Fukuoka’s Meiji migrants and the making of an imperial region

Abstract

: Recent scholarship has brought together the study of Imperial Japan and its colonies with the movements of people West across the Pacific and East into Asia. The result has been the opening of new fields of enquiry in the history of Japan’s emergence as a modern nation state and imperial power. This article contributes to such scholarship by showing how Japan’s overseas expansion was connected to local as well as national and global changes, via an investigation into the origins, nature, and destinations of Fukuoka’s Meiji migrants in the years between 1876 and 1905. It reveals the qualitative differences between Fukuokans’ overseas migration to Hawai‘i and their travel to Korea, via ‘networks of regional migration’. It shows how these movements connected the dual processes of domestic urbanization and industrial growth with Japan’s expansion into Asia. Ultimately, the movement of Fukuoka’s Meiji migrants helped to transform their home from a domestic periphery into a staging ground for Japan’s ‘imperial urbanization’ and brought Fukuoka within a new region spanning the Tsushima Strait.