Oceanic Japan––Islands of the Kuroshio Froniter, or: Building the Infrastructure of an Archipelagic Empire

“Oceanic Japan” is a snapshot of the rapidly evolving historiography of Japan’s aquatic dimensions. Bringing together 31 authors around a broad palette of questions pertaining to Japan’s historical relationship with the ocean, this book draws up a big, terraqueous picture of a country that is often unduly reduced to being an “island” nation. In 28 chapters and framing essays, we walk the reader through different sites, times and social processes that illustrate how the archipelago’s modern emergence was shaped by the ocean and how the ocean was shaped in turn by Japanese ideologies, economy and imperial expansion. We study the role of animals, tides and seismic waves in the development of industry and technology, and we observe how sailors, migrants and travelers crisscrossed their ways across the ocean into the heterogeneous society of modern Japan. My chapter “Islands of the Kuroshio Frontier” (pp. 325–39) discusses how Japan’s incorporation of Pacific islands over the second half of the 19th century laid the infrastructural groundwork and figured as a colonial sandbox from which strategies and modalities of later colonial expansion emerged. With this, the chapter offers a teaser to my book “The Kuroshio Frontier: Empire and Environment in the Making of Japan’s Pacific,” which is forthcoming in 2025. “Oceanic Japan” will become accessible in full open access one year after publication.––Thank you to our wonderful editors Stefan Huebner, Nadin Heé, William Tsutsui and Ian J. Miller for this inspiring collaboration! Oceanic Japan @ University of Hawai’i Press Download your digital copy from DeGruyter  

Islands of the Kuroshio Froniter, or: Building the Infrastructure of an Archipelagic Empire

Perhaps it was a series of coincidences that led John Bravo to the Bonin islands.  Like many others in search of a better life, the son of Cape Verdean farmers signed on to a London-based whaling vessel at the age of eighteen.  Headed to the most prolific whale grounds at the time, John’s ship entered the Pacific in 1849, and steered into the warm Kuroshio current.  While cruising the coasts of Japan – then a “double bolted land” for the whalers, to borrow Herman Melville’s phrase – John was seized by a disease that may be scurvy, forcing his captain to drop him off at the nearest harbor that offered hope for a cure.  In the Bonin Islands, today also known by the Japanese name Ogasawara, a group of settler farmers had come to make a living by catering to the frequently approaching vessels.  The islands became a transit hub of people, goods, and introduced species. Since the number of vessels hunting whales at any time had risen to 700 by the 1840s, carrying 20,000 sailors and their portmanteau biota across the seas, the Kuroshio region became a maritime frontier that transformed quickly on shore and in the ocean. My chapter argues that the international competition over resources and influence in a zone abundant thanks to the warm and nutrient-rich Kuroshio Current, was a moment of sub-elite encounters that led to technological transfer and institutional innovation.