Empire Through the Prism of Phosphate

Abstract

Chapter 6 discusses the recruitment of Okinawan workers into the phosphate industry in the Pacific prior to the Japanese state’s colonization of the northern Mariana, Marshall, and Caroline islands. By documenting the over three hundred workers from Okinawa who were transported to Banaba Island between 1908 and 1910 to toil as semi-skilled workers for the Pacific Phosphate Company, it rejects prevailing understandings of mainland Japanese and Okinawans as merely differentially privileged agents of settler colonialism in the Pacific, instead tracing the way that dispossessed Indigenous Okinawan people were made complicit in the dispossession of Indigenous people in another locale through settlement. It highlights Okinawans historical role as a disposable, colonial workforce and therefore reads the extension of the Farm Household Survey project to Okinawa in 1930 as an instrument of colonial rule rather than national consolidation.