HAYWARD and KONISHI: A Fleeting Aquapelago

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A Fleeting Aquapelago: A Theoretical Considerationof the Japanese Presence in the Torres Strait
1880s-1940s
HAYWARD Philip1,2,3* and KONISHI Junko4

1. Kagoshima University Research Center for the Pacific Islands, 1-21-24 Korimoto,Kagoshima 890-8580, Japan
2. Southern Cross University, PO Box 157, Lismore NSW 2480, Australia
3. University of Technology Sydney, PO Box 123, Broadway NSW 2007, Australia
4. Okinawa Prefectural University of Arts, 1-4, Shuri Tonokura-cho, Naha-shi,
Okinawa-ken, 903-8602, Japan* Corresponding author
E-mail: prhshima@gmail.com

Abstract
In the 1880s-early 1940s a number of people from poor coastal communities in Japan relocated to thenorthern fringes of Australia, and particularly the southern end of the Torres Strait, to work in the pearlingindustry. This group formed a distinct community centred on Thursday Island and also worked more
broadly throughout the region. Their economic activity and related lifestyle were closely premised on
their interaction with the seafloor and with navigating to and from pearling areas. As part of this activity
they came in close contact and interaction with Torres Strait Islanders and other indigenous groups. The
article identifies the manner in which the Japanese community’s interactions with other communities, otherliving species, spaces and technologies within the Torres Strait created a distinct aquapelagic assemblage.
Discussion of this particular topic is preceded and informed by an overview of the development of Island
Culture Studies in the period 1999–2016 and of the concept of the aquapelago arising in this context.
Key words: Torres Strait, Thursday Island, Japanese, pearl divers, aquapelago

Introduction: The Torres Strait and the Aquapelago
The Torres Strait is a narrow, shallow passage of water that lies between the
tip of Cape York, in far north-eastern Australia, and the south coast of New Guinea,
some 150 kilometres north, and marks the interface of the Arafura Sea (to the west)

Received: 6 July, 2016
Accepted: 3 February, 2017

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and the Pacific Ocean (to theeast) (Fig. 1). The Strait covers
what was once a land bridge
between Australia and South
East Asia (during the Mesolithic
period) that was submerged
by rising seas around 8000
years ago. Prior to the arrivalof European colonists andJapanese workers in the region
in the late 1800s, the region
was (and continues to be) home
to an indigenous population of
Melanesians with two distinct
languages (Kala Lagaw Ya, inthe west, and Meriam Mir, inFig. 1. Torres Strait Islands and adjacent coastlines (source
Wiki open access: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torres_the east) who are now referred
Strait#/media/File:TorresStraitIslandsMap.png).
to collectively as Torres Strait
Islanders. The region has been
estimated to have been populated for at least 2500 years with a strong possibility ofearlier settlement (BRUNO et al. 2004: 65-78). Archaeological evidence and research
conducted since the late 19th Century indicates that communities have maintained
a combination of subsistence agriculture, harvesting of marine food resources andtrading with communities within the Torres Strait and on the mainland of Papua New
Guinea. As in the case of Australia as a whole, the non-indigenous groups that arrived
and settled in the area from the late 1800s on were uninvited visitors who disrupted
traditional societies and imposed arbitrary restrictions on indigenous livelihoods andself-determination. While this article focusses on the particular nature of Japanesepresence in and around the Torres Strait in a specific historical period, it should be
noted that whatever degree of intercultural collaboration occurred between them andTorres Strait Islanders (as discussed below), the Japanese presence was fundamentallyan intrusive one and its temporary nature was due to very specific geo-politicaldevelopments.

Theoretical Contexts and Perspectives
Our address to the topic expounded in this article represents a return to the subject
matter some seventeen years after our initial ethnographic and literature research
was undertaken and fifteen years since our original article on the topic was published(HAYWARD and KONISHI 2001). While our return to the topic is informed by new
research findings it is, more significantly, a reconsideration of the significance of ourHAYWARD and KONISHI: A Fleeting Aquapelago

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topic in the light of recent theorisations that were substantially triggered by aspects of
our original work. Before moving to the main subject of this article, it is pertinent toaddress these. Our original research on the Japanese community in the Torres Strait
in the 1880s-1940s was conducted from our respective viewpoints as an Australianbased popular music historian and a Japanese ethnomusicologist. We commenced
our collaboration when the first author, Hayward, was a visiting research professor in
Sociology at Kansai University in Osaka, and the second, Konishi, had just completed
her PhD in Ethnomusicology at Osaka University, researching Micronesian music
cultures. Our collaboration involved archival research into the music culture of theJapanese community in the Torres Strait and associated interviews with a numberof aged Torres Strait pearl industry employees who lived in Wakayama prefecture,
conducted in 1999. Subsequent to completion of our research we attempted toconceptualise and make sense of it from within our two disciplinary fields and withreference to the broader work of GANTER (1988, 1994, 1999) on the Japanese rolein pearl diving in northern Australia during our focal period. As a result of this, ourresearch, while original with regard to aspects of musical repertoire, social musicmaking practice and intercultural contact between Japanese and Torres Strait Islanders,
was limited in its conceptual scope. In particular, it failed to engage with the mannerin which Japanese livelihood activities in the region might be understood more
holistically. Our sense of there being a greater conceptual picture and dynamic to therelationships between culture and livelihoods in a specific archipelagic-marine region
that was somewhat out of our grasp was one that had unforeseen consequences.
Subsequent to our collaboration on the Wakayama field research, we linked
up with Daniel Long, a sociolinguist specialising in Japanese small island cultures,for field research on language and culture issues in Japan’s remote south-eastern
Ogasawara Islands in 2002. In our evening meetings, our discussions about aspects
of island societies and the general nature of social interactions in archipelagic andoceanic contexts led us to ruminate on the lack of dialogue between various academic
disciplines and to comment on a related lack of cross disciplinary theorisation. In orderto address this shortcoming, we decided to try and prompt greater communicationand collaboration by holding a colloquium on cross-disciplinary approaches to island
cultures. Initial responses to our proposal were so positive that we decided to drop our
initial idea of a small event in Tokyo and go for a full academic conference. In order toachieve the latter (and to ensure maximum support from existing island researchers inJapan) we approached Kagoshima University’s Research Centre for the Pacific Islands(the publishers of this journal) with a proposal to host what we identified as the 1st
International Small Island Cultures (ISIC) Conference. The Centre was unequivocally
positive about our proposal and collaborated with us in holding the conference acrossfour days in February 2005. The event was highly successful with over 100 delegates
attending panels, community presentations and music and dance performances. The
sense of a shared research project led to the establishment of SICRI, the Small Island

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Cultures Research Initiative, as a continuing network.1 SICRI has continued to thrive
since the initial event, with annual conferences being held in alternating continents eversince,2 the most recent of which (ISIC 12) was held in Okinawa.
The issues raised at the first ISIC, and subsequent conferences, and theencouragement of researchers such as Henry Johnson, from New Zealand’s Otago
University, led to the establishment of a biannual refereed research journal whose
title―Shima (the Japanese term for island) reflected the Japanese context of the
project’s origins. First published in April 2007, the first ten issues of the journal
primarily explored case studies of particular island and archipelagic societies before
shifting into more sustained conceptual work on how to understand island societies
and the cultures they produce in interaction with the marine environments that encircle
and connect them. Commencing with Volume 6 number 1, published in April 2012, thejournal has actively sought to develop theoretical frameworks and debates about island
cultures. Particular strands of this have concentrated on aspects of the close integrationof some island societies with marine resources and environments, discussed with regard
to the neologistic concept of the aquapelago; aspects of islands and micronationality;
and, most recently, concepts of peninsular ‘almost islandness’.
The concept of the aquapelago was first sketched in H AYWARD (2012a), andwas subsequently refined after responses from SUWA (2012) and MAXWELL (2012) in
HAYWARD (2012b). Further debate on the issue has appeared in Shima,3 and the concept
has, most recently, been developed by Suwa in his paper at the ISIC 12 Conference in
Okinawa and the extended version published in Shima Volume 10 Number 2 (SUWA2016). The concept was germinated by various contributors to Shima in response
to a paper published in Island Studies Journal (ISJ) calling for the establishment ofArchipelago Studies as an academic field (STRATFORD et al. 2011). The ISJ paper
identified that within the broad fields of Humanities and Social Sciences (within which
Island Studies is located) there is an absence of address to “ways of being, knowing
and doing―ontologies, epistemologies and methods―that illuminate island spaces
as inter-related, mutually constituted and co-constructed” (ibid: 119). In this regard,
they proposed archipelagos as assemblages that “act in concert [and] actively map out,
select, piece together, and allow for the conception and conduct of individual units asmembers of a group” (ibid: 122). While correct in identifying the absence of address
to aspects of islands’ connectedness in archipelagic groups, the scope of the article wasstunted by its omission of marine environments as focal places for human livelihood
activities and of related concepts of integrated terrestrial and marine spaces.

1
2
3

See the SICRI website (2004–) for details.
See details of conference locations and proceedings of early conferences on the SICRI website (2004–).
See, for instance, BALDACCHINO (2012), DAWSON (2012), NASH (2012), FLEURY (2013), HAYWARD (2014),
ALEXANDER (2015) CASHMAN (2015) and DICK (2015).

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Prompted by the imbalance in the ISJ article's conceptualisation of archipelagic
spaces, HAYWARD (2012) proposed the concept of the aquapelago as:	a social unit existing in a location in which the aquatic spaces between and arounda group of islands are utilised and navigated in a manner that is fundamentallyinterconnected with and essential to the social group's habitation of land and theirsenses of identity and belonging (2012a: 5)
And went on to emphasise the aquapelago:	as an entity constituted by human presence in and utilisation of the environment(rather than as an ‘objective’ geographical entity). In this regard, aquapelagos areassemblages that come into being and wax and wane as climate patterns alter andas human socio-economic organisations, technologies, and/or the resources andtrade systems they rely on, change and develop in these contexts. In this sense,
aquapelagos are performed entities. (2015a: 6)
The article’s final sections addressed the Torres Strait or, rather, the spaces within
the Torres Strait in which humans reside and interact with marine resources, as an
exemplary aquapelago. After noting that the region is usually referred to by the nameof its aquatic space―ie the Torres Strait―rather than as an archipelago of islands
within the Strait, it went on to identify the manner in which “traditions of marine usage
were a key element in the landmark Australian legal case that led to the rejection of
the concept of terra nullius, formerly enshrined in Australian Law as the pretext uponwhich indigenous peoples were denied land rights due to the assumption that land wasnot ‘owned’ in any way prior to European colonisation of the continent” (ibid: 7). The
article went on to quote key Torres Strait Island indigenous rights activist Eddie Koiki
Mabo, who extended an original land rights claim to Mer Island made in 19824 toencompass two small reefs located 10 kilometres to the east of Mer Island, identifyingthat: here is a stone fish trap that I'm claiming, and beyond that... we have, a lagoon
Tthat I call Las Kapar and beyond that again is our home reef called Op Nor. And
then, of course, there is a stretch of sea which goes out to the Great Barrier Reef,and I claim that because it has special significance as far as our cultural myths andlegends go. (GRAHAM 1989)
Interpreting this as reflective of an aquapelagic sensibility, evident in Mabo’s reference
to “home” as an integrated terrestrial and marine environment, the article went
on to identify how a subsequent claim pursued by a group of Torres Strait Island
4 ‘MABO and Others v QUEENSLAND n2’.

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communities for marine rights in an area of 37,800 square kilometres was upheld by
the Federal Court of Australia in 20105 (implicitly) recognising Torres Strait Islanders
as an aquapelagic people. Subsequent research on traditional aquapelagic societies
was presented in HAYWARD (2012b) with regard to the Haida people of Haida Gwaii,
located off the northern coast of British Columbia, emphasising continuities across precontact and contemporary periods.
Given the above, the Japanese performance of a particular aquapelagic assemblage
through their livelihood activities, residence in and transit across the Straits in the
1880s-1940s was a fleeting manifestation within a region that was home to the Torres
Strait’s complex island societies and trading networks (see B ECKETT 1990, SHARP
1993, DAVIS 2004). It was, nevertheless, a significant one and, in contrast to the longestablished aquapelagic culture of Torres Strait Islanders, it offers insights into howaquapelagic assemblages can be produced by temporary economic migrants in new
aquatic spaces and island terrains.

The Japanese Presence in the Torres Strait
The trigger for Japanese involvement in the Torres Strait was the Meiji
Restoration of 1868, which loosened restrictions on Japanese movement outside of thenation for employment or migration purposes. From 1885 onwards migrants departed
Japan for locations such as Hawai’i, Mexico and South America in organised groups(ENDOH 2009: 160-161) following the paths that individuals (mostly sailors) had
blazed in the previous decade. The year the Emperor was restored to Japan was alsothat in which the first pearl shells were harvested by (European-Australian) divers forcommercial purposes off Tudu (also known as Warrior Island) in the north-east Torres
Strait. After several years of trial harvesting using free-divers,6 a pearling operation
was established on the island in the early 1870s. This led to other trial operations,many using (then new) underwater breathing systems that involved a diver in a suitand helmet descending to the sea floor and moving across it gathering pearl shells
while receiving oxygen via hose connected to a manual air compressor located on aship moored above. This technology created a new experience for humans in termsof their ability to descend to greater depths for more sustained durations than freedivers and to move across the sea-floor in a similar manner to movement across aterrestrial landscape. In this environment, they interacted with marine species (either
deliberately or accidentally) and experienced particular aspects of marine depth (most5 ‘AKIBA on behalf of the Torres Strait Islanders of the Regional Seas Claim Group v STATE OFQUEENSLAND No 2’2010.
6 Free-diving involves the diver holding their breath whilst underwater and restricts the diver tosubmersion for a limited duration. This approach was used in the Torres Strait for marine harvestingprior to the introduction of assisted diving and continued as a subsistence practice in shallow waters
for much of the 20th Century.

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notably during perilous ascents when nitrogen build-ups in the bloodstream could
prove debilitating or, on occasion, fatal, if the divers rose too quickly). In this manner,
air-hose assisted diving for the purposes of marine harvesting created an aquapelagic
space that was central to a range of livelihood activities (either directly involved in oras support operations for divers, pearling operators and their families and associates).
In its early years, the aquapelagic spaces generated were ad hoc ones, explored byvarious operators in various parts of the Torres Strait, but by the 1880s a specific sociocultural aspect was founded through the establishment of Thursday Island (Waibene) as
the centre for the regional pearling trade. The government of the (then) British colonyof Queensland annexed the southern and central area of the Torres Strait in 1872, withthe approval of the British Colonial Secretary, and initially administered it throughoffices in Somerset, on Cape York, before relocating to Thursday Island in 1877 andretaining those offices subsequent to the further annexation of the remaining Torres
Strait Islands in 18797 (MULLINS 1995). By the early 1880s over 200 pearling vessels
were based in Thursday Island. The relocation spurred a substantial developmentof what was initially a small, quiet island, with a number of commercial operations
congregating on it to support the rapidly developing pearling industry.
While Torres Strait Islanders had been free-diving in local waters for centuries,
they were not favoured for employment in the industry as divers (for reasons that
require further research) and, instead, operators employed a variety of Asians andPacific Islanders who found their way to the Torres Strait in order to gain employment
in what was akin to a marine resource “gold rush” that promised ready and lucrative
employment for those willing to work in arduous and often dangerous conditions.
Early foreign arrivals included Malays, Indians and Pacific Islanders. The first Japaneseindividual to reside on Thursday Island appears to have been Kojiro Nonami, from
Hirose in Shimane Prefecture (now annexed to Yasugi city), who arrived in Australia
as a sailor in the mid-late 1860s and found his way to Thursday Island by 1878, where
he found work and established a reputation as an accomplished diver.8 News of his
successful employment reached other Japanese sailors and communities, with a seriesof young men travelling to Thursday Island to work as divers. The majority of these
also proved reliable and competent and the Australian Pearl Company specificallyrecruited 37 Japanese young men to work in the the Straits in 1883 (NAGATA 2004).
By the mid-1880s there were some 90 Japanese divers based at Thursday Island,comprising a significant―although still minority―group with an ethnically diverse
labour pool (GANTER 1994: 101).
7
8This was accompanied by the passing of legislation in the Queensland Legislative Assembly thatformally incorporated the islands of the Torres Strait into the British colony of Queensland.
Juni’chiro Suwa has pointed out to us that Hirose is located in the Lake Shinjiko area (a major centreof shijimi clam harvesting). Nonami might therefore have had some knowledge of and/or affinity for
harvesting shellfish that inclined him to work in the Torres Strait pearling industry.

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There was a substantial increase in the number of Japanese divers and associatedpersonnel moving to the Torres Strait in the 1890s when the Australian marine trading
company Burns Philp began utilising Japanese agents to recruit sailors from Japanand international ports they passed through (such as Hong Kong and Singapore). At
the same time, and as a subset of nanshin-ron (a broader Japanese interest in southerneconomic and/or colonial expansion to regions such as Micronesia, Australia and New
Guinea―IWAMOTO 1995), Japanese business interests began to target Thursday Island
as a ‘bridgehead' into the wider region. As a result, the Japanese presence on Thursday
Island swelled dramatically in the late 1880s and early 1890s, with divers, sailors,
prostitutes, merchants and their families relocating to the Straits (and other parts ofnorthern Australia such as Broome and Darwin). Their numbers and prominent role inpublic and commercial life on Thursday Island was reflected in the establishment of
the Nihonjin kurabu association, which acted as an umbrella group for the Japanesecommunity and as a conduit for communications with Japanese commercial andgovernmental agencies. By 1893 the successful establishment of Japanese nationals on
Thursday Island prompted HATTORI (1894) to advocate the island as a shin shokumin(new Japanese colony). As the 1900 census identified, in addition to Japanese residents
on Thursday island, who numbered 385, a further 706 were recorded as living on boats
or on other islands (NAGATA 2004).
Around half the Japanese population of Thursday Island originated from thesouthern coastal area of Wakayama Prefecture, to the south-east of Osaka. The
principal reason for the region’s prominence in this regard was its poverty and isolationfrom emerging Japanese commercial centres.9 Faced with little prospect of economic
advancement at home, a large number of young men followed an initial handful of
migrant workers who had found success in the Straits’ pearling industry. A smallergroup of migrants from Ehime―who had departed their region for similar reasons―comprised the next largest population cluster, with individuals from Nagasaki andHiroshima making up the majority of the remainder. By 1897 the Japanese numberedaround 1000 and were the largest ethnic group on Thursday Island, outnumbering
European-Australians by a ratio of 2:1 and comprising a significant proportion of pearl
divers and pearling boat captains working in the region. The prominence of the Island’s
Japanese population (and of the Island’s appearance as a potential long-term base forJapanese presence in the region) led to a ‘goodwill’ visit by three Japanese warships in1903. The prominence of the Japanese population, the 1903 military visit and Japan’s
decisive naval victory over Russia during their 1904-1905 war prompted substantial
concern about Japanese expansionism in Australia. One result of this was a resolutionof the new Australian Senate10 to limit the number of non-whites admitted into the9

We have been unable to establish whether the area’s traditional fishing livelihoods inclined migrants towork in the pearling trade, or whether poverty was a more determining aspect.

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country on short-term contracts to equal numbers of those departing.
The Senate action provided a severe restriction on the volume and flexibility ofhiring arrangements for the pearling industry. One (unforeseen) result of this was thatthe major pearling fleets operated by Australians Reg Hockings and James Clarke
relocated their bases to Aru (in the Dutch East Indies), allowing them to hire as they
wished. This halved the number of boats based at Thursday Island and left Japanesedivers in a (near exclusive) dominance of the local industry and provided Japanesewith increased opportunities to captain their own ships. Perceiving the leverage thissituation gave them, Japanese divers organised a strike in 1906 that won them better
conditions but caused further concern amongst the European-Australian establishment
about Japanese power in the region. This led to the imposition of a standard contract
for Japanese employees on Thursday Island that severely diminished the number ofJapanese residents, business establishments and community amenities by requiring
Japanese employees to reside on their pearling boats all year-round, aside from summer
months when the trade was suspended due to unfavourable sea conditions. By themid 1920s pressure to ‘de-Japanise’ the pearling industry led to a substantial increasein the number of Australian Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander and Papuan divers andmembers of pearling ship crews. This resulted in a reduction of the number of new
Japanese arriving to work as divers and a shift from pearling to other marine activities,
such as bêche-de-mer and trochus shell gathering (in the Straits11 and down the eastern
Queensland coast), with Japanese often working as captains. This activity has received
far less attention than pearling histories but is returned to below. Japanese involvementin the marine trade in the Torres Strait and elsewhere in Australia terminated in 1941,
following the outbreak of The Pacific War, when Japanese nationals were interned.

The Japanese Aquapelago in the Torres Strait
One of the most original and significant theorists to contribute to the developmentof Island Cultural Studies and theoretical debates in the journal Shima is Japanese
anthropologist Juni’chiro Suwa. Following his exposition of the concept of shima
in Japanese culture that introduced the first issue of the journal (SUWA 2006), hecontributed an insightful discussion of the concept of aquapelagic assemblages that
extended the livelihood focus of his earlier paper to a discussion of particular humancommunities engaged in interaction with marine environments (SUWA 2012). Citing“the Bajau of the Sulu Sea, the Moken of the Andaman Sea and the residents ofebune houseboats who pursue a traditional lifestyle in some parts of coastal Japan” as
10
11

Established with the federation of Britain’s formerly separate colonies into the Commonwealth ofAustralia in 1899.
NB While the official name of the region refers to the Strait in the singular ― ie‘The Torres Strait’,
the area is colloquially referred to as‘The Straits’ (in the plural).

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examples (ibid: 14), he contended that for such groups:	the assemblage of (human) livelihood provides a mediating process between land
and marine environments and it constructs cultural landscapes with diversity as
well as complexity. People hunt, gather or grow products from the sea as well asfrom the land, and when their ‘commons’ are open, wildernesses and grasslands
can be understood as a‘sea’. In discussing aquapelagic assemblages, therefore, theprocess by which cultural landscapes are generated turns out to be a central issue.
(ibid: 14)
Identifying that the “constitution of aquapelagic assemblages involves the appropriationand sharing of cultural land/seascapes; therefore, occupancy of space is a primaryconsideration” (ibid: 15), he contends that:	Aquapelagic assemblages are, rather, specific products of ongoing processes in
actual locations; and the resource uses, finances, identities and alliances involvedin constituting them are fluid, transient and sometimes elusive... they are occupied
with sacred, untouchable, memorised and/or identified elements that are sharedthrough and as common knowledge, skill, consciousness, desire and ideology,
whatever the direction they take. (ibid: 15)
These characterisations are so precisely appropriate for the subject of this article
that they may have been expounded on the evidence and characterisations previously
published by the authors (HAYWARD and KONISHI 2001). In many ways, they provide
the holistic overview of the nature of Japanese culture in the Torres Strait in the
1880s-1940s that we were unable to grasp in our earlier paper, an irksome aspect that―like a grain of sand in an oyster―contributed to the kernel of theory that accreted
through the establishment of SICRI and Shima. Indeed, returning to a discussion of
the nature of Japanese community in the Torres Strait in the mid-2010s in the light ofsubsequent debates provides clear perspectives on the particularity of that community
within its environment.
The Japanese community in the Torres Strait performed an aquapelago throughthe assemblage of seafloor, sea surface and terrestrial planes of livelihood, socialand residential activity. The central element of the pearling trade was the integrated
assemblage of divers on the seafloor being life-supported by crewmembers on board
ships and by these overall crews’ integration with both the extended pearling businessand by members of the Japanese community providing various services and comforts.
Given the perilous nature of pearl diving and the highly precise requirements of surface
navigation, equipment maintenance and monitoring, communication between Japanese
workers was essential and skills and knowledge transfer was vital to the community’ssurvival and prosperity (in the manner identified by SUWA 2012 above). Given the

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absence of written materials or interviews conducted at the time, it is difficult toassess to what extent Japanese divers discussed their experiences of submerging andascending and of traversing the sea floor and watching and interacting with variously
benign and/or hostile aquatic species. Even if they did not communicate on suchmatters―or else were hampered by the lack of suitable terms and concepts to express
their experiences―they undoubtedly shared similar experiences and various senses ofmonotony, beauty, anxiety, exhaustion and elation relative to the success of their divesand the related conditions in which they dived. One of the few insights into Japanesedivers’ experiences is provided by a song in the kouta idiom (a vernacular song form
that emerged around 1910 and became broadly popular in the 1930s). One composition
identified as popular amongst Japanese divers in the Torres Strait in the 1930s by
various of our interviewees back in 1999 was Daiba no Uta (‘The Divers’ Counting
Song’). The song amply conveys the manner in which aquapelagic lifestyles can be as
taxing as terrestrial ones.
Daiba no Uta consists of twenty stanzas12 that describe the tough conditions
experienced by divers and identifies the various issues faced by new arrivals in
the Straits, chiefly related to language, nature of food, nature of work, absence offemale sexual partners and nostalgia for family and home. Stanza sixteen provides aparticularly stark image of the diver’s physical state after extended periods at sea: “Youcan see our plight from our emaciated and sunburnt bodies”. Reflecting the declining
nature of the pearling business in the Torres Strait in the 1920s and 1930s, when overharvesting had severely depleted stocks, two stanzas include poetic statements ofdisappointment and of the extremity of the divers’ occupation:
Twelve. I had the courage to leave Japan since I thought I would find a mountainof treasure but instead I have found a mountain made of needles.
 ifteen. Divers take shells from the border between Heaven and Hell in a vainF
attempt to gain money.
The reference to the border between Heaven and Hell in Stanza Sixteen is a significant
statement of the liminality―the‘inbetweenness’―of the diver’s existence―working
on the sea floor but tethered by an air-hose to the surface, living on board ship when
above the water, living with compatriots but away from home, and harvesting valuable
pearls but largely excluded from the profits of the pearling industry.
As we discussed in our 2001 article, one way that the divers and Japanesecommunity as a whole negotiated their stresses, alienation and homesickness was
through music. Despite the bleak picture of a diver’s life painted in the lyrics of Daiba
12

See full transcription in HAYWARD and KONISHI 2001: 54-55.

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no Uta, a significant number of Japanese ships’ captains were successful in theirenterprises and often purchased traditional Japanese instruments such as shamisen or
shakuhachi, or western instruments such as guitars or violins which they―or othercrew members―would perform on in evenings, rest days or holidays. A numberof successful divers and captains also owned gramophones and collections of discs
imported from Japan. Accompanied or unaccompanied singing of Japanese traditionaland contemporary songs was also common and musical events were often held
onshore during the prolonged summer lay-off period. The musicality of pearling luggercrews and, later of the crews employed on boats captained by Japanese employedin the bêche-de-mer and trochus trade, was significant with regard to another facetof the aquapelagic lifestyle experienced by the Japanese, that of the aquapelago as
an intercultural contact zone (PRATT 1992), identified by SPYER (1998) as “fissured
performative spaces”.
As we discussed in 2001, and as also identified in the discussion of intercultural
musical exchanges between bêche-de-mer and trochus shell boat crews and groupsof Australian tourists on the north-east Queensland coast in the 1930s described in
HAYWARD (2001), the aquapelagic assemblage operated as a transactional crossroads.
While similar accounts do not appear in records of Australian captained pearling,bêche-de-mer and trochus shell boats, several accounts of musical interactions between
Japanese, Papuan and Torres Strait Islander crew members reported them listening toeach other’s songs and/or watching dances that might accompany them and, in someinstance, subsequently imitating these and/or collaborating in the performance of such
repertoires. This interest also led to Japanese crews’ attendances at festivals on various
Torres Strait islands, where their familiarity with aspects of repertoire facilitated theirenjoyment of and participation in the festivities. One of our 1999 informants, Yuzuru
Kuhara, from Izumo village in Wakayama (now part of Kushimoto city), recalled thata group of his fellow Izumo crew members working on the lugger Trenton made apoint of learning Torres Strait songs and dances and even performed these at festivals
in Japan in the late 1940s after their repatriation from Australia. Another informant,
Yutaka Higashi, sang a song he learned in the Straits13 at senior citizens’ events inWakayama until the 1990s.
The experience of cross-cultural association and observation also extended tothe development of a Torres Strait song repertoire about Japanese crews and captains.
Dicky Lahou, from Poid Island, for instance, who had worked on luggers in the
1920s and early 1930s, regularly sang two songs about life on the luggers to guests
at Lindemann Island Resort in the Whitsundays, where he worked in the mid-1930.
One was similar to Daiba no Uta in describing adverse living conditions on the lugger
Trenton during a voyage to Bell Cay on the Great Barrier Reef, while another (again
13

Which we identified as the composition‘Black Swan’.

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recalling themes from Daiba no Uta) commented on language issues in multiculturalcontexts by satirising a Japanese captain’s confused renditions of “l” and “r” sounds
and the consequent difficulties of understanding particular orders.
The constitution of intercultural spaces within broader aquapelagic ones is
not a regular aspect of the latter but rather results from the particular presence ofJapanese as a prominent group in pearling and, later, bêche-de-mer and trochus
harvesting enterprises. As significantly, it reflected their perverse status as dominantoutsiders in activities constituted in a remote area of Australia sparsely administeredand populated by that country’s dominant European-Australian population. In many
ways, this particular location, at this particular time, merits comparison to the muchdiscussed‘Temporary Autonomous Zones’ identified by BEY (1985) as constituted bycorsairs (pirates) in areas such as the Caribbean during the early period of European
colonisation. While the Japanese workers in the Torres Strait appear to have bean
law-abiding (with regard to the few Australian laws that impinged on their everyday
operations), they enjoyed a variety of autonomies during their heyday, including far
freer associations with cross-cultural groups than was common amongst EuropeanAustralians interacting with indigenous workers in a similar period (again evoking thecorsairs and their frequently multicultural, multi-racial crews). Like the corsair societies
discussed by BEY (above), the Japanese autonomous aqualpelagic assemblages proved
decidedly temporary and faded with the decline of the local pearl stocks and theimposition of restrictions on Japanese recruitment and residency in the Torres Strait.
With no little irony, their internment and later deportation arose from a militaristic
extension of the same nanshin-ron impulse that brought them to the Torres Strait in thefirst instance. Three months after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbour, the Imperial
naval air force also staged an attack on Horn Island in the lower Torres Strait, killing
156 Australia servicemen and support workers and closing the chapter on the Japanese
association with the Torres Strait and their performances of aquapelagic assemblages
within it.14

Conclusion
The discussions in this article have attempted to provide an interlinked andmutually illuminative account of two aspects. The first concerns the origins of the
SICRI research network, the journal Shima and, consequently, the concept of theaquapelago in the authors’ earlier attempts to describe and analyse a series of Japanesecultural activities in the Torres Strait between the 1880s and 1940s. These resulted from
14

Although a small number of Okinawans were allowed to work on pearling luggers in the Torres
Strait in the late 1940s, when a brief attempt was made to revive the local pearling industry. (NB As
residents of an area that had been excised from Japan by the US occupying administration, Okinawans
were exempt from restrictions on Japanese entry into Australia at this time.)

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the migration of a large number of Japanese workers and family members to the area
to participate in pearling and subsequently bêche-de-mer and trochus harvesting. The
second strand comprises a consideration of the manner in which Japanese livelihood
activities in the region created a temporary aquapelagic assemblage that had highly
distinct aspects with regard to the cultural activities and perceptions of both Japanese
workers and members of the various indigenous groups they came into contact with.
As a reflection on a short-lived aquapelagic assemblage it adds to the body of literature
on longer-established indigenous aquapelagos (in the Torres Strait, Haida Gwaii
and Vanuatu islands). In this regard, the article points to the need for research into
aquapelagos to consider various time spans for their constitution and various means of
their invocation and performance. Drawing on a body of theoretical work developedin the journal Shima, the article identifies the complexity of integrated marine andterrestrial societies and the need to find flexible and subtle ways of characterising andanalysing them.

Acknowledgements
Thanks to Hiroshi O GAWA and Kansai University Faculty of Sociology forfacilitating our original research on this topic; to Yutaka HIGASHI, Yuzuru KUHARA,
Kauji TSUMURA and Shin’ichi HORIMOTO, who provided us with invaluable insights
into the experiences in the Torres Strait prior to the outbreak of the Pacific War; and to
Kagoshima University’s Research Center for the Pacific Islands for providing the firstco-author of this paper with a visiting research fellowship in May–October 2016. Also
thanks also to Juni’chiro SUWA for his feedback on the final draft of this article.

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