Martin Dusinberre

Hatoko Comes Home: Civil Society and Nuclear Power in Japan

This article seeks to explain how, given Japans “nuclear allergy” following World War II, a small coastal town not far from Hiroshima volunteered to host a nuclear power plant in the early 1980s. Where standard explanations of contentious nuclear power siting decisions have focused on the regional power utilities and the central government, this paper instead examines the importance of historical change and civil society at a local level. Using a microhistorical approach based on interviews and archival materials, and framing our discussion with a popular Japanese television show known as Hatokos Sea, we illustrate the agency of municipal actors in the decision-making process. In this way, we highlight the significance of long-term economic transformations, demographic decline, and vertical social networks in local invitations to controversial facilities. These perspectives are particularly important in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima crisis, as the outside world seeks to understand how and why Japan embraced atomic energy.

Hard times in the hometown: a history of community survival in modern Japan

Hard Times in the Hometown tells the story of Kaminoseki, a small town on Japans Inland Sea. Once one of the most prosperous ports in the country, Kaminoseki fell into profound economic decline following Japans reengagement with the West in the late nineteenth century. Using a recently discovered archive and oral histories collected during his years of research in Kaminoseki, Martin Dusinberre reconstructs the lives of households and townspeople as they tried to make sense of their changing place in the world. In challenging the familiar story of modern Japanese growth, Dusinberre provides important new insights into how ordinary people shaped the development of the modern state. Chapters describe the role of local revolutionaries in the Meiji Restoration of 1868, the ways townspeople grasped opportunities to work overseas in the late nineteenth century, and the impact this pan-Pacific diaspora community had on Kaminoseki during the prewar decades. These histories amplify Dusinberres analysis of postwar rural decline--a phenomenon found not only in Japan but throughout the industrialized Western world. His account comes to a climax when, in the 1980s, the towns councillors request the construction of a nuclear power station, unleashing a storm of protests from within the community. This ongoing nuclear dispute has particular resonance in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima crisis. Hard Times in the Hometown gives voice to personal histories otherwise lost in abandoned archives. By bringing to life the everyday landscape of Kaminoseki, this work offers readers a compelling story through which to better understand not only nineteenth- and twentieth-century Japan but also modern transformations more generally.

Editorial – being in transit: ships and global incompatibilities

‘Where was the nineteenth century?’ asks Jürgen Osterhammel in his magnum opus, The transformation of the world. It was to be found, he says, in the European ‘discoveries’ of new lands, in the naming of the world, in the ‘mental maps’ of how the world’s regions were imagined to be interconnected, and in the relationship between the land and the sea. In the articles that make up this special issue, we argue that the critical sites of the nineteenth century, broadly defined, were the phenomena that connected these discoveries, mental maps, world regions, and the land and the sea: ships. Ocean-crossing ships are at once obvious yet obscure candidates for the title of quintessential nineteenth-century lieux d’histoire. Their significance is obvious in the sense that they played such a fundamental role in the geopolitical transformation of the world and in its ‘shrinking’ or its so-called ‘great acceleration’. Ships are of obvious historical importance, too, because they were always more than just material objects, especially when (again in the age of steam) their construction necessitated labour regimes and complex structures of finance that were industrial and capitalist phenomena in themselves. But their obscurity lies in the fact that, despite their centrality to the literature of ‘global’ or ‘world’ history, ships as historical

Writing the on-board: Meiji Japan in transit and transition *

This article uses the history of Japanese emigrants to Hawai‘i as a lens through which to examine Japan’s engagement with the outside world in the late nineteenth century. Focusing on a single journey from Yokohama to Honolulu in 1885, it reconstructs the transit of two migrant labourers as they entered an ‘in-between’ state – between regimes of labour, between freedom and coercion, and between local and national identities. These migrant experiences challenge the teleological discourse of Japanese ‘progress’ that was so popular among political elites across the world in the 1880s, and that was embodied by the very materiality of the ship in which the labourers travelled. But the ‘in-between’ also speaks to the historiographical need to fill the silences that exist between archives across the Pacific Ocean, and thus to the wider challenges of writing global history.

Circulations of Labor, Bodies of Work. A Japanese Migrant in Meiji Hawai‘i

the essay, by renowned historian thomas c. smith, described a basic expansion of work, from farmers working the land to farmers engaged in by-employments, and then from farmers working by-employments to former farmers engaged in industrial labor. this was one of many transformations in the extraordinary story of nineteenth-century Japan. indeed, smith’s interest in the transition from the tokugawa period (1600–1868) to the “modern” meiji period (1868–1912) was but one expression of a wider scholarly interest in “preindustrial” Japanese labor at this time. in 1976, Akira Hayami coined the term “industrious revolution” (kinben kakumei) to explain Japan’s socioeconomic transformations in terms of labor-intensive rather than capital-intensive industrialization. Hayami’s term would later be appropriated by Jan de Vries, in a ground-breaking attempt to “place the industrial revolution in a broader historical setting.” And just as Hayami’s work proved to be so influential