Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Steven Ivings
(Kyoto University)
Takahiro Yamamoto (Singapore University of Technology and Design)
Jonathan Bull (Hokkaido University)
Send message to Convenors
- Chair:
-
Harald Fuess
(Heidelberg University)
- Discussant:
-
Harald Fuess
(Heidelberg University)
- Stream:
- History
- Location:
- Bloco 1, Piso 0, Sala 0.06
- Sessions:
- Thursday 31 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
This panel contends that flows of people—in many cases better understood as circulations—have had an enduring and overlooked impact on Japanese history, and the papers also serve to problematize conventional periodization, framing and narrating of the history of Japanese migration.
Long Abstract:
Scholars who have examined Japanese migration to the colonial empire and beyond have tended to follow conventional historical periodization even though this rarely makes sense from the perspective of migrants themselves. Colonial migration, for example, is usually examined from whenever a given territory officially became a colony until imperial collapse in 1945, but as will be shown in these papers, colonial settlers, more often than not, built on pre-existing migratory flows (Yamamoto and Ivings), and in addition, these people were again uprooted as Japan's empire was dissolved (Bull). Historical research into Japanese migration has also suffered from what could be described as a two-dimensional approach, namely a tendency to fragment research onto particular sending regions and/or destinations (i.e. migration from A to B; or from the perspective of either A or B) rather than explore the connections between regions and the circulation of people between them.
Furthermore, the separation of the field in Japan into scholars who study overseas migration and those who study migration to the colonies has served to replicate prewar official discourse/rhetoric on migration, where a sharp distinction was made between "praiseworthy" colonists (shokumin) working in the imperial interest and self-seeking emigrants (imin) looking to get rich quick. Yet, on the ground, these lines were often blurred beyond recognition. Itinerant individuals drifting between spaces created a set of complex entanglements that contributed to Japan's economic growth and invited colonial expansion (Yamamoto), whilst a closer look at colonists often reveals activities and interests at odds with the imperial visions of the centre (Ivings). Ironically, these distinctions were dissolved after 1945 as these people were suddenly rendered "repatriates" (hikiagesha), but rather than blend into the postwar landscape and forget their migratory past, former colonial settlers sought to mobilize and narrate their experiences for political ends (Bull). Overall, this panel contends that flows of people—in many cases better understood as circulations—have had an enduring and overlooked impact on Japanese history, and the papers also serve to problematize conventional periodization, framing and narrating of the history of Japanese migration itself.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 31 August, 2017, -Steven Ivings (Kyoto University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper aims to bring the "far north" back in to the debate on empire and Japanese migration, and suggests that doing so alters much of our temporal and conceptual understanding of the Japanese empire.
Paper long abstract:
Despite a burgeoning literature on the Japanese colonial empire, and the flows of people within it, the northern reaches of the Japanese empire continues to be a conspicuous absence in many of the key debates. Hokkaido, Chishima (the Kurile Islands), and Karafuto (Sakhalin) have rarely been treated in this wider literature, tending to receive no more than an honourable mention in the footnotes of important works, or to be relegated entirely to the level of local history. In the frame of local history the realities of relatively recent incorporation and mass settlement (often dislodging Ainu communities), as well as the shared histories and separated present of these territories (except for Hokkaido they are de facto part of Russia) have proved highly problematic when local historians of Hokkaido's recent past attempt to weave their accounts into the constrained fabric of national history. This is not just due to the discrepancy of conditions between Hokkaido and the rest of Japan, but is also the result of a need to include the north beyond Hokkaido on the one hand, and the convenience of leaving it out on the other.
This paper aims to bring the "far north" back in to the debate on empire, and suggests by doing so much of our temporal and conceptual understanding of the Japanese empire is changed. Including the colonial far north pushes our chronology of Japanese empire firmly into the nineteenth century, and also suggests that scholars of Japanese migration have misinterpreted the role of Tohoku in imperial expansion. This paper combines locally produced print media (newspapers, magazines, guidebooks, etc.) and written testimonies related to, or produced by, Karafuto's colonial settlers and migratory labourers in order to trace migration circuits to the colony. Ultimately, it stresses that the colonization of Karafuto was an "extension" of the project to colonize/settle Hokkaido, and thus northward bound colonial settlement transcends the late Edo, Meiji, Taisho, and Showa eras. Following Japan's defeat, many of the almost 400,000 Japanese residents of Karafuto eventually resettled in Hokkaido further demonstrating these enduring entanglements.
Takahiro Yamamoto (Singapore University of Technology and Design)
Paper short abstract:
This paper traces the movements of a merchant family from Kyushu to illustrate the border crossings for the Japanese in the late nineteenth century, thereby bridging the historiographical gap between early modern trade network in East Asia and modern-era emigration within the Japanese empire.
Paper long abstract:
This paper deals with the first two decades of modern Japan's overseas travels, legalised in 1866. The conventional historiography pays little attention to this period before moving on to the first official migration to Hawaii in 1885, though recent works have begun to revisit this by incorporating migration to Karafuto and Hokkaido (Shiode 2015). I offer another critique to this standard periodisation by tracing itinerant merchants across East Asian waters. Although they do not fit into the standard definition of migrants, their movements merit examination because they provided a pattern of circular movements that were later repeated by Japanese settler colonialists and migrant labourers.
This paper uses a case study of one family business called Tashiroya, a porcelain wholesaler from Arita in northern Kyushu, to illustrate the border crossings for the Japanese in the late nineteenth century. The Tashiro family set up stores and made extended stays in Chinese treaty ports and sold porcelain materials to China, Korea, and the Western world. They eventually disappeared from the East Asian market after failing to follow through a contract with the Korean court to export roof tiles for the Kyongbok palace. Using private records of the Tashiro family, the paper discusses how the boundaries in East Asia were negotiated between the governments and the border-crossing merchants. I argue that the activities of the likes of Tashiroya set a foundation for the ensuing and more long-term settlement of Japanese in China and Korea, most notably in such cities as Shanghai, Tianjin, Hong Kong, and Seoul, but also in the interior. Following the footsteps of the Tashiro family, therefore, allows us to connect the history of treaty port network and the Japanese migration in East Asia which has been told through the prism of colonialism and mimetic imperialism (Uchida 2011; Driscoll 2010), while supplementing the accounts for Japanese prostitutes in East and Southeast Asia (Yamazaki 1998; Warren 2003; Mihalopoulos 2011). The paper ultimately describes an overlooked aspect on the origins of Japanese migration, placing it in the continuum from the Tokugawa-era commercial links to the post-Meiji emigration driven by the logic of empire.
Jonathan Bull (Hokkaido University)
Paper short abstract:
Of the multiple strands to repatriate narratives, this paper focuses on how memories of 'heading further north' became entangled with repatriate leaders and Hokkaido politicians' attempts to 'weaponize the loss' to achieve various political objectives.
Paper long abstract:
If the literature on the Japanese colonial empire has failed to include Hokkaido, Chishima and Karafuto, this research gap is more pronounced for the post-war period. Recent research on repatriates from the former Japanese empire has focused on Manchurian repatriation. Nevertheless, as Yamamoto and Ivings' papers emphasise, migration during the days of empire was a complex phenomenon. After 1945 the appearance of the repatriate figure seemingly erased this complexity. Using government documents, repatriate newsletters, memoirs and local newspapers the aim of this paper is to disentangle Karafuto repatriate narratives from those of the generalized story of the "figure of the repatriate" (Watt 2009).
An analysis of Hokkaido should be fundamental to any explanation of repatriation (by 1950 Hokkaido has the largest number of repatriates of any prefecture in Japan). Furthermore, although the 'loss' of the 'Northern Territories' (the disputed islands of Kunashiri, Etorofu, Shikotan and Habomai located to the north-east of Hokkaido) is today widely 'remembered' and Karafuto is not, mid-1950s public opinion polls showed overwhelming support for the 'return' of Karafuto as well as the disputed islands. These two points suggest we need to analyse the construction of repatriate narratives more in the context of understandings of flows of people within particular geographical regions. Of the multiple strands to repatriate narratives, this paper focuses on how memories of 'heading further north' became entangled with repatriate leaders and Hokkaido politicians' attempts to 'weaponize the loss' to achieve various political objectives. The exact nature of 'the loss' being written and spoken about in repatriate narratives changed over time. It went from being primarily a narrative about loss of 'settler identity' to one about loss of 'a homeplace'. In sum, I question the periodization that frames repatriate narratives as beginning with repatriation in the late-1940s. Although the repatriate figure emerged in the early post-war, the usefulness of memories of 'heading further north' to Karafuto repatriates indicates how narratives had origins reaching back into the pre-war period.