The collapse of Japan’s empire in 1945 closed off the South China Sea as a space of Japanese imaginations of future adventure, but in the early postwar era (in the 1940s and 1950s) this maritime space remained open for cultural productions intended to conclude the Sino-Japanese romance on favorable terms. As regional maritime territorial disputes have intensified in the twenty-first century, the repository of fantasies from an earlier time is always available for resuscitation and adaptation to new geotemporal needs. Meanwhile, intimate Japanese encounters (both personal and vicarious) with the Sinosphere in the imperial era have continued to inform the popular imagination of China as threat and of Chinese immigrants as potential exploiters and victimizers of a hapless Japanese polity and people. In highlighting the stories of Japanese and their descendants who lived in Fujian and "returned" to Japan in recent years, the epilogue elucidates the ironies of border practices that have included certain marginal people as a means of extending state reach into new territory in one period, only to disavow them and use state power to redefine or externalize their marginality in another.