Asian Studies Seminar Series: Seth Jacobowitz

About the event

The historiography of Japanese immigration to Brazil has developed along several lines. Ethnic studies (Lesser, Masterson, Saitō) trace community formation and assimilation within Brazil's fraught racial democracy. Studies of settler colonialism (Azuma, Lu, Iacobelli) read the extension of Japanese imperial ideology across formal and informal boundaries. Lu’s Collaborative Settler Colonialism (2025) notably recognizes Brazil as a prototype for Japan’s later expansion in Manchuria and elsewhere in East Asia.

This talk builds on both methodological approaches by recentering Japan’s agrarian modernity in Brazil in contradistinction to the urban and industrial emphases of modernisation theory. Drawing on Brazilian agricultural and environmental history (Holloway, Stolcke, Dean), it takes stock of Brazil’s failed labor regimes, from African slavery and its late abolition (1888) to the low-wage and still punitive European colonato system meant to replace it.

Although new arrivals from Japan continued to find a reality far removed from the promise of fast fortunes as coffee plantation workers, the advent of vertically integrated Japanese colonies such as Aliança impelled the vast majority of the migratory wave, and small-scale farming on exhausted plantation land built the urban markets that fed São Paulo (Cardoso). Commodities such as cotton, rice, and silk tied these settlements to the Japanese empire through a transoceanic circuit that left the interior of São Paulo on British railways and transited through British ports of call. Brazil’s coffee elites offered seemingly boundless arable land and insatiable demand for labor, while Japan supplied families, agronomy, cooperative capital, and a state willing to underwrite all three.

About the speaker

Seth Jacobowitz is Principal Investigator for Global Japan Studies, a multiyear initiative funded by the São Paulo Research Foundation at the University of São Paulo. He is author of Writing Technology in Meiji Japan (Harvard Asia Center, 2016), and co-editor with Prof. Aaron W. Moore of The Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke Reader: Mass Culture and Intermediality in Imperial Japan (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025).

He was an American Philosophical Society Fellow from May to June 2025 at the University's Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, conducting research for a project entitled 'The Forensic Turn in Modern Japan: Criminology, the Human Sciences, and Detective Fiction'. It investigated the status of forensics in the era of the Empire of Japan (1868-1945) alongside precedents and concurrent developments in the Anglophone world.

How to attend

This event is free to attend and open to all. No registration is required, simply turn up on the day.

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