Hyakushō in the Arafura Zone: Ecologizing the Nineteenth-Century ‘Opening of Japan’

Abstract

Abstract In the 1880s, ordinary fishers and other commoners who were intimately familiar with the seas left the Japanese archipelago in search of bluer waters. Ending up in South-East Asia and Australasia, these hyakushō used their local knowledge of nature to navigate unfamiliar ecological contexts and create ocean-spanning infrastructures capable of facilitating their everyday lives. The resulting transnational connections gave birth to the ‘Arafura Zone’, a largely non-state space where empires had little influence and mechanisms of the global marketplace met with both human and environmental friction. This article tells a new story of Japan’s nineteenth-century global connections. It shows how the so-called ‘Opening of Japan’ was not primarily characterized by the temporality of industrial civilization and the spatiality of an international community of civilized nation-states. Hyakushō developed a new understanding of time and space based on the monsoonal climate and the geographical distribution of marine biota. As a result, they came to share a nature-centric intellectual common ground with those who were more indigenous to the Arafura Zone. Drifting beyond conventional historical narratives of globalization, Japan’s transnational encounter with the Arafura Sea forces us to rethink the possible forms that global connectivity might take.