This article covers the controversy that followed the March 16, 1893 escape of prisoner Yosaku Imada to the Japanese warship, the Naniwa , which was docked in Honolulu. Imada’s act of seeking refuge onboard the ship occurred at a time when the provisional government of Hawai‘i had no extradition treaty with Japan. This created a diplomatic event that entangled leaders from Japan, the provisional government, and the United States. To further complicate matters, Issei and Meiji government officials were also pressing for franchise in the Islands, a right that a majority of the community did not have access to at home. By placing Imada’s escape and the Issei fight for voting rights in the context of the uncertainty that followed the January 17, 1893 overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy, this article emphasizes Hawai‘i’s relevance as a site where inter-imperial dynamics aligned with competing settler colonialisms.

The scholarship on the “Yellow Peril” looks at Japanese immigrants (Issei) as an object of anti-Asian racialization in domestic politics or as a distraction in U.S.-Japanese bilateral diplomacy. Seldom do historians consider its ramifications outside those contexts. They also lack perspective on the impact of Issei practice on the geopolitics of Yellow Peril, which spread from California to the U.S.-Mexican borderlands and beyond. This article examines the role of Issei settler colonialism, as well as its unintended consequences, in the formation of discourse on the transborder Yellow Peril. That discourse propelled white America to reaffirm its commitment to the Monroe Doctrine, shifting the nature of U.S. diplomacy from the endeavor to keep European rivals out of the Western Hemisphere to one that sought to exclude the Japanese racial enemy from America’s “backyard.” It culminated in the construction of a hemispheric national security regime.

In the 1950s, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) managed the Navajo Reservation's feral dog population by scheduling semi-annual “dog shoots.” After one gruesome dog shoot resulted in seventeen slaughtered dogs in Chinle, Arizona, community members pressed local BIA authorities to reform reservation dog control, an effort that pitted the interethnic community against an authoritarian form of settler-colonial governance. Because citizenship on the reservation—for Navajo and non-Navajo alike—was effectively rendered inferior to that of citizens outside the reservation, substantive changes to local BIA policies required an alliance with a constituency beyond the reservation’s borders, one with full access to state power—in this case, the National Dog Welfare Guild. This article thus demonstrates Native American grass-roots activism and boundary politics against oppressive federal authority.