The study of Japanese immigrants and their descendants has long been important to the historiography of Latin American studies as produced both inside and outside Latin America. In addition, the hagiographic production emanating from intellectuals linked to the national/diasporic communities has been extensive. This quantity of scholarly and semischolarly work, no doubt, is a result of the large numbers of Nikkei in Brazil, Peru, and Bolivia and their prominence in business, intellectual, agricultural, and artistic spheres. Indeed, even in countries with smaller Nikkei populations—Paraguay and Argentina, for example—community scholars and researchers on Latin America have long produced fascinating work.

The traditional historiography on immigrants and their Nikkei children flowing out of Japanese studies has taken a different path from that from and about Latin America. Scholars of emigration have tended to minimize movements to Latin America within what appears to be a hierarchy that has placed Asian and North American migration in positions of prominence. Furthermore, scholars of Japan often ignored the descendents of immigrants, implying that their experiences did not apply to “Japanese” studies. These presumptions began to change about twenty years ago, for two reasons. First, as research on Japan became decentered within a reconfigured Asian studies, scholars began to look at Japanese studies in novel ways that included the embrace of new theories of diasporas and transnationalisms. Second, with the change in Japanese labor laws in 1990, significant numbers of Latin American nikkei began to legally migrate to Japan with work visas. Suddenly, Nikkei could not simply be ignored as part of an imagined and faraway transnational Japanese diaspora. Rather, relations with Nikkei, either in person or through the press, became part of the day-to-day experiences of Japanese in many cities.

The two volumes under consideration represent important contemporary scholarly trends and are useful in multiple ways. For those engaged primarily in Japanese and/or Asian studies, the volumes bring information that is not widely disseminated. In addition, the volumes bring to the English-speaking audience the work of authors (especially in the case of the Japanese Diasporas) who may not be well-known among Asianists. Finally, both books fill gaps in the current historiography, a particularly useful aspect of Exporting Japan.

Exporting Japan is primarily an analysis of Japanese government documents combined with a synthesis of a wide range of scholarship in English and Japanese on emigration policy. Toake Endoh's major hypothesis, that the Japanese government used emigration policy simultaneously as a means of social control and as part of a broader imperialist project, is not a new one, but the book's strength is that it makes the argument in a coherent, chronological way. Endoh is to be particularly commended for his careful use of Japanese-language primary sources from a range of different government entities. Unfortunately, Endoh's bibliography shows only one book in Spanish (and none in Portuguese), and even the English-language work on Latin America is somewhat dated. This is a shame, as Exporting Japan, inadvertently I think, suggests that emigration policy was delinked from immigration policy in receiving nations when give and take was the rule. Nowhere is this clearer than in the Brazilian case, where recent scholarship in Portuguese and English shows how de facto immigration policy toward Japanese citizens was quite at odds with what the written legislation would suggest. Endoh's only modest engagement with the broader scholarship leads him to accept traditional victimization discourses that recent scholarship has deconstructed in very nuanced ways. These critiques aside, Exporting Japan will be important for both Asianists and Latin Americanists looking to understand the de jure policy side of Japanese emigration.

Nobuko Adachi's edited volume takes a very different approach from Endoh's to the relationship between Latin America and Japan. Japanese Diasporas tackles the creation of Nikkei ethnicity through engagement with the growing field of diaspora studies. Indeed, Adachi's introduction to the volume will be of significant theoretical use to all in diaspora studies for its willingness to engage with culture, policy, regional difference, and generation. The volume is organized chronologically and will be an excellent classroom tool for those looking to analyze Japanese immigrants and their descendants broadly. Adachi is to be especially commended for putting together some of the superstars of Asian American studies (Roger Daniels, Daniel Masterson, Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, Akemi Kikumura-Yano, and Gary Okihiro) with a group of more recently trained scholars whose interests cross traditional boundaries of race, class, and gender. Furthermore, Adachi's willingness to place the experiences of Nikkei in Asia, North America, and South America in conversation is critical at a moment when diaspora studies has become highly centered and hierarchical, often with the United Sates assumed as the model against which all other diasporic nations must compare. I found Shun Ohno's chapter on intermarriage among Issei and mestizo Nissei in the Philippines, and Leng Leng Thang, Miho Goda, and Elizabeth MacLachlan's chapter on Japanese women working in Singapore, to be particularly informative.

In her introduction, Nobuko Adachi describes diaspora as “something vigorous, kinetic and divergent” (p. 22). Toake Endoh agrees, noting that the Japanese state's domination of “transnational relations with its co-ethnic Diaspora [has changed as] the Nikkei Diaspora has come to the fore and reconfigured the relationship” (p. 200). In early 2009, the Japanese government began offering payoffs to Latin American Nikkei and their families who were willing to return to their homelands, with an initial promise (later modified) never to return in search of work. The unwillingness of the overwhelming majority of Nikkei to accept the offer suggests that scholarship on the Japanese diaspora is about to move in exciting new directions.