This short essay aims to address the structural barriers that deter the study of “Global Asias”—or even something smaller in scale, the study of the “Pacific”—in the context of the institutional split between Asian studies and Asian American studies. Instead of treating Global Asias as a general subject of my discussion, I employ the Pacific as its component and as a reference point for my deliberations. The Pacific forms the very space where the rigidly separated fields of Asian studies and Asian American studies likely meet with overlapping research agendas. Therefore, problematizing our cartographical act relating to the Pacific makes it possible to illuminate the challenge of confronting, if not overcoming, the profound divides—not only institutional but also epistemological and political ones—between Asian studies and Asian American studies.

As a historian who completed a graduate program in modern Japanese history but adopted a professional identity as an expert on the Japanese American experience, I have been operating in the interstices of the two fields. From that vantage point, I would like to call into question some salient problems that scholars (especially historians) seldom seem to consider when they theorize or deliberate new approaches to studying the Pacific. Specifically, I would like to discuss how the institutions of Asian studies and Asian American studies have chopped up the Pacific into pieces—so much so that we may not see how much we are divided even when we adopt a transgeographic perspective or employ a common transregional reference term, like Global Asia.

The challenge of using such a transborder concept in our research is not the paradigm itself but the different and regimented ways in which scholars have been molded and then expected to act professionally according to the particular bordered areas in which we hold expertise. Put differently, it is necessary to consider how fundamentally warped our individual cartography of the Pacific is, because our education as academic scholars takes hold with a certain spatial specificity under the highly institutionalized structure of a national academe. That structure entails not only the geographically segmented system of graduate training but also the regimented processes of academic hiring, publishing, and tenure evaluation. In the end, whether as Asianists or Asian Americanists, we tend to be conditioned to envision a bounded space in a prescribed manner when we frame our own studies—even when we may wish to go “transregional” or “transborder.” Not only does the national academe compartmentalize the “world” and balkanize its histories into regional units, it also produces and disciplines professional scholars—certified with an academic degree and tenure—in accordance with the preexisting logic of spatial segmentation. (This essay discusses the situation of the US academe, but most of my analyses should apply to the inner workings of other national academes, too.)

To examine this critical but often-neglected problem, which may render a “Global Asia” difficult to serve as a common intellectual frame between Asian studies and Asian American studies, I would like to start with personal anecdotes. Having been recognized as a transnational historian of Japanese America with a focus on its relations with imperial Japan, I have participated in several workshops and special conferences on the histories of colonialism and migration, often organized under the banners of “(trans)Pacific.” I was usually fascinated by presentations on new research and theoretical formulations, as well as the ensuing conversations that involved Asianists and Asian Americanists. But I sometimes struggled to engage in dialogue, even though I certainly learned from others’ projects and perspectives. Given my eclectic background in the two fields, I was often led to feel that the two groups of historians were not talking about the same “Pacific”—whether as a physical space or a conceptual one—even though they employed that very term. I do not consider this to be anybody's fault. It mirrors the time-honored spatially segmented way of learning, which artificially breaks up the Pacific into self-contained subunits. These segmented spaces, I argue, should be referred to more precisely as the “Japanese Pacific” or the “American Pacific,” and I must add that their discontent—the “Indigenous Pacific”—is almost always absent. It is difficult to break out of these institutional and epistemological dividers and containers, and the state of myopia and blindness sustained by them, that prevail within Asian studies and Asian American studies.

Before discussing these containers in which we are trapped, it is important to consider what the “Pacific” means to scholars who aspire to bridge Asian studies and Asian American studies. That term can mean anything, but I see it primarily as a space where not only research subjects but also researchers themselves travel with all their intellectual baggage and limitations. The former includes the ideas, bodies, capital, goods, technologies, nation-states, and empires that are mobile, shifting, and mutable beyond the geographic boundaries of landmasses and sovereign political powers. In this case, the Pacific refers to the physical areas that our research subjects crisscross or inhabit as historical agents. We, historians, look at their transborder experiences, analyze their practices and thinking, and write about them in scholarly narratives. In a discussion about the Pacific, I suspect most historians would talk about this kind of space (which, of course, can still be multiple, depending on who is being studied and from what vantage point that space is being studied).

If we envision the Pacific as space that we may move across or inhabit as researchers, it requires more than standard scholarly research and theoretical endeavors. This is a fundamental problem relating to our cartographical act, in which we knowingly or unknowingly engage when we take up research or writing on the “Pacific” or other “Global Asias.” I argue that our mapping of that space tends to be very skewed, because we are all scholars with a specific training background and identity tied to an established regional field of academic study. As Asianists or Asian Americanists, I dare to argue, historians of different land areas are “conditioned” to envision a space of our research endeavors in particular prescribed ways. And the cartographic act of an oceanic Pacific by indigenous “islander” scholars, I might add, would be even more disjointed from the way that Asianists or Asian Americanists would envision their Pacifics from a “Rim” or land-based perspective. To explain the origins and consequences of this problem, it may be useful to weave my personal intellectual trajectory into an analysis of how the national academe continues to reify the spatially organized way of knowledge production.

During the mid-1990s, I was formally trained at a US institution as a historian of modern Japan, but I was interested in the experience of Japanese migrants and their US-born children, which I felt could not be enclosed within the conventional geographical and epistemological parameters of Japanese or US history. For this reason, my graduate coursework took place as much in the US history contingent as in its East Asian counterpart, despite my formal affiliation with the latter, because all courses on transpacific “immigration” and Asian “American” experience belonged to the US history curriculum. My research project, and my view of Japanese American history, reflected the way in which I constructed this eclectic scheme of graduate training, as I combined the endeavors to master the divided historiographies and differing methodologies of Japanese history and US history concurrently. My experience and trajectory present an anomaly, since the regimented process of graduate training usually disallows the kind of deviations that my example entails.

My research monographs were products of that unconventional training, allowing me to bring a divergent set of research problematiques from each field into conversation (Azuma Reference Azuma2005, Reference Azuma2019). It was necessary to examine how US and Japanese imperialisms formed an indispensable background for a story of an American ethnic minority that was also deeply entangled in Japan's colonial expansionism. I was also committed to engaging in an analysis and constructing a narrative without reducing Japanese Americans to the sole property of their “home” empire—the very Orientalist perspective that rationalized their race-based mass incarcerations during the Pacific War. Thus, while refusing a common Asian Americanist practice of avoiding examining the enduring ties that prewar Japanese America maintained to imperial Japan, my research monographs represent an earnest attempt to overcome deep-rooted academic Orientalism in Asian area studies (and conventional American studies) that used to conflate Asian Americans with foreign Asians. It is tempting to simply call my work a “transnational/transimperial” history of Japanese Americans. Yet, what is most important here is how my own experience crisscrossed the geographically detached fields of historical research in Japanese history and US history as much as my research subjects (Japanese immigrants) had traversed the two national imperial spaces over (parts of) the Pacific. And my institutional border-crossing involves not only an act of entangling the hitherto split historiographies of Japanese and Japanese American histories, but also that of combining the separately established historical archives for historians of East Asia and of Asian America.Footnote ¹

Indeed, the politics of archive making is not free from the prevailing logic of spatial compartmentalization and nationalized/regionalized scholarly production, and for this reason, I had to frequent the kinds of archives and libraries that historians of Japanese America usually would not consider visiting. By the same token, historians of Japan have rarely consulted primary source materials in Japanese American–related research collections, since it is likely that their graduate training (learning area-specific “research methodology”) would lead them to assume that Japanese American source materials are not relevant to their research agendas. My background in Japanese history and US history helped me imagine the possibilities of finding something relevant in archives that were separately developed for and consulted by historians of Japan and Japanese America.

The flip side is that, as I repeat here, many historians have not done it or recognized the need to do it, thus holding on to the conventional spatially organized way of research and writing—even when they might adopt the language of “transpacific.” Thus, if we are to interrogate the meaning of the “Pacific” or a “Global Asia” in the context of an attempt to bridge Asian studies and Asian American studies, we need to see it as more than a subject of academic research, an analytical or conceptual category, or a matter of transnational/regional framing. The Pacific is where different institutionalized fields of academic studies coexist but rarely intersect or interact, thus keeping it fundamentally a segmented space—that is, an assemblage of regionally defined academic turfs for experts in area studies/histories. Each geographic turf (tied to particular monopolized expertise and methodology) forms an institutional trap in which we are trained and conditioned to think in a spatially prescribed way from the moment we enter the field as graduate students.

In this regard, I am compelled to point out that the problem of the region-based institutional trap has already been tackled collaboratively by forward-looking contingents of Asian and other area studies fields, as exemplified by the Social Science Research Council's InterAsia Program. Starting in 2008, the project strives to promote intellectual and institutional border-crossing by way of international conferences and institutional partnerships, interdisciplinary research trainings, and a range of cross-field collaborations for new transregional perspectives and interpretive paradigms. As desirable as such an interinstitutional development is, however, I must also note that even the InterAsia Program is still lacking in terms of its reach for the Pacific, because it concentrates on the landmasses of Eurasia: “Central Asia, East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East (including Turkey), and Russia.”Footnote ² As a scholar with a research background in East Asia and North America, I am hard-pressed to justify my involvement in this program, which still serves as an institutional device to compartmentalize the Asia-Pacific and detach it from the Western Hemisphere and the ocean in between. Of course, Asian studies scholars alone should not be faulted for the lack of engagement with the greater Pacific; it takes two to tango, and I suspect the hegemonic position that Americanists occupy in the US academe (coupled with a general deficiency in command of foreign-language research) has to do with their frequent complacency with the status quo—that is, to stay comfortably within their Anglophone geographic turf.

By drawing on my own combined expertise and positionality in two segmented regional fields, I now intend to explicate how the Pacific has been split artificially and institutionally between modern Japanese history, a part of foreign area studies, and Japanese American history, a branch of US ethnic studies. While developing different sets of historiographies tied to nationalized spaces, these two fields of historical study are accomplices in dichotomizing the Pacific—more specifically, the Northern Pacific—into an East Asian/Japanese space (the western half) and a bounded US space (the eastern half), where the histories of imperial Japan and the US empire were set apart as the research domains of East Asianists and Americanists, respectively.

Since the institutionalization of Asian American studies, it has generally been accepted that the Asian American experience is an American story, not a part of Asian history. Spatially speaking, thus, orthodox narratives of Japanese Americans have been detached from the western half of the Pacific and fenced into the eastern half, plus Hawai‘i. Although there was, and still is, a political need for insisting on this nation/hemisphere-centered framing in light of prevailing academic Orientalism, virtually all practitioners of Asian American history are now molded as specialists in modern US history, whose graduate education stays within established norms of historiographical and methodological training in that field (which, unfortunately, offers virtually no opportunity for foreign-language acquisition for deep archival research). It is not surprising, then, that their research—including one claiming to be “transpacific”—is usually devoid of “Asia” or west of Hawai‘i (except for the colonial Philippines) in a substantive way, because it sits outside their monopolized signature space defined by US national/imperial sovereignty. And the opposite entails a near-complete neglect of Asian American history and the eastern half of the Pacific in the Asian studies circle.

This artificial split of Northern Pacific is not just a matter of geographic space, however. It has to do with the different sets of scholarly problematiques that Asianists and Asian Americanists have developed in their respective fields. For example, as historian Takashi Fujitani argues, the problem of race illuminates significant fault lines between institutions and practitioners of Asian history and Asian American history. On what he calls “the racialized split,” Fujitani (Reference Fujitani2001, 391) explains,

Indeed, these separate academic fields developed contrasting approaches and analytical styles around the problem of race. Traditionally, Asianists were not nearly as concerned about race as Asian Americanists, who at times seemed almost obsessed with it. And even though there are now many Asian Asianists without heightened race consciousness and white Asianists without Orientalist baggage, race remains only one of the many questions that Asianists tend to look at. Contrarily, Asian Americanists—still “overwhelmingly Asian American”—continue to hold race at the center of their inquiry and analysis, even when they couple it with gender, culture, class, and so on under a new theoretical banner of intersectionality. In this sense, the analytics of race accentuate the spatial division of the Pacific that has been sustained by the rift between area studies and ethnic studies. These gaps reveal more than differences in personal politics or individual perspective; they are institutionally prescribed and maintained.

Fujitani's observations about who has traditionally staffed the institutions of Asian studies and Asian American studies also elucidate the problem of particularized scholarly positionality that characterizes the skewed mode of operation in each field. I should not have to retell the entire history of Asian “area studies,” for others have done plenty (see, e.g., Dower Reference Dower and Dower1975; Gluck Reference Gluck, Molho and Wood1998; Harootunian Reference Harootunian and Harootunian2000). Here, it suffices to state that the field has been dominated by white male scholars since the early Cold War years, despite notable recent changes. The prevailing indifference to “race” cannot be divorced from this institutional legacy and prescribed identity, which have sustained Asian “area studies” and tended to color the scholarships that the field has produced. Hence, the following question is worth posing: Does Asian studies accommodate scholarly agendas and research themes that both address and stem from the particular positionality and concerns of Asian and other minoritized scholars?

Back in the 1990s, I personally experienced some pushbacks from, and mostly slights by, many Japan studies scholars about my interest in race and migration between Asia and America, but nowadays there seems to be more acceptance of these themes in the field. What about other themes? Insomuch as the choice of a research theme is often inseparable from the researcher's positionality in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, and so on, the legitimacy that a specific research theme may enjoy or lack has much to do with the question of who controls the institution. And in an equally self-reflexive way, I must say that the distinct “color” that the group of authors (including myself) for this Journal of Asian Studies forum share is telling of the particularized aspect of this political endeavor as much as it signifies an important change that certain kinds of practitioners can generate inside the institution of Asian studies, because they tend to be more keenly aware of the problems to raise and rectify.

Finally, returning to the theme of the institutional hurdles that distort our cartographic act and how lopsidedly we envision the Pacific, I would like to discuss the self-perpetuating process by which the spatially organized way of learning and thinking has been instilled in each and every scholar who holds a doctoral degree. The professionalized and standardized graduate training that aims to produce an expert on an area- or nation-specific history/theme constitutes only a part of the larger institutional machine that serves to compartmentalize the Pacific(s) and other Global Asias. Most university faculty jobs are still framed and advertised according to the conventional region- or nation-based logic of research and teaching. To get favorably evaluated as junior scholars, we are compelled to publish our works in journals that carry titles such as the Journal of Japanese Studies or the Journal of Asian American Studies, depending on our institutionalized scholarly identities and affiliations. We may have wonderful book manuscripts on Global Asias, but acquisition editors at academic presses have often divided the responsibilities for Asian studies and (Asian) American studies, thereby making the identities of our monographs largely predetermined in line with who handles our manuscripts and what book series our works come out of. In tenure and promotion processes, external reviewers are usually selected from a pool of “peers” in the same or adjacent regional fields, who generate their assessments of given scholarships in accordance with the norms and yardsticks specific to those fields.

The list goes on, but my point here is that these practices are not only embedded deeply but also reproduced constantly within the institution of Asian studies or that of Asian American studies. Cross-regional theoretical reframing and transnational research paradigms can take shape during these processes. Yet, such individual intellectual labors are no match for the self-regenerating capacity of these institutions to bring us back to the old mode of operation, which not only reinforces the divides between Asian studies and Asian American studies but also breaks up Global Asias again into conventional spatial units.

I can attest to the inner workings of these institutional hurdles with certainty, since I have personally experienced all the challenges I listed here. At my home institution, I was hired as an Asian American historian with an affiliation to an Asian American Studies Program that had little relationship with the Center for East Asian Studies. This job of mine—not I—defined my scholarly and institutional identity, requiring me to act as a member of the US history group in terms of my teaching and research activities. To solidify my standing as US historian in the department for tenure and other considerations, my senior colleague advised me to publish in the Journal of American History (which I did) and other US history-centered academic periodicals. And because my eclectic graduate training rendered my PhD dissertation very schizophrenic, with one side addressing “Japanese history” questions and the other speaking to “Japanese American history” problematiques, I had to cut out much of the former while overhauling the latter to turn it into a book manuscript congruent with the prescribed ideas that editors and readers likely held about a scholarship on Japanese Americans. Viewed from this experience, it is a welcome development to have a journal like Verge: Studies in Global Asias, in which authors are not compelled to conform to the conventional logic of regional compartmentalization when they engage in scholarly research and writing. The journal offers an alternative, more flexible “institutional” framework. There was nothing equivalent when I was untenured assistant professor, struggling with my own dubious scholarly identity, which was dictated wholly by my institutional affiliation.

Thus far, I have discussed how difficult it is for East Asianists and Asian Americanists to imagine and talk about the “Pacific” on similar terms or on common ground. And I have only been talking about the Northern Pacific. If we lower our gaze to the Central and Southern Pacific, it looks even more complicated and muddled. There are Southeast Asian studies, Pacific Islanders/Indigenous studies, Oceania studies, and Latin American studies, to name a few. These areas, too, comprise Global Asias, but they have their own ways of studying the respective spatial territories, as well as their own historiographies and methodologies. In this situation, it is hardly possible to argue that the Pacific (or a Global Asia) exists as an integrated space or a common analytical category/frame, for it is conceptualized, looked at, and studied differently. The Pacific essentially remains a plurality of carved-up “worlds,” as Matt Matsuda (Reference Matsuda2012) aptly characterizes it. We still seem to have difficulty figuring out how to tie the separate worlds together, except for examining interconnected networks, linkages, mobility, and so forth, that are still described as cutting across the prescribed bounds of the hitherto compartmentalized regional units, such as East Asia and North America. And it is important to note that the traditional bias toward the landed Rims continues to characterize most existing approaches to and thinking about the Pacifics and Global Asias, since even “global history” perspectives tend to treat an oceanic Pacific not as an inhabited indigenous space in and of itself, but as a site where mobile historical subjects simply pass through and/or the state of interconnectedness takes shape between the surrounding landed areas on the Rim.

I have provided a rather bleak characterization of “Global Asias” as a new scholarly development. Yet, insomuch as I have illuminated the institutional barriers that have been embedded in Asian studies (and Asian American studies), this JAS forum—and the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) Presidential Panel that preceded it—represents much-needed institutional change from within. These developments also show what forward-looking leadership can do to deal with the institutional hurdles. Over twenty years ago, when I was a graduate student with eclectic research interests that were not appreciated by most historians of Japan, the AAS conference was a somewhat uncomfortable space for me. But now I can find many colleagues with whom I can talk without having to justify why my research should matter to East Asianists. I hope this forum and other positive developments inside Asian studies will pave the way for more changes, even though the institutional boundaries between Asian studies and Asian American studies will, and perhaps should, continue to exist, as the United States and the rest of the world have again witnessed the perils of Orientalist thinking and racial othering that necessitated the region-specific division between the two institutions in US academe in the first place.