On board

‘On board Steamship “Yamashiro Maru”’: the first words of a letter from Robert W. Irwin, Hawaiian chargé d’affaires for Japan, to ‘His Excellency Walter Murray Gibson, Minister for Foreign Affairs’.Footnote ¹

Irwin’s letter, written ‘Off Honolulu June 25, 1885’, spoke to a transitional moment in Japan’s engagement with the outside world during the Meiji period (1868–1912). It opened by countering allegations in the Honolulu press that the nearly 1,000 migrant labourers who had travelled to the Kingdom of Hawai‘i on board the Yamashiro-maru were ‘reeking from the slums of a seaport town’. Rather, Irwin stated, they had been carefully recruited from the Japanese countryside and had undergone pre-departure quarantine near Yokohama. After more details about the backgrounds of the migrants, he turned to a recent claim made in the Hawaiian Gazette newspaper that the arrival of such large numbers of Japanese constituted the ‘Asiaticizing’ of the Hawaiian islands.Footnote ² Instead of rebutting the Gazette by quibbling about numbers, however, or by pointing out that the islands’ influential sugar planters had long been calling for new labourers from overseas, he put forward an idea that would have been unthinkable earlier in the nineteenth century: ‘Now, I do not consider Japan an Asiatic nation. The Japanese people have nothing in common with India and China. Japan is progressive and is rapidly becoming a Western Civilized State.’

That Japan was no longer part of ‘Asia’ was an idea that had in fact been articulated a few months earlier by the doyen of ‘civilization’ debates in Meiji Japan, Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901). Fukuzawa was an intellectual who had travelled both to America and to Europe on government embassies before the 1868 Meiji Restoration and who subsequently made his name with books such as The conditions of the West (1866–70) and An outline of a theory of civilization (1875). In March 1885, three months before Irwin’s letter, Fukuzawa wrote of Japan’s need to ‘cast off Asia’ (‘Datsu-A ron’): ‘Japan is located in the eastern extremities of Asia, but the spirit of her people has already moved away from the old conventions of Asia to Western civilization.’Footnote ³ Irwin may not have been aware of Fukuzawa’s ‘Casting off Asia’ when he wrote his letter later in June, given that the latter’s editorial only became widely read in future years. Nevertheless, the fact that the two men sought almost simultaneously to recast Japan’s relationship to ‘Asia’ suggested that, in the mid 1880s, Japanese elites and foreign residents of Japan (such as Irwin) shared a rhetoric of Japanese ‘progress’. To be ‘civilized’ was to be ‘Western’. Nearly two decades after the Restoration, Japan was moving in such a ‘progressive’ direction towards civilization that it could no longer be classified as ‘Asian’. And, with the arrival of Irwin in Honolulu, that message was conveyed to a Pacific audience. On 29 June, the Pacific Commercial Advertiser, a newspaper owned by Walter Gibson, the Hawaiian Minister for Foreign Affairs and the recipient of Irwin’s letter, opined, ‘Japan has cut loose, as far as it is presently safe to do, from its Asiatic methods, and adopted those of the Western world.’Footnote ⁴

This message of Japanese civilization was not only diffused through human interlocutors. Steamships, too, were central to a narrative of progress. In 1853, the arrival of Commodore Perry’s steamships in Edo Bay had underlined Tokugawa Japan’s isolation from new technologies that were revolutionizing the world.Footnote ⁵ Just thirty years later, by contrast, it was no coincidence that Irwin described Japan’s ‘progress’ while sitting on board what he called ‘a splendid iron steamer’ – a Japanese steamship. The Yamashiro-maru had, in fact, been constructed in the shipbuilding mecca of Newcastle upon Tyne. But a Japanese company ordering a new fleet of British-built passenger-cargo ships was also an example of Japan’s having ‘adopted [methods] of the Western world’.Footnote ⁶ On its maiden voyage to Japan, the Yamashiro-maru was lauded as a ‘high class ship’; it was the ‘best steamer’ of the Union Steamship Company, according to its (British) captain in 1885; and, soon after its arrival in Honolulu in June of that year, the Yamashiro-maru was subjected to a long profile in the aforementioned Pacific Commercial Advertiser, which concluded: ‘The cost of the vessel, without any “extras,” was $255;000, and any one who visits her will not think that sum too much to pay for such a splendid specimen of marine architecture.’Footnote ⁷ Such praise across the globe channelled the wider discourse of ‘civilization’. The ‘splendid specimen’ became more than just a ship: the Yamashiro-maru itself embodied Japan’s ongoing attempts to redesign the traditional architecture of international affairs in the late nineteenth century by becoming a ‘high-class’ nation.Footnote ⁸

Before getting too carried away, however, we need to note a tension at the heart of this rhetoric. The Yamashiro-maru may have stood for one story of what its captain called the ‘New Japan’,Footnote ⁹ but the people on board the ship represented another: migrants who, in the eyes of opposition sections of the Honolulu press, were smallpox-carrying, slum-ridden ‘Asiatics’; men (overwhelmingly) who, owing to economic hardships in their hometowns, had chosen to make new lives and livelihoods halfway across the Pacific Ocean. The journeys that these migrants made to Hawai‘i and their subsequent reception there undermined the very teleology of Japanese ‘progress’ represented by the ship that carried them.

To explore these tensions further, to tease out the differences between what the ship represented and what the people on board represented, this article takes the period of transit during the particular journey of the Yamashiro-maru to Hawai‘i in June 1885 as a historical window through which to consider the more general transformation of Japan’s engagements with the wider world in the late nineteenth century. In reconstructing the history of the Yamashiro-maru for the first time, I focus on two questions: how did the migrants experience the journey from Yokohama to Honolulu, and what did the period of transit mean for them? My argument is that the shipboard passage constituted a crucial moment of being ‘in between’ for the Japanese labourers: not only between home in Japan and a new life on the sugar plantations of Hawai‘i, but also between contrasting regimes of identification and labour respectively. To frame even a relatively short, two-week passage in these ways then allows us to ask, at a more fundamental level, what it meant to be ‘Japanese’ in the late nineteenth-century world, and to propose the space of the ship and the time of transit as significant – and significantly understudied – arenas in the genesis of national identities.Footnote ¹⁰

In these ways, I join with the other contributors to this special issue in problematizing the period of the on-board during the high age of steamships, with a view to highlighting the internal temporal and spatial dynamics of ‘transit’. My starting point, inspired by work on the Atlantic slave trade, is the assumption that close, microhistorical analyses of what it meant for different people to be ‘in transit’ offer historians distinctive ways of constructing global histories of a particular time or place.Footnote ¹¹ As Sheila Hones and Yasuo Endo point out in their insightful reading of Commodore Matthew Perry’s expedition to ‘open’ Japan in 1853–54, for example, attention to the period of transit – in Perry’s case, eight months – leads to a very different narrative framing of the commodore’s arrival in Japan. Pace numerous popular accounts in both English and Japanese, Perry’s ships did not just ‘appear’ on the Pacific horizon one day: for a start, his expedition came to Japan via the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, not the Pacific, and nor was his arrival a total surprise to the Tokugawa authorities in Edo. To understand the nature of Perry’s transit is to acknowledge a much more complex narrative of global geopolitics in the early 1850s than that suggested by the phrase ‘the opening of Japan’.Footnote ¹²

But how can historians historicize the on-board, thus enriching and complicating our understanding of global connections, if we lack transit sources such as the official diary of Perry’s expedition?Footnote ¹³ The crossing of the Yamashiro-maru to Honolulu in June 1885 was the second of what would become twenty-six crossings of Japanese labourers to Hawai‘i. These constituted the so-called ‘government-sponsored emigration programme’ (kan’yaku imin, 1885–94), during which 29,000 Japanese emigrated to work on the sugar plantations in Hawai‘i. Significantly, this was the first time since 1868 that Tokyo had authorized a mass overseas migration of Japanese subjects, and, looking forwards, the emigration programme to Hawai‘i marked the beginning of hundreds of thousands of Japanese crossing the Pacific to work in Hawai‘i, North America, and South America in the decades before the Second World War.

However, although scholars have successfully traced the early migrants’ villages of origin, their reasons for seeking new lives overseas, the hardships they endured in their host countries, the significance of their remittances back home, their forging of new identities, and so on, the shipboard passage has been almost entirely written out of the history of the Japanese Pacific diaspora, at least during the early decades of mass migration in the 1880s and 1890s.Footnote ¹⁴ Such silence reflects the paucity of the sources. The most detailed report of shipboard conditions in this period survives from the third government-sponsored crossing of migrants to Honolulu, on the City of Peking in February 1886.Footnote ¹⁵ Irwin’s letter, meanwhile, is the only document I have found that was actually written on board the Yamashiro-maru, not just in 1885 but throughout the ship’s entire career (1884–1910).

To reconstruct a story from silence is, of course, the principle challenge of writing any history, not just global history.Footnote ¹⁶ But because the silence in this case is to be found in the very act of movement, and therefore in one of the core concerns of global history, the way in which we engage with the period of transit offers insights into the writing of global history more generally. Following Greg Dening’s lead in his essay, ‘Writing, rewriting the beach’, I take silence to be not ‘empty soundlessness’ but rather a relationship – in this case, a relationship between the archives in Japan and Hawai‘i respectively.Footnote ¹⁷ Through the story of the Yamashiro-maru in 1885, I extend the concept of ‘transit’ to cover not just the shipboard passage but also the wider processes of departure in Japan and arrival in Hawai‘i. This allows me to frame the journey with land-based fragments of sources – names, addresses, a grave, a labourer number, a cross-section design drawing – in Tokyo, Hiroshima, Kaua‘i, Honolulu, and even Newcastle upon Tyne, and thereby partly to fill a historical silence by bringing these fragments into dialogue with each other. But when that dialogue runs out, or is barely audible in the first place, I leap by necessity into the realm of historical speculation.

To draw attention to this methodology of framing and leaping, and to its limitations, I now turn away from the one ‘on-board’ source, Robert W. Irwin’s letter, to focus instead on two other men: Wakamiya Yaichi, aged thirty-seven in 1885, and Kodama Keijirō, aged twenty-eight. Their stories reveal not only the historical significance of the transit but also one method for writing a global history of silence – for writing the on-board.

Between departure and landfall

‘A landfall’, writes Joseph Conrad at the beginning of The mirror of the sea, is a particular moment in time, the initial cry of ‘Land ho!’, which ‘you meet at first with a single glance’. It is ‘a matter of a quick eye and of a clear atmosphere’, after which you begin to fall in with the land. By contrast, a departure is a technical act – the first pencilled cross on a track-chart after the final sight of land – but one that entails a longer process, in which a ship ‘may have been at sea, in the fullest sense of the phrase, for days’, even though the coast remained in sight.Footnote ¹⁸ It is this longer process of departure, in terms of pre-migration lives and expectations, that we need to grasp first in order to start reconstructing the significance of ‘being in transit’ for Wakamiya Yaichi.

I have found Wakamiya’s name in two locations. The first is the Ministry of Foreign Affairs archives in Tokyo, which houses a list of the Yamashiro-maru migrants, including their home addresses and their work destinations in Hawai‘i.Footnote ¹⁹ Wakamiya hailed from the coastal village of Jigozen, in Saeki county, in south-west Hiroshima prefecture. Hiroshima accounted for the greatest number of migrants on board the Yamashiro-maru (390, or nearly 40%); Saeki accounted for the greatest number of migrants within Hiroshima (239); and Jigozen, with 37 male migrants aged between twenty and thirty-eight, formed the single largest sending community within Saeki county.Footnote ²⁰ Why, we might wonder, did so many Hawaiian migrants come from one place?

Until the 1870s, Jigozen had been typical of the many coastal communities in the Inland Sea region whose economies boomed in the mid nineteenth century at the expense of bigger, more established market and castle towns.Footnote ²¹ As domestic trade between Osaka and the west and north of Japan increased from the mid eighteenth century onwards, so too did the number of long-distance sailing ships passing through ports such as Jigozen, ships that offered the town’s inhabitants the chance to make money in trade and services. By the 1860s, 60% of Jigozen’s households could make a living without owning land (an astonishing transformation of the farming : non-farming ratio compared to the 1760s), and the village population was growing to the extent that in 1881 the population of 2,300 was nearly double that of the 1820s.Footnote ²² The problem was that many of Jigozen’s landless labourers – officially classified as ‘farmers’ – depended for their livelihoods on the town’s vibrant retail sector, which depended on the steady flow of ships coming to port, which in turn depended on economic and political structures that rewarded interregional trade at relatively low speed. These structures were destabilized by Japan’s post-1858 participation in international trade, and then torn down completely after the 1868 Meiji Restoration. Starting in the 1870s, goods could be transported to Osaka at higher speeds and in greater bulk – by steamships and eventually by trains – and the merchants of these previously booming Inland Sea ports suddenly found themselves bereft of business.

If things became bad for the merchants, they were even worse for the ‘farmers’ who had taken by-employment in the ports – as cooks, maids, porters, couriers, apprentices – and who owned no land upon which they could fall back when those by-employments dried up. Meanwhile, those who did own land found themselves taxed at unprecedented levels under the new Meiji government; if they were able to survive without selling up and joining the landless ranks, they did so by raising rents for their tenants, thus exacerbating the growing gap between rich and poor in the community. Finally, those ‘farmers’ who had depended on the local cotton industry as a secondary (and sometimes primary) source of household income in the mid nineteenth century suddenly found themselves unable to compete with the new mill opened by the Hiroshima Cotton Spinning Company in Saeki county in 1883.Footnote ²³

No wonder, then, that such a large group of men sought to escape Jigozen in 1885: these were desperate times. If we are to follow the Tokyo records and believe that Wakamiya really was a full-time farmer, he was at best a tenant; equally, he may only have been a part-time tenant farmer who had grown up expecting to support himself and any family mainly through by-employments. Either way, a guaranteed salary of US$9 a month on a Hawaiian sugar plantation (equivalent to 10.6 yen), plus room and board, was almost three times what he could earn as a day-labourer in Jigozen in 1885.Footnote ²⁴ Fuelling these expectations, Wakamiya would have read – or, more likely, would have been read – a message from the prefectural governor on 25 May, the day when the migrants left Hiroshima for transit to Yokohama. Work hard, it said, using an idiom of triumphant homecoming, ‘that you may gain the distinction of one day returning to your hometown dressed in brocade’.Footnote ²⁵

The second mention of Wakamiya Yaichi comes in a ‘Laborer Contract Book’ compiled by the Kingdom of Hawai‘i in July 1885 and kept in the Hawaiian State Archives. The migrants’ names are transliterated into the Roman alphabet, but instead of information on provenance or plantation destination, the Yamashiro-maru migrants are listed next to a number, starting at 713: Wakamiya is number 1405. This was the (in)famous ‘bango’, an individual number engraved on a metal disk and worn around the migrant’s neck like a soldier’s dog tag. (Women, absent in the ‘Laborer Contract Book’, went by their husbands’ bangos.Footnote ²⁶) Such labelling made it easier for the employers and government officials to discuss individual cases. Thus, correspondence regarding Takiguchi Jinta, who arrived with Wakamiya on the Yamashiro-maru in 1885 but died eighteen months later at the age of thirty-six, simply referred to ‘the death of Japanese #863’, as if discussing a farm animal.Footnote ²⁷ In subsequent decades, Japanese labourers in Hawai‘i would be photographed with their bangos, in a mug-shot pose that foreshadowed the handling of Japanese internees in the mainland United States during the Second World War.

This shift in official identification suggests a first way for us to frame the period of transit for the Yamashiro-maru migrants: on their departure from Yokohama they were individuals with names, but on their arrival in Honolulu they were objects with numbers. ‘The [overseers] never call a man by his name. Always by the bango, 7209 or 6508 in that manner’, the migrants would later recall. ‘And that was the thing I objected to. I wanted my name, not the number.’Footnote ²⁸

A second way of framing the transit is to consider the transformation in the very state of physical ‘being’ from Japan to Hawai‘i. The government-sponsored emigration programme was very popular from its beginnings in 1885, with local officials in western Japan overwhelmed by the queues of prospective migrants lining up outside village offices.Footnote ²⁹ Despite the economic hardships that had led thousands of men and women to this point, there was no legal or bureaucratic coercion involved in their decision to leave Japan. Rather, that decision was freely undertaken by Wakamiya Yaichi and his fellow villagers, and rendered all the more attractive by exhortations for the migrants to return ‘dressed in brocade’. Yet, following the outbreak of illness among a dozen of the labourers during the Yamashiro-maru’s passage, an illness that after a spectacular misdiagnosis by the Honolulu port physician turned out to be smallpox, the migrant labourers were bundled off to the isolation of Honolulu’s Sand Island Quarantine Station. There, in what later became known among migrant arrivals as the sennin-goya (‘thousand-person huts’Footnote ³⁰), Wakamiya and his compatriots spent more than a month, surrounded by a high paling and a watchtower, and guarded by as many as ten men during the daytime.Footnote ³¹

Thus, between departure and landfall, Wakamiya moved from a state of freedom to one of confinement. This was no temporary change for, as the ‘Laborer Contract Book’ demonstrates, the post-quarantine Japanese migrants were bound – almost certainly for the first time in their lives – to a particular work regime by a signed piece of paper. That they and later arrivals came to consider the contract itself as a form of confinement is suggested by the repeated line, ‘When my contract ends’ (jōyaku kiretara), in the work songs of the cane fields: theirs was a three-year sentence to endure.Footnote ³² During that term, the migrants would have to live on plantation and, if absent from work, forfeit their wages or spend time in jail, or both. Such a system was potentially open to abuse, as was made abundantly clear to Tokyo by Japanese consular officials in Honolulu, who reported on maltreatment of ex-City of Tokio workers (the first group of government-sponsored migrants, who arrived in February 1885). These reports, received in the spring of 1885, prompted the dispatch of a special commissioner, Inouye Katsunosuke, to Hawai‘i on the Yamashiro-maru to investigate. After a tour of numerous plantations throughout the archipelago, Inouye reported to the Hawaiian foreign minister, Walter Gibson, that he had discovered ‘unwarrantable and frequent acts of violence that have been perpetrated upon Japanese by overseers on many of the Plantations’.Footnote ³³ Even as the Yamashiro-maru lay in Honolulu, ex-City of Tokio labourers on Hawai‘i Island were being arrested ‘for continuously shamming sick and refusing to work without cause’ and being forced to defend themselves in trial without understanding English.Footnote ³⁴

Bangos, confinement, violence, kangaroo courts: no wonder that foreign ministry officials in Tokyo preserved a cutting from the Honolulu Daily Bulletin which argued that Hawai‘i’s ‘labor contract system … is but the slavery of the Southern States of America transplanted and revived in a modified form’.Footnote ³⁵ No wonder, too, that the Hawaiian Board of Immigration sought to reassure the Meiji government, through Irwin, that complaints of ill treatment were being fully investigated – or that Gibson’s pro-government newspaper, the Pacific Commercial Advertiser, was so keen to stress that ‘our contract system should be as free from any imputation of being a species of slavery as it can possibly be made’.Footnote ³⁶

In a third way, therefore, the passage between Yokohama and Honolulu may be framed by the gap between Wakamiya’s expectations (as suggested by the Hiroshima governor’s exhortations) and the reality of his new life as a contract labourer (as suggested by Inouye’s investigations). This was a gap expressed in the songs of the canefields (holehole bushi):

Such bitterness notwithstanding, however, it is too simplistic to think of the Yamashiro-maru’s passage merely in terms of the Japanese migrants moving from ‘freedom’ to ‘slavery’. Instead, the framework developed by Scott Nelson in his study of Irish and Chinese labourers during the US Civil War helps us to understand better the significance of the period of transit for the Japanese migrants in the 1880s. Nelson argues that the Irish and Chinese ‘apparently left home of their own free will but did not arrive at work that way. … Although immigrant workers may not have understood the coercion at the beginning of the process, many sought to protest it at the end.’ The significance of the shipboard transit, therefore, was in the creation of ‘a special category of labour somewhere between slavery and freedom’.Footnote ³⁸

Given the transformations in Wakamiya’s identification, in his expectations, and in his state of freedom between departure and landfall, we may now hypothesize that the transpacific passage was a period during which the Japanese migrants were made aware of being in between: not only between geographical locations but also between the poles of ‘freedom’ and ‘slavery’.Footnote ³⁹

But how, exactly, would Wakamiya and the other 988 migrants on board the Yamashiro-maru have been made aware of this ‘in-between’ status?Footnote ⁴⁰ The answer may lie in the physical conditions of the shipboard transit – conditions that we can reconstruct using extant ship plans in Newcastle upon Tyne and in the Japanese Defence Agency Archives. The Yamashiro-maru, as is clear from multiple newspaper reports and from the Lloyd’s Register of British and Foreign Shipping, was a three-decked iron steamer, 92 metres long and over 11 metres wide (301 feet by 37½ feet). On the upper deck, forward of the large funnel, was the bridge, while to the aft was a ‘fine smoking room’ and an area where first-class passengers could promenade, sheltered from less privileged eyes by a large screen that ‘cut off the quarter-deck from the rest of the vessel’. Immediately below the smoking room, to the rear of the middle deck, was the first-class accommodation, where Irwin wrote his letter on 25 June: a ‘handsome’ dining saloon, ‘well lighted with electric lights of various descriptions’; a music room; and around a dozen cabins – ‘large, lofty, and well ventilated’, each containing two berths and a bell to summon the steward.Footnote ⁴¹ Still on the middle deck, but forward of the engine room, were second-class accommodation and, in the bow, quarters for the crew. Below this, the whole of the lower (orlop) deck was reserved for steerage passengers, probably in two large rooms respectively to the fore and aft of the engine. Finally, below the orlop deck were the Yamashiro-maru’s cargo holds, water tanks, coal bunkers, and not least the two-cylinder, four-boiler engine – the boilers, 3.5 metres tall, extending up into the space of the steerage deck.

All of this meant that 940 male labourers, 35 women, and 14 children were packed into at least two rooms, each measuring approximately 30 metres by 11 metres (the engine room taking up the central third of the lower deck). If we allow space for a central gangway, plus for some kind of communal washing and toilet areas, and even space for some kind of small dining area in which the migrants could eat in shifts, then it seems more likely that the total sleeping area of each of the two main steerage rooms was approximately 27 metres by 10 metres. In the style of migrant ships of the late nineteenth century, however, these rooms would have been further divided by large wooden shelves built inwards from the ship’s sides, thus doubling the floor area on which the migrants could sleep. According to Irwin’s letter, the Yamashiro-maru was able to carry up to 1,200 migrants; in theory, therefore, each migrant had a sleeping area of 0.9 square metres, or approximately 163 cm. by 55 cm. (5 feet 4 inches by 1 foot 9 inches), most probably with about 80 cm. to sit up or change clothes. Of course, with only 989 migrants, the Yamashiro-maru’s crossing to Honolulu in 1885 afforded Wakamiya marginally more room.

To put these figures in context: according to Japan’s first Rules for Ship Facilities (1934), each long-distance passenger was legally entitled to a bed of no less than 180 cm. (length) by 60 cm. (width) by 75 cm.Footnote ⁴² In other words, the sleeping space theoretically afforded to the Yamashiro-maru migrants in 1885 was only marginally lacking in generosity according to the Japanese legal standards of half a century later. Similarly, by the standards of European migrant ships in the 1920s, the space allotted to Wakamiya and his compatriots was acceptable.Footnote ⁴³ Conditions on board the Yamashiro-maru were vastly better than the ‘coffin’-like accommodation endured by victims of the ‘coolie’ trade in the mid nineteenth century.Footnote ⁴⁴ And the fact that the ship was nearly brand-new in 1885 marked it out from the vessels typically used in the contemporary Melanesian forced-labour trade (many of which became human transporters only after they were no longer fit for inanimate cargo).Footnote ⁴⁵

Nevertheless, my assumed calculation of 163 cm. by 55 cm. by 80 cm. gives us a converted figure of approximately 24 cubic feet per migrant. This was only one-third of the space stipulated in contemporary law for lascars in the British merchant marine.Footnote ⁴⁶ Moreover, the comparison with migrant ships in the 1920s and 1930s is misleading because legislation – including that in Japan – talked of bed size. By contrast, the Yamashiro-maru migrants slept not in beds but head to foot, probably three people deep, either on the deck or on the wooden shelving, with at most some canvas as a mattress and whatever blankets or futons they themselves had brought.Footnote ⁴⁷ For those unfortunates who berthed on the floor of the deck, they did so in almost entire darkness: there were no portholes in the lower deck of the Yamashiro-maru, and the large wooden shelves would have blocked out any electric light coming from the ceiling. In other words, these were not the conditions of a slave or coolie ship, but nor is it terribly likely that Wakamiya and his friends from Jigozen would have enthused – unlike the Japanese who viewed the Yamashiro-maru for the first time in Osaka – about the ship’s ‘lofty ‘tween-decks’.Footnote ⁴⁸

It was exactly these cramped, uncomfortable conditions that offered migrants a foretaste of the ‘thousand-person huts’ at the Sand Island quarantine station and, later, the minimal accommodation on the sugar plantations, where the wooden bunks of the ‘thousand-person huts’ could be stacked three or four high.Footnote ⁴⁹ Those bunks, indeed, would later be compared by the planters themselves to shipboard accommodation.Footnote ⁵⁰ Moreover, when Irwin decreed, five days out of Yokohama, that the migrants must take three hours of daily exercise on the upper deck of the Yamashiro-maru (safely screened off from the fourteen first-class passengers), Wakamiya experienced for the first time the intervention of a white man in his daily routines and bodily regimes.Footnote ⁵¹ This would be a precedent both for the mass disinfecting showers that the migrants would be forced to take in the quarantine station and for the racial hierarchies of their lives on the plantations. Even the auditory sensations of the ship – such as the bridge bell, sounding every half-hour and then eight times on the fourth hour to mark a change of watch, or the constant rumble and grind of the engine – prepared the migrants for the new time regimes they would experience on the plantations, and for the non-stop clatter of the sugar mill. In these ways, we must speculate, the migrants were made aware of their ‘in-between’ status in terms not just of geography but also of working regimes. The ship was a boot camp for the plantation.

All of this suggests a modification of Conrad’s observations about departure and landfall. For Wakamiya the departure was inevitably a longer process than simply the last sight of Japan. But so, too, was his arrival in Hawai‘i. The process of his arrival began almost as soon as he left Jigozen: with his shipboard passage to Yokohama, his medical checks in the Nagaura quarantine station, his adaptation to the cramped and uncomfortable conditions on board the Yamashiro-maru, and his auditory experience of the shipboard journey. By the time that he disembarked at Sand Island – carrying his summer bedding, his pots and pans, his bamboo-woven trunk filled with working clothes, a short-sleeved kimono, a pair of tight-fitting trousers, and some summer nightwear – he had already begun to fall in with the regimes of the land.Footnote ⁵²

Between states of being Japanese

At the beginning of ‘Casting off Asia’, Fukuzawa Yukichi wrote:

Steaming across the Pacific Ocean in June 1885, the Yamashiro-maru was itself an example of Meiji Japan’s endeavour to float in the ocean of Western civilization, both in the vessel’s British construction and its concomitant ‘splendid’ features, and in the apparently humanitarian on-board conditions of the migrant labourers it carried.

One history of this ‘endeavour’ was partly bound to the foundational year of the Meiji state. In 1868, under the mediation of a Yokohama-based US businessman and in the midst of the chaos that accompanied the fall of the Tokugawa shogunate, 148 Japanese crossed the Pacific to work on sugar plantations in the Kingdom of Hawai‘i. On the occasion of the labourers’ arrival, the Hawaiian Gazette newspaper noted that ‘it will require patience to train them to the promptness of civilization’. But some plantation owners had no such patience, and almost immediately problems arose between the Japanese and their employers over pay, sickness, and not least language, with some overseers also accused of abusing their new workers.Footnote ⁵⁴ In Japan, meanwhile, the Chūgai Shinbun newspaper criticized the enterprise as ‘identical to the trade in Negro slaves’.Footnote ⁵⁵ From a Meiji government perspective, there was a danger that, under a new policy of engagement with the outside world, Japanese subjects would now become victims of the contemporaneous ‘coolie’ trade in Chinese labourers. For this reason, Tokyo imposed an informal ban on mass overseas labour migration after 1868, a restriction that would remain more or less in place until the new Hawaiian emigration programme began in 1885.

But the Meiji government response to overseas migration was not merely reactive. In 1872, a 370-ton Peruvian barque, the Maria Luz, took refuge in Yokohama from a severe storm during its passage from Macao back to Callao. The Maria Luz was carrying 231 ‘Chinese passengers’, but according to two escapees the Chinese had been coerced into boarding the ship in Macao and severely maltreated in the five weeks since: they were, in fact, ‘coolies’.Footnote ⁵⁶ At this point, after various debates at the highest levels of government, the highest-ranking Japanese official in Yokohama initiated legal proceedings against the ship’s Peruvian captain. There were many issues at stake in this intervention, concerning jurisdiction in the treaty ports, the legality of the international coolie trade, Japan’s relations with Qing China, and the legal status of prostitution in Japan. But, as Douglas Howland has argued, the thread that connected all such questions was ‘Japan’s eagerness to attain an international standard of civilization, for that was the measure by which the unequal treaties had been imposed in the 1850s and by which those treaties would be revised. Justice for coolies and prostitutes was secondary to the overall national goal of international parity.’Footnote ⁵⁷

This longer history of restricted overseas migration from Japan (especially to Hawai‘i) and of the Meiji government’s intervention in the Maria Luz incident is essential to understanding the significance of the ‘on-board’ for Japan’s first transpacific migrant ships in 1885–86. By insisting on a certain level of hygiene and comfort on the City of Tokio and the City of Peking (both chartered from the Pacific Mail Steamship Company) and especially on the Yamashiro-maru (a ‘Japanese’ ship in ownership if not construction), Tokyo bureaucrats were making a statement about Japan’s ability to ‘sail the same waves’ of civilization as ‘the West’. The Japanese migrants were not ‘coolies’; they were contract labourers. Their ships were not barques; they were state-of-the-art steamers. Almost two decades after the first group of Japanese migrants to Hawai‘i, here were shiploads of men and women who embodied Japanese civilization rather than requiring patience in the training thereof.

As for Fukuzawa in ‘Casting off Asia’, however, ‘civilization’ required that Japan not just ‘cast our lot with civilized nations of the West’ but also ‘leave the ranks of Asian nations’. Thus, in a letter to Walter Gibson, carried on board the Yamashiro-maru and delivered to Gibson by Inouye Katsunosuke, Foreign Minister Inoue Kaoru wrote that the Meiji government

In other words, for Inoue, mass Japanese emigration to Hawai‘i would be dependent on the Hawaiian government restricting the flow of Chinese immigrants to the kingdom. Perhaps more than any actual encounters between Chinese and Japanese, Inoue wished to avoid the rhetorical ‘association’ of the two nationalities. For him, the kinds of articles published by the Hawaiian Gazette (on the ‘Asiaticizing of the Hawaiian Islands’), or the post-1868 rhetoric of the Hawaiian Anti-Asiatic Union, which saw Japanese labourers as no different from Chinese ‘coolies’, were the real ‘embarrassments’.Footnote ⁵⁹

Nevertheless, Inoue was not only concerned with what the Pacific Commercial Advertiser labelled the Gazette’s ‘bracketing’ of Japanese ‘with Chinese coolies, for the purpose of misleading the public’.Footnote ⁶⁰ More practically, it was clear from reported maltreatment of the ex-City of Tokio labourers that a number of plantation overseers also did not perceive the higher ‘civilization’ of their Japanese workers in relation to ‘Chinese coolies’. Hence the importance of Special Commissioner Inouye’s dispatch to Hawai‘i: in contrast to the Maria Luz incident, when China was initially dependent on the intervention of outside powers (including Japan) to protect Chinese labourers from foreign maltreatment, Japan was responding with alacrity to reported maltreatment of its own contract labourers in 1885.Footnote ⁶¹ Later that year, Inoue would similarly intervene in the question of Japanese labour migration to Tasmania. He wrote to Japan’s honorary consul in Hobart that he was concerned about labourers ‘who were made to work virtually like slaves and in consequence incurred serious hardships’.Footnote ⁶² No doubt in Hawai‘i and in the Australian colonies Japanese government officials were motivated partly by human concern for the physical wellbeing of their compatriots. To return to Howland’s argument, however, it seems more likely that such concern was secondary ‘to the overall national goal of [attaining] international parity’. That is, the welfare of Japanese labourers, on shipboard as on the sugar plantations, was a matter of national prestige, one that could improve the standing of Japan in the international community of ‘civilized’ nations. Certainly, when British officials discussed with Queensland sugar agents the possibility of contracting Japanese labour in 1887, they noted ‘the liberal and enlightened spirit in which the Japanese Government have dealt with [emigration] questions’ in Hawai‘i.Footnote ⁶³

The ‘enlightened spirit’ of the Meiji government’s treatment of overseas migrants in the mid 1880s suggests another way of framing the experience of the ‘on-board’ for Wakamiya Yaichi and his compatriots. Almost as soon as the Yamashiro-maru left Yokohama, the migrants were transformed from individuals who hailed from different villages, counties, and prefectures into representatives of the Japanese nation in the wider world. Just as the international powers used the treaty port system in Japan to assert the various rights of their citizens, so Japan could use the government-sponsored emigration programme to negotiate what Inoue called ‘the protection of the rights of our subjects and other persons in Hawaii’.Footnote ⁶⁴ The performance of that protection, however, aroused the ire of anti-monarchical constituencies in Hawai‘i. In a petition to King Kalākaua in November 1885, a number of influential sugar planters criticized Inouye Katsunosuke for having conducted ‘formal courts of inquiry without apparent legal authority’. The petitioners argued that the king’s government should no longer succumb to ‘pressure from foreign governments’ but rather promote the ‘national welfare’.Footnote ⁶⁵ In these ways, at the moment of their arrival in Honolulu in 1885, the Japanese migrants became props through which various governmental and business interests articulated competing visions of national ‘rights’ and ‘national welfare’.

How might the migrants themselves have perceived this transformation from local subject to national representative across the period of transit? One shift concerned the face of the bureaucratic state. When Wakamiya Yaichi applied for his passage to Hawai‘i in late April 1885, he addressed his papers – including a pledge of good behaviour, a request for passage assistance, and a statement from his guarantor (usually an older relative) – to the head of the Jigozen village office, a man called Nakai Jutarō.Footnote ⁶⁶ In a community of 2,000 people, Nakai would have been a familiar face to Jigozen residents – not only personally (as a neighbour and community leader) but also as a figure who mediated Wakamiya’s interactions with the Meiji state.Footnote ⁶⁷ Nakai, in turn, would have dealt with officials in the Saeki county office, who would have dealt with officials in the Hiroshima prefectural office, who would finally have dealt with officials in Tokyo. By contrast, once the City of Tokio and Yamashiro-maru migrants arrived in Honolulu and were dispersed to their individual plantations, this ‘local’ face of the bureaucratic state no longer existed. Instead, the migrants communicated with a direct representative of Tokyo in the form of the Japanese consul in Hawai‘i and his deputies. The Meiji state became at once impersonal and yet, in terms of bureaucratic layers, less distant: Tokyo was figuratively closer to Wakamiya in Hawai‘i than it had ever been in Jigozen.

For the ex-City of Tokio migrants, arriving in Honolulu in February 1885, the transformation from ‘local’ to ‘national’ was particularly abrupt. As they spent their first few days in the immigration depot awaiting transfer to their plantations, they were visited by the German doctor and amateur photographer Eduard Arning (1855–1936). Arning took a set of nine photographs depicting the migrants in a variety of poses: wearing geta (platformed sandals) and dark-dyed cotton yukata (summer kimonos), squatting with cooking utensils on the dusty ground. The migrants’ bamboo-woven trunks are stacked high with blankets folded over them, while futons and drying yukatas hang from washing lines in the background. In one posed scene, men dressed only in fundoshi loincloths re-enact a sumo bout, the ‘referee’ holding up a frying pan in lieu of the ceremonial fan. In another, a group stares directly at the camera (see Figure 1). A mother on the front row leaves her yukata half-open.

Figure 1

Ex-City of Tokio migrants in Honolulu, February 1885; photograph taken by Eduard Arning. Source: Museum für Völkerkunde Hamburg.

Arning’s iconographic framing of ‘the Japanese’ for a non-Japanese audience was echoed by the Pacific Commercial Advertiser’s reports of this same scene. ‘A bit of Japan’ described the migrants’ skin colour, their clothes, sandals, cooking, and children’s games; another article described the sumo bouts, which were attended by King Kalākaua, government ministers, Irwin, and various other visitors. An extraordinarily long lecture by General Thomas Brodhead Van Buren, the US consul-general to Japan for the previous eleven years, was published over several issues for readers to learn more about the country from which the new plantation workers hailed.Footnote ⁶⁸ Thus, the 1885 migrants were labelled and objectified as ‘Japanese’ on their arrival in Honolulu in ways that they were not at the time of their departure from Yokohama.

But this formulation is passive. Might there have been any experiences between departure and landfall that led the migrants not only to be labelled as Japanese but indeed to label themselves as such – a shift from identification to self-identity?Footnote ⁶⁹ The question is significant because of Naoko Shimazu’s work on how conscript soldiers articulated the beginning of a new national identity through their conscription journeys to the battlefield during the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05). Having been conscripted, such soldiers embarked on what Shimazu terms a ‘journey of life’ from their respective hometowns to Ujina (Hiroshima), whence they would ship to the Asian frontline. As they travelled by train, the soldiers were regularly greeted by cheering crowds, whose support helped young men from otherwise diverse backgrounds begin to feel a sense of connection to ‘the nation’. At the same time, the trains passed key national landmarks – the Akashi Straits, Himeji Castle, and especially the ‘floating’ shrine at Itsukushima. Shimazu writes: ‘the internal journey from their home town to Hiroshima played a key role in expanding [the conscripts’] geographical space of what constituted “Japan” and, in the process, effortlessly integrated these soldiers from disparate parts of the country into the common national landscape of the homeland’.Footnote ⁷⁰

And so to a second hypothesis about the significance of ‘being in transit’. The Yamashiro-maru’s passage from Yokohama to Honolulu was a period during which the migrants formed a nascent sense of national identity – a sense of being ‘Japanese’ that would be central to their sojourns in Hawai‘i. It is possible to sketch this nascent identity by imagining the journey of one of the westernmost migrants on board the Yamashiro-maru, a man called Kodama Keijirō. Kodama, according to the Tokyo Ministry of Foreign Affairs archives, was the only Hawaiian emigrant from the small village of Orisaki, north-east of Kumamoto city, on the island of Kyushu. Given this westerly location, Kodama would have been among the first group of migrants to start their journey east to Yokohama on 22 May (according to Irwin’s letter). Reporting first to Kumamoto, he would have met with the thirty other migrants from Tamana county, including seven from Orisaki’s neighbouring villages. At this point, he would also have realized that he was one of 276 migrants from Kumamoto prefecture. Perhaps this was when the Kumamoto contingent boarded the Yamashiro-maru and sailed north to Hakata, to pick up 149 migrants from Fukuoka prefecture, and then to the Inland Sea port of Ujina, to pick up the 390 migrants from Hiroshima prefecture on 25 May. If the full complement of 989 migrants did not join the Yamashiro-maru before it arrived at the Yokohama quarantine station at Nagaura on 28 May, they must have done so sometime before the ship’s final departure to Honolulu on 4 June. The migrants thus left their respective prefectures with their hometowns in mind: the aforementioned exhortation of the Hiroshima governor was for them to ‘gain the distinction of one day returning to your hometown (sato ni kaeru)’.

To borrow Shimazu’s formulation, however, the ship now ‘played a key role in expanding [the migrants’] geographical space of what constituted “Japan”’. For the women on board, and for those men who had avoided compulsory conscription (of whom there were many in the early 1880s), the shipboard passage may have been the first opportunity in their lives to meet Japanese from other prefectures: in addition to migrants from Hiroshima (390), Kumamoto (276), and Fukuoka (149), there were people from Kanagawa (12), Niigata (37), Chiba (8), Shiga (74), Gunma (10), and Wakayama (33) on board the Yamashiro-maru. Even if they continued to be divided by prefecture for administrative purposes (such as during their pre-departure transfer from the Nagaura quarantine station back onto the Yamashiro-maru), and even if they tended to sleep and socialize in their prefectural groups during the passage to Honolulu, the cramped conditions on board the Yamashiro-maru must have facilitated inter-prefectural communication.Footnote ⁷¹ As Michael Ondaatje’s shipboard novel, The cat’s table (2011), suggests, children were probably central to this communication.Footnote ⁷² The antics of Nakano Tatsuzō, Nakamura Keitarō, Katō Yohei, and Shiina Tatsuzō, all boys aged three, may have provided a common point of conversation for their parents, who respectively came from Fukuoka, Kanagawa, and Chiba prefectures. The mothers Matsuda Tsui (Hiroshima) and Kobatake Kita (Wakayama), both aged twenty-three, perhaps bonded over their baby daughters, aged seven months and twelve months respectively. More generally, the three hours of daily deck exercise that Irwin ordered midway through the passage would have provided other opportunities for cross-prefectural communication, as would cards and shogi (Japanese chess) games in the dark lower deck. Perhaps there were even bouts of shipboard sumo when the ocean was calm.

The cross-prefectural space of the ship may not have been alone in triggering a sense of ‘Japaneseness’ among the migrants, but it was surely one factor in the genesis of national identity – just as the Atlantic slave ships were a site of ‘ethnogenesis’ for an ‘African’ slave community, as Marcus Rediker argues. For bonded people on the slave ships, ‘broader similarities suddenly began to outweigh local differences’, such that cultural and linguistic commonalities became ‘crucial to cooperation and community’.Footnote ⁷³ In a similar way, although ‘local differences’ remained central to the Japanese migrants’ daily lives on the Hawaiian plantations – as expressed in dialect and diet – the experience of transit served as a precedent for the grouping and labelling of labourers as ‘Japanese’ by their overseers. Nation was a key element of the migrants’ new lives. They ‘became Japanese’ through forced competition with plantation labourers of other nationalities and through their shared loathing of the Poriki or Porigi (Portuguese overseers).Footnote ⁷⁴ They performed national rituals by breaking the terms of their contracts to celebrate the Emperor Meiji’s birthday on 3 November (for which they were labelled ‘patriotic Japs’).Footnote ⁷⁵ They appropriated – perhaps tongue in cheek – popular Meiji slogans in their songs:

The ship was the first space after departure from Yokohama in which this sense of a national community could be formed. Later migrants would indeed remember the Yamashiro-maru’s sister steamer, the Omi-maru (also built in Newcastle in 1884) as a ‘Japanese ship’.Footnote ⁷⁷ We cannot know whether Wakamiya Yaichi met Kodama Keijirō during daily exercise on the Yamashiro-maru’s upper deck in June 1885. But in being exposed to compatriots from other prefectures while on board, both men surely experienced what Conrad called the ‘process’ of departure partly as a transition from Jigozen and Orisaki respectively to ‘Japan’ – that is, from hometown to homeland.

Between the archives

After a six-week sojourn in Hawai‘i – time enough for the smallpox quarantine to be completed, for Inouye to finish his investigations, and for Mrs Inouye to recover from a bout of measles – the Yamashiro-maru departed from Honolulu at noon on 30 July 1885. In its cargo, the ship carried a gift from King Kalākaua to Emperor Meiji: an oil painting, some 150 cm. by 75 cm., by Joseph D. Strong, depicting Japanese labourers at the Spreckelsville plantation in Maui (Figure 2). ‘The strength of this picture lies in the figures’, stated the Pacific Commercial Advertiser, ‘which are painted in the full glow of sunlight.’ These figures included a ‘fine looking Japanese man, … gazing good-naturedly out of the picture’, two women caring for a baby, a group of Japanese labourers cutting sugar cane, and an overseer on horseback. ‘The picture is a fine representation of a sunny, thriving, hard-working plantation scene, that … will accomplish its object in Japan of giving the Mikado a correct and pleasant idea of the new home and employment of his countrymen.’Footnote ⁷⁸

Figure 2

Japanese Laborers on Spreckelsville, by J. D. Strong, 1885. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

I have my reservations about this ‘sunny’ scene. It so happens that the Spreckelsville plantation in Maui was Kodama Keijirō’s new place of work. He was #1146 and, like the other Japanese field labourers in Hawai‘i, he was contracted to work a ten-hour day and a twenty-six-day working month. Spreckelsville had been established by the German-born sugar magnate Claus Spreckels in the late 1870s. In 1881, it had been the first plantation in the kingdom to electrify.Footnote ⁷⁹ By the early 1890s it was the biggest sugar plantation in the world and Spreckels was the dominant and divisive figure within the elite sugar planters’ community.Footnote ⁸⁰ But Spreckelsville employed no Japanese labourers until Kodama and his compatriots from Kumamoto, all 276 of them, including only one woman, went to work there on 21–22 July 1885.Footnote ⁸¹ In other words, Strong’s painting, which was first publicly displayed in Honolulu two weeks earlier, is a fiction. If Strong ever went to Spreckelsville to sketch the landscape of the painting, he saw no Japanese. Instead, as one of the visitors to the immigration depot in February 1885, he took some ‘instantaneous negatives’.Footnote ⁸² Indeed, given the similarity of the figures in one of Arning’s photos to those in Strong’s painting (see Figure 3), it seems likely that the two men visited on the same day and photographed the same posed groups.Footnote ⁸³ Strong then simply transplanted these Japanese ‘models’ to the Spreckelsville background.

Figure 3

Details from Figures 1 and 2 respectively.

The real workers did not ‘transplant’ so easily. Only a few months later, in November 1885, the Board of Immigration received reports of ‘trouble arising between Japanese Immigrant laborers on the Spreckels Plantation and their employers’. As with previous reports received by the Japanese government, the main complaint was of labourers being ‘sent to work while sick’. Such allegations were rejected by the Board of Immigration’s Secretary, Mr Cleghorn, who instead wrote of labourers remaining ‘up at night gambling, long after the regulation hour of nine o’clock, at which time lights are ordered put out’. Through his interpreter and interlocutor, an inspector called Ito, Cleghorn recorded that ‘the Japanese laborers on Spreckelsville come from a district in Japan where there was a good deal of trouble in 1877’. This was a reference to the Satsuma Rebellion, which had indeed occurred partly in Kumamoto. Cleghorn continued, ‘some of these men belong to a class, who make their living by gambling’.Footnote ⁸⁴ In December, when he returned to Spreckelsville to investigate more complaints, he reported that the plantation manager ‘would like to have from 25 to 50 of the Japanese removed, many of whom are inveterate gamblers’. The issue of ‘gambling’ notwithstanding, there clearly were some problems with the health of the Japanese labourers, for Cleghorn reported eighteen Japanese on Spreckelsville’s sick list in November 1885.Footnote ⁸⁵

Strong’s painting, therefore, is anything but a ‘correct’ depiction of ‘thriving’ Japanese labourers on the Spreckelsville plantation. But, together with Cleghorn’s reports, it highlights the power of the archives to frame our knowledge of Kodama and his compatriots. The painting represented a confluence of powerful sugar interests in 1885 Hawai‘i: the king, widely recognized to have been in debt to Spreckels; Spreckels himself, with his enormous plantation; the Pacific Commercial Advertiser, scornfully referred to by rivals as the ‘Spreckels Government organ’; and the paper’s owner, Walter Gibson (also widely acknowledged to have been ‘bought off’ by Spreckels).Footnote ⁸⁶ For obvious reasons, these men had a vested interest in promoting the ‘thriving, hard-working plantation scene’. And when that image momentarily failed, punctured by the nameless voices of labourer discontent, then the problems were reframed by a Hawaiian government bureaucrat, diligently supported by the social and regional prejudices of a Japanese inspector who was almost certainly a former samurai and who earned ten times the salary of the non-samurai labourers.Footnote ⁸⁷ In short, either the plantation was ‘sunny’ or its problems were caused by the labourers themselves.

Historians are, of course, indebted to these archives. Just as the exhaustive passenger lists of Seville’s Casa de la Contratación ‘produced’ sixteenth-century migrants to the New World ‘with great bureaucratic effort’, thus making them ‘legible people’ for future historians,Footnote ⁸⁸ so the labourer lists in Tokyo and Honolulu enable us to read something into the one-line lives of men such as Wakamiya or Kodama. But, as Bill Mihalopoulos has perceptively noted in his discussion of Japanese female sex workers to Southeast Asia in the same period, these people were also ‘made up’ by the bureaucratic dictates of the archive: sex workers began to be noticed by Japanese officials and then categorized as ‘unsightly women’ in the mid 1870s, whereas previously they had been overlooked.Footnote ⁸⁹ To read the ‘legible people’ in spite of these bureaucratic agendas, historians can look to the spaces between the archives – spaces which, in turn, help us to problematize the ‘trans’ in the transplantation of labourers from Japan to Hawaiian plantations.

The ‘transit’ thus stands for more than just a journey: it is also a metaphor for the imaginary space that exists between the places where the migrants’ names are recorded – a space that scholars of global history must populate. And when we are exceptionally lucky, objects cross our paths that help us read the Yamashiro-maru migrants to Hawai‘i in marginally more complex ways. On Kaua‘i island, I stumbled across this gravestone:

The discovery sent me scuttling back to the archives. In Tokyo there survives a list of births, deaths, and returnees among the Japanese diaspora community in late nineteenth-century Hawai‘i.Footnote ⁹⁰ It is a rich list: it tells us that Wakamiya Yaichi returned to Japan in November 1892, again on board the Yamashiro-maru. He went back to Jigozen, a town that, in the seven years since his departure, had sent another 247 migrants to Hawai‘i, and that, by the early twentieth century, would become known as ‘America village’ for its high rate of overseas workers.Footnote ⁹¹ But the entries for July 1896 do not mention Kodama or his cause of death: there is nothing to explain what Joseph Conrad calls ‘that final journey from which no man returns [when] Landfall and Departure are instantaneous, merging together into one moment of supreme and final attention’.Footnote ⁹²

In my rush to cross-reference the archives, however, I had failed to read the significance of what the gravestone makes legible. Kodama Keijirō arrived in Hawai‘i Nei (‘beloved Hawai‘i’) on ‘June 18, 1885’, it says. That is not true. According to all official records, Kodama actually arrived on 17 June, early in the morning. What we have here, therefore, is an example of an individual gently resisting the time regimes of nineteenth-century globalization: the international framework, agreed in Washington, DC, in 1884, for the world to anchor its time to the Greenwich Meridian and to bifurcate the Pacific Ocean with an international date line – such that 18 June in Japan was 17 June in Hawai‘i.Footnote ⁹³ In post-war Hawai‘i, that time difference would be noted in Japanese songs:

While this is a playful recognition of the ease of transpacific travel in a global age, the ‘mistaken’ date on Kodama’s 1896 gravestone perhaps indicates something deeper: that, up to his death, Kodama himself (or, alternatively, the unknown donor of his gravestone) maintained a sense of temporal affinity with his homeland. This affinity is also suggested by the precedence given to the Japanese imperial calendar over the Gregorian calendar. Perhaps it is too much to argue that, until his death, Kodama retained a sense of core ‘Japanese’ time, even as he learned new temporal regimes on board the Yamashiro-maru and during his working routine in Spreckelsville. At the very least, however, the gravestone suggests an ambiguity of identity, a suspension between Japan and the Hawai‘i Nei, between Meiji and Gregorian, between an old life and a new life, between moments of landfall.