Writing the on-board: Meiji Japan in transit and transition

This article uses the history of Japanese emigrants to Hawai‘i as a lens through which to examine Japan’s engagement with the outside world in the late nineteenth century. Focusing on a single journey from Yokohama to Honolulu in 1885, it reconstructs the transit of two migrant labourers as they ent...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of global history 2016-07, Vol.11 (2), p.271-294
Main Author: Dusinberre, Martin
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Aliens
Asian history
Cruises
Emigration
Hawaii
Immigration
Letters
Meiji Japan
Migrant workers
Ships
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Summary:This article uses the history of Japanese emigrants to Hawai‘i as a lens through which to examine Japan’s engagement with the outside world in the late nineteenth century. Focusing on a single journey from Yokohama to Honolulu in 1885, it reconstructs the transit of two migrant labourers as they entered an ‘in-between’ state – between regimes of labour, between freedom and coercion, and between local and national identities. These migrant experiences challenge the teleological discourse of Japanese ‘progress’ that was so popular among political elites across the world in the 1880s, and that was embodied by the very materiality of the ship in which the labourers travelled. But the ‘in-between’ also speaks to the historiographical need to fill the silences that exist between archives across the Pacific Ocean, and thus to the wider challenges of writing global history.
ISSN:1740-0228
1740-0236
DOI:10.1017/S1740022816000097