Provincializing Empire: Ōmi Merchants in the Colonial World of Retail

The Council on East Asian Studies is pleased to have Professor Jun Uchida give the 2024-25 McClellan Visiting Fellow Lecture in Japanese Studies.

This lecture examines the role of expeditionary merchants from Ōmi—so-called Ōmi shōnin—and their modern successors in the Japanese colonial empire. Renowned for their entrepreneurial prowess and frequently compared to overseas Chinese and other diasporic communities, Ōmi merchants operated across the early modern Japanese archipelago. Yet their trajectories after the fall of the Tokugawa shogunate remain understudied. Family archives and business records reveal that many Ōmi merchants operated at the frontlines of Japan’s empire in Asia and across the Pacific. 

Using the case of Minakai—a clothier–turned–department store founded by the Nakae family—this talk demonstrates how provincial merchants became forerunners of mass retail, drawing inspiration from both American retail pioneers and their own ancestors in Ōmi. By situating Minakai within a transpacific framework, it further reveals how the family firm strategically refashioned its Ōmi merchant identity while expanding its business at the nexus of Japan’s colonial empire and immigrant diaspora. 

Jun Uchida is the Asian Cultures and Society Professor and Professor of History at Stanford University. She is the author of Brokers of Empire: Japanese Settler Colonialism in Korea, 1876-1945 (Harvard University Press, 2011) and numerous articles exploring the history of overseas Japanese communities within the empire and beyond. In her recently published book, Provincializing Empire: Ōmi Merchants in the Japanese Transpacific Diaspora (University of California Press, 2023), she examines the diasporic lives and activities of the so-called Ōmi merchants, tracing their evolution from Tokugawa-era entrepreneurial peddlers into key players in the global age of empire, migration, and capitalism.