Eiichiro Azuma is the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American History at the University of Pennsylvania. He specializes in Japanese American history; transpacific migration, diaspora, and settler colonialism; and inter-imperial relations between the United States and Japan. He is the author of the award-winning Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America (Oxford, 2005) and coeditor of three anthologies. His second monograph, In Search of Our Frontier: Japanese America and Settler Colonialism in the Construction of Japan’s Borderless Empire (California, 2019), received the 2020 John K. Fairbank Prize in East Asian History from the American Historical Association. In June 2026, Azuma's latest book, Brokering a Race War: Japanese Americans in the Pacific War and the Occupation of Japan, was published by Oxford University Press, and his microhistory titled Settling the California Delta: Rural Japanese America under Racial Segregation is forthcoming from Stanford University Press in January 2027.
Eiichiro Azuma
Wolf Humanities Center Penn Faculty Fellow
2026—2027 Forum on Practice
Eiichiro Azuma
Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American History
Settler Colonization on the Ground: Practicing Hawai‘i-Bred Knowledge in the Sugar and Coffee Economy of Pre-World War II Taiwan
This research project examines settler colonization in Taiwan’s eastern “frontier” during Japanese colonial rule (1895-1945) by looking at the practice of agricultural “experts” on the ground as well as the value of the knowledge that they acquired in and brought from Hawai‘i. Before settling in Taiwan, these experts had lived as immigrants across the Pacific. Once they were in Taiwan, these resettlers were hailed as teachers of industrial tropical farming despite their lack of formal education. Scholarly literature examines the roles of colonial elites, such as policymakers, investors, and corporate heads, without a full analysis of the everyday practice of grassroots settler colonialism carried out by those of humbler origin, like the transpacific resettlers. Moreover, the practice-based knowledge that these remigrants brought from Hawai‘i was deemed more suitable for Taiwan’s local environment and hence more desirable than the abstract classroom knowledge brought from non-tropical Japan and practiced by elite technocrats and educated settlers with no background in tropical farming. In addition to shedding light on the neglected theme of remigrant practice in Japan’s settler colonialism, this research project explores the meaning of practice-based knowledge (“vernacular knowledge”) relative to that of school-based knowledge (“institutionalized knowledge”), the latter being a focus of academic analysis and narrative in the existing scholarship.