Along Japan's picturesque Inland Sea and near a small fishing community called Kaminoseki, planned site of a highly controversial nuclear power station, a pronuclear fishing boat deliberately cuts across a sardine net being trawled by antinuclear fishermen in 1983. The resulting fracas lands one pronuclear supporter in jail (p. 226, n.30), and in some studies the episode might be hardly worth mentioning. Yet by the time we learn of this unfortunate incident, Martin Dusinberre's impressively dense and insightful microhistory of Kaminoseki has already demonstrated how the briny mesh of such sardine nets had (ironically) trussed the community together for many years in small splayed webs of obligation, employment, and formalized investment (e.g., pp. 78–80).
The book also explains how landowning elites on the nearby island of Iwaishima, from whence the sardine fishermen came, had long been bound together in cooperative clusters called kabu-uchi (pp. 73–75), as well as through complex ties of intermarriage achieved over many generations (pp. 75–77). These elite families were much more likely to be pronuclear, and they had for centuries maneuvered to keep power out of the hands of fishermen just like these.
How times have changed. The passions surrounding the nuclear dispute have kept Iwaishima a highly charged protest space, with the overwhelming number of antinuclear activist residents there having usurped traditional power structures (pp. 173–76) to subject a small number of pronuclear families to extreme noise disruption, bullying, and ostracism. Close relations living a stone's throw away from each other have not spoken for decades. Dogged antinuclear activists have prevented nuclear industry representatives from landing on the island for an astonishing three decades, swarming some members of pronuclear families on the dock as well. So much for town leaders’ claims that the “‘charming town-making’” (p. 182) of nuclear development would inspire “liveliness” (p. 8) and “‘heart-to-heart communication’” (p. 181)! As Dusinberre writes, Kaminoseki became a “community fissioned by nuclear power” even before the preliminary surveys had begun (p. 180).
Such rich and rigorously researched detail makes Dusinberre's Hard Times in the Hometown a unique and important resource for anyone interested in the precise machinations with which Japan's relentless nuclear lobby mobilized consent for nuclear facilities in chosen communities. Yet to confine Dusinberre's monograph under such an (admittedly timely) nuclear rubric would do it an enormous disservice, for the book employs abundant original historical data and a resolute “‘backwater’” focus (p. 7) to show how this now distinctly marginalized coastal town was once, in several key ways, “at the very heart of Japan” (p. 4). Indeed, Kaminoseki and its industrious residents participated with surprising demonstrated agency in larger historical chains of events that were central to the development of modern Japan.
Dusinberre digs into largely abandoned archives to exhume compelling stories of local gumption and entrepreneurship during Kaminoseki's heyday as a hub of the nineteenth-century kitamae shipping trade. He also pieces together Kaminoseki's hosting of periodic embassies from Ryūkyū and Korea and active participation in the Chōshū Rebellion and subsequent Meiji Restoration. Combined with oral history, these records also tie the town to emigrant dentists and laborers in Hawai'i, hoteliers in San Francisco, entrepreneurs in colonial Korea, sake brewers in Sakhalin, and others. Even banal-seeming archives, such as those of the “Iwaishima Elementary School Donors” (pp. 106–13), furnish stories of fortune-seeking abroad that demonstrate Kaminoseki's extensive transborder connections.
Through the tiny lens of this village microhistory, we can glimpse an astonishing range of interlinkages in modern Japanese history, and in beguiling detail. The periodic currents of prosperity and “hard times” that Kaminoseki experienced over the centuries furnish an understanding of the town's self-perceived legacy and atavistic entanglements that complicate Kaminoseki's more recent attempts to revitalize the community amid economic decline, steep depopulation, and flagging morale. As such, the book will prove a useful resource for students and scholars of microhistory, Japanese and East Asian history, and Japanese studies. It will also appeal to anthropologists, sociologists, and geographers, particularly those interested in rural issues, social movements, protest, and of course nuclear and/or environmental controversies. Much of the book offers witty perspective on furusato or “town-building” initiatives from a relatively underexamined peripheral vantage—such initiatives have remained significant to social scientists of Japan in recent decades.
Microhistory of this sort bears more than a family resemblance to ethnography; the author not only interviewed locals and immersed himself in everyday life there but also surveyed the uneven geography of the island-dotted community, yielding vivid scene-setting, telling stone inscriptions, apt billboard nuclear propaganda, and so on. If there is any limitation to such an insightful and deftly executed monograph, it lies in the thorny choices and obligations perhaps more routinely confronted by ethnographers. For while Dusinberre's study offers profound insight into the nuclear controversy that roils contemporary Kaminoseki, it is clear that the same savvy local diplomacy that gained him access to key hoards of town records—and to conversations with locals on both sides of the dispute—prevents him from frankly describing the nuclear conflict he witnessed during his years in Kaminoseki. (Indeed, the sardine net incident above is relegated to a footnote.) By successfully navigating around the fraught “‘no touch’” (p. 9) topic of the nuclear controversy, Dusinberre (presumably) secures the opportunity to conduct future research in this well-chosen community. Yet even though I know from personal experience the immense difficulties and sacrifices of chronicling a bitter protest in progress, I hope that someday Dusinberre will find himself able in future work to tell the full story of nuclear micropolitics in pre- and post-Fukushima Kaminoseki in all the rich “ethnographic” detail that it deserves.
