失われたハワイ島ヒロ市の日本人移民町－戦時下での暮らしと津波事件を中心に－

抄録

From the beginning of the twentieth century, Japanese immigrants to Hawai‘i whose contracts at sugar plantations had expired moved to the coastal areas of Hilo on the island of Hawai‘i, where a number of Japanese towns grew. Numerous studies about Japanese immigrants and their descendants in Hawai‘i have been carried out by both Japanese and international scholars, but there have been few studies of the Japanese towns in Hilo. One such area was called Waiakea town, popularly known as Yashijimacho. Yashijimacho was destroyed in the devastating 1960 tsunami, and the history of Yashijimacho is kept only by elderly former residents of the town in their memories. The motivation for this study was to preserve Yashijimacho’s history, and the goal was to examine the lives of Japanese immigrants by focusing on World War II and the two major tsunamis of 1946 and 1960. This research found that there was tension between Yashijimacho and the other Japanese communities. In addition, Yashijimacho was a multiethnic community, and a number of well-known businesses in present-day Hilo were started in Yashijimacho. During World War II, life under martial law was difficult in various ways. Finally, the tsunamis in 1960, along with the declining sugar industry, damaged Hilo.