This book tells the story of Hawai‘i's role in the emergence of Japanese cultural and political internationalism during the interwar period. Following World War I, Japan became an important global power and Hawai‘i Japanese represented its largest and most significant emigrant group. During the 1920s and 1930s, Hawai‘i's Japanese American population provided Japan with a welcome opportunity to expand its international and intercultural contacts. This book explores U.S.–Japanese conflict and cooperation in Hawai‘i—the crossroads of relations between the two countries prior to the Pacific War. F ... More

This book tells the story of Hawai‘i's role in the emergence of Japanese cultural and political internationalism during the interwar period. Following World War I, Japan became an important global power and Hawai‘i Japanese represented its largest and most significant emigrant group. During the 1920s and 1930s, Hawai‘i's Japanese American population provided Japan with a welcome opportunity to expand its international and intercultural contacts. This book explores U.S.–Japanese conflict and cooperation in Hawai‘i—the crossroads of relations between the two countries prior to the Pacific War. From the 1880s to 1924, 180,000 Japanese emigrants arrived in the United States. A little less than half of those original arrivals settled in Hawai‘i; by 1900 they constituted the largest ethnic group in the Islands. Even after its withdrawal from the League of Nations in 1933, Japan viewed Hawai‘i as a largely sympathetic and supportive ally. Through its influential international conferences, Hawai‘i's Institute of Pacific Relations conducted a program that was arguably the only informal diplomatic channel of consequence left to Japan following its withdrawal from the League. The Islands represented Japan's best opportunity to explain itself to the United States. While hopes on both sides of the Pacific were shattered by the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japan–Hawai‘i connection underlying not a few of them remains important, informative, and above all compelling.