The outpouring of Black Lives Matter activism in response to the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd in 2020 has sparked renewed efforts to interrogate and undo the entanglements and complicity of Asian Studies with racism and anti-Blackness, particularly in the realms of research, teaching, and hiring practices. Since then, institutional initiatives have been called for to support Black scholars of Asia and research projects that further examine the white supremacist structuring of certain taken-for-granted disciplinary theories and methodologies, so as to explore the historical and contemporary engagements and intimacies between people of Asian and African descent. Written in that moment of “racial reckoning,” Wendy Matsumura’s Waiting for the Cool Moon: Anti-Imperialist Struggles in the Heart of Japan’s Empire (Duke University Press, 2024) reflects the field’s now intensified commitment to antiracism and anticolonialism. But differing from and complementing much of this growing scholarship that focuses on Black-Asian exchanges and perceptions of Blackness in Asia, Matsumura’s book draws on theoretical and methodological insights from the Black radical intellectual tradition to illuminate Japanese imperialism’s physical, psychic, and epistemic violence and the liberatory imaginaries and practices of the subjugated. While not a book centrally about the Black experience, Waiting for the Cool Moon brings the seemingly discrete fields of Black Studies and Asian Studies together not only to explore the relationality among diverse oppressive and liberatory processes, especially Japanese imperialism’s entanglement with white supremacist and heteropatriarchal formations in the late-19th century and well into the 20th century, but also to interrogate the role of anti-Blackness in structuring how we conduct historical research and indeed how the world operates. One of Matsumura’s goals is to devise ethical, non-extractive approaches to uncovering histories of radicalism.
Waiting for the Cool Moon unfolds in four parts. The first part reveals how Japanese categories of work are steeped in conceptions of labor, value, and accumulation that emerged with the transatlantic slave trade and how they have functioned to erase and naturalize the brutality of Japan’s imperial domination. Particularly drawing inspiration from Sylvia Wynter’s pieza framework, which considers economic oppression as only one component of the order of colonial domination, Matsumura shows that the survival of “ideal” types of small farm households (or the establishment of small farmer protectionism) and the legitimation of state and capital in the metropolitan countryside required racialized and gendered dispossession and exploitation. She thereby points out the embeddedness of Japanese conquistador humanism in settler colonial logics and practices. As she analyzes in detail, one instrument devised to extract the labor of small farm households was the Farm Household Survey, which, by invisiblizing reproductive labor within agricultural families, naturalized and fueled racial, sexual, and colonial oppression throughout the Japanese empire.
The second part, composed of chapters 2 and 3, is in conversation with Black radical scholarship that examines the mutually constitutive relationship between race and class. While both burakumin (outcasts) and ippanmin (so-called ordinary people) suffered the effects of the state appropriation of communal lands, including the intensifying exploitation and devaluation of women’s reproductive labor within farm households, the latter survived by piggybacking on and consolidating a racialized consensus to exclude the latter from considerations of policies that could soften the burdens of such enclosures so as to further enrich themselves. Buraku communities’ response, however, went beyond demanding legal inclusion and pointed to the need for fundamental transformation that could undo both imperial racialization and economic oppression. In particular, Buraku women activists, not unlike Black leftist feminists, formulated a notion of “triple suffering” that linked heteropatriarchy, racial oppression, and capitalist dispossession that blurred the distinction between city and countryside and that envisioned solidarity and structural change as the path to collective liberation.
Chapters 4 and 5, forming the third part of the book, utilize Black feminist theories that denaturalize and destabilize the category of woman to show the indispensability of the exploitation and ungendering of colonized Korean agricultural workers and the importance of this disavowal to the emergence of new, rationalized small farms with reformed gender relations as the cornerstone of the revitalized Japanese imperial economy in the 1930s. The violence that Korean agriculturalists endured in the Japanese metropole, as Sylvia Wynter’s investigation of the pieza system in a different context suggests, did not only take the form of labor extraction and exploitation, but also occurred within the intimate domains of quotidian life, sometimes through concessions by Japanese colonialists that did not fundamentally alter the status quo. In the face of such colonial brutalities, Korean workers enacted practices of radical dependency and worldmaking. Uncovering these practices, as Black studies scholars have shown, requires the rethinking of the criteria for political struggle as part of a multi-sited struggle that sought to counter the extractive and dehumanizing mechanisms of empires at key nodes of their circuits of governance. As Matsumura shows in particular, Korean migrant women played a crucial role in creating and sustaining relations that, in turn, made radical acts of resistance and refusal possible.
In the last part of the book, Matsumura shifts attention to the enlistment of the labor and other resources of colonized Okinawans in the expansion and consolidation of Japanese imperialism in general through the 1930s, 1940s and beyond. One way colonial subjects from Okinawa became implicated in such oppressive projects was by working as phosphate miners in the Pacific Island, Banaba. While acknowledging Okinawan workers’ relative privileges compared to their indigenous and Pacific Islander counterparts on Banaba, Matsumura reveals the entrenchment of their colonized status and its consequent erasure in policy and scholarship and shows how seemingly disparate processes of settler colonial domination reinforced each other, particularly how the destruction of existing communal rituals and ceremonies became a common technology of dispossession within the Japanese empire. Like other Japanese colonial subjects, Okinawans did resist and attempted to bring forth a world otherwise. Following Dionne Brand’s The Blue Clerk, which points to the necessity and possibilities of withholding crucial information from colonial authorities and urges accepting opacity in the processes of archival data collection and historical knowledge production, Matsumura considers Okinawans engaged in a struggle over access to water, especially women activists, as secret-keepers. Matsumura can only describe the scope and context of these women’s persistent anticolonial and anticapitalist activism while she illumines as nurturers and protectors of radical relationalities crucial to the building of alternative futures.
Waiting for the Cool Moon provides a model of how to bring Black radical scholarship to productively and ethically bear on discussions on the mechanisms of Japanese imperial brutality, the major and minor rebellions waged by communities subjected to it in differing yet interconnected ways, and on the continued complicity of professional academic knowledge production with the historical and lingering imperatives of colonialism. Matsumura’s mobilization of Black studies perspectives is not only necessitated by the Japanese empire’s adaptation of white supremacist logics and practices and their longue durée as well as by its cooperation and competition with Euro-American powers. But, in addition, the fact that the modernity that Japan constructed and indeed the world within which it pursued geopolitical and economic prominence were both structured by the anti-Black and anti-Indigenous dominations Matsumura mobilizes means that bodies of scholarship that examine the entanglements of race, gender, class, sexuality, and nation, as well as the imbrication between the local and the global, between the colony and the metropole, and between the public and the private, and the imagining and making of alternative worlds by the most downtrodden can illuminate how the expansion of Japanese capitalism qua imperialism was also predicted on racial, gender, and colonial differentiation. Such dedicated scholarship can reveal how activists mounted multifront struggles, rejected assimilation in favor of revolution, and enacted radical modes of living, sometimes in fleeting moments of resistance.
In addition to helping explicate Japanese imperial violence, both in its spectacular and more quotidian forms, Black studies and in particular recent work within the Black studies field on the archive can not only contribute to understanding the crucial role of archival representation—presence and absence—in naturalizing and perpetuating colonial domination, but also such critical work can remind us how historical records are shaped by the dynamics of power struggles and cannot completely erase the lived resilience of those who are refused archival entry. While bearing this in mind, Matsumura critically analyzes the way her own scholarly and institutional positionality impacted her research and her ability to maintain her commitment to anti-imperialism. Inspired by Dionne Brand, Matsumura recognizes the unknowability of certain aspects of the history in order to extricate herself from playing a part in the colonial will to know and to help realize the radical potential of withholding and waiting. Indeed, the title of the book suggests the revolutionary possibilities of emergent acts of refusal and subtle incremental shifts in collective consciousness that, at an opportune time—when the moon is cool, will lead to monumental change.
In its methodological, rather than topical, indebtedness to the Black radical intellectual tradition, Waiting for the Cool Moon indicates the possibility for further dialogue between Black studies and Japan studies. What conceptual and methodological frameworks in the latter field might be useful for the former’s, for example, investigation of race and racialization in the Pacific and the relationship between anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity? How might explorations of imperialism and anti-imperialism in other parts of Asia benefit from Black studies insights too? How might we cultivate a mindful citational praxis that, while acknowledging the immense intellectual contributions of Black scholars, eschews disciplining, simplifying, and separating from their histories and lives their work in ways that enforce racist and sexist logics and reinforce the hegemony of U.S. academia? Waiting for the Cool Moon will surely inspire more such efforts at disciplinary cross-pollination, which will transform both Black studies and Japan studies.
Zifeng Liu is Assistant Professor of History at Hong Kong Baptist University.