Tomohiko Uyama
Tomohiko Uyama is Professor at the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center at Hokkaido University. His main areas of expertise are Central Eurasian history, post-Soviet politics, and comparative imperialism. He is currently leading a project on the contemporary history of great power nationalism. He has edited numerous books, including Comparing Modern Empires: Imperial Rule and Decolonization in the Changing World Order (Sapporo, 2018), and Asiatic Russia: Imperial Power in Regional and International Contexts (London, 2012). His articles include “‘Include and Rule’: The Non-Titular Ethnic Elites in Eurasian Empires, 1500–1850s,” Acta Slavica Iaponica 46, no. 2 (2025, co-authored with Michael Khodarkovsky); “Between Essentialism and Multiple Identities: Central Asia as Part of the East, South and the World,” The Russian Sociological Review, 22, no. 1 (2023, in Russian); “Unmasking Imperial History: Emotional Empire, Violent Politics of Difference, and Independence Movements under the Name of Autonomy,” Ab Imperio, 2022, no. 1; “Why in Central Asia, Why in 1916? The Revolt as an Interface of the Russian Colonial Crisis and the World War,” in The Central Asian Revolt of 1916 (Manchester, 2020). In 2022, he was awarded the Dostyq Order of the Republic of Kazakhstan for his contributions to Kazakh history research.
Hokkaido University
Session
Between the conclusion of the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 and the expiration of the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact in 1945, the Russo-Japanese rivalry was contained by a fragile strategic balance that paradoxically fostered an unprecedented wave of inter-imperial exchange. Koreans, Mongols, Tatars, Kazakhs, and Buryats, among others, moved across imperial frontiers, seeking in the rival empire both a refuge and a vehicle for their own aspirations toward nationhood and modernity. Machinations through proxies, containment of direct warfare, agitation of minoritarian identities, and borderlands animated by military reconnaissance, insurgency, and arms trafficking prefigured the geopolitical and ideological structures that would later define the Cold War. Yet existing scholarship has rarely recognized this Pax Japano-Russica as a crucial precursor, and indeed, a direct progenitor, of the Cold War complex. This panel examines how Pax Japano-Russica shaped the geopolitical and ideological alignments of modern Northeast Asia, both in its own time and in its afterlife during the Cold War. Collectively, the papers propose a new prism for Cold War studies: one that situates Pax Japano-Russica as the formative crucible from which the region’s Cold War order emerged. By foregrounding the continuities between these two historical moments, the panel highlights how non-dominant actors animated inter-bloc mobility and how subordinate identities became the very substance through which hegemonic block formations were consolidated.