Hagimoto, Koichi. Samurai in the Land of the Gaucho: Transpacific Modernity and Nikkei Literature in Argentina. Vanderbilt University Press, 2023.

A pioneer in the burgeoning field of Transpacific Studies, Koichi Hagimoto explores two regions he knows intimately-Japan and Argentina-in his newest monograph, Samurai in the Land of the Gaucho:Transpacific Modernity and Nikkei Literature in Argentina.This incisive study illuminates how early twentieth-century Latin American intellectuals turned their eyes eastward in search of an alternative, non-Western civilizing paradigm that Hagimoto deems a transpacific modernity, a coinage that builds upon Beatriz Sarlo's "peripheral modernity."Focusing on writers of European descent, he argues in the book's first half that Argentina's intellectual class came to glorify and essentialize everything from Japan's hygiene culture to its religious and spiritual traditions on to its imperial prowess; they imagined how such qualities might be infused into the inchoate Argentine society.This celebratory view even informed the Argentine government's portrayal of Japanese immigrants as "desirable" and worthy of a sort of symbolic whiteness (7).