Perforating colour lines: Japan and the problem of race in the ‘non-West’

Abstract Why do racialised states subscribe to the racial international hierarchy? While the critical scholarship in International Relations (IR) has meaningfully unsettled the discipline’s silence on race, it remains bound to the white versus non-white binary, neglecting the transmission and persistence of racism in international politics outside that divide. This article proposes a Lacanian reading of race as constitutive of state subjectivity in the modern world order to address this gap. Focusing on Lacan’s notion of the ‘lack in the Other’, I suggest that non-West/non-white racism is a fantasy that racialised states construct upon encountering the void of ‘Whiteness’ as a master signifier. I argue that racialised states appropriate racism in response to the anxiety induced by the collapse of the Other’s authority. Using the case of Japan’s transition to a modern nation-state, I mobilise the framework to examine Japan’s flirtation with Western racial theories and subsequent attempts to depart from the white racial order by creating its own racial hierarchy.