Book review: Demarcating Japan: imperialism, islanders, and mobility, 1855-1884 by Takahiro Yamamoto. - Harvard East Asian Monographs 460. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2023. ISBN 9780674291386.

Few states seem as naturally legitimized as island nations, yet their boundaries are by no means more historically determined than those of political entities on the continent. Takahiro Yamamoto’s Demarcating Japan asks how Japan’s borders solidified between the 1850s and the 1880s, a time in which the centuries-old and vaguely defined outskirts of Japan’s bakuhan-state were delineated from abutting imperial spheres of influence. By framing the demarcation of modern Japan as a trans-Meiji process, the book joins an emerging body of scholarship that questions prescriptive chronologies, and it redefines space and place of Japan’s modern reinventions. It is structured regionally rather than chronologically, consisting of five chapters centered on one region each, where the modalities of modern Japan’s territorial claims were laid out in competition against Russia, the Qing empire, Britain and the United States.