「Industrious」な労働者たち

グローバル・ヒストリーからみた初期ハワイ日本人移民

抄録

The transpacific migration of tens of thousands of Japanese men and women from the late-nineteenth century has traditionally been studied as a history which was external to the historiography of the Japanese nation-state. Recent research has challenged this assumption and argued that Japanese overseas migrants played a key role both in the making of the modern nation and in the expansion of the Japanese empire (e.g. Azuma 2019). This think-piece examines some of the methodological challenges raised in the study of such transpacific migrations by focusing on the history of the first government-sponsored Japanese laborers to Hawai‘i (kan'yaku imin, 1885-1894). It proposes new ways in which scholars might offer global contexts to proto-industrial transformations in mid-nineteenth century Japan by bringing the history of late-nineteenth century kan'yaku imin labor into their analytical frameworks. One consequence of such an approach is that Japanese sugar plantation laborers in Hawai‘i may be understood as part of the history of Japan's long transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy. The paper further suggests that the discourse of "industrious" immigrants on the Hawaiian sugar plantations forces scholars to study the Japanese kan'yaku imin laborers as part of the historiography of colonial settlement in Hawai‘i. In these ways, the paper illustrates the high potential of "global agricultural history" methodologies to the future study of nineteenth century Japan.