David Ambaras is Associate Professor of History at North Carolina State University. His research explores the social history of modern Japan and its empire, particularly through a focus on transgression and marginality. He is the author of Japan’s Imperial Underworlds: Intimate Encounters at the Borders of Empire (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press); Bad Youth: Juvenile Delinquency and the Politics of Everyday Life in Modern Japan (University of California Press, 2006); as well as articles and book chapters on urban space, total war mobilization, and class formation in modern Japan. Ambaras received his M.A. and Ph. D. in History from Princeton University; an M.A. in Area Studies from the University of Tokyo; a License in Language and Literature from the Institut des Langues et Civilisations Orientales in Paris; and a B.A. in Religion from Columbia University. He has been awarded fellowships from the National Humanities Center and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

This major new study uses vivid accounts of encounters between Chinese and Japanese people living at the margins of empire to elucidate Sino-Japanese relations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Each chapter explores mobility in East Asia through the histories of often ignored categories of people, including trafficked children, peddlers, 'abducted' women and a female pirate. These stories reveal the shared experiences of the border populations of Japan and China and show how they fundamentally shaped the territorial boundaries that defined Japan's imperial world and continue to inform present-day views of China. From Meiji-era treaty ports to the Taiwan Strait, South China, and French Indochina, the movements of people in marginal locations not only destabilized the state's policing of geographical borders and social boundaries, but also stimulated fantasies of furthering imperial power.