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Japan’s local imperialists: Expansive ideas of hometown and empire within the Asia-Pacific world
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 August 2025
Abstract
This article focuses on a case study of one Japanese prefectural association and its monthly magazine to reassess the importance of prefectural associations (kenjinkai) beyond the diaspora communities in North America on which Anglophone scholarly focus has remained until now. It also returns an overlooked imperial dimension to Japanese language histories of domestic prefectural associations and discourse over the ‘hometown’. Arguing that the expansive ideas of the hometown, created through the networks of prefectural associations and the pages of their publications, gave rise to ideas of borderless empire and frictionless mobility, this article demonstrates how histories of prefectural associations and magazines like Fukuoka kenjin present a new, regional perspective on both empire and the idea of the hometown in pre-war Japan. Associationalism in and beyond Japan’s empire was not unique, and this article puts the history of kenjinkai in conversation with other such regional settler networks around the globe that were happening at the same time. The article then looks at the transwar continuities and ruptures felt by overseas associations in both North America and among former Japanese colonists, before contextualizing the rise of a ‘third wave’ of domestic migration and hometown discourse in the 1960s.
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- © The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press.
References
1 ‘Fukuoka kenjinkai sōkai’, Pusan nippō, 19 January 1928.
2 Jun Uchida, Brokers of Empire: Japanese Settler Colonialism in Korea 1896–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Asia Center, 2011), pp. 127–129. From 1908 the resident-general had the authority to appoint the head of each residents’ association, in 1911 the foreign settlements were abolished, and in 1914 the residents’ associations were dissolved.
3 Brian Niiya (ed.), Encyclopedia of Japanese American History: An A–Z Reference from 1868 to the Present (Los Angeles, CA: Japanese American National Museum, 1993), p. 201. The majority of scholarship in Japanese on kenjinkai overseas is on Okinawan organizations.
4 ‘Kōchikenjin kazoku taikai’, Pusan nippō, 7 April 1929; ‘Ōmi kenjinkai yayūkai’, Pusan nippō, 6 June 1933.
5 ‘Pusan no gakugisen yōyaku iromeki tatsu’, Pusan nippō, 26 April 1929; ‘Chibang jedoŭi kaejŏng sǒn’gŏ undongjuǔi’, Tong-A Ilbo, 4 February 1931.
6 ‘Kōro byojin wo sōkan’, Pusan nippō, 9 July 1925; ‘Chaeyubangin p’isal piyubinesŏ’, Tong-A Ilbo, 2 August 1937.
7 ‘Saga kenjinkai tsuitōe’, Pusan nippō, 23 September 1939; ‘Pusan Toyama kenjinkai irei hōyō’, Pusan nippō, 14 November 1941.
8 ‘Fukui kenjinkai sōbetsu en’, Pusan nippō, 13 April 1917; ‘Songjŏnch’ŏksang Bongch’ǒn hyangbal’, Tong-A Ilbo, 2 October 1929.
9 See Uchida, Brokers of Empire; Emer O’Dwyer, Significant Soil: Settler Colonialism and Japan’s Urban Empire in Manchuria, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2015); Seiji Shirane, Imperial Gateway: Colonial Taiwan and Japan’s Expansion in South China and Southeast Asia, 1895–1945 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2022); Bill Sewell, Constructing Empire: The Japanese in Changchun, 1905–45 (Vancouver, BC: UBC Press, 2019); David Fedman, Seeds of Control: Japan’s Empire of Forestry in Colonial Korea (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2020).
10 Sayaka Chatani, Nation-empire: Ideology and Rural Youth Mobilization in Japan and its Colonies (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018).
11 Jennifer Robertson, ‘It Takes a Village: Internationalization and Nostalgia in Postwar Japan’, in Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan, (ed.) Steven Vlastos (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
12 Bryna Goodman, Native Place, City and Nation: Regional Networks and Identities in Shanghai, 1853–1937 (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 2004), p. 2.
13 Takenaga Mitsuo, ‘Kenjinkai, kyōdo zasshi kō: kindai chiikishi kenkyu no kadai ni yosete’, San’in chiiki kenkyū, vol. 1, 1985, pp. 1–18.
14 Narita Ryuichi, ‘Kokyō’ to iu monogatari: toshi kūkan no rekishigaku (Tokyo: Yoshikawa kobunkan, 1998).
15 Takenaga, ‘Kenjinkai, kyōdo zasshi kō’, p. 13.
16 Narita, ‘Kokyō’ to iu monogatari’, p. 22.
17 David K. Abe mistakenly describes kenjinkai as ‘a phenomenon that is present only within Japanese immigrant communities: these groups do not exist in Japan’. See David K. Abe, Rural Isolation and Dual Cultural Existence: The Japanese-American Kona Coffee Community (Cham: Palgrave MacMillan, 2017), p. 104. Although focused on a single village rather than a prefecture, Martin Dusinberre pushes beyond these divisions via the idea of the ‘transnational hometown’, in Martin Dusinberre, ‘Unread Relics of a Transnational “Hometown” in Rural Western Japan’, Japan Forum, vol. 20, no. 3, 2008, pp. 305–335.
18 See Eiichiro Azuma, In Search of Our Frontier: Japanese America and Settler Colonialism in the Construction of Japan’s Borderless Empire (Oakland, CA: California University Press, 2019); Sidney Xu Lu, The Making of Japanese Settler Colonialism: Malthusianism and Trans-Pacific Migration, 1868–1961 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
19 Jun Uchida, Provincializing Empire: Ōmi Merchants in the Japanese Transpacific Diaspora (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2023). See also Anne Giblin Gedacht, Tōhoku Unbounded: Regional Identity and the Mobile Subject in Prewar Japan (Netherlands: Brill, 2022).
20 There are several ways to translate kyōdo, the most commonly used term for hometown in the sources this article deals with. When it is used as an adjective, I have translated it mostly as ‘local’. When it is used as a noun I have translated it as ‘home’ or ‘hometown’.
21 Takenaga, ‘Kenjinkai, kyōdo zasshi kō’, p. 7.
22 Ibid., p. 1. On the interwar kyōdo boom, see Louise Young, Beyond the Metropolis: Second Cities and Modern Life in Interwar Japan (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013), Chapter 4.
23 Narita, ‘Kokyō’ to iu monogatari’, p. 20.
24 Goodman, Native Place. In 1939, the Shanghai Fukuoka Prefectural Association, possibly inspired by these hometown halls, announced plans to build their own ‘Fukuokan Hall’. Fukuoka kenjin, December 1939, p. 72.
25 Madeline Hsu, ‘“Qiaokan” and the Transnational Community of Taishan County, Guangdong, 1882–1943’, China Review, vol. 4, no. 1, 2004, pp. 123–144.
26 The term ‘Anglo-world’ has been taken up by several historians to refer to English-speaking settler societies around the globe. See James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-world, 1783–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Robert Bickers (ed.), Settlers and Expatriates: Britons Over the Seas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); and Tanja Bueltmann and Donald MacRaild, ‘Globalizing St George: English Associations in the Anglo-world to the 1930s’, Journal of Global History, vol. 7, no. 1, 2012, pp. 79–105.
27 On New Zealand, see James Watson, ‘English Associationalism in the British Empire: Yorkshire Societies in New Zealand before the First World War’, Britain and the World, vol. 4, no. 1, 2011, pp. 84–108. On Cornwall, see Bernard Deacon and Sharron Schwartz, ‘Cornish Identities and Migration: A Multi-Scalar Approach’, Global Networks, vol. 7, no. 3, 2007, pp. 289–306.
28 Tanja Bueltmann and Donald M. MacRaild, The English Diaspora in North America: Migration, Ethnicity and Association, 1730s–1950s (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), p. 12.
29 Ibid., pp. 1–2.
30 We could see this also as an attempt to stave off the growing power emanating from the metropolitan centre, similar to the case of regional associations in the Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique, where ‘for those who lived at one periphery, remembering other peripheries was a way of denying the centre its exclusivist nature’. See Daniel Melo, ‘Out of Sight, Close to the Heart: Regionalist Voluntary Associations in the Portuguese Empire’, e-Journal of Portuguese History, vol. 5, no. 1, 2007, p. 14.
31 David Washbrook, ‘Avatars of Identity: The British Community in India’, in Settlers and Expatriates, (ed.) Bickers, p. 199. Similar dynamics can be seen in debates over French national identity in response to the presence of the ‘neo-Francais’—Spanish and Italian migrants to French Algeria, who formed regional associations in the face of a nascent French national identity. See Yuval Tal, ‘The “Latin” Melting Pot: Ethnorepublican Thinking and Immigrant Assimilation in and through Colonial Algeria’, French Historical Studies, vol. 44, no. 1, 2021, pp. 85–118.
32 On the national association of these overseas associations, founded in 1923, see Sakaguchi Mitsuhiro, ‘Dare ga imin o okuridashita no ka: kantaiheiyō ni okeru Nihonjin no kokusai idō gaikan’, Ritsumeikan gengobunka kenkyū, vol. 21, no. 4, 2010, pp. 67–76.
33 Other publications produced by prefectural branches of the Overseas Association include Hiroshima’s Ō-Hiroshima ken and Nagano’s Umi no Soto (discussed by Lu, The Making of Japanese Settler Colonialism).
34 It is unclear when the last edition of Hakkō was published: the last extant issue is from December 1938.
35 For a short overview of Fukuoka kenjin and other local publications, see Namigata Tsuyoshi, ‘Shumi no Hakata, Fukuoka kenjin, soshite Fukuoka’, Shishi kenkyū Fukuoka, February 2008, pp. 97–99.
36 Ishida Hideto, Zaikyō Fukuokaken jinbutsushi (Tokyo: Gakansha, 1928), pp. 38–42.
37 Kyūshū University, Asoke monjo shokan, kennai 193 (15 October 1923). One of the less savoury characters who had supported Fukuoka Kenjin and was thanked by Naitō in his final afterword in 1943 was Fujita Isamu, ‘newspaper mogul and political fixer’, who was also a notorious opium trafficker with links to the Chinese crime organization Qing Bang. See Christopher Spzilman, ‘The Japanese Right Wing and the Drug Trade, 1923–1945’, in Drugs and the Politics of Consumption in Japan, (eds) Judith Vitale, Miriam Kingsberg Kadia and Oleg Benesch (Leiden: Brill, 2023), pp. 171–180.
38 ‘Fukuokakenjin no sekimu’, Fukuoka kenjin, March 1924, pp. 1–2.
39 Shinohara Masakazu, Kurume jinbutsu shi (Kurume: Kikutake kinbundō 1981), p. 381.
40 ‘Mansen shisha secchi shakoku’, Fukuoka kenjin, July 1933, p. 89; ‘Honsha Sen-man shisha secchi’, Fukuoka ken jin, April 1937, p. 36. The earlier Keijō branch chief was Yoshida Tadashi, a former Chōsen Shinbun journalist.
41 Fukuoka kenjin, December 1931, p. 60.
42 Foreword by Naitō Rikizō, Fukuoka kenjin, April 1934, p. 1.
43 ‘Isshūnen no kaiko’, Fukuoka kenjin, July 1924, pp. 1–2.
44 ‘Fukuoka kenjin rondan’, Fukuoka kenjin, July 1933, p. 2.
45 Azuma, In Search of Our Frontier, pp. 7–8.
46 Teishin sho chokin kyoku, Sekai chizu (Tokyo: Chokin kyoku, 1935), pp. 44–45.
47 ‘Hawai zaijū hōjin gakusei raifuku’, Fukuoka Nichi nichi Shinbun, 26 July 1927; ‘Fukuoka ken shusshin no shoshi ni kinkoku’, Nichibei Shinbun, 17 May 1931; ‘Bokuku kankōdan dan’in boshū’, Nichibei Shibun, 3 August 1935; ‘Nisei chūshin bokoku kengakudan’, Maui Record, 11 April 1939; Fukuoka shi (ed.), Fukuoka shi shi dai yon kan: Shōwa zenpen (ka) (Fukuoka: Fukuoka shi, 1966), pp. 779, 798.
48 ‘Fukuoka ken no kaigai imin’, Fukuoka kenjin, November 1932, pp. 60–63.
49 ‘Kaigai ni okeru Fukuokakenjin’, Fukuoka kenjin, December 1936, pp. 22–25.
50 Tahara wrote for the Fukuoka Nichi Nichi Shinbun and later Asahi Shinbun before he was elected to the Diet in 1937 as a member of the Shakai Taishū-tō. In 1942 he published Nanpō yūhi annai (Guide to Southern Expansion).
51 On these trans-Pacific connections, see Iijima Mariko, ‘Senzen Nihonjin kōhī saibaisha no gurōbaru hisutorī’, Imin kenkyū, no. 7, 2011, pp. 1–24.
52 On Japanese migrants in the Philippines in the first half of the twentieth century, see Lydia N. Yu-Jose, ‘World War II and the Japanese in the Prewar Philippines’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, vol. 27, no. 1, 1996, pp. 64–81; Lydia N. Yu-Jose, ‘Turn of the Century Emigration: Filipinos to Hawaii, Japanese to the Philippines’, Philippine Studies, vol. 46, no. 1, 1998, pp. 89–103.
53 ‘Kaigai ni okeru Fukuokakenjin’, Fukuoka kenjin, December 1936, pp. 22–23.
54 Ibid., p. 25.
55 Robertson, ‘It Takes a Village’, p. 117.
56 ‘Honsha Sen-man shisha secchi’, Fukuoka kenjin, April 1937, p. 36.
57 To aid location, place names in this table are generally transliterated using the local rather than Japanese pronunciation.
58 ‘Mansen chihō e tokuhain haken’, Fukuoka kenjin, September 1932, p. 2.
59 On Gen’yōsha and Kokuryūkai members and their connections to ‘resource development’ (fugen kaihatsu) and the development of Asia (Kō-A), see Nagashima Hiroki, ‘“Kō-A” no jissen kyoten toshite no Pusankō to Genyōsha, Kokuryūkai’, in Kindai Nihon no kigyōka to seiji: Yasukawa Keiichiro to sono jidai, (ed.) Arima Manabu (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kobukan, 2009), pp. 266–267.
60 Fukuoka kenjin, September 1932, p. 3.
61 ‘Dainikai Mansen chihō tokuhain haken’, Fukuoka kenjin, September 1934, p. 2.
62 ‘Mansen kō’, Fukuoka kenjin, November 1934, p. 40.
63 Shinohara, Kurume jinbutsu shi, p. 340.
64 Fukuoka kenjin, November 1934, p. 43.
65 ‘Minami Manshū tokushū: Mansenkō ni’, Fukuoka kenjin, December 1934, p. 19.
66 Ibid., pp. 19–20.
67 Ibid., p. 25.
68 ‘Mansenkō ni’, Fukuoka kenjin, November 1932, p. 23.
69 Ibid., p. 22.
70 Japanese publications on the Philippines and South Seas rapidly increased in number from the mid-1930s onwards.
71 ‘Taiwan tokushū’, Fukuoka kenjin, May 1937, p. 7.
72 Ibid., p. 8.
73 This attack by local Indigenous Seediq communities on an athletics competition in Musha, a ‘model colonial village’, targeted Japanese settlers and left 134 people dead. The incident shocked the colonial government, and its response deployed over 1,000 Japanese troops, used chemical weapons, and resulted in over 600 dead—over half of the population of the original six communities involved in the attack. A second attack—seen as orchestrated by the Japanese—resulted in a further 216 detainees from the Seediq villages being killed. See Michael Berry (ed.), The Musha Incident: A Reader on the Indigenous Uprising in Colonial Taiwan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022), pp. 1–3.
74 My thanks to an anonymous reviewer for highlighting this important point.
75 ‘Taiwan tokushū’, Fukuoka kenjin, p. 4.
76 ‘Kyōdoai ni tsuite’, Fukuoka kenjin, July–August edition 1939, pp. 16–17.
77 Tsurusaki had stepped down from the magazine in spring of 1939 to run in Kurume’s city council elections.
78 ‘Hokushi dayori’, Fukuoka kenjin, December 1939, p. 27.
79 On Tōa Dōbun Shōin, see Douglas Reynolds, ‘Chinese Area Studies in Prewar China: Japan’s Tōa Dōbun Shoin in Shanghai, 1900–1945’, The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 45, no. 5, 1986, pp. 945–970.
80 ‘Hokushi dayori’, Fukuoka kenjin, p. 28.
81 ‘Man Shi kakuchi ni katsuyaku suru kenjin’, Fukuoka kenjin, November 1939, pp. 30, 39.
82 ‘Fukuoka kenjin meibo’, Fukuoka kenjin, November 1932, pp. 25–32.
83 ‘Mansen kō’, Fukuoka kenjin, November 1934, p. 49; ‘Chōsen tokushū’, Fukuoka kenjin, February 1935, pp. 29–30; ‘Pusan, Keijō kenjinkai meibo’, Fukuoka kenjin, October 1932, p. 35.
84 Hannah Shepherd, ‘Writing Home: Settler Women in Japan’s Empire’, History Today, January 2018.
85 Narita, ‘Kokyō’ to iu monogatari’, p. 22.
86 Wendy Matsumura, ‘Review: In Search of Our Frontier: Japanese America and Settler Colonialism in the Construction of Japan’s Borderless Empire, by Eiichiro Azuma; Liminality of the Japanese Empire: Border Crossings from Okinawa to Colonial Taiwan, by Hiroko Matsuda; The Making of Japanese Settler Colonialism: Malthusianism and Trans-Pacific Migration, 1868–1961, by Sidney Xu Lu; Unsustainable Empire: Alternative Histories of Hawai ‘i Statehood, by Dean Itsuji Saranillio’, Pacific Historical Review, vol. 89, no. 3, 2020, p. 460.
87 Patricio N. Abinales, ‘Davao-Kuo: The Political Economy of a Japanese Settler Zone in Philippine Colonial Society’, The Journal of American-East Asian Relations, vol. 6, no. 1, 1997, p. 78.
88 Edith M. Kaneshiro, ‘“My Body Trembles with Fear”: Okinawans Remember World War II in Davao’, Amerasia Journal, vol. 45, no. 3, 2019, pp. 352–372.
89 ‘Kyōdoai ni tsuite’, Fukuoka kenjin, July–August edition 1939, p. 17.
90 Itoh Kaori, Giin gaikō no seiki: Rekkoku gikai dōmei to kingendai Nihon (Tokyo: Yoshida shoten, 2022), pp. 153–155.
91 ‘Ilbonyŏn’gu yusinŭi wŏndongnyŏk (6) tan’gyŏllyŏgŭi kyŏn’go’, Tong-A Ilbo, 15 January 1932, p. 5.
92 ‘Henshū goki’, Fukuoka kenjin, July 1943, p. 85. Narita notes that this rhetorical connection was in use from late Meiji. See ‘Narita, ‘Kokyō’ to iu monogatari’, pp. 96–100.
93 Interview (1) with Harry Honda, in REgenerations Oral History Project: Rebuilding Japanese American Families, Communities, and Civil Rights in the Resettlement Era, (ed.) Japanese American National Museum (Los Angeles: Japanese American National Museum, 2000), vol. 2, p. 19. Japanese prefectural associations in Hawai‘i were disbanded in late 1941, with a 16-year gap until the Hawai‘i Fukuoka Kenjinkai reformed in 1957.
94 Its full title was Renrakusen: Chōsen hikiagesha shōsoku zasshi. On Yamada, see Asahi Akira, ‘Yamada Shinichi: aru seishun to no saikai’, Sansai, vol. 344, 1976, pp. 35–39, and Fukuoka Ajia Bijutsukan, Nikkan kindai bijutsuka no manazashi: ‘Chōsen’ de kaku (Fukuoka: Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, 2015), p. 373.
95 The original title in Japanese is futōgen (port word), a play on kantōgen (foreword).
96 ‘Kitakyūshū tenbyō’, Renrakusen, vol. 1, no. 4, 1947, p. 8.
97 ‘Shiyū tsūshin’, Renrakusen, vol. 1, no. 3, 1947, p. 18.
98 ‘Kaitakumin no kokoro de kikoku subekida’, Keijō Nihonjin Sewakai kaihō, 22 November 1945.
99 Nicole Leah Cohen, ‘Children of Empire: Growing up Japanese in Colonial Korea, 1876–1946.’, PhD thesis, Columbia University, 2006, p. 321; Jun Uchida, Brokers of Empire, p. 412.
100 Iijima Mariko, ‘Okinawa ni okeru Firipin hikiageshi no irei: Mabuni no oka “Dabao no tō” no kenritsu wo megutte’, Imin kenkyū, vol. 9, 2013, pp. 79–96.
101 Yamaguchi Satoshi, ‘Kōdo seichō ni okeru shukkyōsha no toshi seikatsu to dōkyōdantai: Amagasakishi no Kagoshimaken Eishikai wo jirei to shite’, Jinbun chiri, vol. 50, no. 5, 1998, pp. 25–45; ‘Toshi ni okeru kenjinkai no setsuritsu to katsudō: Amagasaki Kōchi kenjinkai wo chūshin ni’, Chiri kagaku, vol. 54, 1999, pp. 22–44.
102 Narita, ‘Kokyō’ to iu monogatari, p. 21; Marilyn Ivy, Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Robertson, ‘It Takes a Village’.
103 Ronald P. Dore, City Life in Japan: A Study of a Tokyo Ward (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1958), p. 219.
104 Robertson, ‘It Takes a Village’, p. 111.