Japan and the Ocean: A transnational history of Hyakushō and the making of the Arafura zone
Keywords: Nature/ecology
Everyday death
Transnationalism
Local knowledge
Psychogeography
Disasters
Hyakusho
Care and mutual aid
Competing modernities
Japan

This dissertation chronicles the lives of a group of people thus far unknown to History – people for whom the challenges posed by nature formed the principal driver of historical change and whose seaborne ways of life, in turn, challenged the agents of industrial modernity in Japan and the colonies of European empires in the Western Pacific in the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. These people were ‘hyakushō’, ordinary seafolk who used their rich local knowledge of the sea to navigate changing social and ecological conditions. Joined by a whole host of vagrant and unruly characters, they left the Japanese archipelago for the bluer waters of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Here, they created autonomous spaces for themselves and likeminded others in what I call the ‘Arafura Zone’, a place ruled by ocean currents and monsoonal winds. By examining Japan’s historical relationship to the world’s oceans through the making of the Arafura Zone, hyakushō emerge as the central actors of a new transnational history of modern Japan.
Fundamentally, this dissertation is concerned with the question of how the course of history is shaped by nature – by which I mean not just ‘the environment’ but also the living systems that are inseparable from it. I look at how hyakushō’s local knowledge of nature informed technological change in the early Meiji era and how this knowledge led hyakushō to embrace a life in which the ocean shaped the patterns of everyday life. The movements of hyakushō were underpinned by a sense of time and space that diverged from the temporal and spatial regimes of state actors concerned with the modernization of Japan according to Western models. I argue that this nature-centric historical trajectory forces us to rethink the meaning of the ‘Opening of Japan’, which has until recently mainly been discussed in terms of Japan’s incorporation into global industrial civilization. I also examine the ways in which environmental hardship facilitated the emergence of practices of care across racial boundaries on the industrial seascape (the decks of ships, boomtowns, and courthouses), and how those practices evolved into more expansive forms of mutual aid across a multitude of cultures in the wider Arafura Zone. Hyakushō’s relations with a heterogeneous cast of people were based on a nature-centric intellectual common ground that subverted the intrinsically hierarchical and racialized order of the international community of ‘civilized’ nation states of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The story of hyakushō and the making of the Arafura Zone offer interventions in the subfields of transnational history, environmental history, and oceanic history as they relate to the historiography of Japan. By examining non-state actors, processes, events, and ideas that fall outside of state-centric frameworks of historical research, this study shows how transnational approaches constitute a distinctive way of doing history. Transnational history might thereby be differentiated from international or diplomatic history, instead of becoming another way in which nations, states, empires, and their institutions reassert themselves as the central units of historical analysis. As oceanic history, this study consciously avoids retelling the story of ‘globalization’ from the deck of a factory ship or the administrative centers of port towns and the civilizations to which they belong. Instead, it tells a history ‘from below the waves’ that is capable of shedding light on actors whose agencies reveal differently envisioned futures and implicit notions of historical progress that evade historians’ interpretations ‘from above’. This is what makes my study an environmental history as well, in the sense that it focuses on the dreams, desires, motivations, and intellectual worlds of ordinary people as understood through their relationship with nature (thereby offering an alternative to narratives that focus on environmental decline or management). In sum, this dissertation shifts attention away from the land to the ocean to examine the transnationalism of ordinary ‘Japanese’ seafolk in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – I show how their temporality, spatiality, and cross-cultural practices of mutual aid constituted a type of modernity that undermined Western civilizational discourse.