How did the dead bodies that scientists of imperial Japan examined become both empirical objects and suprahuman representations of entire peoples? And how and why did human remains become re-animated outside of the boundaries of scientific treatises and institutions? This dissertation examines both questions by tracing the intertwined journeys of living scientists and the deceased bodies that they examined, measured, dissected, collected, and traded in imperial Japan. I argue that the bodies/body parts of marginalized peoples in the Japanese empire – particularly women, criminalized people, impoverished people, and colonized people – became material evidence for scientific theories that hierarchically ranked and racialized populations. Their flesh, blood, and bones informed a wide range of scientific fields, including anatomy, phrenology, craniometry, anthropology, and bacteriology. Scientists also treated disempowered people’s remains as commodities, forming a bone trade network that encompassed the US, Japanese, and Western European empires, as well as various anatomical laboratories and museums. These human remains experienced multiple recontextualizations (including de-individuated scientific objects and/or representatives of entire genders, classes, and ethnic groups) through the processes of scientific collection, examination, and exchange. The corpses under scientific observation did not merely act as objects. They also had the power to influence living communities. Within scientific communities, bodies could generate fear and discomfort, or even jeopardize the bodily safety of those who examined them. In contrast, marginalized communities in the former Japanese empire have found hope and decolonial potential through repatriating remains held in scientific institutions. The journeys of the people who became scientific objects therefore reveal the agency that dead bodies exert upon the worlds of the living.

This dissertation interrogates the possibilities and limitations of tourism, particularly in the transimperial system of the postwar Pacific. It reframes Cold War US-Japan relations as symbiosis between two imperial nations. It examines post-World War II tourism to illustrate how the American and Japanese empires engaged in intellectual and population exchanges that aided the maintenance of both Pacific empires. I show how Japanese women served key roles in postwar tourism between Japan and the US. First, they served as a major consumer base. Gender norms and ideals enticed young Japanese women to travel, starting as a trickle in the late 1960s that later became a cascade of millions by the 1980s. I argue that the postwar tourism industry between the US and Japan shifted focus to a new kind of colonizer: the Japanese woman traveler. Second, Japanese women, particularly those who migrated to the US (“Shin Issei”), worked in the tourism industry throughout the Pacific. I examine how these tour guides sit at the nexus of both the US and Japanese empires.By combining archival research cultural history, oral history, and Asian American theoretical perspectives, I consider how the lives of Japanese women were intertwined with international relations and empire. Adopting an intersectional analysis, my dissertation explores these topics through Japanese women born between 1945 and 1979. Using a cultural history methodology, I examine a variety of sources, including Japanese tourism campaign materials, guidebooks, and magazines, to understand the discourses that women of this generation encountered as they were growing up and what incited them to move—both as travelers and as emigrants. Moving beyond the individual, I examine the impact of Japanese tourism on several settler colonies of the Pacific: Hokkaido, Okinawa, and Guam. This dissertation interrogates the linkages of tourism and empire through a postwar, transpacific lens. I advance the historiography of tourism by examining the multiple and layered imperial forces and legacies that structure tourism in the Pacific. I contend that tourism functioned as a key mechanism in Cold War era international relations between these two transpacific empires.