Introduction
On 21 January 1928, around 80 men, all Fukuoka-born, gathered at the Kagetsu restaurant in Pusan’s waterfront Minamihama neighbourhood to celebrate the New Year. The event carried on into the late evening, with performances of Hakata niwaka (a traditional comedy routine from Fukuoka), along with other unusual tricks and entertainment. Four days later, Fukuokan women held their own celebrations with a lunchtime gathering at Kagetsu. Mrs Okamoto, wife of the city’s police chief, gave an opening address. Around 60 women attended, providing the entertainment themselves with the help of some ‘beautiful geisha’. The women held raffles and gave niwaka and folk song performances, until the unusually warm and springlike January day drew to a close.Footnote 1
There was a second cause for holding these two parties at Kagetsu beyond celebrating the New Year. Attendees were commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the founding of Pusan’s Fukuoka kenjinkai or Prefectural Association. The group had been founded in 1908, two years before Japan’s annexation of Korea, and the same year that the Japanese resident-general began to dismantle the autonomy of residents’ associations.Footnote 2 By 1928, over half a century since its opening to trade with Japan, the port city of Pusan had become home to many interwoven communities of Japanese settlers from across the Japanese home islands (J. naichi). In colonial Pusan, one of the cities of the Japanese empire most dominated by settlers from the home islands, there were at least 27 prefectural organizations, representing over half of all Japan’s prefectures. These organizations linked settlers to their local origins, replicating metropolitan geographies and identities even within Japan’s colonies, and creating inter-urban alliances that further marginalized colonized populations. Such ‘local’ networks benefitted some settlers more than others, connecting them to a wider network of the mobile colonial elite who moved between the metropole, Japan’s colonies (both formal and informal), and the greater Asia-Pacific world.
While prefectural associations have been discussed in some detail in research on Japanese communities in North and South America, their presence in other regions, especially Japan’s colonies, has been overlooked or taken for granted.Footnote 3 Some generalizations can be made about the nature of prefectural organizations in Japan’s colonial possessions, many of which significantly resemble their counterparts in the Americas. In their local groups across the Japanese empire, prefectural association members were predominantly men, who paid an annual membership fee of one or two yen. They held gatherings throughout the year, usually at local restaurants or ‘clubs’ (J. kurabu). These events were masculine spaces, with separate events organized for women and special family days held at amusement parks, beaches, or local nature spots.Footnote 4 The head of prefectural associations was often a successful figure of some status in the community.
Unlike rural migrant communities in Hawai‘i or Brazil, where large numbers of Japanese lived on plantations and later their own farmsteads, most prefectural associations in the empire were urban organizations. Members were also involved in local politics: they endorsed and campaigned for candidates for office in local government and school boards.Footnote 5 They occasionally banded together to provide support—financial or otherwise—for their countrymen who had fallen on hard times.Footnote 6 During the Asia-Pacific War they held memorial services for fallen countrymen at local temples and raised money for the war effort.Footnote 7 Prefectural associations across the empire and beyond also hosted welcome events for important figures from their hometowns who passed through their city.Footnote 8
The past decade of English-language scholarship on the Japanese empire and its expansion has given us rich portraits of settler life: whether in settlers’ roles as brokers between colonial and metropolitan governments, their policies, and settler communities; as boosters in local governments and for their adopted city or colony; and as builders—and planters—of these spaces.Footnote 9 Settlers played a crucial role as colonial intermediaries, but as the scholarship mentioned above has also shown us, this was far from a selfless act of patriotism, nor was it frictionless—within the settler population were a variety of groups, each with their own interests that rarely aligned perfectly with colonial policy.
Prefectural organizations were part of a larger ecosystem of associationalism, both in the home islands, Japanese colonial territories, and beyond. Indeed, in the case of Pusan, the membership of various groups overlapped across hometown organizations, chambers of commerce, trade groups, and other mutual aid societies. Sayaka Chatani has shown us how personal ambition and aspirations for social mobility led young men, both provincial and colonized, to join organizations across the empire.Footnote 10 Ready-made networks and opportunities for connection and advancement were also a draw for people to join other organizations, like kenjinkai, as well.
What marks out prefectural associations, I argue, is the mediating role of the shared hometown between nation and empire. Unlike the purely nostalgic construction of the hometown in post-war Japan, I argue that in imperial Japan, the prefecture took on the affective role of the hometown (J. kyōdo) while simultaneously being framed as a modern, outward-facing, and proactive unit of belonging, with a role to play in Japan’s modernization and imperial expansion.Footnote 11 Beyond local meetings like those in Pusan, what linked members of these associations, and helped to construct this new, expanded idea of the hometown, were the publications of these prefectural organizations. As Bryna Goodman writes about similar synchronous phenomena in newspapers in China, these groups and their publications ‘suggest … a variety of extra-national (and subnational) imagined spaces left unexamined in Benedict Anderson’s focus on the “imagined community” of the nation’.Footnote 12 Through an analysis of these publications, we gain insight into not only the nature and role of prefectural associations in Japanese colonies such as Korea, but also, I argue, a fresh perspective on Japanese expansion more broadly, via the expanding unit of the ‘hometown’.
A brief history of Japan’s prefectural associations at home and elsewhere
Historians of Modern Japan often utilize and cite the publications of prefectural or hometown organizations like kenjinkai, but as Takenaga Mitsuo pointed out in his ground-breaking 1985 article on the topic, they have suffered from a lack of coverage as subjects of research themselves.Footnote 13 Takenaga’s periodizations and suggestions for future research were later taken up by Narita Ryūichi in his work ‘Kokyō’ to iu monogatari (The Story of the ‘Hometown’).Footnote 14 However, both Takenaga and Narita focus almost exclusively on these organizations’ founding and presence in Tokyo.
Even in Takenaga’s and Narita’s brief discussions of ‘overseas’ branches, the linkages between overseas expansion, empire, and hometown associations remain underexamined. In Takenaga’s article, he lists branches of Shimane prefecture’s overseas associations. In contrast to the three in ‘the West’ (London, New York, and San Francisco), those in Japan’s colonial possessions are not differentiated from those elsewhere in East Asia. Takenaga lists 13 in Japan’s colonies (Korea, Karafuto, Taiwan, Kwantung Leased Territory) and three others in China (Shanghai, Tianjin, and Qingdao).Footnote 15 The fact that the majority of overseas kenjinkai were in Japan’s colonies is left undiscussed. Similarly, Narita’s sole reference to Japan’s colonies alludes to the possibility of settlers considering their new colonial homes as ‘hometowns’ (J. kokyō/furusato), but this is not explored further.Footnote 16
There has been a significant division between research on overseas kenjinkai in the Americas and that on the domestic spread of these organizations, which accompanied waves of domestic migration and socioeconomic change. This has resulted in work on Japanese American history characterizing kenjinkai as unique to overseas Japanese communities, and otherwise foundational work on the idea of the Japanese ‘hometown’ overlooking the extension of these hometown networks beyond the Japanese islands.Footnote 17 Luckily, recent scholarship has shown the growth of transpacific connections between the two: Eiichiro Azuma looks at the relationships between overseas associations in Japan and local prefectural associations in the Americas, while Sidney Xu Lu looks at the case of Nagano prefecture’s ties to migrant communities in Asia and the Pacific.Footnote 18 Most recently, Jun Uchida has shown how the historical province of Ōmi and its (self-) mythologized merchants provided their modern descendants from Shiga with a shared identity, as they expanded their businesses across the Asia-Pacific.Footnote 19
In the face of change, the recourse to local identity by Uchida’s Ōmi merchants was a common one. Both Takenaga and Narita point to key moments of political and economic dislocation that precipitated ‘waves’ of new associations and their connected publications as well as increased discourse on the ‘hometown’ or ‘native place’ (J. kokyō/kyōdo/furusato).Footnote 20 According to Takenaga, the first wave of prefectural organizations and magazines occurred at the moment of political and economic change that occurred with the opening of the Imperial Diet and establishment of chihō seido (local administration) in the late 1880s and early 1890s, when the regions were being brought closer together by the expanding railway network. Narita’s study focuses almost exclusively on this period; he characterizes the creation of these groups as part of the ‘birth of the hometown’ from the 1880s to the 1900s.
After this initial wave of domestic development, Takenaga argues, the next wave of new prefectural organizations and their publications took off in the 1910s, widening their remit beyond domestic expansion, and tying local development to overseas expansion too. During the post-Second World War boom, local pride swelled to match the new spirit of internationalism and cosmopolitanism, before the economic bust that followed transformed local pride into local protectionism, along with calls for local development to overcome the uneven economic effects of this downturn. Other domestic events impelled the creation of new forms of local network building. One prefectural magazine, Shimane Hyōron, was founded in 1924, in the aftermath of the Kantō earthquake. According to those involved, the earthquake disrupted former ties and a new organization was needed to allow people from Shimane prefecture to reconnect.Footnote 21
Takenaga characterizes the history and character of local magazines as responses to the changing dynamics between Japan’s modern centre of Tokyo and its regions (chihō). He is also careful to distinguish between two different types of local magazines (J. kyōdo zasshi) that had emerged by the interwar period. One type—local research magazines—featured articles on local history and culture.Footnote 22 The other, the subject of his article, were those magazines for locals: kyōdojin zasshi. While the subject of this second genre of magazines was local, the phenomenon was nationwide: according to Takenaga’s research nearly every prefecture had at least one such publication. Towards the end of the 1920s, approaching the period Narita characterizes as the ‘establishment of the “hometown”’ (‘kokyō’ no teichaku), the first umbrella organization for these publications—the Japanese Association of Local Magazines—was founded in Tokyo in 1926 by the staff of magazines from Shimane and Ōita prefectures.Footnote 23 The content of these publications also shows nationwide similarities: magazines of various prefectural organizations featured similar genres of content, such as local news from the prefecture, reports on prefectural association gatherings, interviews with or profiles of prefectural figures who had achieved nationwide prominence, and columns featuring announcements from subscribers, whose dues gave them the privilege of having their news or life updates published in the magazine.
The magazines produced by these organizations offer historians a window into understanding just how different scales of belonging—nation, empire, hometown—were articulated and conceived of from the perspective of those moving between them, as well as by those ‘back home’. They also offer us an opportunity to correct the disciplinary blind spots discussed above, and reconnect studies of Japanese locality and mobility in the metropole with those across the Asia-Pacific. What is more, they allow us to put the Japanese case into conversation with similar examples elsewhere in Asia and beyond, in order to think about how ideas of the local shifted and were mobilized in the era of global migration and overseas expansion.
Regional associationalism, diaspora, and empire
Although there is limited scholarly work on the history of overseas Japanese kenjinkai, especially their presence in Japan’s colonies and elsewhere in Asia, a similar and synchronous phenomenon to the spread of these organizations and their publications was occurring in China and among the Chinese diaspora, which has received more scholarly attention. Bryna Goodman talks about the contemporaneous case of the ‘paradoxical creation of national communities out of native place ties’ via huiguan (hometown halls) and tongxiang hui (native place organizations) in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Shanghai.Footnote 24 In her work on qiaokan (overseas Chinese magazines), Madeline Hsu discusses how these publications ‘redefined’ ideas of local community to include those overseas.Footnote 25 Hsu’s discussion of these magazines suggests that while the magazine expanded the scale of its community, the idea of ‘home’ remained centred on the hometown itself. The Xinning magazine that Hsu uses as her case study was published out of Taishan city, and its articles focused on China and Taishan county, despite a large readership across North America, and other diaspora communities in Southeast Asia and beyond.
Histories of regional or hometown associations occur much more frequently in the study of migrant communities like the Chinese diaspora than in the histories of imperial expansion. Regional associations among English settler communities, and in the ‘Anglo-world’ more broadly, have, until recently, been thought to be relatively scarce.Footnote 26 There have been some exceptions that prove the rule; for example the spread of Cornish associations among migrant miner communities in British settler colonies and the United States, or Yorkshire societies in New Zealand. Both cases suggest that only in very particular circumstances—where settlers from one region form a plurality or majority (e.g. Yorkshire settlers in New Zealand), or where that region has a particularly strong and separate identity from the metropolitan centre (e.g. Cornwall)—would settler colonizers, rather than immigrants, feel the need to form associations based on regional identity or hometown ties.Footnote 27
Recent scholarship argues, however, that English associations in North America played a bigger role among settlers and the ‘English diaspora’ than heretofore believed. Although the English (and perhaps the Japanese in Asia) as ‘colonialists and imperialists’ are more often thought of as ‘the benchmark against which diaspora has often been measured’, Bueltmann and MacRaild offer an alternative conceptualization of the term ‘diaspora’. Rather than a term that signifies ‘forced exile and reluctant migration’, they define diaspora instead as ‘a conscious international community of people with shared ethnic-national roots and a heightened, potentially politicized, sense of common identity’.Footnote 28 Within English ‘ethnic’ associations in North America, there was a distinct class divide. Upper-middle class organizations worked to promote ethnic pride via philanthropy, while working class groups functioned along the more common associational model of migrant mutual aid groups.Footnote 29 This reassessment of ethnic or regional associations among English settlers and imperialists helps to contextualize the relative gaps in the literature on the Japanese case and offers a useful comparison.
A mistaken belief that these local associations were only a phenomenon among migrant rather than settler communities (with the Chinese diaspora as a key example and case study) might be the reason why kenjinkai formed by Japanese migrants in Hawai‘i and the Americas have been well-researched, while those in Japan’s colonies have not. But what does it tell us about the case of the Japanese empire that these organizations also existed across its colonies, like the English case described above?
The hybridity of the case of Japanese hometown networks and their publications is noteworthy, and begs further questions. What was specific to these organizations in Japanese colonies? Were they set up for reasons of pride or protection—or both? Did the unit of the hometown, with an emphasis on one’s place of birth, offer a new logic of exclusion for Japanese settlers in Korea, for example, as their rights as residents were being eroded by the resident-general?Footnote 30 David Washbrook discusses a similar phenomenon in nineteenth-century Calcutta, where white British society became more and more ‘Anglicist’ to ‘stretch … social goals beyond [the] reach’ of the ‘Eurasian and “not-quite-white” population’.Footnote 31 However, whether in San Francisco, Pusan, Tokyo, or their home prefecture, people could all be linked back to their ‘hometown’ via the circulation of certain local magazines. Through their articles, and the new unit of the prefecture as ‘hometown’, settlers, migrants, sojourners, and even provincial residents who never even left the home islands, could become part of Japan’s growing ‘conscious international community’.
Fukuoka and Fukuoka kenjin
Within the category Takenaga defined as ‘magazines for locals’ we can differentiate between those magazines connected to associations run by and for people from the prefecture, and those produced by prefectural overseas associations (J. Kaigai kyōkai) which specifically promoted emigration.Footnote 32 In the case of Fukuoka prefecture, on the western Japanese island of Kyūshū, close to the Asian continent, the former is represented by Fukuoka kenjin (The Fukuokan), and the latter by the magazine Hakkō, its title a reference to the expansionist slogan ‘hakkō ichiu’ (all the world under one roof).Footnote 33 Large numbers of both these publications are held in Fukuoka’s prefectural and city libraries, and in the case of Fukuoka kenjin, are available to buy from second-hand book dealers. Analysis of their contents reveals the differences between the nature and purpose of these two types of ‘magazines for locals’. Hakkō was published from 1928 by the Fukuoka Prefecture Overseas Association. It had a more formal relationship with the prefectural authorities than did Fukuoka kenjin, as the Overseas Association was run by bureaucrats employed by the prefecture.Footnote 34 Unlike Hakkō, whose mission was to provide information for those in the prefecture planning to migrate ‘overseas’, mainly to the Americas, Fukuoka kenjin had a much wider circulation and mission—to relay information between members of Fukuoka’s prefectural associations living in the metropole and the empire, and beyond. Because of this, I have chosen to focus my analysis in this article on the pages of Fukuoka kenjin.Footnote 35
Fukuoka kenjin was begun by Fukuokans based in Tokyo in June 1923. Like many of the magazines Takenaga and Narita describe, it was originally aimed at those who had migrated domestically—often to urban centres. The advertisements in the magazine feature prominent placing for Genkai, a Shinbashi restaurant serving the Fukuoka delicacy mizutaki, as well as stores in Tokyo where one could purchase nihonshu (sake) from Fukuoka or neckties woven in Hakata-ori patterned silk. Its first editor, Hayashi Shigeo, was from Fukuoka’s rural Ukiha county, near Kurume city. From its founding, the magazine received the support of many Fukuokan elites in business and politics, including those with ties to the Fukuokan group, the Gen’yōsha, which espoused ultra-nationalist and Pan-Asianist views. Hayashi’s background seemed at odds with this group—he was not of shizoku (former samurai) descent, was a Methodist, a lover of modern poetry, and renowned for his hot temper and shock of hair.Footnote 36 However, in the months after the magazine’s founding, he was introduced via letter to Fukuokan mining magnate Aso Takichi by the former journalist and politician Nakano Seigō, who had ties to the Gen’yōsha. Throughout its two decades in publication, the magazine continued to list as advisers (komon) influential Fukuokans like Nakano, many with shared expansionist ideals.Footnote 37
Although couched in biblical language, Hayashi’s understanding of the mission of Fukuokans in modern Japan, as revealed in a 1924 editorial, also had much in common with the rhetoric of Fukuoka’s more well-known expansionists, who saw Fukuoka as a fulcrum for Japanese imperial expansion and industrialization:
Where is it, that has an inexhaustible supply of that black diamond [coal]? Where has the booming industrial zone of Kitakyūshū? Where is Japan’s centre of gravity, not just for Korea, Manchuria and South East Asia, but on the world stage? […] We must cry out, like the prophet in the wilderness, our Fukuoka Prefecture! … We Fukuokans are the messiahs who will save Japan.Footnote 38
Fukuoka kenjin ran for two decades until 1943, when wartime shortages and financial difficulties forced it to close. Hayashi left in 1928 to start a rival magazine, wider in scope, entitled Kyūshū oyobi Kyūshūjin (Kyūshū and Kyūshū people). His successor Nagata Masami, the son of a Kurume domain retainer, managed the magazine along similar lines to Hayashi for the next three years.Footnote 39 In 1931, however, upon falling ill, the 55-year-old Nagata handed the reins to a new generation: former Fukuoka kenjin journalist Naitō Rikizō and a new local branch chief in Kurume, Tsurusaki Shin, both in their late twenties at the time. Under Naitō and Tsurusaki, Fukuoka kenjin expanded its reach: setting up two branch offices in Fukuoka prefecture and from 1933 a branch office in Keijō (Seoul). The Keijō branch chief from 1937 until his death in 1940 was Sano Juntarō, who had worked in Korea’s colonial bureaucracy for some 30 years.Footnote 40
Membership of the local prefectural association did not give one an automatic subscription to the magazine. According to notices in the back matter of each edition of Fukuoka kenjin, the cost of subscription started at four yen per year, with individual monthly magazines costing five sen. Regular subscribers would receive each monthly magazine and could submit their news for publication, as well as requesting the magazine staff to research topics of interest to them. For an additional eight yen a year, one could become a ‘supporting member’, which granted one a say in the running of the magazine and its contents, as well as the option to contribute one’s own articles.Footnote 41
In March 1934, the Tokyo-based Japanese Association of Local Magazines mentioned above, to which Fukuoka kenjin belonged, merged with a similar group based in Osaka to form a new umbrella organization, the Japan League of Local Magazines (Nihon Kyōdo Zasshi Renmei). As Naitō noted in an editorial foreword the following month, the formation of this new organization came at a ‘delicate’ time for international affairs: ‘At a time when nationalism centred on ethnos (minzoku) is showing signs of strengthening, we believe that our patriotic movement which centres the hometown (kyōdo) should be more greatly appreciated.’Footnote 42 While the ultra-nationalist Gen’yōsha was known for its members’ involvement in violent and dramatic episodes of Japanese continental imperialism, the pages of Fukuoka kenjin feature more everyday iterations of their vision for Japanese expansion, in which the hometown acted to triangulate readers between the imperial metropole and a range of overseas destinations.
The power of an expansive hometown
In his editorial for Fukuoka kenjin’s first anniversary edition in July 1924, Hayashi argued that ‘The prefecture is the unit that will make Japanese civilization great … these are more than administrative units, they are our home [kyōdo]. Japan can only become great through the power of the prefectures.’Footnote 43 This broadening of the idea of ‘home’ to the bounds of the prefecture suggests a new expansionism, and expansiveness, to Japanese regional identity. This was echoed nearly a decade later by Naitō, who wrote in 1933 that ‘we need to rid ourselves of outdated clannish [hanbatsu] sentiments and bring forth a powerful formation based on the unit of our home [kyōdo], Fukuoka Prefecture’.Footnote 44 In contrast to rivalries between former domains, both Hayashi and Naitō presented the prefecture as a modern, outward-facing unit of belonging. That this still needed stressing in 1933, however, suggests older clannish mentalities were not easily dispelled.
What both these exhortations, and the spread of prefectural associations show, is how in the 1920s and 1930s, the idea of the ‘local’ was being scaled up and transplanted. As we have seen, from the early 1900s, prefectural associations sprung up across not only Japan, but also its various migrant destinations. As Japan extended its influence over the Asian continent, and sent migrants across the Pacific, the expanded hometown of the prefecture became a new unit of belonging, not only for domestic migrants in Tokyo, but also in Pusan, Kona, Davao, and Vancouver.
Reports in both Fukuoka kenjin and Hakkō show a capacious understanding of the concept of colonist (shokumin) and colony (shokuminchi). The overseas reports in Hakkō feature articles from the Philippines, Brazil, Canada, Manchuria, Borneo, and San Francisco, among others. Articles in Fukuoka kenjin on settlers abroad mainly cover those living in the Japanese empire—Micronesia, Korea, Taiwan, and later Manchuria—but also those in the Americas and Southeast Asia, with little to no distinction made between the two groups. This was not unique: the national magazine Shokumin (The Colonial Review), published between 1922 and 1935, covered both imperial and overseas migration. Its reports featured the domains of the Japanese empire as well as South America. From the lives of the colonists and settlers featured within the pages of these magazines, we can see that this blurring of boundaries was not just a discursive phenomenon, but reflected the movement of Japanese within and beyond the bounds of its empire, as part of a wider, Asia-Pacific sphere of migration. This was a ‘borderless’ settler colonialism, which transcended boundaries of countries but also those between state-sponsored and private forms of migration and settlement.Footnote 45 Building on Eiichiro Azuma, I argue that this movement was bound not just by ‘national consciousness’, but also by local consciousness and local networks. The content of local publications such as Fukuoka kenjin and Hakkō spanned the empire and beyond: the information they relayed helped their readers to position themselves within Japan, its empire, and the wider Asia-Pacific world. They did this through the unit of the prefecture.
It is not surprising that articles in both Fukuoka kenjin and Hakkō had a heavy emphasis on overseas expansion. By the 1930s, with Japanese imperial and military expansion on the Asian continent a source of national pride, Fukuokans had every reason to further support their ‘pioneering’ brethren. The prefecture had one of the largest group of expatriates across both lands of Japanese dominion and other popular destinations, such as Brazil and Hawai‘i. By 1933, the prefecture received over three million yen every year in overseas remittances from its expatriates.Footnote 46 Reminders of these overseas connections were present in the spaces of Fukuoka city itself: the city’s most well-known café, Brasileiro, imported its beans directly from Sao Paulo, home to many Japanese migrants.
By the 1930s, there were second and even third generations of overseas Fukuokans. Groups of Japanese Hawaiian schoolchildren visited the city in 1927, 1931, and 1936 to tour their ‘mother country’ (bokoku), as did Fukuokans from San Francisco in 1931 and 1935, supported by the Fukuoka Overseas Association and local prefectural associations. In 1939, second generation Fukuokans from Hawai‘i participated in a three-week tour of both their home country and its colonies, again supported by both the Overseas Association and local kenjinkai. Footnote 47 Travelling lectures by those who ‘made it’ overseas were held in the prefecture’s rural towns and in cities suffering from overpopulation, such as industrial Yahata. Emigrants from Fukuoka prefecture were proudly reported as making up the majority of those on the many boats leaving for South America, and such was the support from prefectural bureaucrats for this exodus that press coverage of the ships picking up passengers in Moji and Miike included reports on members of the prefectural bureaucracy travelling on a leg of the outbound voyage.Footnote 48
For prefectural and city authorities, as well as cheerleading institutions such as the abovementioned Fukuoka Overseas Association, the migration of Fukuokans to formal and informal colonies was seen as a source of local pride, as well as a ‘release valve’ for rural regions. Publications such as Fukuoka kenjin and Hakkō were active both in promoting prefectural associations overseas as well as conveying the successes of members of these associations back to their homeland. They also show us the limited distinctions made between Japan’s colonies and other destinations for migrants in this period. Beyond the rhetoric of Fukuoka’s expansionist elites, and support from its authorities, however, questions arise about what the empire and Japan’s overseas diaspora meant to Fukuokans of all different backgrounds, as well as how they saw themselves and their region within it. For those overseas and back home, what role did local networks and associations play in their daily lives?
Everyday mobility and provincial borderlessness
The pages of Fukuoka kenjin, rather than those of the state-sponsored Hakkō, best represent the nature of Japanese overseas migration and mobility, and also reveal its almost oxymoronic provinciality. Compared to those from regions without a large overseas diaspora, many Fukuokans may have had exposure to life overseas through friends and family, but this was supplemented again by the breadth of information presented in Fukuoka kenjin. One of the magazine’s monthly columns, ‘News from Locals’ (J. Kyōjin shōsoku), featured mundane communications from Fukuokans across Japan and its empire, acting as a message board for announcing marriages, deaths, travel, relocations, and promotions among the readership, which allowed the sharing of personal news across an extended hometown network. Table 1 offers some examples of these announcements from the whole span of the magazine’s extant editions.
Table 1. ‘News from Locals’ (Kyōjin shōsoku) announcements in Fukuoka kenjin.
The monthly columns of ‘News from Locals’ represent a microcosm of the Asia-Pacific world as viewed via the movements of Fukuokans through it. This view on the world changed over time: with the outbreak of war in China in 1937, the column was augmented to include a list of those Fukuokans who lost their lives fighting on the continent. That same year, Fukuoka kenjin’s office in Keijō began publishing a monthly column, entitled Sen-man tsūshin (Korea-Manchukuo Dispatch), which featured reports on Japan’s colonial policy, as well as the activities of settlers in the Korean peninsula and Manchuria.
Fukuoka kenjin also regularly published longer reports from Fukuokans living overseas. In one example of the representation of a ‘borderless’ empire inhabited by Fukuokan locals, an article entitled ‘Fukuokans Overseas’ from December 1936 focused on expatriates living in Micronesia, the Philippines, and Hawai‘i.Footnote 49 The article began with a report from journalist and Fukuoka native Tahara Haruji, who, on his way to investigate the land problems in the Philippine city of Davao, visited the Micronesian islands of Saipan, Tinian, Yap, and Palao, spending a week meeting Fukuokan settlers on each island.Footnote 50
Being a member of one’s prefectural association in a colonial environment was not simply a sentimental activity but a replacement for, or a transplantation of, one’s jinmyaku (human networks). The parallels between the structures of prefectural organizations and settler communities become more visible, the smaller the size of the colony: Saipan was home to 300 members of the South Seas (Nan’yō) branch of the Fukuoka Prefectural Association. Its president was Yamamura Seiji, a Fukuokan from the city of Kurume, who was also head of the Saipan Industrial Union.
As a result of Fukuoka’s long history of overseas labour migration, Fukuokan settlers in Micronesia had often spent time elsewhere outside of the Japanese home islands before making their way to the South Seas—a Japanese mandate since 1919. Ikeda Torahei had spent time learning coffee cultivation in Kona, Hawai‘i, before becoming a founding member of the South Seas Coffee Company on Saipan in 1926, where Tahara met him.Footnote 51 On Tinian, Tahara met Shida Shinzorō, who had also returned to Fukuoka from Hawai‘i before moving to Tinian and setting up a metalworking business.
Tahara’s main goal, however, was to investigate a conflict between Japanese landowners and the local government in the Philippines’ Davao province. At the time of Tahara’s visit to the Philippines, 26,000 Japanese were living in the islands, with the largest number of those—some 10,000 settlers—in Davao city. Around 700 of these were Fukuokans. The majority were from poor, rural regions and included many women and children. The Fukuoka Prefectural Association acted as a lobbying and support group for settlers living in the area: while visiting, Tahara sat in on one of their meetings about the recent land conflicts.
Unlike South America and Manchuria, which Tahara remarked were both subjects of very positive advertising back home in Japan, he felt that the Philippines remained a relatively unknown destination to most Japanese.Footnote 52 It had not escaped the predations of Kyūshū-based and central zaibatsu (large business conglomerates), however, and he explained why:
the island of Mindanao, where Davao is located, is just a little larger than Fukuoka kenjin’s home island of Kyūshū. Mindanao is home to only two or three hundred thousand people, is covered in virgin forest, and possibly hiding ore deposits too. Mitsui Mining, Yawata Steel and Sumitomo Copper are all busy surveying the island, which can hold hundreds of thousands more settlers easily.Footnote 53
The ‘Fukuokans Overseas’ report ended with a letter from Fukui Ryōkai, a priest at the Honpa Hongwanji Buddhist temple in Hilo, Hawai‘i. Fukui wrote how, unlike the hot and sticky climes of Honolulu, where he had first trained, the climate of Hilo was similar to that of a Kyūshū autumn, with the sound of insects chirping at night reminding him of home. Life in Hawai‘i was easier than that in Japan: warm, with plentiful food, and shorter working hours: ‘the laborer’s day is from eight in the morning until four in the afternoon, with better wages than Japan, but foreigners shut their shops from midday on Saturday and all day on Sunday, which is very inconvenient’.Footnote 54
These three reports, one from a Japanese colony and two from semi-colonies of the United States, all appeared under the same title in the Fukuoka kenjin magazine, and the reports on settler life in all three of these regions have more similarities than differences. They all make use of Kyūshū as an easily understandable and shared referent for readers of Fukuoka kenjin, reminding us of the ‘shifting boundaries of native place’– that is, the various scales of ‘home’ that could be deployed in order to familiarize concepts of overseas settlement and expansion.Footnote 55 Non-Japanese Hawaiians were seen as foreigners; the Philippines were thought to suffer from a lack of good advertising back home to make it as tempting a destination as South America or Manchuria; and settlers such as Ikeda Torahei moved between Japan’s colonies and non-colonies in a way that forces us to re-examine the categories ascribed to these regions and their histories in the post-war period. Looking out at the world from Fukuoka, and understanding the way Japanese at the time viewed overseas migration, we can see how would-be migrants incorporated sovereign states, semi-colonial, and colonial regions into their sphere of possible destinations. Local networks like kenjinkai and magazines like Fukuoka kenjin did not just help to report on Japanese expansion, but constructed a vision of it as both familiar and ‘borderless’.
Reports on our ‘frontline’ pioneers
The editors of Fukuoka kenjin did not limit themselves to relying on communication sent by branch offices nor on those living or travelling overseas themselves: they actively sought to document their fellow Fukuokans’ successes in person. Such reports played a role in the reflexive construction of an apparently ‘borderless’ empire, and with Japan’s military expansion on the Asian continent, grew increasingly intertwined not only with regional pride, but also patriotic duty. In 1937, when new Korea-Manchuria branch chief Sano Juntarō took office in Keijō, he announced that ‘the reportage that this office hopes to convey back to Fukuoka is not just communication between expatriates, but information that can be of service to the country’.Footnote 56
In the 1930s, journalists from Fukuoka kenjin visited Korea, Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, Taiwan, China, and the client state of Mengjiang (Inner Mongolia). The locations of these field expeditions mirror the advances of the Japanese on the continent, especially the magazine’s final report of November 1939 on Japanese-controlled China and the newly founded client state of Mengjiang (see Table 2).
Table 2. Visits to Fukuokan settlers in the empire made by Fukuoka kenjin, 1932–1939.Footnote 57
These visits had several goals. In the announcement of their first trip in the September 1932 edition of the magazine (see Figure 1), the editors Naitō and Tsurusaki expressed their desire to survey the role of Fukuokans in the advancement of the Japanese on the Asian continent. The visit was timed to coincide with the recent founding of Manchukuo and the nearly 25 years since Japan and Korea ‘became one’. They pointed out that the region of Fukuoka
has long historical ties to Korea and Manchuria, and many Fukuokans have travelled to the Korean peninsula and plains of Manchuria and Mongolia to cultivate (J. kaitaku) their rich resources … We therefore plan to make a field trip to survey our expatriate Fukuokans who are advancing overseas, study their lives abroad, and relate this information, via our magazine, in order to help those Fukuokans also hoping to get ahead in Manchuria and Korea. We will hold round-table meetings in key cities on our routes in order to meet our fellow Fukuokans, and also hope to come up with plans for widening the market for Fukuoka’s unique products overseas.Footnote 58
Figure 1. Announcement in Fukuoka kenjin of the first trip to Korea and Manchukuo by editors Naitō (R) and Tsurusaki (L). Source: Fukuoka kenjin, September 1932.
The clustering of settlers in colonial cities aided the formation of these prefectural organizations and amplified their ability to influence local affairs. These settlers were involved in two types of development: kaitaku (the cultivation of land and natural resources) and hatten (the spread of Japanese communities and their modernizing influence around the globe). Both these types of development were popular with the Gen’yōsha and other local elites espousing Japanese (especially Fukuokan) advancement in Asia and beyond.Footnote 59
Mansenkō: Fukuokans in Korea and Manchuria
Fukuoka kenjin’s first trip, to Korea and Manchuria in 1932, had an ambitious schedule. Setting off from Fukuoka’s port of Hakata via ferry to Pusan at the end of August, Naitō and Tsurusaki were to visit ten locations across Korea and Manchukuo in just three weeks. Blaming their youth and exuberance for coming up with such a plan, especially the foolhardiness of visiting Manchukuo when the new state was ‘still suffering with birth pangs’, Naitō and Tsurusaki thanked their more knowledgeable compatriots for advice and guidance, and asked for the help and support of those Fukuokans in Korea and Manchuria: ‘As messengers bringing warm greetings from your homeland, we are hoping for a similarly warm welcome.’Footnote 60
Reports from this trip were the subject of two special editions of Fukuoka kenjin in the autumn of 1932. The articles followed a basic structure, first describing the reporters’ journey through the colonies, then reporting on the various important Fukuokan figures making their fortunes in each respective city, and concluding with a list of the members of those cities’ Fukuoka prefectural associations. The next field trip, two years later in 1934, finished up what the over-ambitious first trip was unable to, visiting smaller urban centres in Korea, Manchukuo, and Mongolia along the way. The first trip, and his reports on it, had, as Tsurusaki wrote in the announcement of his solo second trip, ‘garnered the praise and encouragement of our fellow Fukuokans living in the prefecture and other parts of the metropole’.Footnote 61
The reports on the second Korea-Manchuria trip in 1934 were spread over four editions of Fukuoka kenjin, and had jingoistic overtones not present in the first trip. As a ‘native of the land of the gods’, Tsurusaki visited his hometown of Kurume’s three key shrines to pray for safety on his journey. The following day, 29 September, he set off, alone and from Moji this time, aboard Osaka Shipping Co.’s latest and largest ferry, the Usurii Maru. The Moji–Dalian (J. Dairen) route had increased in popularity since the founding of Manchukuo; what was once a twice-weekly sailing, now had three sailings every four days. Like all the other ferries headed to the colonies at that time, Tsurusaki observed, the Usurii Maru was nearly full.Footnote 62
For Tsurusaki, the trips to Manchukuo also had a personal connection: he had studied for three years at Dairen’s Foreign Language School in the 1920s.Footnote 63 Tsurusaki’s first view of Dairen on the 1934 voyage was like a homecoming: he remarked how ‘everything looked familiar and all set off recollections of fond memories’. While taking in the sights and sounds of the Dairen Shrine’s festival a couple of days later, Tsurusaki ran into an old friend, Moriguchi Noboru, who himself had only arrived in Dairen days before from northern Korea. Upon entering a cafe in Dairen’s Rensa shopping arcade, he discovered it was run by an old painter friend from his ‘apartment days’.Footnote 64 For many mobile Japanese, as well as some colonial subjects, these port cities must have become familiar way stations as they travelled between Japan’s expanding empire and its metropole.
Many of Tsurusaki’s dispatches from Manchuria went unpublished as they arrived back in Kyūshū too late to meet the publication deadline. Those that did make it into print, he apologized to his readers, were little more than travel diaries, but he hoped that his readership could feel as though they had got a free ride on ‘the world famous Mantetsu Asia Express, flying through wintry Manchuria at 115 kilometers an hour’.Footnote 65
For Tsurusaki, this second trip consisted of many unfamiliar locations on ‘virgin soil’. Reliant on the advice and guidance of his Fukuoka network in order to convey reports of the success of these ‘pioneers’ back to the metropole, Tsurusaki wrote that
it is with pain I realised there are still many regions without access to our magazine. Furthermore, whilst we have a readership network in Manchuria and Korea, I have been told by people in all these locations that our coverage of these regions has suffered from lack of knowledge. I hope we can rectify this in future, and that our magazine can be a mouthpiece for all of you, and provide year-round coverage of Manchuria and Korea to people back home in Fukuoka, and elsewhere in the metropole.Footnote 66
The image of settler life across the ‘borderless’ empire that made it into the pages of the magazine was shaped by the nature of Fukuokan networks themselves.
From Dairen, Tsurusaki went to Mukden (J. Hōten) and Fushun (J. Bujun), the mining town an hour-and-a-half’s train journey from the city. The victory of Japan in the Russo-Japanese War left the region’s coal mines in Japanese hands, and they were developed in parallel to the rise of the South Manchuria Railway Company. These mines, Tsurusaki remarked, ‘alongside Ansan’s Shōwa Steel Works, are our country’s crown jewels in terms of economy and defense’.Footnote 67 He took a horse-drawn carriage tour of the city’s new downtown with the wife and daughters of his Fukuokan contact, Ban Hisao, before spending the afternoon visiting the town’s various oil shale factories, power stations, mines, and the Fushun mining offices of the South Manchuria Railway Company (Mantetsu).
This was Fukuoka kenjin’s second report from Fushun. On their first visit in 1932, Tsurusaki and Naitō had been given a tour of the famed strip mines. Fukuoka’s mines in the Chikuhō region paled in comparison with the seemingly ‘endless riches’ of those in Fushun. They were overwhelmed by what they saw: ‘we began to realise just what serious problems the Chikuhō mines face. The crisis of the metropolitan mining industry exposes a contradiction in the Japanese-Manchurian economic bloc.’ Confronting the contradictions of imperial industrialization required the journalists to rethink their view of local competitiveness versus regional expansion: ‘We can’t protect Chikuhō’s mines just because it’s where we come from, we need to see the big picture, and take a more worldly stance: we must think about connecting ourselves and Manchuria together.’Footnote 68
Following this sobering visit, the reporters had attended a welcome party at the Blue Pagoda restaurant to meet Fukuokans, many of whom were employed as white-collar, technical staff at the mines. While Mantetsu was responsible for bringing many Japanese settlers to Manchuria from the early twentieth century onwards, specific links between Fukuoka and Fushun were created by Japan’s imperial energy networks. And, although the figures that the reporters chose to associate with during their visit represented the white-collar, educated classes, the kenjinkai members’ lists revealed that the overwhelming number of members were employed by Fushun’s mines as manual labourers, with the majority of them hailing from coal mining areas of Fukuoka prefecture like Chikuhō. Their report even joked that ‘if the Prefectural Association held a general meeting, they’d have to shut down work [at the mines] for the day!’.Footnote 69
Although they were useful for boasting about Fukuoka’s indispensability to the colonial enterprise, the lower classes of settler society (as well as settler women, discussed more below) remain little more than names and numbers in these publications. How people of different classes within regional associations related to each other, and how they made use of these associations, deserves further analysis.
On his second visit to Fushun, in 1934, Tsurusaki visited Fukuokans working for both of the town’s two newspapers. One of these was Fukuda Chūzō, who had worked for Mantetsu for many years, several on the Imperial Fleet in its coal department, before spending four years ‘fact-finding’ in Shanghai, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Singapore, Java, Borneo, and the Celebes. He arrived back in Manchuria and began work at the Bujun Shinpō (Fushun News) in 1921. At the time of Tsurusaki’s visit, Fukuda was at work on a book on ‘Conditions in the Philippines’—clearly a popular topic of interest for Japan’s mobile imperial class in this period.Footnote 70 Many of the men whom Tsurusaki met with in Fushun got their career break by first joining Mantetsu before going on to work in related positions outside of the company. Some, like Fukuda, returned to make use of local knowledge and contacts.
Taiwan’s local topographies
The next trip taken by Fukuoka kenjin reporters was a belated visit to Japan’s first major overseas colony, the island of Taiwan. The 1937 visit coincided with the magazine’s fifteenth anniversary. Kurume branch chief Tsurusaki was sent to the colony by boat. He admitted that his visit had also been inspired by the exposition held in Fukuoka the previous year, celebrating the completion of works on the city’s port of Hakata. Fukuoka kenjin had devoted a whole issue to the expo, sending Tsurusaki to cover the event. In his report, Tsurusaki studied the Taiwan pavilion’s popularity with the masses:
Where the Manchuria pavilion put all its energy into dioramas of Manchurian industry, the Taiwan pavilion showed us the country as entertainment […] The Taiwan we saw at the expo was the Taiwan of savages, poisonous snakes, and water buffalo. This wasn’t somewhere we could imagine living, rather, somewhere we would visit and then have our friends congratulate us, saying ‘thank God you made it back alive!’Footnote 71
Tsurusaki’s journey through the colony apparently served to disabuse him of his preconceptions, which he then attempted to correct for his readership: ‘The fear of savages in Taiwan is like people who think Japan is still the “harakiri-samurai” land of sixty years ago. Savages today merely wave after passing cars like docile school children. I look forward to the day when the hard work of the authorities pays off, and Taiwan is home to a million metropolitan Japanese.’Footnote 72 The reports made by Fukuoka kenjin offered what its editors considered a more ‘authentic’ view of the colonies, although they were just as narrow in their focus on the activities of the settler class, and silent on the far more recent cases of colonial violence, including the Wushe (J. Musha) uprising of 1930, still in recent memory.Footnote 73 Undoubtedly these reports helped create an impression not only of ‘borderless’ Japanese expansion but also frictionless imperial rule.Footnote 74
Arriving in the northern port of Kīrun (Keelung) on 11 February and leaving from there again a month-and-a-half later, on the Takachiho Maru, Tsurusaki spent 50 days in all in Taiwan. Tsurusaki visited both ‘wild lands’ and ‘Japanese immigrant villages’ but hoped to devote the majority of his time to reporting on the progress and activities of Fukuokans on the island. His first port of call was the home of his brother-in-law, Nakamura Kōzō, who worked at the juvenile detention centre in the provincial city of Shinchiku (Hsinchu). Tsurusaki’s time in Shinchiku was spent meeting local notables and visiting the city’s historical monuments, including the Shinchiku Shrine and a memorial in honour of Prince Kitashirokawa-no-Miya, erected by former Fukuoka samurai Matsumura Yunoshin, governor of Shinchiku in the early years of the colony. The prince had passed through Shinchiku as part of the Japanese landing on Taiwan in 1895. Beneath the topographies of invasion, victory, and imperial rule, Tsurusaki’s itinerary had a noticeably local inflection.
The trip to Taiwan had been made possible by the networks and support of fellow Fukuokans. As a measure of their gratitude, Fukuoka kenjin’s editors promised that from then on, every year they would deepen the connection with their compatriots in Taiwan by sending them film footage of their changing hometown.Footnote 75 Okamura Masami, one of the Fukuokan settlers who met with Tsurusaki on his visit, later remarked on the importance of the magazine to him: ‘in my old age, getting Fukuoka kenjin every month makes me even more nostalgic for home [furusato]’. For Okamura, ‘having Tsurusaki visit all the way from the homeland [naichi], him telling us all about back home and the overseas expansion of our fellow Fukuokans, was like having a nephew or cousin visit to share all their news and made me just as happy’.Footnote 76 Here, a hometown connection brought settlers into an almost familial relationship with each other, heightened, perhaps, by the distance from their real home and family.
Fukuokans on the frontline
In the summer of 1939, Fukuoka kenjin dispatched Sugi Tsukane as a special correspondent to report on Fukuokans in the newly formed state of Mengjiang in Inner Mongolia, and in Japanese-occupied northern and Central China.Footnote 77 This was to be the last such expedition for Fukuoka kenjin and was fraught with incident. Flooding in Tianjin made international headlines and shut down rail lines, slowing Sugi’s progress, as did a fever, followed later by a cold, which he had caught after travelling in summer clothes north into Mengjiang. An outbreak of cholera in Jinan, Xuzhou, and Tsingdao further disrupted his plans.
Sugi’s reports on Fukuokans in Mengjiang charted a recent influx of Japanese into branches of local government and business, many coming from Manchukuo or transferred directly from the Japanese home islands. These descriptions of such ‘front line nationals’ (zensen kokumin) contrasted with those of the long-established Fukuokan communities of Tsingdao, Tianjin, and Beijing, often dominated by those running their own foreign trading houses (Ch. hong or J. yōkō) or involved in the cities’ textile industries, the spearhead of Japanese economic penetration in the region since the 1920s.Footnote 78 The members’ lists of Fukuokan associations in these cities included many graduates of the Tōa Dōbun Shōin (East Asia Common Culture Academy) in Shanghai, which, like its predecessor, the Institute for Sino-Japanese Commercial Research, had seen large numbers of Fukuokan graduates since the Institute’s founding in 1890.Footnote 79
Although Sugi tried to present the situation in the most positive light possible, the martial atmosphere on the continent influenced the language and tone of his reports. These were peppered with the pidgin Chinese adopted by the Japanese military, references to Fukuokan businessmen in China as ‘industrial warriors’, and calls for Fukuoka’s local government to promote the expansion of its goods on the continent and send its youth to assist in the task.Footnote 80 Sugi’s ill-fated trip to China was the last visit Fukuoka kenjin would make to its ‘front line nationals’ in Asia before total war and the collapse of the Japanese empire.
Fukuokan women
The 1939 report on Mengjiang and occupied China lists only two Fukuokan women: Endō Misao, from Kamihirokawa in Yame county, who began running the Yamato Inn in Hohhot in January 1939, and Tajima Yasuko, from Kokura, who had previously lived in Mukden before moving to Beijing in 1936, where she ran the Buzen-ya Inn.Footnote 81
The information Fukuoka kenjin contained about its local women across the empire is very limited—its reports presented a predominantly white-collar, male perspective on life away from the hometown. But men, whether self-made settlers or posted overseas by their jobs, were often joined by their families. Hattori Fumiko, whose death from pneumonia in 1934 was noted in ‘News from Locals’ (see Table 1), was one of few women who made it into the column. Usually these women featured only as the wives or daughters of the men whose names headed the entries, often in announcements of marriages or births. Some longer entries on men in Fukuoka kenjin mentioned their wives and children, but most did not. Similarly, prefectural association members’ lists of hundreds of men often featured no more than a handful of women’s names, although we know there to have been prefectural women’s groups too, like the Fukuokan women in Pusan, discussed at the beginning of this article.
Work outside the home was not the only work undertaken by women, but it increased their visibility in sources like Fukuoka kenjin. Hospitality seemed to be a common occupation for those Japanese women who worked outside the home. Member lists from Naitō and Tsurusaki’s first trip in 1932 mention Fujiyoshi Hama, from Yanagawa, who also ran a boarding house in Mukden. In Manchuria, many Fukuokan women worked in restaurants and cafés in the shopping arcades of Dairen and Shinkyō. Others, like Kurume native Koga Shigeno and Sanefuji Tsukumi from Mikawa, worked in medical clinics in Fushun. In Mukden, Nagabuchi Sukako taught the art of chabana (flower arranging for the tea ceremony).Footnote 82
In colonized Korea, many wives followed their husbands to their postings. Aoyagi Kazuko raised her three children while her husband worked as head teacher of Pusan Middle School. In Keijō, Ikeda Konoko lived with her husband who, aged 60 in 1935, was president of Keijō Natural Ice company. Nishiyama Masa’s husband worked as a photographer. Perhaps she got her hair waved at the beauty salon of Ogata Kuni, who lived on the other side of Han River Boulevard from the Nishiyamas.Footnote 83
We have to look elsewhere to understand the perspective of women in Japan’s colonies—but when we do, what we find is often less sanguine and self-congratulatory than the tone of the male-dominated pages of Fukuoka kenjin. Footnote 84 When Fukuokan women speak in their own words, their experiences of empire and their networks paint an altogether different, and far less frictionless, portrait of settler life.
Locals erased: Representations and responses
One large question remains: where are the real ‘locals’ in these magazine reports on Fukuokans overseas? That is, where are the colonized subjects or Indigenous peoples? In the magazine’s travel reports we find ethnographic photomontages, where local people are often reduced to providing ‘local colour’ (see Figure 2).
Figure 2. Montage of scenes from Mengjiang, including ger tents, horseback riders, stilt dancers, and North Chinese young women described as guniang, a term with Orientalist overtones. Source: Fukuoka kenjin, October 1939.
This visual presence contrasts with the almost total erasure of local people in the columns and reports of the magazine itself, reproducing the idea of these colonies as tabula rasa or terra nullius. The so-called ‘savages’ of Taiwan might be discussed in an aside by Tsurusaki in his report, but there are very few accounts of real interactions with colonized or Indigenous people in the pages of Fukuoka kenjin. Narita Ryūichi discusses a similar erasure that took place when settlers referred to their new colonial homes as furusato.Footnote 85 Just as the Fukuoka kenjin constructed an image of Japanese expansion across the Asia-Pacific that was both borderless and frictionless, when these sources are used in historical scholarship, Indigenous and colonized populations often still remain an ‘absented presence’.Footnote 86
Such textual erasures reflect colonial desires, but also real-world effects that prefectural associations had on colonized or displaced populations. To some degree, I would argue that these organizations achieved Hayashi Shigeo’s vision from 1924. That is, hometown networks did indeed play a key role in Japanese expansion and colonization, which relied on maintaining Japanese local control over land and discourses of civilization. In Korea, they played an important role in gathering votes and rallying the base in local municipal and school board elections. Cities like Pusan, where Japanese settlers had a significant presence, saw much lower representation of Koreans on such councils. In Taiwan and elsewhere these organizations embedded settlers into the landscape—helping them feel ‘at home’ and ‘safe’ in colonized lands where settlers were in the minority. As seen in the case of the report from the Philippines, prefectural associations acted as support for migrants in their land disputes with local government, in the face of nationalist fears in Manila over the region becoming an expansionist foothold.Footnote 87 These organizations also acted to erase forms of difference within Japanese migrant populations. In the 1930s, the Okinawan Prefectural Association in Davao published the Davao Shinpō, which attempted to thread the needle of advocating for Okinawan settlers, but also called for their ‘Japanization’ to avoid further discrimination.Footnote 88
Overseas prefectural organizations wielded political power back in the naichi too. Former Taiwan Government-General bureaucrat Katayama Hidetarō, despite considering prefectural groups obsolete during his time in the colony, later drew on Fukuoka prefectural groups in Taiwan for support when he ran for political office back in Japan.Footnote 89 In the United States, Japanese politicians rallied local branches of prefectural organizations to gain support and promote themselves as a friend to migrants facing difficulties in that country.Footnote 90 These overseas constituencies were considered important at the time, and deserve our attention as historical phenomenon too.
It is harder to find sources that allow us to see these groups through the eyes of the colonized or displaced. In an article in the Korean language newspaper Tong-A Ilbo in 1932, Korean intellectual Hyŏn Sang-yun discussed prefectural organizations and alumni networks as possible sources of conflict within Japanese society. However, due to what he describes as the ‘group strength’ of the Japanese, they never descended into factionalism.Footnote 91 Hyŏn was a Japan-educated school head teacher who after the war became the first president of Korea University before being kidnapped and taken to North Korea. His perspective on the ‘group strength’ of the Japanese, as opposed to the factionalism of China and Korea, was probably coloured by his involvement in the 1919 Independence Movement and his education in Japan. Hyŏn’s search for the ‘secret’ behind Japanese success appears to reflect his own conflicted views on the ‘failures’ of Korean nationalism, rather than shedding light on the reality of these groups in Korea or wider Korean attitudes. There is more research to be done on this topic in the future.
‘Returning with the heart of a pioneer’
Although the last visit that Fukuoka kenjin’s editors made to ‘front line nationals’ was in 1939 to Occupied China, they continued printing reports from Fukuokans abroad right up to the magazine’s final issue in July 1943. This final copy of the magazine is printed on rough, grainy paper, now incredibly brittle. Carefully turning its pages, one is reminded of the shortages of wartime. The final issue featured a closing message from the editor, Naitō Rikizō: ‘In one way, love of one’s hometown, one’s country is more important now than ever, as we fight to win the Great East Asian War. Giving everything for one’s homeland—what is this but the spirit of loving one’s home, expanded?’Footnote 92
After August 1945, when the Japanese diaspora in the United States was recovering from the violence of incarceration and resettlement, and when the borders of Japan ‘snapped back’ to encompass only its four main islands, how did prefectural organizations respond? After the outbreak of war, many Japanese American kenjinkai on the West Coast were shut down by early 1942. A single page of the San Francisco-based Nichibei Shinbun from 5 February 1942 features notices announcing the disbanding of local branches of prefectural associations for Yamanashi, Kumamoto, Fukuoka, Okayama, and Saga prefectures, alongside two advertisements for where to get one’s identity photographs taken. In the post-war period, these groups reformed or formed anew, reuniting people and reconnecting networks. Nisei journalist Harry Honda remembered post-war Fukuoka kenjinkai picnics in Los Angeles, where ‘aside from the races, and the games, and the entertainment, it was a chance to get together. Some hadn’t seen each other since camp, maybe.’Footnote 93
Repatriates to the metropole also had to reimagine their local community after the collapse of Japan’s empire. In the immediate years after the war, this process played out in various ways, often mirroring the earlier creation of settler communities. One window into this process is offered by another magazine, Renrakusen (Ferryboat), founded in 1947 by a repatriate from Korea, artist Yamada Shinichi, who began the magazine for his fellow returnees. Yamada (1899–1991) became a successful artist in post-war Japan. Born in Taiwan, he attended art school in Tokyo, then from 1930 until the end of the war, he worked as a teacher in Keijō, where he exhibited his works in the Imperial Art Institute Exhibition and Korean Art Exhibition multiple times.Footnote 94
Renrakusen, which Yamada not only edited but also illustrated, has, as far as I can tell, not received any scholarly attention. It was first published in Kyōto in March 1947, as a ‘news magazine for repatriates from Korea’. The character and contents of the magazine, which was published regularly until the end of 1948, had a lot in common with that of colonial-era magazines for locals like Fukuoka kenjin. However, new repatriates now formed communities with their fellow former colonists—a geographic bond and shared experience that seemed to outweigh their previous associations formed around their hometowns in Japan.
The shared repatriate experience shaped the magazine’s design: Renrakusen’s different sections corresponded to the different zones of a cross-strait ferry, including columns entitled the ‘Antenna’, the ‘Observation deck’, the ‘Saloon’, and the ‘Meeting Room’. The preface of each issue, entitled the ‘Fore(deck) word’ introduced the conceit.Footnote 95 In the pages of the magazine, repatriates announced their new addresses and positions, and signed off with their colonial-era job titles and locations in Korea. Similar to Fukuoka kenjin’s dispatches on Fukuokan ‘pioneers’, Renrakusen included reports on Yamada’s visits to fellow repatriates from Korea. In one column on his travels around Kyūshū, Yamada reported that the former mayor of Pusan, Tomiyama Osamu, was now running a ‘magnificent’ restaurant in Fukuoka’s entertainment district of Nakasu.Footnote 96 The former editor of the Pusan Nippō, Akutagawa Hiroshi, let readers know that he had successfully founded a newspaper in Moji, the New Kyūshū Evening Post, before retiring to Tokyo.Footnote 97
Upon arrival in the Japanese home islands, Japanese who had been settlers in Korea faced a reversal of the ways in which they defined themselves in relation to each other, and to Japan. Where once they had created networks based on their home prefectures, now they defined themselves by their former homes in Korea and their jobs in the colonial administration. However, the ways in which they adapted also reflected their earlier settler mindsets. Indeed, before their repatriation, settlers were given the advice to ‘banish any naïve thoughts’ and to treat post-war Japan just as they had the Korean peninsula: to ‘return with the heart of a pioneer’.Footnote 98
Other post-colonial associations in post-war Japan included younger generations who had grown up in the colonies forming groups based on their former colonial schools. Historians have made use of these groups’ publications and collected oral history data based on their reminiscences.Footnote 99 Groups were also formed around compensation campaigns for repatriates’ lost overseas assets. Some of these were organized by the repatriates’ former colony and within this, by groups from specific prefectures.Footnote 100
From the 1950s onwards, social change brought about by economic growth and domestic migration created another wave of domestic kenjinkai organizations. Yamaguchi Satoshi has shown how high economic growth in the 1950s and 1960s led to migration from rural Kagoshima and Kōchi to industrializing Amagasaki, near Ōsaka, which in turn resulted in the formation of new prefectural organizations. In one case this began as an attempt by a local Amagasaki politician to gain a voting base among migrants from his home prefecture of Kōchi, before the association shifted to a more mutual-aid format, providing welfare services for isolated urban workers.Footnote 101 In the case of Kagoshima, large numbers of workers from the Koshikijima island chain, west of mainland Kyūshū, migrated to Amagasaki to work in its industrial plants. In both these cases (and indeed in many others) the formation of hometown associations was overdetermined—with many, often conflicting, causes. The disruptions and dislocations of the 1950s onwards, marked by this formation of new hometown associations, were followed by a third wave of Japan’s cultural discourse on the ‘hometown’, from the late 1960s into the 1970s.Footnote 102
Conclusions
Ronald Dore, in his classic 1958 account of neighbourhood life in Tokyo, noted that kenjinkai were pervasive in the post-war city, but he saw them as ‘remnants of fief loyalty’.Footnote 103 Although kenjinkai in post-war Japan may have become more insular, this was not a straightforward case of feudal inheritance. As Takenaga and Narita have argued, in the pre-war period, these associations were in fact an indication of modern dislocation. Furthermore, via the case study of Fukuoka, this article has shown that in the first half of the twentieth century, kenjinkai and their publications worked to promote and familiarize Japanese expansion beyond the borders of the nation-state. Indeed, this pre-war phenomenon—of colonial prefectural associations and their magazines—is a precursor to the ‘dialectical relationship’ between furusato and internationalism which emerged from the 1970s onwards.Footnote 104 What marks the pre-war case as different, I argue, is discourse on the prefecture as a unit of belonging that could mobilize modernizing and expansive impulses alongside nostalgic and sentimental attachments.
The geographies and histories of these organizations are connected to moments of mobility and rupture which go beyond national boundaries. In this article I have attempted to reconstruct the views out from Fukuoka, as well as the views back, via the pages of its prefectural magazine, Fukuoka kenjin. I have reconnected the forgotten histories of prefectural associations in Japan’s empire back to domestic and transpacific migration, and compared the case of Japan with other synchronous associationalist movements around the globe.
Kenjinkai held multiple possibilities for their organizers and members: a political base, a community away from home, a way to organize for rights and welfare, and a network to connect to beyond one’s own friends and family. In Japan’s colonies and other semi-colonial settings, they acted as exclusionary organizing networks to reinforce settler and migrant communities. In the pages of Fukuoka kenjin, the prefecture, as ‘expansive hometown’, made familiar the unfamiliar and acted as a scale for comprehending Japanese imperialism and migration across the Asia-Pacific. The magazine helped construct visions of Japanese expansion that were borderless and frictionless, where colonial subjects and Indigenous people were either erased or presented as an exotic spectacle. From the turn of the century to the end of the Second World War, these local networks spanned—and co-constructed—the Asia-Pacific world, before having to be reformed in the aftermath of empire and incarceration.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
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