Hard Times in the Hometown: A History of Community Survival in Modern Japan

7. The Transnational Hometown: Zenith and Decline

7 The Transnational Hometown: ZenithandDecline One sunny day sometime in 1939, some forty of Iwaishima’s great and good assembled in the island’s elementary school playground: among their ranks were the district head (kuchō), post office master , school principal, doctor, head of the Farming Cooperative, and priests from the temples and the main Miyato shrine. Almost all the men were dressed in emblazoned kimonos and doffed their homburg hats as they watched Matsuoka Jinta (in a three-piece morning suit) and his eldest son Yoshitetsu (in high school uniform) officially unveil a bronze statue of Kusunoki Masashige, a legendary medieval warrior. (See Fig. 7.1.) The statue stood just to the east of the school’s main entrance. To the west stood seven rectangular memorial stones, roughly one meter in height, that recorded the names of islanders who had made substantial donations toward the construction of the elementary school itself, completed in January 1934: six of the seven benefactions were sent by islanders residing overseas. By tracing the life histories of these six donors plus that of Matsuoka Jinta, we begin to grasp the myriad impacts of Kaminoseki’s transnational connections on individual lives and on the prewar hometown communities in general. Indeed, as Table 7.1 shows, the legacy of the overseas communities in the hometown was highly significant in institutional terms, with schools, temples, shrines, and even war memorials being built (or rebuilt) throughout the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s as a result of benefactions from emigrant villagers. This is important because the story of Japan’s post-1868 modernization is often told in terms of national-international axes (the country’s attempt to “catch up” with the West) 100 Hard Times in the Hometown or national-local axes (the center’s attempted subsumption of the regions). But the financial dependence of Kaminoseki and Murotsu villages on their overseas communities indicates the extent to which the local, national, and international aspects of prewar society were constantly intertwined at a grassroots level: institutions of the nation state were constructed in the local village because of villagers whose lives traversed the so-called borders of the Japanese.1 But the significance of Kaminoseki’s transnational era was not merely institutional : the demographic effects of emigration spread across two or sometimes three generations. Moreover, thanks to the “success” of their overseas compatriots and the pride engendered thereby, those villagers who stayed at home would also have been aware of the impact of the Japanese diaspora in the social and economic routines of their daily lives. The shrines and temples at which they gathered, the paving stones they walked over to reach those temples , the electric lights illuminating the steps to worship, the schools in which their children studied, the maps those children used in geography classes, the education broadcasts they heard on the new radio, the two-story houses around the town, the clothes some villagers wore, even the potato salad they ate: these and much more were the transnational legacies of the Kaminoseki Figure 7.1. The unveiling of the Kusunoki Masashige statue, Iwaishima, 1939 (Courtesy of Mita Tsutomu) The Transnational Hometown: Zenith and Decline 101 Table 7.1 MajorprewarbenefactionstoMurotsuandKaminosekivillages fromoverseasmigrants 1895 Hawaiian emigrants from Yashima donate a ceremonial pillar to the island’s Jōkei-ji temple. 1904 Hawaiian emigrant Katō Zensaku gathers donations in order to build the Taishi-dō (Temple to Kōbō Daishi) on Yashima. 1904–1905 Korean emigrant Matsuoka Toyozō funds the construction of the En-no-gyōja shrine on Iwaishima. 1911 Ninety-four Korean emigrants donate 3,203 yen to construct a new assembly hall (the “Korean Hall”) at Murotsu elementary school. 1915 Hawaiian emigrants contribute to the retiling in copper of the roof of Kaminoseki’s Kamado Hachimangū shrine. 1916 Twenty-eight Hawaiian and North American emigrants donate 1,976 yen to build the “America-Hawai‘i Hall” at Murotsu elementary school. 1917 California emigrant Matsubara Daikichi funds the construction of the Russo-Japanese war memorial on Iwaishima plus a monument to his ancestors. 1918, July California emigrant Nishida Mansaku donates 100 yen to pay for a new organ at Kaminoseki elementary school. 1918, August Seven Murotsu residents in Korea contribute 700 yen toward the Mutual Prosperity Association to help subsidize rice during a period of high prices. 1926, January Twenty-seven Hawaiian emigrants pay for new paving stones at Kaminoseki’s Amida-ji temple. 1926, October Thirty-one Hawaiian...