Publications
Civil War Samurai: The 1860 Japanese Embassy and Tateishi Onojirō in Antebellum America
(Leiden University Press, 2026)
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,
ed. Natalia Doan and Sho Konishi (Leiden University Press, 2024)
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.
Doan, N. “The Iwakura Mission: Knowledge, Networks, and National Identity.”
Journal of American-East Asian Relations 31, no.3 (2024): 225–235.
In Reopening the Opening of Japan: New Approaches to Japan and the Wider World in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century, edited by Lewis Bremner, Manimporok Dotulong, and Sho Konishi, 21–58. Leiden: Brill, 2023.
Doan, N. “Samurai and Southern Belles: Interracial Romance, Southern Morality, and the 1860 Japanese Embassy.”
Journal of Social History 55, no. 1 (2021): 149–179.
Doan, N. “The 1860 Japanese Embassy and the Antebellum African American Press.”
The Historical Journal 62, no. 4 (2019): 997–1020.
PUBLIC INTEREST WRITING & PEER-REVIEWED ENCYCLOPEDIA ENTRIES
Doan, N. “The 1860 Japanese Embassy to the United States and a Guide to the Japan-Related Collections at LancasterHistory and President Buchanan’s Wheatland,”
The Journal of Lancaster County’s Historical Society (August 2025), 210–239.
Doan, N. “Japan in Lancaster: A Finding Aid for the Japan-Related Collections at LancasterHistory and President Buchanan’s Wheatland.”
Jan 2025. Finding aid created for the museum’s collections and shared with museum visitors.
Doan, N. “African America and Japan.”
In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History, ed. David Ludden, 2022.
Doan, N. “The 1860 Japanese Embassy.”
Oxford African American Studies Center, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., 2020.