Abstract
This contribution explores the role of migratory fish—tuna—and its materiality within the Japanese Empire. The historiography of Japanese imperialism features what could be called a terrestrial bias. Historians generally analyze Japan’s Empire and its expansion in terms of the occupation of landmasses and islands and the fight for natural sources, but the vast oceans and their living resources being part of the empire is a fact that is scarcely mentioned. Yet, this maritime dimension and living resources such as tuna, this chapter argues, were much more crucial for the Japanese Empire than generally assumed. Indeed, the very materiality of migrating tuna and its pathways through the oceans had steered human interaction with the fish. With this in mind, the chapter traces how it was used as a commodity, but also how it formed narratives of the Japanese as “ocean people” maintaining a specific relationship with tuna. It further seeks to show that it was tuna, in the form of both an economic resource and symbolic capital, that constituted not just the Japanese empire and its society, but also its global impact and power, to a barely acknowledged extent.
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Notes
- 1.
Naikaku Jōhōbu (1938).
- 2.
Yamato (1941, 379).
- 3.
Tsutsui (2013).
- 4.
- 5.
Borgstrom (1964, 273).
- 6.
Hamashita (1990).
- 7.
- 8.
- 9.
Fogel (2009).
- 10.
Ogawa (2016).
- 11.
For a claim to tackle the environmental dimension, and that of oceanic species in maritime history see Wigen (2006).
- 12.
- 13.
This argument was inspired by Franziska Torma who deals with German fishery experts in Cold War Thailand. See Torma (2014).
- 14.
Tsutsui (2013).
- 15.
For a study that deals with much earlier attempts around the Osagawara Islands see Rüegg (2017).
- 16.
- 17.
- 18.
Naikaku Jōhōbu (1938).
- 19.
Kasahara (1972).
- 20.
Wakabayashi (1930, 68).
- 21.
Itō et al. (2016).
- 22.
- 23.
Hayashi (1788).
- 24.
Kuwata (1942, 1f).
- 25.
Nobu Asato (1942, 19).
- 26.
Kuwata (1942).
- 27.
Uda (1952, 120).
- 28.
Tanabe (2010).
- 29.
Albert Herre (1943, 99).
- 30.
Finley (2011, 41f).
- 31.
Nihon maguro kantsume yushutsu suisangyō kumiai (1982, 37–38).
- 32.
For pictures of tinned tuna labels with Mount Fuji and other “typical” Japanese symbols see for instance Nihon kantsume kyōkai (1987, 21).
- 33.
1932. In The Wall street Journal, 2.
- 34.
1933. In The New York Times, 7.
- 35.
Miyauchi and Fujibayashi (2013, 136).
- 36.
1937. In The New York Times, 41.
- 37.
Finley (2011, 104f).
- 38.
Herre (1943, 100).
- 39.
Nihon maguro kantsume yushutsu suisangyō kumiai (1982, 38).
- 40.
Finley (2011).
- 41.
- 42.
Shimada (1951).
- 43.
Shapiro (1950).
- 44.
Borgstrom (1964).
- 45.
Rozdwadowski (2008).
- 46.
Hamblin (2005).
- 47.
Uda (1929).
- 48.
- 49.
File “Confidential.” “Designation of Manager for Singapore Fisheries Training Centre Project.” In Folder “Roy I. Jackson, PERSONAL 21” (Archival number: 14 FI 150 in Food and Agriculture Organization Archives, Rome).
- 50.
Ibid.
- 51.
Ochi and Bell (1966, 11).
- 52.
Chen (2014).
- 53.
Gillett (2007).
- 54.
Tarte (1998).
- 55.
- 56.
Barclay (2008).
- 57.
Tarte (1998, 124).
- 58.
For a detailed anthropological account of Solomon Taiyo in the late 1990s, see Barclay (2008).
- 59.
Miyauchi and Fujibayashi (2013, 137–138).
- 60.
NBK Corporation (2007).
- 61.
http://www.japantuna.net/dic_09. Accessed June 15, 2017.
- 62.
Kuwata (1942, 1f).
- 63.
Kadogawa kōtō dai jiten, digitized.
- 64.
Zimmermann (1933, 216).
- 65.
Tanabe (2010).
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Heé, N. (2019). Tuna as an Economic Resource and Symbolic Capital in Japan’s “Imperialism of the Sea”. In: Kowner, R., Bar-Oz, G., Biran, M., Shahar, M., Shelach-Lavi, G. (eds) Animals and Human Society in Asia. The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24363-0_7
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