see Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003); Eri Hotta, Pan-Asianism and Japan's War 1931–1945 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). On occupied North and Central China, see Kelly A. Hammond, China's Muslims and Japan's Empire: Centering Islam in World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020); Timothy Brook, Collaboration: Japanese Agents and Local Elites in Wartime China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Christian Henriot and Wen-Hsin Yeh, ed., In the Shadow of the Rising Sun: Shanghai Under Japanese Occupation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). On Japan's occupation of Southeast Asia, see Jeremy A. Yellen, The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: When Total Empire Met Total War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019); Ethan Mark, Japan's Occupation of Java in the Second World War: A Transnational History (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018).

²⁸ Mark Peattie, introduction to The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895–1945, ed. Ramon H. Myers and Mark R. Peattie (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 16.

²⁹ In Taiwan under martial law (1947–87), the study of colonial Taiwan other than as a local Chinese case of “anti-Japanese resistance” was politically taboo. Asano Toyomi, “Historical Perceptions of Taiwan's Japan Era,” in Toward a History beyond Borders: Contentious Issues in Sino-Japanese Relations, ed. Daqing Yang, Jie Liu, Hiroshi Mitani, and Andrew Gordon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2012), 299–339; Wen-Hsin Yeh, “A Quiet Revolution: Oppositional Politics and the Writing of Taiwanese History,” in Mobile Horizons: Dynamics across the Taiwan Strait, ed. Wen-Hsin Yeh (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 2013), 259–86.

³⁰ Leo T. S. Ching, Becoming “Japanese”: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Faye Yuan Kleeman, Under an Imperial Sun: Japanese Colonial Literature of Taiwan and the South (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2003); Robert T. Tierney, Tropics of Savagery the Culture of Japanese Empire in Comparative Frame (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); Kate McDonald, Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017). On Taiwanese identity, see Ming-cheng M. Lo, Doctors within Borders: Profession, Ethnicity, and Modernity in Colonial Taiwan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Shih-jung Tzeng, From Hōnto Jin to Bensheng Ren: The Origin and Development of Taiwanese National Consciousness (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2009).

³¹ Sayaka Chatani, Nation-Empire: Ideology and Rural Youth Mobilization in Japan and Its Colonies (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018); Evan N. Dawley, Becoming Taiwanese: Ethnogenesis in a Colonial City, 1880s–1950s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2019); Kirsten L. Ziomek, Lost Histories: Recovering the Lives of Japan's Colonial Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2019); Barclay, Outcasts of Empire.

³² Hiroko Matsuda, Liminality of the Japanese Empire: Border Crossings From Okinawa to Colonial Taiwan (Honololu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2018); David R. Ambaras, Japan's Imperial Underworlds: Intimate Encounters at the Borders of Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Eiichiro Azuma, In Search of Our Frontier: Japanese America and Settler Colonialism in the Construction of Japan's Borderless Empire (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019), chap. 6; Mariko Iijima, “Sugar Islands in the Pacific in the Early Twentieth Century: Taiwan as a Protégé of Hawai'i,” Historische Anthropologie 27, no. 3 (December 2019): 361–81.

³³ My work is indebted to pioneering scholarship by Nakamura Takashi, Liang Hua-huang, Kondō Masami, Chung Shu-ming, Adam Schneider, Lin Man-houng, and Gotō Ken'ichi, who were among the first to trace Japanese and Taiwanese networks between Taiwan, China, and Southeast Asia. See notes and bibliography for their references.

³⁴ Man-houng Lin, “The Ryukyus and Taiwan in the East Asian Seas: A Longue Duree Perspective,” Asia-Pacific Journal 4, no. 10 (October 2006): 2–3.

³⁵ Gotō, Kindai Nihon no ‘Nanshin’ to Okinawa, 21, 76.

³⁶ Hundreds of thousands of Okinawans migrated to other parts of the Japanese metropole, Taiwan, Micronesia, the Philippines, Hawai'i, and Latin America for better socioeconomic opportunities. Those in Taiwan even enjoyed legal status as Japanese colonialists. Matsuda, Liminality of the Japanese Empire; Ronald Y. Nakasone, ed. Okinawan Diaspora (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2002).

³⁷ Sidney Xu Lu, The Making of Japanese Settler Colonialism: Malthusianism and Trans-Pacific Migration, 1868–1961 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), chap. 1; Ziomek, Lost Histories, chaps. 1–2, 4, 7; Steven Ivings, “Colonial Settlement and Migratory Labour in Karafuto 1905–1941” (PhD diss., London School of Economics, 2014).

³⁸ On intra-colonial relations between Taiwan and Micronesia, see Yamada Atsushi, “Shokuminchi Taiwan kara i'nin tōchi Nan'yō Guntō e: nanshin kōzō no kyojitsu,” in Nan'yō Guntō to teikoku, kokusai chitsujo, ed. Asano Toyomi (Jigakusha Shuppan, 2007), 143–63.

³⁹ Edward I-te Chen, “The Attempt to Integrate the Empire: Legal Perspectives,” in The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895–1945, ed. Ramon H. Myers and Mark R. Peattie (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 242–46, 262–66.

⁴⁰ Peattie, Nan'yō, chap. 8. Because Micronesia was not a formal colony, Micronesian residents never obtained Japanese nationality. Thus unlike the Han Taiwanese, they did not experience overseas mobility or second-class imperialist status until the Asia-Pacific War, when thousands were enlisted as military assistants in Pacific islands taken from the United States. The wartime overseas deployment of Micronesians was more analogous to that of the indigenous Taiwanese. Keith Camacho, Cultures of Commemoration: The Politics of War, Memory, and History in the Mariana Islands (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2011); Lin Poyer, Suzanne Falgout, and Laurence Marshall Carucci, The Typhoon of War: Micronesian Experiences of the Pacific War (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2001).

⁴¹ Scholars like Jun Uchida have called colonial Korea a Japanese “gateway” to the Chinese continent. Uchida, Brokers of Empire, chap. 7.

⁴² Alyssa M. Park, Sovereignty Experiments: Korean Migrants and the Building of Borders in Northeast Asia, 1860–1945 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019), chaps. 1–3; Nianshen Song, Making Borders in Modern East Asia: The Tumen River Demarcation, 1881–1919 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), chaps. 1–4.

⁴³ Esselstrom, Crossing Empire's Edge, chaps. 2–4; Hyun Ok Park, Two Dreams in One Bed: Empire, Social Life, and the Origins of the North Korean Revolution in Manchuria (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), chaps. 1–3; Song, Making Borders, chaps. 4–6.

⁴⁴ The Taiwan Government-General was monitored by the Home Ministry but the Korea Government-General was only supervised by the Emperor. While the Korean governor-general required the rank of general or admiral, his counterpart in Taiwan could be a lieutenant general or vice-admiral. Korea also had over twice the number of officials as Taiwan (in 1926, for example, there were 28,657 officials in Korea compared to 11,873 in Taiwan, 3,537 in South Manchuria, 969 in Karafuto, and 288 in Micronesia). Chen, “Attempt to Integrate the Empire,” 262–66; Okamoto Makiko, Shokuminchi kanryō no seijishi: Chōsen, Taiwan sōtokufu to Teikoku Nihon (Sangensha, 2008), 43, 88–96.

⁴⁵ O'Dwyer, Significant Soil; Esselstrom, Crossing Empire's Edge.

⁴⁶ Thomas R. Metcalf, Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Sugata A. Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).

⁴⁷ Mark R. Peattie, “Japanese Attitudes Toward Colonialism, 1895–1945,” in The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895–1945, ed. Ramon H. Myers and Mark R. Peattie (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 96–104.

⁴⁸ Komagome Takeshi, Shokuminchi Teikoku Nihon no bunka tōgō (Iwanami Shoten, 1996); Ching, Becoming “Japanese.”

⁴⁹ Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 11–12.

⁵⁰ Robert Gerwarth and Erez Manela, ed., Empires At War: 1911–1923 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); David Killingray and David Omissi, ed., Guardians of Empire: The Armed Forces of the Colonial Powers c. 1700–1964 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000).

⁵¹ Takashi Fujitani, Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans during World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Brandon Palmer, Fighting for the Enemy: Koreans in Japan's War, 1937–1945 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013).

⁵² See, for example, Mary D. Lewis, Divided Rule: Sovereignty and Empire in French Tunisia, 1881–1938 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); Julia A. Clancy-Smith, Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration, C. 1800–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Sunil S. Amrith, Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).

⁵³ Claude Markovits, “Indian Communities in China, c. 1842–1949,” in New Frontiers: Imperialism's New Communities in East Asia, 1842–1953, ed. Robert A. Bickers and Christian Henriot (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 55–74.

⁵⁴ Yin Cao, From Policemen to Revolutionaries: A Sikh Diaspora in Global Shanghai, 1885–1945 (Leiden: Brill, 2018).

⁵⁵ Sarah A. Stein, “Protected Persons? The Baghdadi Jewish Diaspora, the British State, and the Persistence of Empire,” American Historical Review 116, no. 1 (February 2011): 80–108.

⁵⁶ Miriam Kingsberg, “Status and Smoke: Koreans in Japan's Opium Empire,” in Mobile Subjects: Boundaries and Identities in the Modern Korean Diaspora, ed. Wen-Hsin Yeh (Berkeley, CA: Institute of East Asian Studies, 2013), 53.

⁵⁷ Esselstrom, Crossing Empire's Edge, chaps. 3–4; Seeley, “Liquid Geography,” chap. 3.

⁵⁸ Ann Heylen, “Diaries and Oral Histories as Ego-Documents in the Representations of the Taiwanese Nation,” European Journal of East Asian Studies 19, no. 1 (2020): 48–73.