Hard Times in the Hometown: A History of Community Survival in Modern Japan by Martin Dusinberre (review)

Living and teaching English in the Japanese countryside has become a veritable rite of passage among the current younger generation of Japan scholars across the disciplines, this reviewer and author included. Dispatched to rural locales that even most Japanese people have never heard of, these scholars sometimes connect their time in Japan to their subsequent scholarly work. For Martin Dusinberre, this connection is direct and explicit. He returned to the site of his English-teaching years to write a history of modern Japan, from the nineteenth century to 2012, through the lens of Kaminoseki and its people. In his carefully written introduction, Dusinberre has gone to great pains to justify the academic study of this region. For Japan specialists, his work fits into a historiography of local studies in which southwest Japan has been underrepresented, despite, or perhaps because of, the overwhelming number of southwest natives who dominated Japan's first modern government—the Meiji oligarchy. Resistance, cooperation, and negotiation of power and policy between the national government and local people in northeast or central Japan have been well-studied. As Dusinberre illustrates, the everyday lives of people in Kaminoseki, too, did not always reflect national trends.

The five-part book is divided by theme and chronology, with each chapter building upon the cast of historical figures, families, and industries featured in previous sections. Dusinberre paces himself well; he is in no rush to cover topics that might attract more attention than others, such as his timely discussion of the nuclear power industry in Japan. This allows him to tease out stories from the broad range of sources that might otherwise go neglected in a macro history. In parts one and two, for example, we find local families that benefited from maritime trade along the inland sea through an assortment of employments: buying and selling goods from other merchants hoping to make a profit in distant markets, maintaining warehouses for regional port trade while running inns on the side, and receiving privileges in exchange for various duties related to shipping by daimyo lords. These examples echo a point made by Amino Yoshihiko long ago, that the closer we look at the everyday lives of commoners often mischaracterized as "agriculturists," we find that a lack of land did not equate to poverty. They explored every source of income available and were not tied to any one employment. Local elites were equally complex in their actions during the violent years of the mid 1860s, for example, participating in an attack on a local domain ship while being aware that the same domain was a source of trade revenue.

The fall of the Tokugawa regime in 1868 affected the Kaminoseki area on several fronts. The economy suffered a double blow when domain-related trade and monopolistic privileges disappeared with the domains themselves, and increased contact with the West led to cheaper salt and cotton imports that undercut local products. But some locals proved resilient; over the course of several chapters, the author tells us how villagers migrated to Hawaii, Korea, and California in search of better income. As members of "transnational families," these, mostly men, sent money back to their hometown to build schools, statues, and other public institutions—an international story at the local level usually lost in most macro histories. This does much to dispel the image of village Japan as being isolated from globalization at a personal level. Likewise, the chapters on postwar Kaminoseki complicate the dominant narrative of postwar growth.

Even non-specialists will, by now, know Japan's predicament with nuclear power, which supplies roughly thirty percent of the electricity. The timeliest portion of this book, a topic that receives slightly more attention than others, is the masterful micro history of the pro-nuclear and anti-nuclear tension in the village. During the 1980s, Chugoku Electric identified Kaminoseki as a possible site for a desperately needed...