1106 The Journal of American History December 2001 fers a helpful reading of Heco’s memoirs, showing how the author and his times condi- tioned the details and perspectives present in his texts. Van Sant’s chapters on the 1868 Jap- anese migrant laborers to Hawaii and the 1869 settlers of the Wakamatsu Tea and Silk Farm Colony in California add details to fa- miliar stories. Less well known are the experiences of Jap- anese students who attended Rutgers College, the Christian Jo Niijima, and the followers of the Brotherhood of the New Life. Interna- tional Japanese students preferred the United States to Europe, and many chose Rutgers be- cause Christian missionaries in Japan who had connections with that college steered them there. Jo Niijima graduated from Amherst College in 1870, was ordained as a Congrega- tionalist minister, and returned to Japan to found Doshisha School, later University, in Kyoto. Thomas Lake Harris’s utopian com- munity, the Brotherhood of the New Life, at- tracted several Japanese adherents, former stu- dents in Britain, in 1867. One of those, Kanaye Nagasawa, rose to become Harris’s chief assistant when the colony moved from Brocton, New York, to Fountaingrove, Cali- fornia, in 1875. Many of those early Japanese migrants re- turned to Japan, while others, such as Na- gasawa, remained in the United States and died there. Although Van Sant offers fuller accounts of his subjects, he fails to achieve his larger transnational project of linking them to Japa- nese, American, and Japanese American his- tory. Even at the most discrete level, he neglects to give agency to the Japanese, as for example revealed in R. David Arkush and Leo O. Lee’s edited collection Land without Ghosts: Chinese Impressions of America from the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the Present (1989), or to show how the experiences of these Japanese pioneers es- tablished Japanese America and its relations with wider American society and history. In fact, Van Sant’s “transnationalism” stresses more the influences of the United States and Americans on Japan and the Japanese than it does the mutual impacts of those engagements. Gary Y. Okihiro Columbia University New York, New York White Love and Other Events in Filipino His- tory. By Vicente L. Rafael. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. xvi, 286 pp. Cloth, $54.95, ISBN 0-8223-2505-5. Paper, $18.95, ISBN 0-8223-2542-X.) White Love and Other Events in Filipino His- tory, a collection of essays most of which are revisions of previously published materials, is “an episodic rather than epic account” of Phil- ippine cultural history. Because twentieth- century Philippine history has been intimately connected with the United States, the book is included in the publisher’s American Encoun- ters/Global Interactions series. Organized chronologically, the first three essays examine the census of 1902, the first American women in the Philippines, and the meaning of photographs. The fourth explores the Filipino response to the Japanese occupa- tion during World War II, while the final four essays deal with Ferdinand and Imelda Mar- cos, “Taglish,” the writing of recent Philippine history, and the significance of overseas Filipi- nos. Utilizing techniques from anthropology and cultural studies, Vicente L. Rafael draws meaning from these seemingly disparate top- ics. The essays are held together, as the author asserts, by “the languages of rule, resistance, and collaboration.” The Filipino-American connection is most clearly evident in the first three essays. It is not easy to take something as seem- ingly dull as a census and tease cultural signif- icance from it in an interesting way, but Rafael succeeds wonderfully in showing how the cen- sus helped consolidate American control. By involving thousands of Filipinos in its admin- istration, the Americans co-opted them, and by supervising their work closely they sought to build character and promote assimilation. The census’s racial and cultural categories lead to a fascinating reflection about how the Americans believed that the islands were des- tined for conquest. Filipinos saw things differ- ently, as the popularity of nationalist plays, which created “imagined communities,” dem- onstrated. Those plays challenged the Ameri- can concept of benevolent assimilation and were soon banned. While the essay is persua- sive, Rafael did not place the Philippine cen- sus in the context of American censuses in the