For an empire, some kind of fieldwork to obtain knowledge about newly acquired territories is crucial. So it is a welcome addition to the history of science in Japan that we have this edited volume with six individual works dedicated to the relationship between fieldwork and empire. Its editor, Sakano Tor, notes that Investigating the Empire is "the first work to look into various cross-disciplinary fieldworks and their relationships to the empire" in Japan and beyond (3). This book covers fieldwork in China; Japan; Korea; Palau, in Japanese Micronesia; the Seto Inland Sea; Hokkaido; and Okinawa. The disciplines investigated include not just the obvious field sciences, such as archaeology, ethnography, geography, cultural anthropology, and marine biology, but also history and pharmacology. The time span is from the late nineteenth century to the 1960s, the last two chapters dealing with the "post-imperial" era. Notably, the editor properly sees Japanese cultural anthropologists' fieldwork in Hokkaido' Ainu regions and a US geologist's fieldwork in Japanese Okinawa and Korea, both in the "post-imperial" era, also as "colonial fieldwork."
