Unread relics of a transnational ‘hometown’ in rural western Japan

From the mid-1880s onwards, thousands of young workers left the south-western prefectures of Japan to seek new employment opportunities abroad – first to Hawai'i or the Korean peninsula, subsequently to the United States, Latin America and the colonies of the ever-expanding Japanese empire. While many scholars trace the journeys and new lives of the emigrants, this paper examines the communities that they left behind. It uses a case study of Kaminoseki town, in Yamaguchi prefecture, to highlight the extraordinary impact of the Japanese diaspora on the homeland, in terms of both demography and of institution-building, employment networks and social status. Using a range of unpublished sources, it argues that Kaminoseki was in effect a transnational furusato (‘hometown’) in the half-century between the 1880s and the 1930s – a concept which adds to ongoing research on local-national-international connections in modern Japanese history, and which equally forces us to reconsider what is meant by one of the most ubiquitous discourses in Japanese public life today.