Released March 2026
Civil War Samurai
In 1860, seventeen-year-old samurai Tateishi Onojirō, nicknamed “Tommy,” made headlines across America for his real and imagined adventures as part of the 1860 Japanese Embassy, the first Japanese diplomatic mission to the United States. The perception of Tateishi’s interracial romantic encounters with American women opened up to controversy and questioning the hierarchies of race and culture fundamental to many antebellum American concepts of civilization. This book reveals how Tateishi and his fellow samurai diplomats sparked a whirlwind of national optimism and cultural fantasy within the United States that challenged linked conceptions of race, masculinity, and power. After returning to Japan, Tateishi fought in Japan’s civil war and contributed to many of the defining cultural and national endeavors of nineteenth-century Japan. This book reveals the influence of samurai on antebellum American identity formation and the incredible life of a samurai celebrity and civil war survivor.
Black Transnationalism
and Japan
Since before the American Civil War, African American and Japanese encounters produced relationships and discourse of knowledge that transcended Eurocentric conceptions of civilization and hierarchies of personhood. Black Transnationalism and Japan discloses the diverse activity and intellectual movements created, shaped, and led by Japanese and African American people. While some Pan-Asianisms and Pan-Africanisms urged a uniting of colonized spaces against the colonizer, and were often expressed in the form of decolonization movements, this volume introduces various transnational phenomena that transcended such dichotomies. Black American-Japanese transnational encounters often occurred on the non-state level from within the two new competing empires of America and Japan. Such transnational encounters reveal not only heretofore hidden historical actors, friendships, and solidarities, but also innovative cultural productions that challenged hierarchies of race, culture, and imperialism.
About Natalia Doan
Dr. Natalia Doan is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She received her doctorate in Asian Studies from the University of Oxford. Her research and teaching focus on the transnational history of early modern and modern Japan, particularly in connection to popular culture and conceptions of gender, power, and culture. Her work explores Japanese transnational engagement across different times and spaces in the pursuit of solidarity and positive change. Her book Civil War Samurai: The 1860 Japanese Embassy and Tateishi Onojirō in Antebellum America is forthcoming by Leiden University Press. She has written for, among other publications, the Historical Journal, the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History, and the Journal of Social History, in which her article was shortlisted for the Royal Historical Society Alexander Prize. Dr. Doan has appeared in several Japanese documentaries, most recently discussing her research on samurai. Her forthcoming book from Leiden University Press examines the celebrity and transnational influence of samurai overseas in the mid-nineteenth century.