Purchase Waiting for the Cool Moon: Anti-Imperial Struggles in the Heart of Japan’s Empire here.

In Waiting for the Cool Moon Wendy Matsumura interrogates the erasure of colonial violence at the heart of Japanese nation-state formation. She critiques Japan studies' role in this effacement and contends that the field must engage with anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity as the grounds on which to understand imperialism, colonialism, fascism, and other forces that shape national consciousness.

Drawing on Black radical thinkers' critique of the erasure of the Middle Passage in universalizing theories of modernity's imbrication with fascism, Matsumura traces the consequences of the Japanese empire's categorization of people as human and less-than-human as manifested in the 1920s and 1930s, and the struggles of racialized and colonized people against imperialist violence.

Matsumura treats the archives safeguarded by racialized, colonized women throughout the empire as traces of these struggles, including the work they performed to keep certain stories out of view. She demonstrates that tracing colonial sensibility and struggle is central to grappling with their enduring consequences for the present.

Wendy Matsumura is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego, and author of The Limits of Okinawa: Japanese Capitalism, Living Labor, and Theorizations of Community.

"In the scope, method, and the author’s critical reflection on her positionality as a US researcher, Waiting for the Cool Moon reaches out to a wider audience than Japanese studies and offers a blueprint of historiography aimed toward collective liberation."
-Nozomi Nakaganeku Saito