The Meiji era (1868–1912) marks the initial process of Japan's passage into modernity through Westernization, and its identification as a modern nation-state. As part of the process of identifying with European discourses, of altering its position in Asia, and of adopting Western models and values, Japan changed its political, social and cultural dispositions towards industrialization and capitalism, as well as towards nationalism and colonialism, cultural and artistic creation.

Over the course of modernization, and of adapting various Western discourses on science and culture, Japan accepted several new approaches, especially those setting Europe apart and above from the rest of the world. As a result, Japan saw the rise of racial discourses, which eventually contributed to the state's imperial expansion into Asia.

Japan's path to modernity was a twofold movement: on one hand, it was an internal struggle for association with Western civilizations and adoption of their modernity. On the other hand, Japan sought to conceptually distance itself from Asia, only to return a few decades later as a conquering and imperial power. In the Japanese imagination, European cultures served as a perfect model for its own reformation, yet, at the same time, Japan found itself on a pendulum movement between Europe and Asia. Japan distanced itself from what it perceived as a primitive, underdeveloped region and its cultures, while simultaneously seeking to include China and India in its vision of a unified Orient, a stronghold of Asian cultures positioned against the Occident. Ultimately, Japan's self-definition came about through the notion of Otherness: the concept of “Japan” was defined primarily against the background of European civilization, but also, against a range of other cultures, including China and the United States, as well as its own immediate past of Tokugawa Japan.

In the first stage, the primary task was to set Japanese culture apart, and essentialize “Asia” as its Other. The desire to associate Japan with the West then led to a sense of Japan's “inferiority” (especially in terms of technological and scientific achievements), at the same time that Japanese leaders adopted a Western position in claiming “superiority” over Asia. The double movement of association (with Europe) and disassociation (from Asia) produced a new subtext to the binary opposition between the advanced and sophisticated, versus the primitive and simple-minded. This double movement, much like the binary logic that drove Western colonialism, laid the foundations for racial ideologies and imperial practices in Hokkaidō and Ryūkyū, Korea and Taiwan, Manchuria and China, as well as the South-Pacific Islands and Southeast Asia.

The articles in this issue look at the roots of the discourses on race in the Meiji era, in tandem with the Japanese empire's development in the latter part of the 19th Century. These concepts of race and empire lay at the center of Japan's racist ideologies and imperialist fantasies, and now serve as the focus of our discussions.

The year 2022 marks the fiftieth anniversary of Okinawa's reversion to Japan. This article examines the Japan Civil Liberties Union's 1955 solidarity activism on occupied Okinawa, which generated Japanese civil society's first awakening to the “Okinawa problem.” The Asahi Shinbun's front-page article on the organization's publication “Human Rights Problems in Okinawa” and its follow-up coverage triggered public debate influencing Japan/U.S. official policies on Okinawa. Drawing on archival evidence, the article illuminates the contested nature of Japanese activism caught between Cold War Asia and decolonizing Asia. It argues that the 1955 activist movement shaped the subsequent trajectory of Japanese engagement with the “Okinawa problem.”

The nineteenth century saw the consolidation of a pattern: the high age of imperialism had divided the globe into two spheres, one for the colonizers and the other for the colonized. Various justifications were used to rationalize the colonial venture, one of these being the idea of racial superiority. Geopolitical and scientific developments gave birth to the idea of an unbreachable gulf between the superior “white race” and the inferior “colored races.” While circumstances in the colonies seemed to confirm that idea, Japan had, through a process of modernization, reached the civilizational level of the Western powers, thereby becoming a racial anomaly. To cope with this anomaly, the nations in the West had to devise a negotiation zone, in which the Japanese were temporarily granted privileged racial status without upsetting the racial status quo.

This essay takes a constructionist approach to Representation Studies, examining Fukuzawa Yukichi's elementary geography textbook Sekai kunizukushi (1869) and its hierarchical images of the West, juxtaposed against representations of Japan as framed by concepts of race and civilization. Furthermore, it compares these images to their “recycled” versions as constructed in the vast extra-textual apparatus of Fukuzawa Yukichi no Sekai kunizukushi de sekai wo manabu (2017), a recent translation of Fukuzawa's textbook into modern Japanese. The move to reintroduce older textbooks is here examined as an “imagebuilding” strategy, one that allows the (re-) construction of influential images in support of an ideological agenda.

Nominally fought over competing interests in Korea and Manchuria, the Russo-Japanese war had a significance that far outweighed its strategic reach. Central to its legacy was its outcome - the defeat of an old European Great Power by an aspiring non-European imperial state. This outcome inspired a great deal of racial and geostrategic introspection, whilst intensifying concerns in the West about ‘Yellow Peril’ that would one day overthrow European dominance. This article argues that the impact of the Russo-Japanese War on racial thinking in Japan was as significant as it was abroad, to the extent where the conflict was understood by key intellectuals as nothing short of a race war. These figures, including political philospher Katō Hiroyuki, historians Taguchi Ukichi and Asakawa Kan'ichi, and biologist Oka Asajirō, identified the outcome of the conflict as evidence that the established Eurocentric hierarchy of races was wrong. Japan's success, they argued, showed that the Japanese race (distinct, it should be noted, from other Asians) was at least on a par with their white rivals. Furthermore, some argued that it was in fact the Russians who should be excluded from the upper echelons of the racial hierarchy. Their work reveals the profound impact of the events of 1904-1905 on Japanese self-perception and confidence - and reveals the roots of racial attitudes that continue to bedevil the nation in the 21st century.

A prominent paradigm demonstrates many White Americans respond negatively to information on their declining population share. But this paradigm considers this “racial shift” in a single hierarchy-challenging context that produces similar status threat responses across conceptually distinct outcomes, undercutting the ability to both explain the causes of Whites’ social and political responses and advance theorizing about native majorities’ responses to demographic change. We test whether evidence for Whites’ responses to demographic change varies across three distinct hierarchy-challenging contexts: society at large, culture, and politics. We find little evidence any racial shift information instills status threat or otherwise changes attitudes or behavioral intentions, and do not replicate evidence for reactions diverging by left- versus right-wing political attachments. We conclude with what our well-powered (n = 2100) results suggest about a paradigm and intervention used prominently, with results cited frequently, to understand native majorities’ responses to demographic change and potential challenges to multiracial democracy.

This article examines Immanuel Kant’s evolving ideas on race and inheritance, focusing on his early lectures on physical geography. It highlights his engagement with contemporary debates on physiological defects and adaptation. The notes of Georg Hesse, a student of Kant, are analysed to show how Kant’s ideas matured before his first published essay on race in 1775. The article also contextualizes Kant’s relationship with the works of Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis and Henry Baker, showing how their studies on hereditary anomalies influenced Kant’s ideas. Finally, it sheds light on how Kant navigated the challenges of explaining race and inheritance, balancing environmental and hereditary factors in his conceptualization of human variation.

This article stresses the need for climate adaptation to better grasp the social dynamics of vulnerability to climate change. It argues that prevailing approaches in the UK have been inattentive to the social determinants of vulnerability for ethnic and racial minorities. The article begins by setting out the ways in which adaptation is understood and interpolated across multiple levels in the policy process, before discussing why prevailing approaches struggle to recognise that certain social dynamics render some populations more vulnerable to the ongoing effects of climate change. Following this, it will focus on domains of housing and health to reinscribe vulnerability in adaptation as a multidimensional concept, something that registers differentiated levels of structured adaptive capacity by focusing on racialised communities. It concludes by elaborating ways forward in climate adaptation planning and action.

How does social science insulate police from social movements’ demand for abolition? We explore this through a content analysis of policing social science research funded by Arnold Ventures, the MacArthur Foundation, and the National Institute of Justice published from 2011 to 2022 (N = 143 studies). Our mixed method content analysis revealed what we call “Academic Copaganda,” or studies contesting social movement claims by authors (1) masking their conflicts of interest, or (2) espousing police epistemology. Although Academic Copaganda comprised 20% of studies in the sample, they received most media mentions after the 2020 police killing of George Floyd. We conclude by discussing our contributions to legal scholarship on police legitimacy and empirical critical race theory.

Research on campaign finance suggests that Americans prefer candidates who are not funded by Political Action Committees (PACs). However, prior research has not examined how perceptions of a candidate who is PAC-funded vs. PAC-free might differ for racial minority and female candidates compared to White, male candidates. Using experimental vignettes, we test the causal impact of PAC funding, race, and gender on voter perceptions of the candidate. We find that refusing PAC funds, for example, is associated with appearing more ethical and more likely to work for voters’ interests over special interests, less corrupt, and more capable of winning elections. However, we show that race, more than gender, interacts with PAC funding to impact voter perceptions. We find that White female and male candidates benefit the most from PAC refusal. While Black female and male candidates receive little or no significant change in perceptions, Black PAC-funded candidates are perceived favorably compared to White PAC-funded candidates. Our results have implications for White and Black political candidates considering their funding strategies. Additionally, we contribute to existing literature by showing that refusing PAC funds status does not signal the same qualities for all candidates.