Naoko Shibusawa
Naoko Shibusawa is Associate Professor of History and American Studies at Brown University. Before moving to Brown in 2004, she taught at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa for four years. She is the author of America’s Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy (Harvard 2006).
Updated February 2015
Stories from This Author
Book Review: Yuichiro Onishi's Transpacific Antiracism: Afro-Asian Solidarity in 20th-Century Black America, Japan, and Okinawa
Feb. 10, 2015 • Naoko Shibusawa
It’s largely forgotten today that W.E.B. Du Bois was an admirer of Imperial Japan. Du Bois celebrated Japan’s 1905 victory over Russia for breaking the myth of white supremacy. And throughout the 1930s, he took at face value Japan’s propaganda about a Pan-Asian front united against white imperialism against all evidence to the contrary. Yet rather than dismissing Du Bois’s appreciation for Japanese Pan-Asianism as simply a “stupendous failure in judgment,” Yuichiro Onishi invites us to see it as an …
