East Asia Seminar - Dr Rashaad Eshack

Crafting Citizens Beyond Borders: Japanese Education on the Frontier of Japan’s Borderless Empire

In this talk, Dr Rashaad Eshack examines how Japanese overseas education functioned as a key site for the production and negotiation of citizenship in the interwar and wartime Pacific world. Focusing on overseas Japanese schools, he argues that education served as a mechanism through which competing visions of civic belonging, moral obligation, and subjecthood were codified as part of Japan’s global imperial ambitions. Drawing on a wealth of educational and government archival materials, this talk traces how schools sought to reconcile loyalty to the Japanese state with the lived realities of migration, settlement, and legal marginality in the Americas. Dr Eshack positions overseas communities as central to debates about the boundaries of Japan’s empire in the Pacific. By foregrounding education as a transnational practice, this talk also contributes to broader discussions in the history of empire, migration studies, and the history of global citizenship.

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Dr Rashaad Eshack is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge. His research examines migration, education, and citizenship in the modern Japanese imperial world, with a particular focus on overseas Japanese communities across the Pacific. His current work explores how Japanese schools across the Americas shaped competing ideas of civic belonging and imperial connection during the interwar and wartime periods. His research has been published in leading journals and edited volumes, and he has presented his work internationally in Japan, the United States, and the United Kingdom.

The Japanese Studies Subject Group gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation toward this seminar series.